Harvard GSD I had my first ever experience of being on the other side of an interview on Friday (yes yes I know several of you are thinking...there he goes again bragging, but I think this one is worth documenting). I was asked to interview graduating students at Harvard's graduate School of Design and lure them to come from one suburb to an even smaller, less exciting one to work. I was nervous as hell, until i got there and (surprisingly enough) everyone including the staff and students were super nice. Of course I realized then, that I was in a way, in a position of power. Some of the students' work ranged from mediocre to boring...highly digitalized formal studies without any suggestion of spatial understanding or any response/sense of context. i dont know whether this was because of a lack of previous training in Architecture or was it something that schools are intentionally focusing on now. I guess I can't really tell from my own experience ta school because I always stayed away from studios that focused thier attention on the software more than the resultant architecture. One student however was distinctly articulate with very grounded and good work. She was Lebanese and had done her Thesis project in Beirut. What was most interesting about her work though was a project that she and a group of friends did outside of school for housing in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami. They won the competition and with the help of Engineering professors at MIT and eventual funding from Harvard they went to the site and prepared some of the drawings right there...and the houses are being built. What she called a core house was similar to our site and services schemes in Bombay.

Maybe I am being completely cynical, but over the few years that I have been here and interacted with American students in architecture, I feel that they are unable to understand (or even unwilling at times) the need for architecture to be grounded sometimes and for it to fit within its context without being loud.

This is probably my first post without images in a long time. I wish I had pics of the GSD though. I liked it better this time. Now who knew that the snotty boy sleeping during Swati madam's structures lecture would be interviewing candidates at Harvard some day eh? haha!  ¶ 10:13 AM