The Lucid Facade

It was the eve of Women’s day, I was contemplating a topic for my college magazine . It didn’t take me long to put two and two together and come up with a subject that is very relevant and topical today. Gender equality (or lack of it) is all over the media as if it’s a flavor of the season. I wanted it get more personal – “Women and Architecture”.  I wanted to briefly explore what is it for a woman to be an Architect and how Architecture influences or is influenced by women. On the former, we need not go very far. The institute in which I study is governed and run by two women who have made a mark for themselves in this field. We also been witnessing more and more women opting for Architecture as a profession, even when they have other choices. The essence of successful architecture lies in how it integrates and balances the need, desire and aspirations of the user with the design principles. In this regard, the more women we have in this field , the better it is to bring out ...

The difference between good buildings and great buildings is that, good buildings are appealing to the eyes, but great buildings tell you things you don’t know and remind things you have forgotten. All buildings should strive to be great because life is too short to walk through a dull-witted place. A building in any place should reflect the perplexing variety of colous, shapes, thought, form and spiritual ideas. Architects may be seen as people who just build houses, but what good is a house when it is not a home? After all, home is where the heart is, and with the heart comes a strong emotional connect. As occupants grow, evolve, change with time. In this context, one of the biggest challenges for architects today is to make structures that are future proof, not only in terms of lifespan but also how it can seamlessly blend with change in time. In an era that is increasingly dependent on digitalization and technology, a tendency to create a sense of isolation arises. Architects ...

“The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.” - Frank Lloyd Wright Architecture is one of the most fundamental fields of study and is the building block of existence, quite in the literal sense. An architect is a man of versatility. He creates designs that adapt to human needs and emotions. It can be put this way; like how the prism is able to bring out the underlying colours of plain light into different shades, similarly an architect is able to manifest the needs of a client into aspects of design, aesthetics, engineering, construction, space, cost, materials and colour in the right balance. Architecture is a fast-paced and ever-changing subject, perhaps why we don’t have many solid, stagnant theories. But architecture plays a significant role in relation to quite a few non-architectural theories and fields. It is widely accepted that the Darwinian theory of partial selection is the way of existe...