The delight of design...or maybe he is just working on labour hours, resourcing, project management, budgeting and other things of "real" consequence and importance in global design offices?
Merry Christmas & A Happy New Year.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Siza Sings
The delight of design...or maybe he is just working on labour hours, resourcing, project management, budgeting and other things of "real" consequence and importance in global design offices?
Merry Christmas & A Happy New Year.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Istanbul
Few weeks back in India some of my friends (who are planners) and me were involved in a debate around possible development trajectory for cities with large percentage of informal housing, multiple tenancies, incremental development etc. Our discussion was mostly around Bombay and how 67% of it is informal with an additional 20% old city housing and so acknowledging it to be a 'slum city' or 'informal city' could be a first step towards finding the right solutions. Seeing the role of the designer under threat and not really believing in 'people / community knows best' I tried to defend otherwise, but after my recent visit to Istanbul, I believe maybe there is a possibility of developing multiple decentralised solutions that incorporate the presence of the informal and at the same time have a diversity of design intervention that plug into such a landscape...
...its all up to our favourite underpaid intern sitting in some basement to crack this now....
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Windows to the city
The image of the window travelling across the room as the headlights from passing traffic projected a pattern of light and shadow, splicing the air in the room into thin slices, is a memory that I carry of the place I lived for the first 8-10 years of my life. Since then there have been many windows of many houses that framed my hopes, inspired new desires and provided voyeuristic vantage points of the places I inhabited.
The window becomes a plane on which our eyes often come to rest, framing the outside environment, superimposed by the reflections of the inside and all this further abstracted by our own contemplations, like Casper David Friedrich's 'Wanderer above the Sea of Fog' (1818) we look out towards the city taking pride in our vantage point and nurturing ambitions to understand and live the city, yet another day. No wonder the scene of Danny Boyle's Jamal Malik looking over Hiranandani landscape becomes an image that summarizes the scale of ambition.
And while we watch, the city too invades our most personal spaces like Umberto Boccioni's painting 'The Street Enters the House' (1911). It is this plane of the window that becomes the Wayang kulit stage for the different dialectics of inside/outside, private/public, us/them, etc to be shaped/narrated out by the dalang who sits behind the screen.
It is no coincidence that the window is an important element in many surrealist paintings like Magritte's 'Promenades of Euclid' or Salvador Dali's 'Figure at the Window'.
While moving into a new home, the concern for what one sees outside through its windows is as important as what is seen inside, and maybe it is these imaginary lines/axes/angles that connect our microcosms to heavenly bodies that move across the skies and anchor them to the ground.
It very often is not as heroic a view or as picture perfect an angle as I am making it out to be, but that is one framed view that we see day in and day out for a span of as long as we stay in that place designated as home. Having blessed with friends who come from different cities of the world who were kind enough to share their windows to their cities to which they come back to at the end of their day, here is what we see..during different times of the day/season/festivals/events...
The window becomes a plane on which our eyes often come to rest, framing the outside environment, superimposed by the reflections of the inside and all this further abstracted by our own contemplations, like Casper David Friedrich's 'Wanderer above the Sea of Fog' (1818) we look out towards the city taking pride in our vantage point and nurturing ambitions to understand and live the city, yet another day. No wonder the scene of Danny Boyle's Jamal Malik looking over Hiranandani landscape becomes an image that summarizes the scale of ambition.And while we watch, the city too invades our most personal spaces like Umberto Boccioni's painting 'The Street Enters the House' (1911). It is this plane of the window that becomes the Wayang kulit stage for the different dialectics of inside/outside, private/public, us/them, etc to be shaped/narrated out by the dalang who sits behind the screen.
It is no coincidence that the window is an important element in many surrealist paintings like Magritte's 'Promenades of Euclid' or Salvador Dali's 'Figure at the Window'.
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| From Nora's student accommodation window (2008) |
It very often is not as heroic a view or as picture perfect an angle as I am making it out to be, but that is one framed view that we see day in and day out for a span of as long as we stay in that place designated as home. Having blessed with friends who come from different cities of the world who were kind enough to share their windows to their cities to which they come back to at the end of their day, here is what we see..during different times of the day/season/festivals/events...
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| Chomchon's window in Sheffield, UK |
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| Hardik's window in Ahmedabad, India |
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| Outside Hiroshi's window in Hirao, Yamaguchi, Japan |
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| Hiroyuki's window NY, US |
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| Kiavash's window Vancouver, Canada |
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| Michelle's window in Hong Kong |
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| Namrata's window in UC Berkeley, US |
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| Panayiota's window in Nikosia, Cyprus |
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| Ranjit's window during monsoon in Bombay, India |
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| Sahil's window during Diwali in Bombay, India. |
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| My window in Bombay, India |
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| My window in London in 2009 during winter, UK |
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| Dominyka's window in Vilnius, Lithuania |
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
The other day i got angry at a font...
I found here, that graphic designer by the name Wim Crouwel said "Helvetica was a real step from the 19th century typeface... We were impressed by that because it was more neutral, and neutralism was a word that we loved. It should be neutral. It shouldn't have a meaning in itself. The meaning is in the content of the text and not in the typeface."
This sentence to me sums up all efforts being made to design the ultimate neutrality right from fonts, built form to day to day conversations, a fantastic example of how in the absence of means to reconcile contradictions the only way forward is polite neutrality of liberal capitalism. And guess coincidentally which companies have it in their logos...
Fuck Helvetica!
This sentence to me sums up all efforts being made to design the ultimate neutrality right from fonts, built form to day to day conversations, a fantastic example of how in the absence of means to reconcile contradictions the only way forward is polite neutrality of liberal capitalism. And guess coincidentally which companies have it in their logos...
Fuck Helvetica!
Monday, August 15, 2011
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