How An Architectural Student Deal With Case Studies

An architecture student has an outshining privilege before he or she conceives the design. That privilege is known as case study among the profession. Before designing a building, we (as architecture students) get to do a hand on the study of a live project of the similar genre that helps us to understand the scope of the project better. We get a hindsight on the architect’s design principle, functions algorithm, what worked and what didn’t. An in-depth analysis helps us to visualize our own design better and control the parameters in our own way. How this study affects us depends on how we deal with it. Now this is a topic of good discussion and lets plainly summarize it’s as below:

LITERATURE

Often as students, we are not aware of the objective of the project, what is its scope? We are not sure if the requirements that we have framed are enough or are the spaces covered sufficiently. All such queries are answered by the case study. We are exposed to the various details of the live project that enable us to study which will eventually help us make our literature strong.

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DESIGN

The case study helps us study the design philosophy of the architect and do a detailed analysis. By doing so we get a clear picture of the pros and cons of the design that might have an effect on our design as well. We may like or dislike the design but it doesn’t go unnoticed. We grasp from the good and nullify what is bad. At the end, we are to infer from our keen observations.

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IMAGINATION

In the process of studying the design, it so happens that we tend to imitate the design rather than being inspired by it, not intentionally though. We find it difficult to think on different grounds that that of the case study. Our imagination is prisoned in the cages of our analysis and it is difficult to break open from that.

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GENERALIZATION

One important thing students need to remember while doing the study is that we cannot adopt the elements as a blueprint of the design. Every design is subjective and fits in differently with the changing region, climate, and landscape. So we should deal with design problem with renewed vigor and a fresh vision. Dabbling with different perspectives is like riding two different boats where the fall is an absolute.

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MULTIPLE CASE STUDIES

An important note to all architecture students is to always do at least two case studies. Ideally one of a small size while other the biggest live project one can study. The advantage of doing so is that while studying the smaller one we get to know the basic details that are essential for studying while the insight of the bigger project will help us frame requirements that we haven’t included in our design earlier.