Lets get Steampunked!

(English artist Alex CF's 'inquisitor' eyepiece which belong to a series of mechanical devices based on writings of Jules Verne and HG Wells)
With mankind's sudden discovery of environmental conscience over the past decade, heightened by apocalyptic zombie laced dystopian visions of dying mother Earth, sustainability has become the new post-political world religion. Humanity already running late on the 2001 Space Odyssey schedule and having no scope of space-escape, its has become even more urgent to engineer a more balanced retrofitting for the climate that so badly needs to be managed into obedient submission. Presently most nature & god fearing nations (even the middle east) having expressed their desire to shift away from fossil fuels and towards more greener technologies, we can expect a planned 'rehabilitation' if not an electronic revolution. But I believe like many other products even this green technology will manifest itself through economic hierarchy, like organic-inorganic, leaded-unleaded, tap water-mineral water and finally electric solar powered and steam-punk! Steam punk is a science fiction sub genre that speculates on alternative reality where steam power and mechanics most often styled along Victorian Industrial aesthetics is the predominant technology used in day to day life. Anthony Lucas's 'The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello' with its exquisitely detailed animation (you can find a good description of this one on Lines and Colour blog) or Katsuhiro Otomo's Steamboy are some examples that employ the steampunk genre of conceptualising the environment. Due to the high cost of solar panels, Windows programming and Apple motion sensitive microchips that can detect smell, water, missiles and dust particles this part of technology will be affordable to a selective few (who can afford to be fashionably green with matching emeralds and jades) while the rest of the majority will certainly revert to steampunk technology.

(Steampunk watch by Cabestan Watches, their website also has other alternative designs)
My personal bias towards this genre is due to its easy readability, as if however technologically sophisticated mechanics gets one can see the moving parts and understand what moves what and how each part influences the other, like opening up a watch and being able to understand the gear box.

(model used in the 2002 Time Machine movie)
As if technology has been made open source with different people adding and subtracting making changes, customizing their own computo-abacus and not requiring Windows Vista Firewall anti piracy programmers.

(A robot from the Golden Army from Hellboy 2: The golden army by Guillermo Del Toro)
I also like the visual richness the representation has with mechanical details that stand proof of its workability and also in some cases the choreography of all these parts together in the manner of old industrial Victorian machines with brass knobs, glass lenses, silver chains and wooden programming plates etc. Bjorn Hurri's revisualization of Star Wars characters, Stephen Rothwell's strange surreal collages, Lawrence Northey's playful sculptures, to some extent Arthur Ganson's Kinetic sculptures etc are some of the many artworks that derive inspiration from this genre.

(An artwork named 'The Fishing complex' by David Trautrimas, whose this particular series named Habitat Machines includes a composition of everyday objects carefully arranged and collaged within a background to distort their scales and make these household objects appear to shelter the house. Though the artist does not confirm to steampunk, his work comes very close in terms of its visuals)
Few more years and soon it will be time to start pedalling, running, skipping, turning and arm oneself with kinky accessories all in the name of sustainability! I don't know if mechanization of technology will actually democratize it making it more accessible and comprehensible, but if we miss this speculative future and gears turn little wrongly we might even find ourselves pedalling electricity for ourselves and the Bank. Boom! boom! boom! row your boats!

Shivaji

The State Government of Maharashtra after making a provision of Rs 200 crore (almost 4.5 million US Dollars) in its budget, appointed a technical committee headed by Chief Minister Ashok Chavan that has selected 3 architects from among 11 competing firms for the project of installing a 305 feet high (92.69 metres) statue of the Maratha king Shivaji. The statue will be on an artificial island off the shore of Marine Drive in the Arabian Sea and will also accommodate a library, a museum and an amphitheatre.
The short-listed firms include RG Patki Architects Pvt Ltd, Nitin Parulekar Architects Pvt Ltd and Team One Architects (Bharat S. Yamsanwar). In a state starved for infrastructure, amenities, social housing, with a growing farmer suicides this project is a strong indication of the sorry state of our so called democracy. The Indian Institute of Architects has approved of this so called "International Architectural Competition PWD Maharashtra" on their website.
Maybe in due course of time going by the nature of interstate politics we might have the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal littered with statues of different sword yielding, gun aiming and finger pointing local leaders representing different groups of politics, religion, caste, sub caste, tribe, race, language, region and everything that constitutes our cultural diversity. Sad, we can just stand and watch, while our representative-goons in politics recast history into skewed monstrosities. It is time to dress in white, hold hands, light candles and throw flowers (dominantly fashionable method of protest adopted by the very aggressive urban bourgeoisie in Bombay). Idiots.

