Architecture: A way of life
I must start with a beautiful analogy I read somewhere, which says, ‘Architecture is T-shaped, both deep and wide’. It is disheartening how architecture is not seen as a profession of either logistics or aesthetics by the majority of people, while it is an amalgamation of both. We can’t ignore that most of our life is spent in buildings which are indeed designed by architects, even if structurally analysed by civil engineers. The fascinations of the built form are not too short of the wonder aroused by nature itself. The towns and cities we live in were planned on some piece of paper back in history, the roads, the landscapes, the homes, all of them were born out of a creative mind’s idea transcended through some pencil strokes that governed the position of every brick to make it whole. All the dots on the maps that turn out to be whole cities on a magnified look, cities with each building designed individually, without a predefined set of codes, each one fulfilling its own purpose, existing for its own cause, like all of us, each one unique on its own. Whenever I talk about buildings, about architecture, it feels more like talking about life: a love-hate relationship, but more of an indispensable gift we want to cling to forever.
Just like there are people who see nature as a healer, a thing of beauty, a piece of art, I feel architects see buildings that way, as creations that define us, that govern us, that are so closely connected to us through and through. Those skyscrapers are built to the heights of our hope, the hope of living up to the adobe of most capable creation on this planet. We feel the weight and the strength of those bricks, that concrete, that mortar in the thin pencil lines we sketch on paper to define boundaries. We know and feel what a home is to someone, a long-aspired dream of a common man for which one sweated, perhaps more than half his life. We connect with architecture such that, every time we go to some really good place, the first thing we notice is some element of design in the building, rather than the luxuries in it, a photograph pinches us if the vertical and horizontal lines in the frame are not aligned to the respective edges. Our eyes endlessly scan the details in our surroundings, and we see buildings not as some calculative structures but as ones that house all these billions of lives on Earth.
It fascinates me how the planner of our own college, IIT Kharagpur, weaved thousands of lives in KGP around a 2.2km road with his little trick, and still, we are ignorant enough to think that cities are born on their own, that buildings are all same. We so easily ignore that our built environment has evolved into skyscraper based cities from some rock-cut caves, and still so many around us find it difficult to believe that there can be research and development in architecture too. We face rejections, our hours of work on design gets scraped in a moment, and with several of such instances, we learn to struggle. Maybe people don’t realise what importance design has in our life, and maybe they never will, but the truth is that design won’t cease to affect us.
People will keep on visiting architectural masterpieces like say Taj Mahal, and be awestruck, because that’s what art does to us, it makes us wonder about the ability of human hands to create marvels. And this is not just about architecture, it’s about every design-oriented field that’s looked down at, and not looked up to, just because it is not based on some codes and algorithms. Let me say something honest, we were not born out of some syntaxes, robots are, we were born to savour and appreciate beauty, and to create it too. Someday in future, AI and bots will be able to do all that we can, but they won’t say “Hey! Michaelangelo was an amazing artist!” on visiting Sistine Chapel, we will. At the end of the day, you will always get back home, and that is precisely why art exists, to take you home…
