1 . Introduction: The Concealed Value of Architecture Presencing
In our profession of architectural practice, we have a long-standing subverted or concealed attribute that is expressed in a very complex way. We reveal it in the way that we conceal it. I have written extensively on the concealing of architecture in its technological means and how architectural value expresses as its concealing in the technological proxy. (Karassowitsch 2015) (1) This is developed through Heidegger’s work on technology (Heidegger 1977) and the nature of spirituality as the refinement of ‘mind’ to evolve and undo its modification, a disturbed condition for which spiritual practice arose. (Vivekananda 2012, Patañjali 1983) This appears now as materialist technological values. (2) Today it is extremes of consumerism and social structures reduced to mechanized bureaucratic systems being played out as a general erosion of societal quality, forgotten subtle qualities, renewal of pugilistic nationalist politics and much more. It spills ever more into our lives from the vast destruction of nature’s entities and unbalanced diversions of its energy flows, destabilizing societies and minds already long underway.
The architectural profession as we know it is about 300 years old. Its form is derived in cultures defined by materialist science and technology as the trades transformed. Although technology of our common contemporary understanding has been an essential part of architecture since before Ruskin’s time, arguably beginning with the Renaissance and embarking its path toward the Machine Ages about 500 years ago, that does not mean that its relationship within professional practice will now stay the same forever. (3) Architecture existed before modernity’s common concept of building technology and it will still exist after.
In the architectural community we have long had a passive and often too submissive relationship with what we want to assert as architectural value against the architects, clients and pundits who feel beholden to the narrowest rules of materialism in the manufacturing, construction, finance and other industries. Architects struggle with intentions and functions that do not support architectural value including its professional organizations. Our educational system teaches materiality of building as architecture, often allowing architecture to be ‘true’ only once a technological standard is registered. The reasoning includes the support of communication with the wider field of trades and practices. Architectural value is, however, not the constructed element. Architecture is only in awareness through experience and its material means are not limited to building trades and consultant outputs.
Questioning architecture is difficult if it is experienced but not measurable. For example, we continue to rely on Vitruvius’ De Architectura libri decem (Vitruvius 2006) as proof for today’s architectural profession as a default valuation of architectural value. I have worked extensively with the Mānasāra, the equivalent Indian treatise to De architectura libri decem, which expresses the Vāstusastra with its higher values and subtler calling for architects. (Mānasāra 2004) This higher level of architectural value is simply not present in the Roman architecture of Vitruvius. This questioning of terms of the creative aspect within architectural practice, (i.e. not design or planning), is the crux of the profession’s futurity. This ‘questioning’ is difficult because it takes on the forms architecture’s concealment in its concealing materialist technology. De architectura libri decem is about technology. The factors present already in the Mānasāra make it a tool to develop questioning this easier, although it has a prescriptive character that is antithetical to the freedom we demand within our culture’s sense that freedom-of-choice is an inalienable right. (Karassowitsch 2017) Until we realize more expressly that architecture is based in conscious awareness, which defines the will’s direction in action, and not the built form, we will fare ever worse in our society. (4)
The concept of consciousness governing architecture is ancient. The ancient terms are in a form that we often do not respect. New respect for indigenous knowledge is opening views to its validity. An example from the Mānasāra shows the difficulty:
75. Vāsuki (serpent god) is the presiding deity of the measuring rope and Brahma is known as the presiding deity of the measurement. (Mānasāra, 2004 page 9)
Vāsuki is related to the serpent and its mythical allegorical cultural realm. It is beautiful, divine and strong. It is able to ‘milk’ the world. Brahma is associated with the soul and highest spiritual conditions; in short conscious and super consciousness. Thus, in the description of architecture, Mānasāra relates measuring as a process and its tools to the world, beauty, strength and benefits from the world, while measure itself, which is an interpretation with applied increment based on consciousness is a subtle result beyond matter, related to consciousness. The latter is about architectural value, while the former is technology today.
