In preparing for a talk on pedagogy, I came across this wonderful analogy of the parent as ‘carpenter’ and a ‘gardener’

This is a moment in class (Feb 2020) where i was introducing architectural theory to second year students. Some say it is early to teach theory in second year or some say it is never early to teach theory. This insight is helpful, if at all we agree what is theory. If you had ‘theory’ in your postgraduate title, like me, it is a different game as it comes with some amount of anxiety. I used these two brilliant definitions in this first class and quickly illustrated as above.

(Top right)- “The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind offish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation”
E H Carr, What is History?

My argument is that we have only very few fisherman in the east (compared to the west) , but a lot fishes to catch. Side note : Are academics fisherman or cooks?

(Bottom right) – “The word ‘theory’ derives from the Greek ‘theoria’, which has the same root as ‘theatre’, in a word meaning ‘to view’ or ‘to make a spectacle’. Thus, it might be said that a theory is primarily a form of insight, i.e. a way of looking at the world, and not a form of knowledge of how the world is.”
David Bohm. Wholeness and Implicate Order

(Left)- The sketch happened serendipitously on the board, as an overlapping of the thoughts triggered by the two quotes. And since then this has been my go to diagram to the recurring and useful question ‘What is theory?’ – There are various positions (labelled as ‘T’) to look at architecture ( One can argue that ‘A’ should be ‘a’). Then there are theoreticians / critics have various positions on how to read these positions itself. These relationships form the premise of theory.

After a cycle of teaching online, i am rediscovering the nuances of the blackboard. It has a certain slowness, and allows to grow thoughts collectively as the class proceeds. It traces the emphasis and the hesitations of the teacher, simultaneously. It is an evidence of overlapping thoughts and time, unlike a digital presentation which displaces time. Here the attempt was to summarise the learning outcome of the first semester drawing course. It traced all the things we spoke about the need to ‘draw’. There is a certain pleasure to look at the final mess, like the one we have when we cook our own food.

Reading notes from the essay ‘Learning from Ekalvya’ on architectural education by Charles Correa

Correa brilliantly argues about architectural education in this essay : He broadly categorises two types of studios : guru studio and distancing studios. In guru studio “The master, coming to your desk, would pick up a thick grease pencil and draw a bold line, changing things radically: the proportions, the cornice, the depth of the shadows, whatever. “Not this—this!” And you learned because you trusted his judgment, you entered the gestalt of his world. ” In the distancing studio, the students learns from their own process and judgement beyond the ‘idiosyncrasy’ of the guru studio. Correa argues that a school needs a good balance between these two types “The system would also allow a school to use its faculty to much better advantage—because it would make explicit the differences between the two types of studio, permitting each of them to be run with minimal cross- sniping. So that gurus who have their own idiosyncratic and intuitive design skills could return to the atelier model of teaching without being accused of reckless brainwashing, while those teachers that run the distancing studios would not be criticized for not being “designers,” or “creative” enough, and so forth.” One of the sharpest sentences from the essay (and thus the story of Ekalavya reference) is that “This is why the presence, however hallucinatory, of the guru is so important. Through our trust in him, we teach ourselves.” 

And there is another sharp observations on our expectation from students from design studio :”..on the contrary, students (regardless of any inherent aptitude for the astonishing mix of analytic, synthetic and topologic skills that make up the design process) are compelled to take such a studio every semester, for five continuous years— and it is always the heavyweight in their schedule, preempting enormous quantities of time and energy. Each semester these unhappy students are presented with brand-new problems, often in complicated and subtle contextual situations, and then asked to come up with new and brilliant responses, possibly expressed in an architectural syntax of their own invention. In the entire hisory of our profession, very few architects have managed to pull that one off— even once in their lifetime! Yet we demand this of each student, in each design studio. The result: dismay and frustration (and at several universities, among the highest stress rates of all departments) “

This essay is from the book “The Education of the Architect : Historiography, Urbanism, and the Growth of Architectural Knowledge” edited by Martha Pollak. It is available in open access format from MIT Press. 

I have been teaching basic drawing course (technical drafting to be precise) skills for first year students for a few years now. Each time I teach, it is a great reminder to myself saying one needs to draw with ‘care’ – and thats all matters.  The ‘care’ gets manifested in the drawings implicitly. It is this ‘care’ which translates into actual construction too. I am looking for new ways in the class to emphasis this point. Here is a drawing i made for this week’s class to make this point. The difference between object A and B is just an extra bold silhouette. It takes only 10 % of extra time to finish the drawing but then makes the drawing read many times better. The extra line itself doesn’t matter per se, but the time and mindset it takes to take a bit extra ‘care’ is what matters. Drawing as carrier of ‘care’ and ‘attention’. 

In the seminal book ‘Why Architects Draw’ Edward Robbins makes this observation while talking about Moneo’s drawings and design process ” This emphasis on the craft of drawing comes from the belief that craft must be a part of the whole process of design and building. This care for craft and for beauty must start at the very beginning of the process of design and be kept all the way through that process. As drawing is essential to design, it too must al­ways reveal a sense of craft and a sense of the qualities of beauty that in the end one wants one’s building to show.”