gold medals / thesis

sanmita - the winner

tarun - cited

sujay - cited

rutwik - cited

ninad - cited

vami

shetty

mayur

siddharth

sawant

saki

what is architectural research? the complaint being that the concerns of architecture can somehow be removed outside that of the (and i hate the overused under-understood hyphenated word)- “socio-cultural”. if so then how i am yet to know. and if architecture is not understood in relationship to the ‘socio-cultural’- how is it understood? purely formally? and what does that mean- really? where does pure form begin? this disciplinary slotting of a phenomenon i am unable to understand. i do understand when the question is framed with no relationship to space- but weren’t so many? granted that the final thesis building had to cater to the square foot demands of some university assumed standard; and so many ideas were unresolved in the making of the building. but does that mean that we refuse the theoretical and make research to be only about the making of the building- the measurable – ‘size, circulation, services’ or about the vaguely defined – “good” proportion, colour, scale.’ and that is the scope of architecture. we tie ourselves down again from asking difficult questions and replay in unending loops the good research / bad building; or the ‘where is the architecture?’- i ask – look around – where is not the architecture? and just because we still don’t have the language to speak of it- do we stop speaking completely?