Here is my belated entry on SLIA 'Sessions' this year!
SLIA (Sri Lanka Institute of Architects for those ignorants!) has its annual sessions which include the exhibitions, annual sessions and the AGM, this year, well all over Colombo. Yes, the usual venue BMICH was under renovations and apparently there is no other single venue where SLIA could herd all these events together. To make the matters even more complicated CAA (Commonwealth Association of Architects) annual conference was also held concurrently with these events.
The theme this year was "Rethinking Sustainability". With the global recession, most of us architects, for the last few years have been thinking about nothing but sustainability as there was nothing much else to do. So this is a very comforting and reassuring theme as it kindly reminds us it is time to 'rethink' of the same! By the way last year it was "doing less with more".
Well, jokes apart, there were a couple of very relevant and impressive presentations at the conference this year. For me the most impressive was by the Bangladeshi architects Md. Rafiq Azam of SHATOTTO. (its worth checking his website out)
Images via shatitto web (http://shatotto.com)
Firstly, were you implying that SLIA was ignorant...well if you were arrrm...ok..let’s just leave it at that...
ReplyDeleteMaking more with less, last year it was the same crap...some poor sod came in and started talking about things which he didn’t even know about, fortunately the engineer was there to save the bugger.
I know "sustainability" is the buzz word, well it has been for several years hasn’t it? Isn’t it kinda old? I mean come on isn’t there anything else to do than just be sustainable? and as our great pillars of the SLIA preach, we have been practicing sustainability well before the time of the almighty Mr. Yeang.
I honestly think the SLIA should at least attempt at being creative coming up with themes. I would expect them to at least by next year come up with a good timely theme like, post-conflict construction, or some new trend in Architecture. We don’t need to have sessions on something which we can read in a book, a magazine or even from an ola leaf.