The mind is the essential aspect that we are responsible for in nature. It is the essence of being human. Architects make present the aspiration of mind in the environments we make in the world as we dwell. Concealed or not, mind’s aspiration has its effect. Architecture channels it, or the response turns to chaos. As architecture is conscious awareness and its aspiration, rather than focus on the artifacts (or urban and built architecture), we focus on the approach to providing the value that architects would provide. Focusing closer, we find that certain architects of the generation now concluding its ouvre formed practices around their experience to maintain and defend the value of their architecture very individualistically. The (nominally) Deconstructivist architects, based on the 1988 exhibition at MOMA, are united by this on a practical level, while they appear wildly different in the traditional categories of formalism and architectural theory. See Figure 1. Their approaches range from the material (e.g. Frank Gehry and Coop Himmelb(l)au) to philosophical, or political in the case of Bernard Tschumi. This is necessary and profound for practice in a profession that structurally subverts architectural value in our institutionally defined proxy that is integral to architecture; already become part of its conceptual frame hundreds of years ago.
Figure 1. These are vignettes of architectural loci showing ‘irrational bits’. They have been brought to realization by architects with practices that support aspiration through measuring it as technicist contradiction of architectural value. They serve what cannot be objective measure and what had no form in dwelling by giving it measure. Their architecture accepts that contradiction, isolating aspiration from technicist measurement/discovery in specific intentional modes of practice, to carefully protect the architectural value.
The object of this paper is to describe characteristics for a faculty project of the studio environment for architectural education. The space of differentiation that makes the view to doing this an interesting possibility is based on practice of the architects selected by Philip Johnson to exemplify so-called Deconstructivist architecture almost 30 years ago. These practices made explicit approaches to discriminating the concealing technicist proxy, raising that characteristic of modern culture to architecture itself. Although individualism, artistic and theoretical value and hubristic manipulation of print media at the pre-internet end of its hegemony in architecture’s culture seem to mark the value of these architects, it is a much wider impulse that includes its ‘opposing’ Post-modernist architects (e.g. Michael Graves, Robert Stern, Robert Krier, Aldo Rossi). The seven architects of the Deconstructivist exhibition have each developed a specific form of insulating and controlling the technological means (i.e. process, building and planning) for their architecture. The form of that control informs the form of the work and the practice. Architects such as Richard Meier, I.M. Pei and Charles Moore, or even Venturi-Brown or Asymptote, have a blurred relationship that is more traditionally modernist in terms of their relationship to technology. Archigram’s fantasies were precursors to this response when it was still an unformed need. It was essentially supportive of the coming consolidation of capital with the ‘super-rich’ in the decades of neo-liberal capitalist reign of corporations. They did not reinforce architectural value through the subordination of technology and even rational process, but made up technology as horror film clown: frighteningly banal pretty dystopia.
What is express in certain Abstract Post-modernist (i.e. Deconstructivist) and Classicist Post-modernist architectural practices is a mode of elevating specific practical isolation of technological power as architecture to the heart of practice and projects. It functions as willed attitude and appears as self-promotion. But if we look at history of consciousness in light of spirituality, we can see that the misuse of attainments of capacity is a herald of ‘new’ levels of consciousness. In these centuries of westernized materialism, abuse of nature tends to ensue when some people are able to run amuck with means of power. Nevertheless, architecture as practice is blessed to be wholistic, nature’s ally and the bringer of aspiration to the human gardens we attempt in the world – even or despite our flawedness. Our moral and material failings do not contradict this capacity that makes architecture original to humanity, only concealing it in ironic or tragic reversals. Its application as we fail as stewards of nature’s beneficial advancement.
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The Architectural Studio as Faculty Project: The educational environment as superordinate brief.
Architecture and urban planning started to give up the traditional styles and start to create further form in constructions at the beginning of 20th century with respecting to distribution Western modern architecture and from which underpinned many significant concerns in our world. After industrialization, the building was made more affordable and stronger by using new technology. The new technique created an opportunity to construct wider spaces and taller buildings. Also, by using new technology, mass production of materials became easier and more inexpensive while new methods increased the speed of construction process.
