SEA Ideas Forum

Neha Mhadolkar

The Ideas Forum was conceptualised as a stage where a few students from SEA come together to discuss some interesting ideas that emerged in the work done by them and their peers over the course of the year in different modules with a wider audience, particularly with students and practitioners from other architectural colleges. The main provocation for this forum was to discuss projects that make one think, “Oh, building aisa bhi ho sakta hai”; putting forth not the final sheets but the entire methodology, reasoning, and thought process that one goes through during the course of designing.

It proceeded with presenting the work done from the first to fourth year, from seven studios. The ideation of the forum involved a week of the team discussing among themselves about different projects in the college, going through several works,  studying those projects, even sometimes tracing them to understand how they deal with the context they are situated in, and thus coming up with core diagrams that could talk about the project in its entirety. Though these diagrams were never presented, still struggling with the notion of what ‘presentable’ work is. 

This forum was the first time that the students took full responsibility and control over its setting up, with minimal faculty intervention, which allowed the students to take full fledged roles as presenters and moderators, and understand how forums or similar events are held and conducted; where the students become respondents as well. This newness also had its downsides, as the team struggled with managing the time required for the setting up of the forum, and focusing more on the aspect of discussing ‘ideas’ rather than projects. The presentation thus became more jury-like presentations and the main aim of the forum was slightly left behind. 

The discussions that thus took place during the forum became an opportunity for the students and faculty to talk in length about what it means to keep such a forum as a public event, how one mobilises it, and why it becomes important for us as architects and students to be active participants in it. Some questions that were raised during the event asked one to first inquire about what ‘ideas’ even mean, to think deeply about the correlation between academia and practice, how one presents - the entire manner of it, also about the form of the forum. It also highlighted the need of moving away from the idea of finished work and to learn to be able to talk through the process conceptually, to put the importance on ‘ideas’, for which diagramming becomes an important medium.

What emerged from the discussions was also the importance of ‘culture’. For such a forum to become an important event where the students actually come together and talk, what we first need is to make this practise of discussing ideas and works as a collective an important part of the college culture, which teaches the students to become much more capable and sensitive to articulate their own opinions and understanding of the built environment, as well as the world around them.