searching direction

What are the various explorations in design for final year and thesis design?

1. The fragment and the fracture

Over the last few years, the practice of architecture is undergoing dramatic transformation. The urge to fragment, fracture form and space as we see in the recent works of Gehry or Leibeskind, Alvaro Siza,Zaha Hadid, Richard Meier, Rem or Steven Holl. The question is - Are there other relevant contemporary explorations ??? Or do these experiments in fragmentizing architecture render other experiments as outdated (not avant garde). Are there other discourses besides these?

2. The derailment of history!

What is the role of memory and history!The nature of practice undoubtedly impacts architectural education.One dimension that modern architecture endeavored to explore – but which was abandoned or derailed by the so-called "post-modernists" –was the "idea of history". In the eighties of the twentieth century,vested interests misrepresented the idea of history – Two fallacies were resurrected. Firstly that modern architecture emerged from a tabula rasa approach of severing itself from history. Secondly bringing back in its most crass and literal form – elements of the past as professed by the post-modernists.

3. The large-scale commercial and IT boom today!

Surreal virtual realities built in concrete forms! OR pure rational efficiencies On the other hand, large-scale projects, software parks, shoppingmalls transform the city landscape. Projects in shining metal and glass constructed at a frenetic pace – standardized details and added interiors – engage mass cultures and new forms of urban recreationwith the multiplex. Large scale townships, SEZ's, airport terminals,Olympic stadia, and structures at new scales – Unique and anonymous.History and architectural memory stands frozen in the wake of such commercial ventures.

4. The organic natural and structural

Few transformed to a new organic in the lineage of Antonio Gaudi andSantiago Calatrava and Ar. B V Doshi's recent work. Uneasy, awkward and emotional against the purist modern.

5. The ecology of the architectural search

It is in this contentious and challenging space that both the practice of architecture today and its education stand today. The dialogue anddiscourse however returns to the most basic relationship of humanity and the object – its scale and experience – often over-shadowed by the questions of ecology and sustainability.

6. The continuity and an unfinished modernist exploration

The fact that modernism and its tools of abstraction of language never really negotiated a comfortable engagement with place and location –in its pre-occupation with the universal - opens up new opportunities for exploration. The abstract language of Corbusier and Kahn continue to pervade the works of several architects. Few modernist architectshave been able to imbue new meaning into this process - through a morehumane and democratic engagement with materials and techne, local cultural practices of construction and technology and layered meanings with their contradictions - that transcend geographical boundaries! AD Raje, Correa, B V Doshi, Ando, GianCarlo, Van Eyke, – Whose works need to be reassessed. Frampton's critical regionalism may have momentarily filled the void though in a sympathetic manner rather than a self-referential anchored generation from the locus of place. For now, the architecture of expectation probably does not exist and may be a hypothetical precept!
Posted by Durganand B

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MATERIALS IN THE REAL WORLD - some links

check out http://www.taiyomc.com/ for tensile structures

check out : kvvoltex for textured stone surfaces

checkout - COSTFORD for alternative technologies

checkout Auroville - holistic experiments