On the other hand, Pollio et al (1914) stated that the introduction of modern period organized fast urbanization and construction in cities. Therefore, more homogenized cities and continuity structure was appeared and the cultural, traditional and vernacular architecture was disappeared in designing. Because the architecture only accepted the modern style in their design and abandon the traditional styles without any consideration. It was the time to face with many disadvantages such as designer try Practice that slakes the needs that architecture’s concealment in the profession’s technological proxy implies are essential content in the educational space of studio. This research is a ‘live’ project for the faculty in studio to develop how to give educational betterment through an architectural environment as architectural project for an architect’s education. The guided educational environment, student’s studio work and space are taken as means to form a locus of architectural value. Presenting the goal of architecture as a studio environment provides for the students’ attunement to architectural value. The premise of educational studio as faculty’s architectural project is formed to address this issue as the discrimination of architectural value from the means of making an environment, i.e. technology. The student forms their project which uses means of practice while the Studio as Architectural Project utilizes the student’s project development as a means for a meaningful environment of architectural value.
The brief for the faculty team of the studio is a project for an architectural locus of the students’ educational welfare. The faculty team harmonizes what a professional has to do, from the very beginning of taking up an architectural impulse (brief), through evincing and defining it as a program and preparing materiality and modelling toward physical realization as means for an environment as locus of the educational studio’s architectural value.
There is a tremendous increase in number of institutions for architects’ education across India. All are striving to build that atmosphere for proper educational environment. Without it, the students and faculty are hindered. This paper is inspired by this challenge. It is deeply informed by knowledge based in Vedanta through spiritual practice as rajayoga, to approach the transformation of current professional practice anywhere, for spirituality is the same in all humanity.
Although many schools of architecture like the AA, GSAPP or the Bartlett may avail well established cultures that have been maintained over decades, these are also trapped in the technicist value proxy of the Machine Ages profession in its extant form. This proposal allows a level of research that develops awareness of these tropes for education, allowing education to embrace architecture discriminated from its means as a function of its concealment, rather than disjunct from its value. We may transcend limitation that have already long been questioned.
2.1. Architectural Value vs. Answers: Means to realizing Questioning.
Architecture is aspiration, not ‘answers’. This tends to appear as questioning. It is not ‘critical thinking’, which is based in scientific analysis. ‘Lysis’ is to cut. Our scientific mind feels the need to analyze, cutting up the world, leading to fragmentation that we see all around us. This is the ‘Enframing’ that gathers world in technology according to Heidegger. Technicist practice conceals value of architects’ work within mechanical valuations of parameters ‘cut’ from their natural context in terms of narrow material functionality.
Architecture arises in the aspiration that mind destines and purpose in mind’s dwelling and its intentionality. Architects aspire to give measure. The Architectural Studio as Faculty Architectural Project intends the space of differentiation opened as architecture’s superordinate program of dwelling. A brief for an architecture demands that a whole be crafted. This is the essence of the brief of the educational Studio as Faculty Architectural Project. It is the essence of any architect’s work, whether conscious or not. The essence of the brief is, therefore, ‘questioning’ that aims to refine project work as its architectural value. The programme touches the very heart of the profession’s needs at this time. We actively avoid rationales. Words do not suffice, the only possible answer is to change/evolve the project.
what is the purpose of ‘the’ (space, place, room, etc?)
how is this place answering the need? What is the need?
who would come here?
what does it mean to arrive t/here?
how is ‘this’ good for the culture/feeling of xplace ?
how does it help us to do ‘x’?
what is concealed and what is revealed?
where do you arrive and what do you do when you get there?
what does the environment mean to ‘y’?
Such questioning repeatedly turns the student back to the aspirational space for (yet) another iteration to continually bring the student back to the threshold of peeping into ‘what is’ architectural value and their own formulation of ‘questioning’. The questioning can never be accessed finally, only better. To aspire a better expression of what has no measure is eventually to express the questioning itself. The faculty project aspires to create such an ambient zone of learning to develop the space of differentiating means to presence what is in our intention forms its aspiration and to develop a future ‘science’ of this measure–giving. The faculty team may guide the student beyond the technology of Machine Ages materialism, toward the essence of matter and nature’s value and role in our environment.
