jury day no 3

this time the jj building when smita and me sat through more than 27 students third year design projects. first of all, i don’t know whether you know about the even batch and odd batch thing in jj. every year has two divisions made of odd numbers and even numbers. they have completely independent projects from one another. how do they keep up with this complication is beyond me. anyways we saw rural centers for community development where there was no community to be seen, an agricultural information institute somewhere near hospet that might as well have been in new bombay (except that the site was made into a pentagon because the students were bored of orthogonals), an artisans village which was on the pune highway- enormous and atrocious (seen before) and a museum at bijapur . none of the projects was even marginally interesting and for some reason the students thought that a logical adjacency diagram was architecture. so when we tried to ask them what their design idea was it was like talking to them in a strange east european language. “huh?”

still some kids were just naturally talented. some of the drawing skills were fabulous. watercoloured sheets and perfect inking. trees and skies- and human figures with scio. i got all nostalgic. sometimes this urge for finishing was ludicrous. even though most of the drawing was incomplete the skies just had to be there. liked one girls cheese wall project and another kids libeskind wannabe. even the bamboo obsessed boy seemed like he had potential.

met vandana there too. she was seeing fourth year work and was still toiling away when i left to meet eli at wellington mews – the fancy serviced apartment building at cooperage. anna, angela and her in pretty tackily detailed but generously endowed room on the first floor. she looks the same and pretty happy. it was good to see her.

angela

eli

anna