Sem 09 / Culture Studies
Research Design
Rohit Mujumdar
Cover image by Sharvin Jangle
Cover image by Sharvin Jangle
If a thesis refers to an opinion, statement or proposition that contributes to the existing body of knowledge, then what literacies should its pedagogy in India’s undergraduate architectural academia advance in the contemporary moment?
SEA’s endeavour (re)aligns its goal to nurture literacies contributing to the production of a soft spatial imagination to move beyond taken-for-granted conceptual frameworks, flatten and depoliticise difference, or gatekeep narrow imaginations and cannons of architectural praxis. Soft imagination in SEA’s research thesis pedagogy is a practice of making spatial arguments that advances a critical and creative engagement with dialectics, plots and vocabularies of world-making, with the hope of articulating how architects might act in remaking the world. It inquires into the dialectical relationship between ‘spatiality’ and ‘life’, while opening multiple vantage points to understand its (dis)appearance, including a reading of decay and death as afterlives. ‘Spatiality’ is defined as the configuration of space, form and techne that play a role in shaping experiences and behaviours within them. ‘Life’ is defined in plural, encompassing human and other-than-human lives. It also includes the lives of materials and matters, and even of abstract concepts such as infrastructure, technology, home, family, class, caste, money, religion, god, spirit, etc., whose forces co-produce spatiality.
SEA’s endeavour (re)aligns its goal to nurture literacies contributing to the production of a soft spatial imagination to move beyond taken-for-granted conceptual frameworks, flatten and depoliticise difference, or gatekeep narrow imaginations and cannons of architectural praxis. Soft imagination in SEA’s research thesis pedagogy is a practice of making spatial arguments that advances a critical and creative engagement with dialectics, plots and vocabularies of world-making, with the hope of articulating how architects might act in remaking the world. It inquires into the dialectical relationship between ‘spatiality’ and ‘life’, while opening multiple vantage points to understand its (dis)appearance, including a reading of decay and death as afterlives. ‘Spatiality’ is defined as the configuration of space, form and techne that play a role in shaping experiences and behaviours within them. ‘Life’ is defined in plural, encompassing human and other-than-human lives. It also includes the lives of materials and matters, and even of abstract concepts such as infrastructure, technology, home, family, class, caste, money, religion, god, spirit, etc., whose forces co-produce spatiality.
If the political project of architecture is to advance soft forms, then creative-analytical provocation in SEA’s research thesis pedagogy articulates four literacies to accompany this endeavour. In making spatial arguments, architecture, as a literacy, is: first, an ‘architecture of ‘analogical thinking’ whose search is directed towards a critical engagement with plural spacetimes that does not reproduce mirror images of existing realities; second, an ‘architecture of voice’ directed towards its democratisation in substance; third, ‘script of architectural space’ whose devising involves design to explore a language system and the rules of its grammatical composition to communicate meaning; and fourth, an ‘architecture of narrative form’ directed towards exploring the form, its political valency and situational ethics.
I articulated this proposition in the form of an essay published in Soft Forms, the tenth year publication that advances SEA’s propositions on architectural pedagogy. This essay forms the basis to teach the Research Design module. The introduction to the essay is reproduced here from Soft Forms.
The complete text is available for purchase here: Soft Forms
I articulated this proposition in the form of an essay published in Soft Forms, the tenth year publication that advances SEA’s propositions on architectural pedagogy. This essay forms the basis to teach the Research Design module. The introduction to the essay is reproduced here from Soft Forms.
The complete text is available for purchase here: Soft Forms