2.2 SSAA Curriculum and the Learning Outcomes of the Studio as Faculty Architectural Studio
The SSAA Curriculum and Architectural Studio Learning Outcomes (ASLOs) were not written with the concept of the Architectural Studio as Faculty Project in mind. This paper proposes how that curriculum may be arranged to support this initiative. It is thus an opportunity that was brought near by SSAA’s developing curriculum, while this paper looks toward means of accelerating the realization of proper environment through its implementation as architectural project of a locus for education.
SSAA ASLOs align into two distinct aspects. The first group is defined through what is commonly guided directly through the students’ project. This aligns with ‘built’ matter, the realm of technology. This is differentiated from architectural value that the built matter is projects to allow ‘anyone’ to presence through their experience of the environment. The second group of ASLOs 1, 7 and 8 are ‘implied’ until they are given measure by the faculty team’s project. This is the matter of the studio as educational space that becomes measure of the studio as the locus of that architectural educational intent.
1st Group. The first groups of ASLOs is about the discourse with the student is through their project work and the specific approach of the students’ differing paths. ‘Teaching’ through the students’ project is addressed directly with the ASLOs 2, 3 and 4.
2 – Spirit of time as brief/programme;
3 – The Meaning of Context is sensitivity and knowledge of structuring an environment and its zone of relevance or influence and what is changed and what is not, and what is to be transformed;
4 – Material Thinking as the means for the intervention and environment that are directly addressed in the studio project.
The students’ project necessitates the development of ASLOs 1, 5 and 6 in conjunction with faculty guidance. These subordinate to ASLOs 2,3 and 4 and are accessed through the project.
5 – The presence of nature is the modifications in response to sunlight and heat, and wind and water and extending to all factors in nature;
6 – Media relates to communication and students’ represention of the means for transforming an environment and the preparation to do so. They serve formal and the aesthetic influences. As the substance of an architecture is not building, this opens the concept of building construction as a form of mediation.
2nd Group. The Studio as Faculty Project is developed with student projects as means and the students as beneficiaries, dwelling in that architectural locus through the studio’s specific brief. The ends of studio are discriminated from its means as the Studio as Faculty Project, whereby the second group of ASLOs are manifest as creating the environment. This is to provide architectural value that the student will naturally gravitate to in terms of their own muse. The faculty creates the environment and atmosphere where these curricular items are supported.
1 – Primary Programmatic Ability is to develop a combination of factors and a combination of spaces that engage ‘unknown’ users, architecturally;
7 – Research Based Learning Research is saliently to locate architectural value within the sphere of practice and the requirements of our culture, the profession and its futurity. This is not overtly part of the students’ studio project and is served by Studio as Faculty Project. Students today will be actively productive in only 10 -20 years hence. Research based learning in the educational studio is for the individual to locate their architectural practical values, register that against the profession as it is, engage the tools they need and initiate their own values in practice and toward the profession.
8 - Positions in the Profession: Discipline, Profession and Identity is a tripartite area of the profession in terms of its support and the architecture’s responsibility in practice and the students’ identity as architects. this cannot be ‘taught’ in a studio project while such a project can bear all of it. To develop the students’ understanding and access means to make real those values the Studio as Project makes this express in the studio architecture.
1.3 Means and measure of studio, more specifically at SSAA Semester III 2018.
In this case, Semester III students of the Sushant School of Architecture (SSAA) are taking a first formal look at architectural project development from A-to-Z. The enabling catalyst for this project is the large number of students and the correspondingly large faculty. A studio year has up to 150 students with up to 16 faculty engaging a single syllabus. The studios have 30 to 40 students with 3 to 4 faculty. Students’ welfare in terms of architectural education demands an orientation, or re–orientation, of their value and knowledge structures to enable their comprehension and acquisition of the necessary knowledge in terms of architectural value. This is especially true in India where grade school is relatively authoritarian and prescriptive. This studio therefore engages architectural value overtly from the beginning to immediately move students from the expectations of ‘right answers’. This can be borne by the students’ studio projects in a faculty brief for the studio’s architectural value. It is a form of conscious awareness for which mutable artifacts is space of practicing architects. The Studio as Faculty Architectural Project addresses learning outcomes in the configuration to make express the value of architecture. In the Studio as Faculty Architectural Project, such measure is given to the environment of architects preparing for practice.
