Tessera

Foreword

A New Beginning

Master of Architecture Tectonics is a new program at the Faculty of Architecture at CEPT University. It is founded on the promise of developing competencies in architectural detailing and expression. The curriculum is focused on creating a community of fellow students and tutors who can examine, envision, and resolve a building’s architecture.

The MAT Foundation studio is a balancing act of four essentials of architectural tectonics. First, it teaches students how to make using analogy and digital workshop tools. The emphasis here is on tool handling, optimal posture while working, and the concentration required for general focus and safety. Second, it trains students to visualize structural stresses through modelling experiments. Students can express a detail based on structure and material properties. Third, it fosters agility in surveying available market items and products to employ them in detail or as a building element. Fourth, it prepares to discern between different sorts of drawings and create an appropriate drawing set to communicate an idea.

While grounded in the pedagogy around making as a basis, the studio never loses sight to be one of the prime movers of the future of architectural tectonics concerning India. An elaborate discussion on developing building language and aesthetics out of the coming together of industrial and natural material were taken at length to respond to some of our future environmental crises. In this sense, the foundation program is groundwork, reflexive yet with an eye set on the future for our students to lead with ideas when the time is right. We are very well answerable to a realistic present as much as to an imaginary future.

I acknowledge and express my deep gratitude to the students for having shown fortitude and taken a leap into the relentless demands of the foundation program. I am also thankful to my fellow teaching team Neel, Hemanshu, and Divya, for having supported me thoroughly and professionally during a tough academic time. We cannot fail in the beginning since we have failed so many times in the past. The studio remains incomplete without all of them. I wish to particularly thank Neel for having supported me in the studio throughout the last four years in a sustained way. I wish to thank CEPT workshop technicians Yatin bhai, Chirag bhai, Chhagan bhai and Amar bhai for training the students in the workshop. Maharshi bhai from FabLab ensured that the students learn 3D printing and laser cutting. Many thanks to him for his continuous support with modern tools. The studio also got immense support from Anjali Yagnik (Dean, Faculty of Architecture) in its inception, and colleagues of the Faculty of Architecture.

This booklet is inception to build a tradition of a compilation of studio work before the commencement of the CEPT exhibition. I am thankful to the entire student team to have made this possible.

Sankalpa 03 December, 2022