Sunday, October 15, 2006

educators or teachers? an update on St Ives trip

After my cornwall trip and all the tutorials i had so far, I came to the conclusion that my tutors are not really teaching at all, they are facilitators and consultants. Most of the time, each tutor gives different opinions which makes the continuation of my projects difficult. It's also kind of interesting to switch from grading based education to a system where there is only pass or fail... It's ironic that it doesn't provide you as much drive but yet you will be very concern about failing too... Seriously, it's easy to fail, you just need to fail one single component and that's the end of it... My course is divided into 4 subjects per year.

1. Studio - the main design projects
2. History and Theory - 3 essays a year to hand up only
3. Technical Studies - civil eng suff, with one case study and one physical model structure test
4. Media Studies - 2 main courses a year (i took information systems - information, programming and how they translate into architecture.. it's kindda mathematical and intersting)

as you can see there is neither exams not no gpa or cap grading system... perhaps i'll give a comparison with nus at the end of my school term and see if AA system is as busy or tough... school has been picking up...

I remember sarah mentioning to me about her first studio trip in nus to bangkok, which was filled with 40 sketches of the building facades, which left them totally no time to enjoy the place. Well, I was expecting something like that too for my St. Ives trip, but it turned out to be something different, it was a project about finding patterns, making them visually apparent on prints and there is another essay which i have to write on the landscape and urban forms of st ives... St Ives is a coastal area in the city of Cornwall which is located on the south western part of UK. It's a small town with loads of green hills and beaches, and ironically the food is more expensive over there.

there were so many different ideas of patters: circular growth of mosses, human traffic, tidal patterns, sand patterns, shop patterns, demographical pattern and my group did on street lamp patterns. I will post the photos up once i'm done with the project. Pattern recognition and representation seems to be fundamental part of architecture, as compared to the traditional free hand sketching. Although, the ability to sketch is important, and i hope to improve of it, cuz i can't draw for nuts, i guess having a deep appreciation of the environment is more important. It is this ability to spot an understand the built environment that will allow us to be very conceptual and analytical. That's the difference between American (US and Canada) schools and European schools. Perhaps it's best to be well trained with the technicalities of architecture too during internship, to ensure my desirability in singapore's architecture industry, which is still very commercialised and conservative.

I realised that more than half of my classmates smoke and it can get kind of intoxicating when they smoke in the meeting area too. Anyway, got to know qutie a number of classmates better through the trip and some of them are really nice. John actually went to look for me in the streets at 2am (i was still counting the street lamps and light bulbs) just to see if i was alright. Sylvie is such a great person to talk to, perhaps it comes with age. It seems that I have more in common with the older people in my class as compared to those who are younger than me. It's easy to talk to anyone apart from eastern eu, cuz there is still this language and cutural barrier which i will try to eliminate it over time.

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