What should be the basis of our learning?

What should be the basis of our learning?

This is one important question to answer. And the answer itself took me around two years to be formed. I will answer this question through the process of my research. And then I will state why I consider our Indian syllabus so inadequate to tackle the crucial issues of the contemporary world or where it ought to improve.

My first topic was related to finding the connection between architectural spaces and emotions. Or the ability of architectural spaces to impact human emotions. This topic roughly fell into the domain of phenomenology of architecture and since the nature of this topic was intuitive, it could not be rationally proved. I realized that it could have taken a substantial amount of time to complete the research and so I decided to change the topic to something I was comfortable to do it alone. This is an important decision. This is so, because no one tells you how to do research. You need to make all the sense of the infrastructural support that you get from the university. The journey is entirely by yourself. And in this scenario, your interest in your research topic is the only thing that will sustain your research journey for two years.

My research topic was to understand the meaning of the Hindu temple for the north Indian community in Vancouver. Essentially, at the end of the research, I came to realize that it is the ‘people’ who create or define a meaning in architecture and NOT the architects. An architect has lesser control to define how should people behave in his arrangement of spaces or whether his anticipated spatial arrangement will have a predictably a uniform social and psychological effect on people. Human behaviour is a complex thing and architectural decisions have a meagre role to play in shaping and defining human actions. Conversely, any given piece of architecture will be subjected to some kind of ‘meaning creation’ by the people who are using it (and that meaning will most of the times, be different from the architect’s perception). In other words, each individual interprets architectural spaces according to his identity – which depends on his age, gender, class, context, environment, social, cultural and other factors. Therefore, the most important point to be noted is there is NO fixed way of looking at architecture and neither should architect claim to control human behaviour through architectural arrangement of spaces. Where does that leave the architect then? I think the crucial issues to be dealt with while designing is – creativity (which means finding new interpretations for problems), climate, context, people. It is no use to think in terms of politically religious forms (temples, mosques, churches). The thinking should include above factors and also about light, shade, texture, paint. Thus, the form should be churned out of the thinking process rather than hurryingly crystallizing a predefined form (although this is another matter that ANY form can fulfil ANY function and therefore one can start thinking from the form side or the function side). There is no fixed rule that a particular function should represent a particular form and neither a particular form should denote a particular purpose. It is all in our minds. The first task of the architect is to convince the client. Great architects surpass this immediate requirement and conceive a form that appeals to the society and is temporarily successful too. This is extremely difficult, because to conceive an eternal architecture for all mankind is to have an eternal quality to space that is perceived by each and every individual using that form.

The second important lesson that I learned is that our identities are a social construct – identities are also subject to change and our context plays a tremendous role in shaping those identities. Thus, everything is relative. Since identity is relative, our meanings are relative. Thus, meaning of architecture as perceived by the individual is also relative. There is no Indian architecture or Western architecture in terms of form. I mean, to study Indian architecture in terms of definite form and materials is foolish. This is a very narrow definition of identity tied up with architecture and I do not understand the fuss about why architects are so concerned about ‘finding the true identity of Indian architecture’. There is no such thing as that. The issue is of context and to understand the response that people of different societies have come up with to conceive their architecture. One will realize that the response has come from psychological perception of cosmos, social realities, cultural norms, materials, climate and finally how our mind operates. The issue is to understand how does one think? What is the nature of thought itself? And how does thought relate to architecture? In other words, there is no such thing as an ‘Indian’ or ‘American’ or a ‘British’. These are political labels. Labels meant to differentiate and set economic and political relations. They are fictitious and stem from insecurity or ego. Thus, we come to the aspect of understanding what is insecurity and why do we feel insecure? What is the cure for it? The answer to this question will help us to understand our very nature of being ‘human’.

The third important thing to realise is that knowledge has become interpretive – which means no one holds a privileged position in defining what constitutes correct information – absolutely no one. No one is superior to anyone else and all forms of knowledge and societies are equally relevant. The historical distinctions between the Dominant West and the Subordinate East are redundant and almost everything that the colonial rulers entrusted is now open to challenge. Multiplicity and complexity is the hallmark of today’s world. Important questions to ponder are:

1. How is my identity shaped? Who am I?
2. How is culture related to myself? How is context related to me?
3. How am I related to ‘others’?
4. How are ‘nations’ formed? What is the colonial history and how is it related to Indian history?
5. Who defines history? How is it reconstructed and represented?
6. How is society formed? How is it the same or different from historical societies?
7. What is then constant? What is eternal? What is cyclic?

Answers to above questions will eventually reveal the nature of knowledge and how we shape it and how it shapes us. THIS should be the basis of our syllabus.