The educator’s role at this stage includes getting the students’ practical abilities up to speed as quickly as possible. Students often do not find purpose in study of media and technological processes. To address this problem as the students’ issue can be seen as a form of prejudice. No architect ever disliked the means of building and forming environments, so where does the aversion come from? The prescriptive dogma of today’s technological tropes may leave many students, who in India are already hindered by rigid prescriptive teaching regimes and a stigma against manual labour, without access to meaningfulness and scanty access to architectural value from the vantage point of becoming its maker.
The active tradition has it that the student must analyze the site, the context, programmatic elements and materials in terms of the intended project. This is design process as technological steps. As a ground, this continues the circular reasoning that defies architectural value and keeps architecture from advancing. For the students in the studio to develop discrimination of architectural value, developing an architectural project on the terms required for graduation as the human sphere, a studio’s brief allows experience of assessing architectural value. Semester III is essential for preparing the student for absorbing the tremendous amount of highly diverse and technical information in third, fourth and fifth year. They must find the need for this and feel enabled to tackle it. The field of knowledge that can pertain to a single project are beyond anyone’s capacity to know fully. This points to the human mandate, facilitated by mind, to give measure where there is none. Mind is intention’s engine.
Two distinct levels are created by the faculty’s brief differentiating architectural value from its means. The faculty leads by developing the studio as influence for students’ awareness so that they can organize that information in a way appropriate to preparing environments with architectural value. Each student would initiate and develop their own structure to accommodate the needed technical information with such values. The difference between the students’ and the faculty’s project gives leverage for educational impulses that allow more elements of practice to be communicated consciously. There is a great deal of spiritual and architectural practical knowledge behind this. It is based on the difference between what we can measure and what we cannot claim to find measure for, which architects give measure to, and that humanity and identity are immeasurable. The studio program accords with the SSAA’s ASLOs to create lines of common value and communication. See Figure 2. The educational power of the studio multiplies via the two levels in iterative transformation, like any communication. It drives a ‘making conscious’ of the unconcealing of the technicist value proxy, just as that human aspiration of consciousness drives spirituality toward emancipation.
2.4. Studio Space as Locus of Architecture. Block E.406.
As it is mentioned in previous section, city governors and architects attempt to re-survive city identity by applying post-modern style in architecture and urban forms (Harvey, 1989). Architecture understood that the structure should contain cultural and social values so they attempted to make integration between past and present. Cities should develop the sense of place in the built environment by applying human’s culture and traditional indicators. The idea of post-modernism was applying urban process and constructions to increase livability throughout traditional environment. The style wants to increase local sense of place by embedding culture and regional architecture (Harvey, 1993). However, the style of design doesn’t have long term vision so some important indicators are ignored such as future generation, the anticipated consequences like increase older population and some of the important human’s requirements. Also, creativity and innovation gave up design through the postmodern style. Calinescu (1987) mentioned that the style is meaningless because it uses empirical knowledge. Lack of long term vision cause urban sprawl, lose wild life and agricultural ground, health communication, and social segregation in the cities. On one hand, designer focused on cultural and social activities by integrating past and present on the other hand they couldn’t overcome objectives because of lack of strategic planning. In the study will be introduced a new approach to the new style in design based on make sustainable cities with making strategic harmony between past, present and future.
The physical space of an architectural studio can be anything. They are often rough and unfinished, simple and open ended. They are also often formed by an architect hell bent on making the ideal space. See Figure 3 and 4. Comparing such spaces with SSAA is a fair comparison. SSAA is one of the most expensive schools of architecture in India. The school emulates western architectural studio structure and intends parity with western schools of architecture. Architectural value is only partly dependent on capital expenditure, while in the Indian context, the finances based on SSAA’s tuition would signify a significant project.
