Last semester I had two design studio teachers,one who post graduated from TU Delft, while the other one was a post graduate from a London university, I cant seem to recall which one.

For the very first time we had the freedom to explore. Explore materials, explore ideas, explore visual possibilities and provide our own individual design briefs for the project we worked on. By the end of the semester every student had a different germ to extract from his/her project. Of course, only 17 of the 40 students managed to pass the studio but ill discuss as to why that happened some other time.

This semester we have three teachers who are completely "Indian" in their approach. An Indian Approach simply means that the studio lecturers are highly rigid and tend to spoon-feed the student (something we Indian students are used to ever since in high school).

For the past three semesters I have had three different types of studio lecturers. In semester 1 I had a subject called basic design where art was given a major chunk of the syllabus. In semester 2 we learnt the Design and Build concept where we built prototypes. And in semester 3 we had crazy wacko teachers who I absolutely loved only because they said "do what you feel like doing".

In semester three (as students of the crazy wacko teachers) we were to build on Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. We were each given a city to work on and build on it. I was assigned the city of Valdrada. We were then supposed to design a community space within the college campus by drawing inspiration from our city. In the process we learnt what the term "process" in architecture really meant.


The Valdrada Concept



I'm trying to beat the system this semester - not in terms of amount of time spent or amount of work done on the project... but in terms of following a fixed rigid process to design a space.
A way to salute what I learnt last semester.