sorry, the gallery at the end of last post wont work for some reason, so check this out

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

so, its been a year and we’ve come a long way

So first year ended last month, I think I’ve come a long way this year. I definitely feel like I have learnt so much and grown so much over the past year, as a person, as a designer and as an architect(ure student). Its been such a short year though, it seems like only yesterday that I landed in England and now the first year is over, the most amazing part has obviously been the steep learning curve and the independent learning skills and how can I forget the people, the tutors, the Students Union, the university staff, the classmates, housemates, everyone.

This year has been like a dream, lets start by talking about the major projects we did in the 1st year as architecture students. There was the first term where we were introduced to the tectonics of  architecture, the ground, wall, frame and canopy, we watched films, did sketches, had lectures and seminars, learnt about how these function and then had to design a pavilion using the knowledge we previously gained, then alongside was the technology report wherein we had to describe our precedents, research technology and construction techniques and the essay. Then the 2nd term kicked off with a 1 week collaborative project with fine artists at a site called Holton Lee in Poole, about an hour away from uni, that was fun and it helped us get accustomed to the site because that’s where our next project was gonna be, we designed the writer’s retreat. This project was so much fun, it was the first real project I did with a specified site, a well defined brief and meter squared heated floor space, im gonna attach the working drawings of this project along with this post but  this project influenced us to think as a designer, provide challenges along the way and it taught us how to work with well defined guidelines, again along with this there was the tech report and the essay. 2 big projects but so much to do all the time, we had to slog and make sure every detail was fine and that is when I think I learnt what its like to be a designer, looking at 2nd year students work, we have big shoes to fill but I’m confident that all of us will do well.

Apart from that, yesterday, I went to the Sculpture park for an architecture seminar, it was incredible, not only the par but the speakers, the architects, everyone. I was well inspired by this firm called Practice Architecture, this was a group of 2 Part 1 students and 1 sculptor who did a lot of exciting work in their year outs, their work was amazing and made Mark and me think, we should stand up and be counted now, so now, I’m entering a competition, hopefully alongside Mark and his friends, or by myself, I am confident I wont win but its pretty exciting just to be a part of it and produce some really good work and learn a lot more about myself through my work.

so wish me luck and check out the drawing oh and my business card design….. cheerio

Description of Retreat

Description of retreat
The word retreat stirs a very strong emotion of holiday, vacation. It is the idea of going away from work or something one does on a daily basis. People have different ideas for a retreat like people have different ideas for a vacation, some people like to be alone, on the mountains or in the sea, just being with themselves whereas for others, like the author, a vacation is the opportunity to know more people and the idea of retreating has to be social. It has to have the opportunity to interact with people, so the program has to be designed keeping in mind the social aspects.
As described before, this retreat plans to experiment with the idea of interlinking interior and exterior spaces to form a good program for a writer. The writer will inhabit this house when he wants to come away from his daily life. The house is a simple brick clad house with simple structural integrity. The heart of the program is the garden which was also the first idea when thinking of a retreat. The house has one patio which faces the south and this is the first place one sees as one enters the house and one gets the view of the whole fields ahead of oneself and one can also see the beach in the distance. One has a place to sit here and talk or just sit and enjoy the wind and breathe in the views and the fresh air that the site has to offer. From here, one can take a left and go into the living room and kitchen (3m X 5m) which has a north facing window but no views of the south as according to the author, one realizes the value of the view one has when he doesn’t see it, if the whole house had a south facing window, the writer would get bored of the view, the living room is the only feature of the house which doesn’t have any form of south facing windows.
If one takes a right from the patio, one reaches the writer’s bedroom (3m X 5m); the bathroom with a WC is located in between the writer’s room and the living room so that nobody has to go through the writer’s room to enter the bathroom. The writer’s room is a simple room but large enough to fit all the requirements for it having enough storage space, a large double bed, a bookshelf, a single seated sofa, a couple of drawer racks, a book shelf, a television and some pieces of art which inspire the writer. The writer’s room is finely lit with south light during the day and it also has a west facing window which shows the garden. To access the garden, one has to go around the writer’s room as the garden is a very private space for the writer; this is where he does most of his thinking, sitting outside on his bench, under a tree watching people pass by in the fields in front of him but he is almost invisible to them, he is protected by the columns and the large tree in front of him, this place is almost like the Bodhi tree which under which lord Buddha attained enlightenment, this is the place the writer gets most of his ideas and when he is stuck somewhere in his work, he comes out and just watches people, thinks about his life, chats with his closest people till he solves the problem and this space is the most important to him and only available to people he wants to get there, another very important use of the garden is that he has to pass through it to enter his office or his writing room, this is the most important process as this is where he leaves the world and enters his own space, the writer can use the WC which is right next to his room in the garden if he has to use the bathroom. The writer’s room also has some south light and south views but it lights up his writing table which doesn’t get direct south light. The writer’s room has his large table and his comfortable chair. It also has a piano which he can play when he wants to do something other than writing. He also has loads of space to put his books. The main idea of this room is that it is away from the rest of the house but it’s still in the program, it is only separated from rest of the house through this sacred garden of his and this whole space is his own, his private and no one that he doesn’t want can go there. The building program works by stirring different human emotions in different parts of the house. The entrance emphasizes on the sense of entering somewhere by passing through a door to a heated room to a windy, and sunny patio, the living room and the bedroom provide warmth that only human touch can provide, the sacred garden and the writer’s room stir a sense of pride, a sense of ownership where only the writer and people close to him can go.

