Christopher Benninger regarded as a legendary figure of Indian and international architecture, had built a great legacy which will keep inspiring generations. Great Expectations: Notes to an Architect, his most recent and final book, published posthumously in October 2024, is a sequel of sorts to his bestselling 2011 title, Letters to a Young Architect, and a philosophical retrospective of his distinguished career. Following is an excerpt from this book. The Chapter is called Note 4- Future of Architectural Education in India: Crisis and Challenge
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Seven: We must increase mind-body skills
Our students must learn how to draw by hand. Drawing diagrams and images of our intentions is yet another essential means of having introspective dialogues with oneself, and we cannot deny students the ownership of this great tool.
Drawing is a skill and it can be taught. Drawing is not about making beautiful pictures or photographic images; it is about building the link between the imaginative mind and the body so that the sketching hand becomes an extension of the mind. The mind cannot imagine without the hand moving to make real-world images with pencil, pen or other instruments. Neither can the hand move intelligently, unless the mind is thinking of ideas and concepts and moulding the two with facts. Sketching is less the ability to draw human faces, landscapes and flower pots, and more the ability to ‘diagram’ spaces, to analyse the interrelationships between spaces, to study interior spaces and exterior connectivity of spaces, and to understand the kinetic visual movement that is structured in a framework of axes, enclosures, focal points, scale and proportions. Sketching is not reproducing reality like a photograph; it is creating new realities of three-dimensional spatial arrangements through architectural diagrams.
Eight: We must understand that architects work with their own hands
Equally important to sketching and diagramming is working with one’s hands in a workshop. Building models from paper, cardboard, wood and wires brings the mind into contact with materials, their connections, their natural capabilities and how different materials want to be different things. When architects work with their own hands, they begin to love the truth of real materials and to scoff at artificial laminates, fake marble or Plaster of Paris imitations. They understand what is ‘measurement’, and what is ‘craftsmanship’. They know that the joints only work in certain ways and that shear, bending moment and compression are real aspects of materials and the structures they can make.
Nine: We must rediscover imagination
Digital technology has robbed our youth of the need to yearn and wander in their minds. It has robbed our youngsters of the need to constantly create imagined realities within their minds. When one reads a book in black and white one must imagine the character’s faces, the rooms in which stories happen, and what the protagonists see out of their windows. This imagination must be in colour too! One must continuously be challenged to create, in one’s own mind, one’s own intimate, personal picture of the world. If a two-year-old child is given a motorised electric wheelchair he will never learn to walk. By giving our youth the crutch of digital and Internet images to ‘see’, and ‘imagine’ for them, we have made them poetic cripples! Through endless clicking, they can scout the world without discovering anything!
Each era of history has its own spirit. Some eras are periods of change and hope; others are cynical ages of repeating things, making the biggest things and feeling, “I will never change the world!” Perhaps the history of the imagination puts individual thinkers into little cubbyholes of thinking, either narrowly or vastly; either creatively or through repetitive cut and paste. I have said that we cannot teach creativity, but I do think we can expose our youth to creative thinking. We can expose them to beautiful music, paintings, urban spaces, true architecture and transcendental moments of ecstasy that they alone can hold and cherish. Maybe from this, they can evolve images of hope out of images of despair!
Feature Image: Representational, Generated by Dall.I
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