Architectural Hygiene

With growing innovations in building materials and technology, coupled by availability of clients (before recession) from equally inflated economies, we as architects and designers (before recession) could not only imagine formal atrocities but even get them built (before recession). Architectural audacity (before recession) was being redefined with every passing day (before recession) through projects (before recession) that twisted, turned, gelled, splintered, bent, flowed and did many other things, evolving from an agonised belly of an architect, it looked like sports shoes, toothbrushes, space crafts and now they have to be kept clean!
This post I dedicate to the window cleaners who keep architectural megalomania clean. I can almost imagine their CVs shining with a list of building facades they have cleaned with only the best cleaners having survived through a Zaha Hadid.

(Sage Music Centre at Gateshead UK designed by Fosters & Partners, Buro Happold, Mott MacDonald and Arup. Image sourced from BBC)

(Reichstag dome in Berlin, Germany designed by Norman Foster. Image from daylife.com)

(30 St Mary Axe or the Gherkin designed by Norman Foster. Image sourced from www.dailymail.co.uk)
I don't know how most of the photographed images happen to be of Norman Foster projects, maybe his clients maintain highest levels of Architectural hygiene (?) But one must admit cleaning contemporary architecture must be an experience that needs to be packaged and sold to the presently redundant architectural community, like archi-adventure sports. This would not only make a great enterprise but also allow to truly subvert and critique the architecture (Interesting read by David Gissen on HTC experiments in reference to Philippe Petit's tight rope walk between the World Trade Centres) by staging a 'time to clean your act up' art performance.

Of Ships, Dreams & Tiphares

(Ships at Sitakunda ship breaking yard in Bangladesh)

(Ships stacked together at Chittagong in Bangladesh, some more information related to the agencies, policies and different stages of ship breaking in Bangladesh is available here)


(Ships at Alang ship breaking yard in India. For people wanting to pursue researching on Alang, KRVIA has done a very good study of this place. Some more information here)
Like beached whales, these rusting giants of the seas come to breathe their last in the ship breaking yards of Asia. These Elephant's graveyards formed out of devouring and recycling these Goliaths lie at the extreme margins of the world, where cost of labour and environmental policies in contrast to the rest of the world facilitate exploitation. At present, most large scale ship breaking yards are in South Asia and specifically in:
India (Alang)
Pakistan (Gadani)
Bangladesh (Chittagong, Sitakunda)

Like the city of Tiphares from Yukito Kishiro's Battle Angel Alita ("A megalopolis 'Tiphares' in the air soars in the sky, and the town of scrap 'the Scrapyard' iron extends under that") , these terrains survive on the waste dumped by the floating world that upholds its morals of sustainability and equality by outsourcing the opposites to far off horizons away from its cone of vision.
Interestingly in Of other Spaces Foucault writes "...the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates." And if this is true then one can only imagine these spaces where boats (that are the very representatives of dreams of escape) are torn to pieces by the same prisoners (informal labourers) yearning to flee from these poisoned lands.

(image from http://www.cqc.org/gallery/keyday05/ which according to me is one of the very few good photographs available on the internet taken at Alang ship breaking yard)
But all these dialectics aside, I have never had the opportunity to go to any of these places, but I can imagine the sheer scale of these ships and human bodies working on them along a waterfront that keeps changing its configuration everyday as ships get cut into smaller pieces and new ships arrive. I am also curious of the nature of landuse and typologies where most population is informal labour, with skewed sex ratio and other population statistics that will give contemporary planners and urban designers a nightmare. But at the same time I instinctively want to believe that geographies like these that lie on the margins of our society may have within them clues for a completely new form of production of space.

Thrilling Wonder Stories: Speculative Future for an Alternative Present

Of recently with a lot of time on my hands, contemplating the future (mine and my design career's) is one of the luxuries that my unemployment status entertains. And now that I have jumbled together words like future, design, contemplation, etc with the cunning use of commas, it would be worth elaborating on The Thrilling Wonder Stories ,a symposium co-ordinated by Liam Young (AA INTER 7 / Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today) and Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG). The list of Speakers was:
1) Geoff Manaugh
2) Peter Cook
3) Vicktor Antonov
4) Squint Opera
5) Ian Macleod
6) Nic Clear
7) Jim Rossignol
8) Warren Ellis
9) Francois Roche and Stephanie Lavaux
Consisting of collection of presentations, interviews and group discussions chaired by Geoff Manaugh of the BLDGBLOG. I had the opportunity to see the first 6 speakers talk on the relationship between the built environment, architectural design and speculating the future through the medium of images, movies, gaming environments and literature.

(seminar poster from the AA website)
Geoff Manaugh with his extremely fertile mental archive of things big and small, of cities, images, translucent concrete, living glass, interview with Lebbeus Woods, Science Fiction of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Étienne-Louis Boullée's Cenotaph for Newton to SMLXL was able to vividly lay foundations for the intent and direction the discussions of the day would assume. His pitching the idea to a predominantly architectural audience as need for Architecture (which as a field strategically positions the architectural community to dwell within mixed careers) to mutate through the recession and create alternative careers, according to me was a very encouraging start.