Figure 3. Harvard GSD. Harvard GSD.
Figure 4. New studio space John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto. One Spadina. Photo John Horner.
In the case of SSAA, the studio spaces in the two year old building are deeply flawed. Studios are too small for even 30 students, while the target of 40 students is well over the limit of ‘gathering around’. The space is designed essentially as a large classroom with no specific attributes pertaining to architectural studio needs. Workspace for each student is very limited on relatively small tables that are not fit for purpose, while most of them are damaged. The students cannot set up their own project space for the duration of the studio. Theft is common. Students may not stay in the space to work outside 8 am – 5 pm on weekdays without special permission requiring a number of signatures from the University administration. See Figure 5. Accepting the lack of 24 hour access, with no personal work space, and that this is essential for a significantly better educational result, research to better the condition of each person and the atmosphere within each studio section must be addressed to enhance the education and output of the students under these conditions. This project is inspired in the face of such generic, unstable and impersonal environment in which the culture of architecture is weak at best, questioning what will generate the necessary studio culture with an atmosphere for a strong orientation to the special nature of architectural education? In the case of Semester III students who need to be prepared properly for the next stages.
1. Certain elements should be (re-)arranged in the same way each time when the studio convenes. This signals that the studio is ‘in session’.
2. The items in the room and on the walls should be arranged so that there is never a sense of rubbish or clutter. Items that the students produce, such as the site model, should be arranged so that they are treated with respect and in fact give the space dignity just as they are given dignity by this treatment.
3. The students should clean the room themselves to avoid the cleaning staff throwing out their work and arrange the studio so that when they are not present so that their sense of ownership of their environment remains clear at all times.
The value of the education is borne in the faculty and students, found at the space beyond the temporary spaces of studio in session. It is important in mind. The students will need to find support in the faculty with this project via its brief.
Figure 5. The studios are essentially large classrooms. The desks are small. The students have no permanent station. It is imperative that the nomadic studio is given identity when it is in session to give architecture’s education the special locus that presences its own architecture. Photos Karassowitsch.
4.5. Studio Project
The Semester III studio is to facilitate the early stage development of practicing architects in terms of program and its outcome as an architectural project. The outcome of architectural practice is architectural value. This studio project as a project of combining architectural spaces begins by,
A. Forming inferences based on the approach(es) of the signature architects of the previous generation via the Un-Canon of Deconstructivist Architecture; and
B. and C. Introduction of a brief and a site that the architectural project gives form.
A. Un-Canon. The (Nominally) Deconstructivist Architects. Rather than studying their architectural projects, we looked at the seven architects that signified that ‘un-canon’ in the original 1988 exhibition as ‘case studies’. (MOMA 1988) The study of their architectural practices and process was kept away from old-school development of taxonomies to focus on the intentions of the architect and how they brought it through to completion: How do these architects refine and develop architectural value consistently and protect it from divergent energies and erosion devolving the work to mere buildings?
B. Site. The site is between the Asiad Games Village and the Asiad Games Tower in a park associated with the Asiad Games. Context is minimalized in a program to serve locally only. It is activist by reclaiming the plot out of the area taken by a commercial venture that has taken the public park private. See Figure 6.
C. Brief. The project brief is a local communication and information hub, interpreting ‘library’. This place is intended for the locals to be accessed within walking distance.
In this case we interrogated ‘library’ to really grasp its meaning. This ‘library’ must respond to the access we have to the world at home and everywhere that we go.
1. What functionality does such a ‘library’ have to support local wellbeing and as a portal to the world, the social sphere and our unity?
2. For what purposes will people come together here? Where do we arrive?
3. How can this presence architecture of the established the Asiad Village?
4. How will such a place add to the physical infrastructure of that area materially to improve well-being?
Figure 6. The site is opposite the west entrance (directly ahead) to the Asian Games Village. Diagram based on Google, Karassowitsch. Photo Karassowitsch.
