2250 AD: A Nautical Odyssey

desoumal writes " In the blog 2250 AD: A Nautical Odyssey published in WorldChanging, which covers a recent challenge presented to the student teams from 80 Indian colleges that entered in NASA '04 (National Association of Students of Architecture's annual design event), held in Mumbai, India, by Hiray College Of Architecture, Rohit Gupta writes about the highlights of the event - a city based on a giant question mark, a city inside a giant genetically-modified tree trunk, cities that grow like viruses, cities that look and function like holes made by earthworms... my personal favorite amongst them being a city with a photovoltaic dome 'designed so that it literally followed the path of the sun round the year, to maximize the solar energy, down to individual housing units'. Damn cool. "

Comments

Bleh

[SlipJig]

As one of those whiny former architorture students (studied it for four years), these contest submissions remind me of everything I hated about the subject. Namely: lots of pseudo-intellectual babble, and a propensity to design buildings based on arbitrary objects with no eye towards function. For example, my classmates used to do things like base the building design on a "found object" (piece of junk) from the site, or maybe on some random patterns generated by a pet with a marker. The fact that this rewarded is incredibly frustrating to someone who demands any kind of rational justification for their own design ideas.

I should state that I don't have these objections to the profession of architecture itself (I have other ones); just the way it's taught. My wife is a licensed architect, and she suffers from the scars inflicted by a typical architecture school, but from few of the goofy delusions enjoyed by its students.