(image from Design Museum website, Archigram section. The image was done by Ron Heron)
There could have been no better person to talk after such a talk than Peter Cook, the pioneering spirit of Utopian futurism within Archigram. Having heard his talk before, most of his presentation sounded vaguely similar, with borrowings of personal experiences, Avante Garde Radicalism and last but not the least Gossip. But he made one very interesting point, he said "the architectural profession has a moral responsibility of provocation, pushing the boundaries of our field and if it isn’t that, we can all just leave it to the computers and go home to do something more rewarding". Here what interested me is not the provocation and radicalism part but the possibility of leaving everything to the computers. I remember few days back when my friend Kostas was talking about a Utopia where what would it be if we could leave everything to the machines and could there be a society that did not NEED to work but CHOSE to work (or not) in what interests the 'spirit' (?). Peter Cook's advocacy for radicalism though encourages experimentation, it also tends to ascertain radicalism as having an aesthetic rather than a theory, and by complete coincidence it seems to be along the lines of Archigram.

(one of the stills from the animation Renaissance, from Vicktor Antonov's website)
Vicktor Antonov's ideas of designing Fantastic Capitals of Urban utopias, their representation through different styles of renderings and infusing the geometry of design with layers of multiple subjective perceptions was quite interesting. His intention to capture the spirit/rhythm of a city through renderings that do not actually correspond to a particular city geography or do not hint any urban landmark but just get the image of the city, was also quite an interesting exercise. Inspite of him coming from a background of graphic design and gaming, he made points that were clear, precise and extremely structured. He explained his methodologies for speculating future utopian geographies as adding "What if..." within the historical narratives of the past, present or somewhere in the future, (with some interesting examples provided by Geoff with regards to mutational moments in time or material revolutions) that allowed one to imagine multiple parallel strands of realities...what if the Romans had structural steel? opening up whole new possibilities to envision Roman Architecture and its implications on the present. His examples of his ongoing animation project The Prodigies and already released movie The Renaissance are something that I would like to follow up on when I do get an opportunity.

(Book cover of Song of Time authored by Ian Macleod for which he received the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2009, sourced from his website)
The next speaker Ian Macleod's talk on the difficulty of writing about the future and science fiction today was the point in the seminar when the conclusions actually started forming a more comprehensive and realistic structure. He said the utopian spirit of the past allowed for writers to write and readers to 'buy' into ideas of cheap space travel, cure for diseases, eradication of poverty and mankind finally having solved the energy crisis and settled in a state of equilibrium with nature, but the future has become the present and now we see most of the predictions have not been met, this is a future that readers don’t buy into today. His exercise of writing science fiction with kids proved that most future predictions were dystopian Ballardian visions. But none the less he did take efforts to end his talk on a positive note as he read a text written by student which ended with..."But the moon is not that far away..."
Nic Clear who teaches at the Bartlett, (this is when I realised the difference between the undergraduate and post graduate programmes) according to me was an absolute star in the seminar. He was the one who actually anchored the future speculations into the present by talking about the methods of production of spaces and how architects today have rather aggressively embraced capitalism. He spoke about the architect's future being completely utopian not as a matter of belief but more out of a need to sell. On the other hand the writer's speculations of the future tend to balance between being utopian and dystopian, like J G Ballard's writings (here is a very good interview with Nic Clear by Ballardian).
Squint Opera who came after Nic Clear being an agency that works towards making happy-pink renders exquisitely done for the architect and his clients, turned into one such example of what Nic warned about! And their defence seemed to be "it depends where you look"...
The seminar was inspiring and very well co-ordinated, it encouraged people to think and formulate their ideas for "What if" interventions within design (a field that has no boundaries and can flow through different disciplines assuming different forms of media)...and it just might be that even in these difficult times, we can say to ourselves "the moon is not that far away"...

Mapping information

(image from Guardian, and found posted on Francesco Mugnai's blog which also contains other diagrams that are as interesting and varied in terms of the data and audience)
Going by the present day complexity of information, and the datascape born out of such vast information-static, it isn’t surprising that info graphics / data visualizations have become important fields that take up the responsibility of dataxonomy of this networked society.

(Facebook's friend wheel application generated my social network)
The diagrams are maps of information, relation and network of different things communicated based on easy readability of graphics and ability to generate clear analysis, for example the Facebook's friend-wheel application created by Thomas Fletcher, which uses links between various Facebook profiles to generate a diagram that shows various 'friendly' linkages within your Facebook-social circle. If one adjusts the outcome to be shown as a heat diagram one can see which of your friend is friends with maximum people in your circle (besides you, some do get confused with that).

