When the proposed location for a design project is located far away and it is impossible to travel, one delves deeply to acquire information and become an innate part of context as much. Perhaps this enquiry involves more effort; than when visiting a site is taken for granted. While working on a recent community design centre competition project, we tried to gather as much visual information as possible from villages in a 100 km radius and even enquiring material availability more rigorously than working on a live project. While working I wanted to explore replicability and flexibility of the module in the simplest possible sense across the landscape of villages from what the competition brief had asked for.
I was trying to juggle between the practicality of application and exploration of design ideas. In the end as the design options were put out I found that another round of deliberation was required and maybe presentation of many options wasn’t needed but explaining the flexibility of one was sufficient for initial design discussions by the organizers and maybe more personal representation of design from the community usages point of view – considering all the cultural, climatic and place based analysis done earlier. This project forced me to think more clearly, intensely, and intentionally for a time bound brief and not ideating according to “available slots of creativity” that architect gives excuses for in day-to-day scenarios.
Competition projects I think open another lateral way for design thinking, forcing the architect to use real academic skill of handling uncommon project proposals, also depends which completion one chooses to participate in. Also the selection of outcomes by organizers is purely based on skill than bonhomie of advertising on Instagram and “common friend referenced ” architectural pages in magazines.