1.6. ConFusion: The Project in Studio and the Studio as Project
In this faculty experiment, the discrimination of technological means and matter from architectural value was hindered at every turn. In this case one of three faculty members (of the required 4) was changed three times, leaving periods with only 2 of the 4 required, and finally, a new third faculty team member who stuck 6 weeks into the program. The site model took all semester to complete to a nominal 70% of completion, but with a minimum of personal investment. See Figure 7. Most errors went unrepaired. The individual project models were not fitted to the opening in the studio model in almost all cases. Most students did not make a model of their individual projects of quality utilizing the formulae already in place to provide ‘deliverable’ having its end on review day.
The faculty assessed the students with a regime of training as a series of disconnected assumptions. The lack of interest of the faculty relative to the impulse of this project gave clear and concrete guidance to the need, while the faculty is itself of the same regime. The distinction of technology and architecture could hardly be taught as it is as yet very unclear as a general concept of building technology and planning as architecture. The main hindrance is not the lack of knowledge or acceptance of the issue, but the lack of initiative to attempt resolution to create forward movement. Although technology as implemented fails everywhere, it is uncritically applied according to prescriptive formulae derived decades ago. Despite evidence of striving to understand the subtleties of the profession, the students prioritized a stylized reticence to submit to ‘teaching’ while the faculty on the team responded in kind with punitive emotional treatments of students and minimal guidance. Discriminating the means of teaching from its environment becomes absolutely necessary in such a case, but as that need approaches fullness, so too the difficulty of implementation.
Figure 7. We encouraged and taught the students to make a solid base that accommodates for individual models. We brought new materials to the supply store and described and encouraged new ways of working. Photo Karassowitsch.
The purpose of this paper is to make that discussion explicit and to develop means to form a proper environment that gives the student a space of architectural aspiration to grow in. Studio cannot remain a technical or bureaucratic apparatus and facilitate this. Technology cannot be the purpose of studio, even if it is essentially present as its production aspect. The development of architecture of the educational space as faculty project of architectural value includes immeasurable quality of life as it dwells, which is arguably the essence architectural practice.
The application of western-based architectural process and design method to architectural practice in an uncritical way fails the essential premise of such traditionally modernist architectural work; technology and its sciences are founded in critical thinking and driven by ana/lysis. The uncaring attitude that lets critical thinking languish unabashedly highlights other values that are taking precedence. What are these other values that clearly usurp the intentions for completion as ‘shiny materiality’? Taking a peek around the corner, turning from centuries of punitive western colonialist abuse and the habits of victims that support the continuing momentum, the quiet unresponsiveness reflects the simplest samadhi. It is a stony character, blind to the world; pashanyatulya, which is not yet Kaivalhya. When something seems that it cannot be fixed, the path of ease can be to turn away and stop caring, we let it go. It is also wisdom to remain unattached even to great things that give us pleasure. But one’s condition remains steady.
3. Conclusion
The beauty in the eyes of the beholder is not in material shine that has been arranged just so. An other beauty is aspired to give experience of the heart’s aspiration. It is negated by western methods and modes of creating technologically intense shining results to matter. One way to look at this is to say that nature has its own order. If we make a garden, or even just put human order in wilderness, there is at least a sense of raw beauty in the human impulse in the area. It is the very beginning of what creates a Taj Mahal, a Seagram Building or Rouen Cathedral. If a human space goes fallow and a destructive element remains in place, order reverts to the natural forces and ecosystems that are not human, even if they serve endlessly to keep humanity well. In the case of the Sushant School of Architecture, the limitation is a technologically orientated understanding of architecture in a general view of learning as a top down exercise of power over students. The faculty that can grasp greater fields of nuance will give up this use of power, for it does not give the student the space to develop, especially their own values, and values in harmony within the cultural heart of south Asian cultures. For their part, many students were unable to utilize the freer space they were given for positive ends, taking it as leniency. The students as a group did not develop a strong sense of ownership of their studio space. Only the model, unfinished and repeatedly abandoned and restarted, gave it a center and a modicum of grace.
