Have you ever wondered what a day in the life of an architecture student consists of? You must have heard about the sleepless nights and the stress about our juries, but there’s always a fun side to everything serious we go through, isn’t it? I am a final year architecture student and today I’m going to take you through one such incident out of many that have happened throughout my journey as an architecture student.
On one fine day during my fourth year of college, I had this wonderful opportunity to attend a workshop conducted by Ar. Pappal Suneja. His workshop was focusing on Architectural Journalism. As a young learner, I’m really grateful that I got to learn about architectural journalism from a very well known writer and architect. I am into writing for a few years now and since I’m studying architecture I wanted to work as someone who can connect these two fields, so I was really excited and looking forward to this workshop.
Workshops in my college are usually held in the auditorium where everyone gets an opportunity to be interactive, which in turn makes the workshop interesting too. All the students gathered at the auditorium and were eagerly waiting for the workshop to begin, then there entered Ar. Pappal Suneja, very energetic and greeted all of us with a warm smile. We conducted a small welcome ceremony where a few teachers and students from college had to give speeches and an introduction about the architect.
Here comes the time, the workshop finally begins. Pappal Suneja didn’t want it to be like a usual seminar session where one just talks and the others listen because that would become boring and non-interactive. He included a lot of activities in between his presentation so that all students and teachers could be equally involved in that space. He began with his presentation about architectural journalism, which a lot of students were keen to learn about.
After a few slides he came up with an activity – he wanted to know any incident that took place in our lives which totally changed their perspective towards things. For this activity, he picked a random roll number and that particular student had to talk about an incident. Is there any such incident in your life too? Do think about it.
He again began with his presentation where we got to learn a lot about a career which most of the students have no clue about. If you’re a student reading this article then please do make sure to attend such kind of workshops because the outcome from experiencing something outside of your regular classes is very huge and you get to learn a lot more new things.
Coming back to the workshop, here comes another fun activity and something which we all could participate in. In this activity, we had to hold pens and write down our own names with both hands and look at the difference. Some of us are left-handed, some of us are right-handed and all of us have different handwritings too, which basically was the whole point of the activity – every individual has a different kind of skill set, every individual is good at something different and unique from the others which cannot be compared.
We had a small break after the activity and we came back for the presentation. He concludes the presentation by encouraging us to take up architectural journalism and also to spread knowledge about this field. Hold on, the best part is yet to come. We had a few more activities after this conclusion, the next one was very similar to the previous activity but the only difference was that this time we had to try writing our own names with the help of our legs.
Now, this was quite interesting which made all the students try it out and kept the workshop really interesting. This activity shows that few of us have unique abilities where even something written with the help of legs looks beautiful. It’s like an appreciation for all those artists who create wonderful pieces of work with the help of their legs (we all must have seen at least one such person).
The last activity of the day was the most humorous part of the day which was particularly related to me. In this activity, all of us had to close our eyes for about ten seconds and draw the first thing that came to our mind. Now, this didn’t have to be something related to architecture only but could be anything and we were given a time limit of 10 minutes to finish this sketch. After the given ten seconds all of us began to draw something on a piece of paper.
My visualization was a dream room that I’d like to have in my house if I ever have one of my own. I like to always be around the natural environment surrounded with greenery all over, so my dream room consisted of so much greenery because of which I had to put in all those green colors into this paper. This in turn made my drawing look so funny that the person looking at it couldn’t figure out what it was.
Towards the end of the end, Pappal Suneja had gone through all our drawings and it was time to distribute them back along with a review of the drawing. It was my turn and he goes like “Whose is this one? Very interesting”, I was really surprised listening to that, I raised my hand and say “Thank you”. He then says “What an irony, you thought I was serious?” and starts laughing. I heard that and I started laughing too and then followed the rest of the class. It was a little embarrassing but I loved my time at the workshop and what’s the fun otherwise right?
I’m sure you also have experienced such humorous incidents at least once in your architecture student life. Apart from this, every architecture student must have gone through something humorous during their exams, juries or, similar workshops. You can also try out these activities with your own group of people and learn new things. Don’t forget to rewind your nostalgic moments too and share them with others.
