I never like to sit in on final design juries for students whom I tutor because most likely I would already know at least 90% of what it’s all about. But I do go around listening to the dialogues that go on between them and the jurors. And I do listen to the comments the jury will be making in the post-jury assessments, albeit from a distance so as to make sure I keep an objective stance on comments by avoiding to look at who it was who said what.
I do this solely for input for what works, what doesn’t or what’s deficient. However, even after more than 10 years of this in various architectural faculties, I can hardly find much that I can use from the comments to work on. That’s because there seems to be a consistent reappearance of the same set of comments over and over again, regardless of the students output. Probably there was a much earlier time when those comments could have been taken on board to work on though in retrospect, I strongly doubt it. Reason is because they were comments that were abound even during my diploma years in ITM almost 30 years ago, of which I had made sure my students would address each time I tutor.
I find these comments that jurors make no longer reflect the shortcomings of the students but unfortunately highlights those of the jurors themselves.
1. That the students spend too much time on making nice images.
I’m always asking students to produce large 3D representations of their designs, both exterior and interior, and montages so as to illustrate their desired effects and intentions. This also includes 3D construction details for students to have a more real world visualization and appreciation of them. However, there will be at least two persons every session who must remark that the students should spend less time making them and spend more time on more ‘architectural’ matters. There’s even a killjoy or two [or three or four, etc,] that even declare that the students are only good at producing nice images. Bloody cheek! One particularly obnoxious lady even stood in front of a partition full of interior montages and was going on about how the students should spend more time developing their spaces instead of making all those nice images. She was standing in front of interior montages. Interior montages. Interior would be the spaces within the building. A whole 2m x 2.5m partition full of them. And she still talks about making more spaces and less images. How does one present spaces without images?
Why this makes them look bad.
The average final project would be at least 9 weeks long. I would never have seen any of those nice images during those 9 or so weeks. That’s because the students would have to produce a design first in order to make all those nice images; because after all, those images would have to be of their design. Therefore, if they say that the students spend so much time making nice images, then it appears that they are disregarding the actual design that was produced in 9 weeks that those images represent. They can’t see design – all they see are just nice images.
However, I should say that this actually make the students appear really good because they produced images of quality that the jury thought would take 9 or so weeks to do; while we know students only had 2 or 3 days/nights to come up with them. Kudos to the students!
2. Harping on about drawing conventions.
This is such a common comment that more or less reaffirms the previous point, and is especially for jurors who just keep going on and on about it throughout the jury. Now, we know that drawings would have only been done at the very last stage of a project. For a 9 week project that would have begun after the 8th or even 9th week itself, simply because students need to come up with a design first before they could draw something. Therefore such comments on drawings would be only for the last stages of a design project. So why so much emphasis on this last stage which is only about a week or so instead of more input on the design which made up at least 90% of the project time?
Why this makes them look bad.
Okay, so it seems that we are in an academic culture that seems to prioritize in producing worker ants; students are groomed to be proficient and efficient for the office. Some actually say that students are expected to know everything about producing buildings from drawing conventions right up to authority submissions, fire regulations, contractual matters, etc. This is particularly disturbing if the person saying it studied in a western country because they themselves would not have been trained as such. And that is because such matters would not have been heavily imbued academically because it’s best picked up through actual working experience.
So it appears that to such jurors students are simply potential office machinery. They appear to disregard the design acumen and skills displayed and can only see production quality but not content. That’s assuming of course that they can actually recognize content in the first place.
3. Insisting on the basics.
I can’t say enough how despairing it is to hear my contemporaries continually asking students for basics. Actually, I no longer know what these basics are that they request or need to see so badly. So I’ll address this in general.
In a nutshell, basics are what you would acquire in formal subjects such as building construction, structures, services, materials, drawing, theory etc. They are the fundamentals to your understanding of a subject matter. But come Design Studio, you should not merely regurgitate those basics into an architectural design. I would expect students to explore, exploit and expound on those basics to come up with their own creative design solutions. As far as I’m concerned, the only basic or fundamental rule that I insist they comply unequivocally to is gravity.
So naturally the students would have designs that are very far removed from those illustrated in books on the various subjects. I would even encourage students to explore presentation techniques to the point of even seeing it as an art piece for some. They should explore communicating moods and effect above the technical information. But the moment the works display beyond the overtly familiar, the students are under immediate suspicion of ignorance of basics, without due or fair process for what is actually on display.
Why this makes them look bad.
Best guess is the juror can’t see beyond the dry and the familiar. To be fair, they are most probably conserving mental energy especially if they are to see more than 3 students at the session; because looking at the non-familiar does take more mental energy to process. It’s just a crying shame that they choose not to look close and long enough at how far the students have come ahead from the basics.
4. Remarking on the lack of architectural clichés or the generic in the students work.
This point is very much in tandem with the previous one. I’ve actually written on this before after a particularly mind-numbing jury session. This is where they insist on seeing what is familiar in the architecture around them within the students’ work and a refusal to accept anything that is not immediately recognizable. Furthermore, they actually dismiss and disregard the justifications by the students for their respective idiosyncratic solutions. They just brush aside what they don’t like simply because it’s different – to them.
This also include clichés such as insisting that it goes without saying that one has to relate when within vicinity of historical or heritage sites without the possibility of responding or reacting to it, even if one finds said site to be simply horrendous.
Why this makes them look bad.
What’s ironic is that these are jurors who would encourage students to be explorative and innovative in their design. It’s just that somehow when presented with something new, they ask for the more familiar and the generic. I wonder what does the word innovative actually mean to them? Whatever it is, one thing’s sure – they don’t think the students can be so.
This is also a symptom of those who see architectural design as a design by catalogue process. That means that they have established architecture as a process of putting together pre-catalogued clichés and components into ‘creative’ configurations. Thus they could never see newer solutions – just new formations.
5. Accusing the students of mere form making.
I’m more interested in students seeking newer solutions by constant reassessment of familiar problems, rather than students just coming up with new forms as envelope to the usual, normal solutions for usual generic problems. Traditionally, this is called critical thinking. Examples of this covers everything from making actual office spaces exciting rather than just their main lobby, making circulation interesting rather than just merely keeping it short and convenient, to even reassessing the necessity for economics and compactness of toilet and service core design. This is an integrative process and hence generates and evolves new and exciting forms. What that means is that if the form captures your attention, you could trace it back to how it is a product of response or reaction to what is inside. Of which if you don’t do so, then all you will see are just exciting forms and not much else.
Why this makes them look bad.
They did not do so thus all they see are exciting forms and not much else.
