Drawing 28

A note on the drawing : 

This drawing is from my 2008 sketchbook. It was my first month at CEPT as a post grad student. I was still overwhelmed coming to this new city and esteemed campus. The move from Mysore to Ahmedabad was both exciting and anxious. We were elated that Prof. Doshi will be visiting our design studio. Prof. Snehal Shah was our design studio faculty, who insisted Doshi visit our studio and also teach. We were fortunate he made a few visits to our class at regular intervals from the beginning to the final review. It was also a rare privilege, as this might have been one of his last longer academic engagements being part of a studio. In one of the early classes, to introduce ourselves, he asked to bring sketches to share our interests and skills. This was one of the drawings i showed. I made some sketches of the SA building.  It was both an embarrassing and fertile moment for me. Doshi pointed out that only the central grid has 3 frames and and other grids have 4 frames (not 3 as i had drawn!). I also embarrassingly argued with him that there was only was 3 frames even in the other grids. He drew on my notebook (right bottom corner), to explain me.  Our studio was also located inside the same SA building . He took me out of the studio and showed the four frames in the building he designed . Now you can imagine how naive and overwhelmed i was then. As a constructive lesson, he upped the assignment for the next class, where we had to measure a part of the CEPT Campus and draft to scale – so  we had to be more careful and observant of what we drew. On that day he asked us to pin up the drawings and not say or explain anything. I remember very vividly him saying that, with an impish smile, that our ‘drawings will reveal the background, interests, skills and everything about us’ – without us speaking a word. Drawing a small sketch cross section on a paper, he said one should draw slowly, the skin should feel the scale and profile of the space you are in – and one should sense if the height of the corridor in the section is 2.1 or 2.4 m high – so the scale is both perceived and registered in the drawing. 

A vivid learning experience for me.