Together with the architect BV Doshi and Dr Vakil, an engineer, we started the school of architecture with 30 students.
I drew up the very first curriculum, based totally on FOLK/WORK/PLACE.....
Over the year, a city planning department was started, then art and sculpture, engineering, landscape, interior design.....
Finally, it has had the status of a university.
Three years back,
while in Ahmedabad, I suggested an interdisciplinary workshop, as in India
,as sometimes elsewhere, heads of schools, or department may slowly become
centered only on themselves....
The 2008 workshop, the first was superb,
the 2009 a bit too ambitious...
2010, I do not really know.
Inspite of my INSISTENCE
that :
- just doing an interdisciplinary workshop was not enough,
- that studying an exterior "reality, sort of"action-research,
was not enough,
- that doing a lively interactive exhibition in the market,was terrific,
but not enough
- that is was CRUCIAL to evolve an ongoing relationship between the university
and that field of study.
This last point never really reached home.
That is my own (borrowed)
definition of Geddes' "militant university".
That said and done, I have not found a long description, by Geddes, of
what he put into this concept of"militant university"...,
except of course that I have FULLY UNDERSTOOD AND INTEGRATED the concept
of the ivory tower in the morning, and walking in the mud in the afternoon,
as a ever constant credo.