New Project renders

Project Info:

Name: Writer’s Retreat

Location: Holton Lee, Poole, Dorset, United Kingdom

Area: 60 sq. m

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

so, temme what you guys think…… Its our first real project wherein we’re designing a retreat for writers

Another day another post

hey there,

stayed home today because of fever so I have the opportunity to update the blog on a weekday, yeah, I will be uploading most of the stuff on weekends as I generally have more time during weekends. Anyways so this week  has been so far so good, worked on a frame & canopy and then I realized that it didn’t have the same flow as the ground and walls so remade another canopy which has a more fluid approach. I was taking to my tutor yesterday and I realised that having a certain theme or idea in the start does not help in the sense that the end design maybe very different from what we imagined but it does help a lot in the sense that it brings about continuity to the whole design. If we just start sketching randomly, we might come up with something but if we start with an idea in mind, it reflects so many more characteristics of how we design. I mean I started working on grounds without any idea but when I got to walls, I had the idea of a fluid design, i mean I didnt want this design to have any fixed rules or fixed boundaries, I made walls with huge curves and “ideally random” shapes, when I say ideally random, I mean that they have a certain amount of randomness to them but they still aren’t very far from the basic idea, as i went on to frames, i played around with the idea more and by the time I got to the canopy, I almost knew how I wanted it and now that I have completed this exercise, I think very differently about the idea of designing and I know that every architect goes through such basic things but I look at it and I’m amazed at the way my thinking has changed so much through just 1 simple exercise. Everyday at the University is a new challenge and that’s why I love going in so much. I love the fact that I am learning to think in such a way and I’m trying my best now to work on the aspect which I am not very comfortable with – freehand sketching.

I now need to go and send a mail for my National Insurance number and need to look for a job, shit, that’s taking so much time. I need to find one soon, I hope I get the one I have applied for now, I reaalllllly hope so

Getting a little more serious

So right,  I got amazing response on the first post and nobody knows how much that helps in writing the second one. So I was advised by Nicholas, an architect to blog my work each week, so here I am talking about my work, as a 1st year student, we work with the basics really, the basic ground, wall, frame & canopy kinda things, in other units, we have a 2000 word essay to write on the model we selected on our visit to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. I had selected the model of the mosque of Miyan Khan Chishti in Ahmedabad, India. The last but not the least is my favourite subject - Architectural Technology where we’re experimenting with different materials in architecture. As for uploading my work, we’re half way through each unit and I will be updating the stuff as soon as I am done with the units.

Anyways, I was talking to this kid recently, he’s all of 15 and he was worried about what career he should take up. When I hear stuff like this, especially from people back home in India, it pisses me off. Why can’t we let kids be kids, why do they have to make these decisions in a time when all they should be worried about is “who’s stronger? Batman or Spiderman”. Im here and I see people who have taken gap years after their schooling to decide what they want to do with their life and I think it makes perfect sense, If someone in India talks about taking a gap year, people treat them like social outcasts and if the child is really lucky, he will decide what he wants to do by the time he graduates and go to another field altogether and start again thus wasting 3 to 5 precious years doing something that he hated because it was decided by his parents at the time he didn’t understand anything. I think the education system in India doesn’t let a child explore all possibilities before deciding what he or she wants to do. I think India produces so many doctors & engineers not because we super-smart or anything but because when a child is in his year 11 or year 12 he does not have time to see other options and his parents decide what he is going to do for the next 50 years of his life. I mean I have seen so many of my friends fall into this, they’re studying  20 hours a day for 2 years for an examination which lasts 8 days and the result tells them nothing about what possibilities they have in their life, the result only judges on the quality they can reproduce what they read and even if you top the exam after this, you have no clue what to do, your parents tell you that you’re very good at physics, you should become and engineer and you go and do as they say. I have cousins who are 11 or 12 and they carry bags which literally weigh more than them. Now the scenario is like this, the kid is studying engineering because it was chosen by his parents although he understands nothing about it and can’t deal with the pressure in classes, he starts smoking or drinking because he thinks it reduces stress and realises that he wanted to study fine art and in the end fails to pass from an engineering college and doesnt have the guts to tell his parents about pursuing fine arts because he thinks his parents think of him as a failure and he can’t do anything with his life.

