Throwback Four Years

C'était la vie

"It's 3 a.m., the room is swathed in white fluorescent light and any horizontal surface surrounding you is invisible beneath a mountainous pile of stationary. Music is buzzing somewhere, strums and waves, your fingers are coated in the debris of pen marks and glue. Hair in a tangled mess, cold, and the back of your head (and for that matter, more importantly your eyes) is throbbing. And you're focused on drawing a straight line for a technical drawing, or cutting pieces of art board, or squinting in front of a computer screen editing your graphic illustration. Refrain from checking the time so much and internally asking yourself why you took architecture.

In the studio, the whole place would be abuzz (!) in various activity, related and unrelated to work. Food containers littering the tables, compiling with t-squares, bits of butter and tracing paper. Pencils and erasers are owner-less, waiting to be used next to the scissors and scale rulers and set squares. And during art projects, paint splats, polystyrene, coloured boards, and other bits and bobs would be e v e r y w h e r e. The occasional burst of laughter would surface, drowning the variety of music blasting loudly and interim discussions, conversation would pick up then tone down, random studio mates would come at hourly intervals, and a computer game would ensue in one of the cubicles.

You either accidentally fall asleep on the table, or find a comfortable nook somewhere in a dark corner (or the bench outside the studio in the corridor). Around 6am, the sky outside will lighten up, dark blue slowly morphing to white, ascending with it in you a sense of foreboding. At 8am, when class is supposed to start at 9, you'll try to smarten yourself up (and fail) and looking distinguishably rumpled, head to the parking lot (going past students walking the opposite of yours heading to class instead of from it) to find a decent place to shower before presenting yourself in front of the lecturer. It's either that or rushing in mad frenzy for the nearest available printing shop for your boards. T minus 30 minutes!"

Article published in ArchiStudent,

written by Acacia Daud, 2011