Meaning: Building Undefined Crafting

The built environment is an intricate mosaic in which a multitude of systems are brought together in a complex manner to produce “meanings”. This studio, in its emphasis,was designed to ignite among the students a critical discourse on the production of architecture as an artefact, through the questions of resources and the processes of construction. The global contexts of ecological and environmental issues and regional contexts of socio-cultural co-existence will frame the critical engagement with processes. The studio exercises enabled the students to investigate, analyse and extract ‘values’ embedded in built forms through perspectives of the various acts and actors of the execution team. Understanding of these processes- of construction, crafting, assembly, amalgamation- largely informed their own design projects aimed at expressing architectural thought as a coherent whole, from macroscopic context (‘the structure’) to microscopic detail (‘the construct’).