(Greater London's Spatial Accessibility Model developed by Space Syntax)
The applicability of data visualization on the built environment has very well been proved by the growing demand for GIS software but one such practise that is able to actually use this empirical data for analysis and logic of intervention is Space Syntax started by Bill Hillier in 1970 (through a research programme in the Bartlett, UCL). Space Syntax uses on ground data of pedestrian-vehicular movements, frontages, road widths, landmarks, etc to create diagrams of accessibility, efficiency, crime etc. This spatial analysis gives rise to key challenges for the intervention and also ability to test the design through simulated data tests of the new circulation and behaviour the intervention would generate.

(Mark Lombardi's Sociogram pencil drawing found here)
In the field of Arts, I found some interesting work by artist Mark Lombardi (1951 - 2000) which deals with Sociograms of George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens (drawn around 1999) as neat pencil drawings of network that connects global capital, oil and weapons trade, backed by loads of research and access to information that he was able to enjoy as the curator and director of museums and general reference librarian for Fine Arts department in Houston Public Library. The work is clean and extremely powerful, no Meta narratives or any post-structuralist abstractions of angst ridden paint strokes but only clear objective information map. But this does not mean there is no space for subjectivity, the subjectivity comes from the choice of subject and the logic of graphics selected to communicate a singular clear analysis.

(print spreads from Jonathan Jarvis's The Crisis of Credit Visualized animation as available on his website)
Another name that comes to my mind is of Jonathan Jarvis an interaction and media designer, whose video The Crisis of Credit Visualized as explained on his website, "distils the economic crisis into a short and simple story by giving it form. It is also argues that designers have the ability to see a complex situation, then turn around and communicate it to others. By giving graphic form to the credit crisis, it becomes comprehensible. Not only do economic activities take shape, but new relationships can emerge between these shapes". For people unclear about the credit crisis and animation lovers alike this video is a very good watch. The no frills simplicity maintained in the animation reminded me of the good old days of Doordarshan educational animations like Ek Chidiya, Simi Machli and Tree of Unity cartoon that spread principles of socialism.
In Architecture work by OMA & AMO on different global statistics, networks and diagrams is interesting and the data represented is able to build an interesting picture of the world we live in. But I am not sure if the Post modern point of view to pollute the structural dialecticism is out of choice or just out of need of Rem Koolhas's practise.
As my sense of affiliations constantly sway between need for subjectivity (as in my previous post on Peter Doig) and objectivity in my present post, I feel it even more important to be strategic about these two 'weapons of choice' based on the context that we seek to intervene in. Ofcourse these two polarities are constantly polluting each other but the consciousness of the nature of final result as being objective with certain subjectivity or subjective Meta narrative based on certain universal objective truths is an important choice. It is about knowing if one wants to author A City of Slums or a Shantaram. But with cities and our struggle to map them we can never be sure...

Buried Treasure of Bomb Bay

Around 1940 two men Madhukar Vaidya and Pandurang Achrekar worked at the Bombay Docks. Every month they brought back with them their nominal wages and loads of stories to their families. Port stories of smuggling, tax evasions, fire and many more, of this geography that got touched by vessels and ships that came from far off magical places. These stories were passed on from them to their children and finally inherited by the grandchildren. One such story that I had vague memory happened to resurface in Suketu Mehta's Maximum City: Bombay lost & found. A story which grandfathers working at the docks unfailingly describe to their grandchildren as the day it rained gold bricks, the day of SS Fort Stikine (14th April 1944). Mehta describes:

“The disaster of the Fort Stikine is with us still. Bars of gold from the ship were being found as late as the 1970s, during dredging operations at the docks. But there was a mountain of more base debris from the explosion, and the British municipal authorities chose to create a landfill out of it. They started filling in the Back Bay, where the mangroves used to be, in what is now Nariman Point..."

Thus the raining gold bricks from Fort Stikine laid the foundations for the development of highest commercial real estate rental space in the world (1995 @ $175 per square foot or $1880/sq. m.). This was also a point in time when the War actually touched Bombay, as it was the smuggled ammunition/explosives cargo that caught fire and was responsible for such a big explosion. My grandfathers described this incident to me as experiences at ground level, which I tend to imagine with sepia tints, of the sound, the smoke, the debris and most of all the gold & silver. For me this is one of the very few stories where personal, urban and global histories collide into a single narrative of conspiracy, buried treasure and everything else that makes cities & its people
...And to this day somewhere in the water lies a buried treasure waiting to be discovered by the brave soul who can swim through human faeces, industrial waste, Ganapati clay, animal carcasses, plastic bags, feathers, dead beggar and other day to day things that we choose to avoid direct confrontations with.