I have 1 question, who do you blame here, the poor child? the parents? or the system?

Nobody thinks of blaming the system, the child blames his parents, parents blame the child and we all know what happens then.

Luckily, like maybe 1% of kids in the country, I’ve had the most supportive parents, they were infact so supportive that my dad thought I should do a degree in film direction and my mum though I should study Animation. I mean I know kids out there who would kill to have parents who support their kids in the decisions they make and I think that the idea of gap years should be more accepted in India. I have a Norwegian friend on my course, Henriette, who tells me that almost everyone in Norway takes a couple of gap years before deciding what to do and I think that it helps in the long term but what the hell, I’m just 18, what do I know.

 

Anyways back to my love,  I am confused about what buildings I should write about in my tech report for concrete. I mean the buildings obviously have to be made of concrete and they have to be sustainable, please help me if you can.

Again, I’m leaving you guys with some pictures of 2 buildings from my tech report:

This is the 1st Brick Building

This is the building for Office of South Asian Human Resource Developement Centre in New Delhi

It was designed by Anagram Architects

Design Team: Vaibhav Dimri & Madhav Raman

Client: South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre

Site Area: 50 sqm

Project Area: 172 sqm

Project Year: 2005

 

 

 

The Next brick Building is

This Building is for a Secondary School in Dano, Burkina Faso, Africa

The design is by Diébédo Francis Kéré

The construction cost was paid by the architect himself.

This was something he did for his country while he was still studying (I think)

 

As the son of the village headman, he could go to school in Tenkodogo. From 1978 he worked as an carpenter.1985 he worked as a instructor for Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, the German ministry for development aid. In 1990, a scholarship from the Carl Duisberg Society allowed him to go to school in Germany, finishing with Abitur in 1995, and to study architecture at the Technical University of Berlin, graduating in 2004. In 2006 he was made knight of the National Order of Merit in Burkina Faso.

 

I am again tempted to leave you with a picture of Barragan’s work and I have to give in so enjoy

 

Cheers till the next post and don’t take me seriously, I’m only 18, what do I know. HAHA!!

So Here I am

I am Ami Nigam, an 18 year old Architecture Student studying in Bournemouth at the Arts University College at Bournemouth. I am an international student from India. I grew up in Mumbai (Bombay) and moved to England to pursue my Bachelors Degree in Architecture.  I am currently in my first year and I’m having the time of my life. I knew I wanted to study architecture but its more fun than I ever expected, I am drawing, looking at buildings, making models, working in the workshop designing, I feel like a true artist. I have never in  my life been as passionate about anything else as I am about this. I can spend days reading about buildings and getting their sketches right. My favourite Architects are

• Luis Barragan, he is a Mexican architect who’s work I fell in love with as soon as I googled up his name, I love the way he uses colours, water and light in his designs. His designs are simple yet efficient and bring out the best out of the simplest materials. What I love the most about his work is that it has an undertone of his roots, Mexico. You can see his work from anywhere in the world and know that its a Luis Barragan building and it has a rich mexican background to it. The other thing I love about his work is the way he takes us from interiors to exteriors so smoothly. His designs connect the interior of the structure to the wild outside. Make sure you google up his name once even if you’re not an architect.

• Tadao Ando, he is a Japanese architect whose work inspired me to take up architecture. The interesting thing is, Ando never studied to be an architect, he worked as a boxer and a truck driver before taking up architecture. He has the most amazing amazing designs in the sense that the moment you look at them, you can think of just 1 word, COMPLETE. Some of his works are basic shapes which he uses a lot in his designs.

1 day maybe 100 years down the line, I’d like some kid to put my name in his favourite architects.
Its just been 2 months since I’ve moved here.Yes, I miss my family (a lot) but you know what keeps me from breaking down?

2 things,

1st – I know what I’m doing and I’m having so much fun everyday just looking at buildings and reading about them.

2nd my friends, my best friends, i mean noone can think you can make best friends in 2 months but I have, its because of them that I dont miss being at home because now, this is my home and that helps because I can put in all the energy I have into my work.

This is done by Luis Barragan, look at the way he uses colours, water & light.

Cheers till the next post!~

PS: In every Post, I’m gonna try and attach a  picture of a piece of architecture that I really like