it takes two hours of a painful drive to go to new bombay for a design jury only to find the work mediocre to awful. dyp and bvp were the colleges and the projects were the usual crafts village/ wholesale market/ cultural center kind of crap. there wasn’t a single person who tried anything at all and even then the drawings were sub-par and the designs unresolved. its no wonder that navi mumbai is so tacky looking. i feel sorry for the kids. i am looking forward to wednesday when i am jury for the third year for the bombay colleges. they have to be at least marginally better.
2 comments:
well then best of luck for wednesday.... i hope we get an insight into th bombay colls as well
hey dharmesh
if i remember correctly your class had done the art museum in vashi and the kutch project. i thought the projects were excellent and it was good to see the energy there. this year was very dissapointing unfortunately. the projects were all incomplete. it is unfortunate, and i was sorry for the state of affairs not only in your school but also in mumbai in general- and this includes the work our school is producing.
in india our academy has not been able to establish itself as a place for serious discussion about architecture. if it is only a place where building drafting is taught then it is sad that we have to take 5 years to achieve it. i once worked in an office where the draftsmen used to resolve the buildings so much better than the architects- with only a year long course.
architectural production will continue to languish in the state it is in right now with cheap imitations of western "styles" unless we begin to look honestly at our strenghts and weaknesses. our pride refuses us to acknowledge our faults or even recognize our strenghts. we believe in an outdated romantic regionalism or in a blind surrender to the high tech tastes of the market- and cannot see that both of these are merely surfaces that we create with the same hollow interior. thats not to say that there is not good work being done all around the country. the projects in your college that year i was there were refreshing and exciting. perhaps there are more of these experiments being undertaken elsewhere; but more often their very nature of asking the dangerous questions is what makes them marginal.
to be appreciate the good it is also important to know what is not and being able to say so.
i am sorry for being so explicit and long with my reply. perhaps it is because we were just in a heated debate here about the nature of practice and the role of the school. sorry for boring you.
i also am sorry that you think that i was generalising too much. i do apologize if i was. it must have been my frustration on that day venting. after all thats what i keep the blog for.
you must be in your thesis year now. how is it going? what is your topic?
rohan
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