Sunday Market

A detailed map of the entire Sunday market was drawn by students, each one limiting himself/herself to 20 paces x 15 paces. Some views were also generated and the plan was pasted together in the class. Sketches of a railway carriage bogie were made. Sketches of cars, cycles, motorcycles, auto rickshaw, push carts, pull carts, etc in detail is another exercise that is important in the first year.

Landscape of the Mind

Childhood memory recall and an important incident in one's life, one's neighborhood and a place one visited in his/her childhood were drawn. A directory of the class's experiences emerges as a matter of introduction to one another.

Railway Station Simulation

Measured drawings of the railway station, the carriage types and the food carts on the station have been an important exercise to understand dimensions of spaces and anthropometrics. Earlier, a railway station was simulated in the classroom by drawing railway carriages, an over bridge, people, a cycle and such things where the students even sold tea.

Seurat's Painting, Understanding Seurat's-Bathers at Asnieres

Seurat's Painting, Understanding Seurat's - Bathers at Asnieres

Exploring Vernacular Architecture - Building a Vernacular Structure

A workshop in Jaipur was conducted in order to understand the power of such an exercise of exploring a vernacular type.

Exploring Vernacular architecture (Wood)

Wooden, traditional and vernacular architecture taught through the examples of Japan, India, Turkey and other countries. Twenty scale models in both the media allows the student to get as close to reality as possible. Two sheets of geo- climatic, socio-cultural and technological aspects of an attempted example were researched and presented along with the model. (not seen here)

Exploring Vernacular Architecture-Clay

Vernacular architecture seen as a natural way of understanding spaces, material, structure and social aspects at a time - some examples from various parts of the world. Mud was the predominant material explored here.

Spatiality of Tripods

Exploration of a 10cms-armed tripod to make three dimensional objects, two dimensional pattern drawings and blown up tripods to learn visual and physical structuring.

Understanding Climate through CEPT Campus

Measuring the campus by pacing and presenting it in different mediums. Recording shadow for 12 hours with the help of a model made by the students. They took readings every half an hour and arrived at a pattern by eliminating a few shadows.

Pattern Development

A part of a letter or a doodle converted into a black & white pattern exercise that goes through phases of instruction as work progresses.

Colour Exploration and Composition

Learning water colour and pastels. Drawing bougainvillea flowers with extremely watered down colours, fearlessly; in different sizes and subsequently adding more colour, yields the results of a colour palette that the student has attempted. Black and white line drawing sketch given to four different students with four different permanent colours yielded the result. Understanding the idea of composition and becoming visually literate about how colour contributes in the making of images.

Transformation

Understanding transformation by studying a pen holder with accurate sketches and turning it into an animated object.

Sundry Exercises

Conversion of a two-dimensional idea into three-dimensional objects, optical art into a three-dimensional book, making of a ball even out of leaves, creating three-dimensional drawings with the help of a selected letter, exploration of linear elements based on given constraints and a with a pattern worked out by a student into a lamp, are a few of the exercises. Design of a dress in paper to be worn in class.

Killing the Sun

'Killing the sun' is a ceremony of the Ainu people of Japan. A semantic as well as symbolic architecture was introduced as an exercise in the class, based on Nold Egenter's book. The entire ceremony was conducted from making to burning by the students.

Exploration of Feelings though Clay Modeling

Imagining a word or a feeling and to be able to externalize it through drawings and to convert it into a sculpted object in clay on a plate of 40x40 cms has yielded a variety of results. Visual literacy is one of the aims of some of the exercises of Basic Design-I course.

Study of a Designed Object

Here the lantern is used to understand the complexity of a simple object, its components and how they come together.

Sagara’s Paintings - An Interpretation

Professor Piraji Sagara’s painting on the basement wall was used to imagine a plan, a location and arrive at a street as well as three-dimensional views of the settlement that would relate to the painting.

Ball, Ribbon and Feelings

A ball with black cross bands on it and a ribbon, with a black on one side and white on the other, were given to express feelings or words selected by the students such as unity, entanglement, falling, movement and such through graphic rendition.

Basic Shelter Building

Models of the different types of tents made in the class, executed in full scale on the grounds of CEPT University. The grounds were cleared and tents were used by the students to understand the construction as well as problems and potentials of it.

Colour, Form and Pattern

Mundane objects, like a copper pot explored through various exercises that tried to understand transparency, penetration, overlapping and juxtaposition through a disciplined colour use where a pure colour mixed with black and white controlled the palette. Like most exercises, sketching of the object in as many ways was the mandatory initial phase.

Exploration of Cuboid Spaces and Negative-Positive

Three examples of an exploration of the void created in four quarters by bisecting planes. The rules for the exercise were developed for each individual student that gave him/her the control of the idea.