The general quality of the students work matched or exceeded that of the previous semester’s Semester IV, of which I was a part, and from which this semester’s syllabus and outcomes was derived. This syllabus could be provided for Semester II students at the same level, as the present Semester III students did evince bringing significant skills from Semester II. See Figures 8 and 9. The lack of good culture around media development, especially model making, held them back despite efforts to improve the quality of materials and make succinct material contributions to their skills.
Figure 8. The studio site model in the background. In the foreground is the final model of Mehak Madan. Photo Karassowitsch.
To evolve the roots of the profession in mind and heart – within the budding architect – education for practice must become explicit work of evolving awareness and sensitivity to environment. To do this, certain characteristics are required in the faculty. The Studio as Faculty Architectural Project would demand these be developed within the essential knowledge that any faculty would bring to such a position. The faculty will require either 1) architectural knowledge or 2) spiritual knowledge. The former is 1a) awareness of the professional issues or 1b) skills of architectural practice or talent with skills of implementation. The latter is 2a) self-development skills and a practical approach and 2b) willingness to evolve self. The third item is structural consistency in school administration over semesters. Architectural knowledge is to discriminate architectural value from the means to attain loci of its experience, while spiritual knowledge is awareness of the aspiration that architecture is the experience of a prepared loci. Both are always present, but not always the explicitly expressed in the individual faculty’s work.
Figure 9. In the foreground is the final model of Tejas Nirula. Photo Karassowitsch.
By discriminating the function of the educational project from the project of the students as learning tool, we may begin to form the emancipation of architecture from its technicist value proxy in which we have highly developed the art of concealing architectural value as materiality, technology and systems ‘thinking’ that oppose nature and human nature. The Studio as Faculty Architectural Project is proposed as an architecture of unfolding or ‘turning’ to dwelling’s original architectural value and after-technology architectural practice in the educational setting. It is ground to all architects and it is specific to architects in India, rather than adapted from western theoretical grounds. Its ground is in practical tools for understanding practice of mind’s evolution that has its cradle in the areas we call India today. Further down the road, the articles of the professional associations and the legislation that gives them their place will have to be revisited. This proposal for an educational practice native to architects’ original superordinate program extends from spaces of education to revise the very basis upon which professionals are responsible to society, toward humanity’s original aspiration for architecture, through architectural projects that provide for the student the environment of architectural education as architectural value.
4. End Notes
(1) This research is the result of the doctoral research, Goal in Architecture: The Essential Mutual Claiming of One Another of Architecture and Spirituality. Dissertation: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. 2016. This remains unpublished due to a lengthy rewriting.
(2) The values of technology and the forms of science that support it are plausible as an externalization of our mind's values. (Karassowitsch 2016) Technology and the technicist value proxy for architectural value that architects use in practice reflect our mind's values. This signals the link between architectural practice and spiritual practice. The individual is In the condition of the 'modified mind'. Each one of us faces this in accordance with advancements in human capacity. The Yogasūtra describes the use of mind in that state to undo this condition; to remove these modifications. Rajayoga is a contemporary form of elements already within Patañjali’s Yogasūtra, which deals with this condition almost 2000 years ago. The parameters are complex and spiritual practices and religions have kept evolving as people grapple with it. Krishnamurti and Dr. David Bohm develop an argument to describe this based in Vedantic values and rajayoga. (Krishnamurti 1983) The development of my doctoral research develops this theme extensively.
(3) Reyner Banham defined the first machine age in terms of architecture in his seminal book. (Banham 1980) Others have posed further machine ages. This paper implies the 'Machine Ages' of any stage, based on Reyner Banham's approach.
(4) I have developed an extensive description of the relationship between the freedoms we expect in our 'free' societies, duty, the ancient triadic values structure of action (karma), knowledge (jnāna) and devotion/love (bhaki), as well as a treatment of Habermas' approach to the public sphere and Bandura's Triadic Reciprocal Determinism, in architectural practice. The ramification of freedom-of-choice is ancient and original, as is architecture, and underlies this work in terms of rajayoga and the profession's technological value proxy.
5. Acknowledgment
I thank SSAA for the opportunity to integrate my research with the SSAA curriculum research.
Conflict of interests
The Author declares that there is no conflict of interest
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