Paint Archaeology

(image of G Hay 100x UV, sourced from Arch Daily)
Among million odd ways to look, re-look, study, map, analyse and archive architecture, I believe this adds another truly remarkable milestone in how we understand history of architecture. I found this interview on Arch Daily Interviews section and the ingenuity of the field's logic and the absolutely beautiful images just convinced me of the numerous possible visions of the past that this newly discovered lens may be able to gaze at. The interview is with Natasha Loeblich by Sarah Wesseler. Natasha is introduced as "Architectural paint analyst Natasha Loeblich traces the histories of structures ranging from Revolutionary War-era buildings at Colonial Williamsburg to the Forbidden City in Beijing by studying what’s on their walls."

(image of Sample BRS14, visible light, 100x magnification, sourced from Arch Daily)
This method of analysing paint isn't new to Art History or Archaeology, but to do so for more contemporary buildings brings it into a different light, somehow acknowledging the status of modern artefacts and doing a conservative paint analysis of Villa Savoy, Chandigarh or even Kanchenjunga apartments. Or investigating the flooding patterns in Bombay through paint samples from numerous ground floor apartments.
To have professionals of Architectural History and Conservation peering down microscopes to investigate patterns of one of these mega-events, wondering if like rings of a tree trunk, will we be able to understand revolutions, depressions, wars, famines and floods through a microscopic cross section of paint layers deposited on almost every building, elevation and interiors designed to last, will certainly be a sight to behold...

Death by Design

Drawing
Andrea Palladio (1508 - 1580)
"Since a drawing in perspective necessarily involves distortion causing relationships between elements to be hidden, fifteenth-century architect and theorist Leon Battista Alberti and later Raphael in the sixteenth century drew distinctions between perspective depiction of architecture as pertaining to artists and orthogonal depictions as pertaining to architects. Acknowledging this distinction, Palladio later chose to redraw his earlier perspectives in the form of orthogonal elevations or facades." -The Villas of Palladio By Kim Williams, Giovanni Giaconi


(First image: Photo of Palladio's Villa Rotonda, Veneto, Italy photographed by Stefan Bauer, second image: plan and section sourced from wikipedia)
So the story goes, that at the age of 70 and almost on his death bed Andrea Palladio started to redraw all his drawing, not only of buildings he was commissioned to build but the buildings that he had already built as well. Maybe he wanted to assert that the tool of drawing architecture goes beyond its obvious usage of facilitating construction...or maybe it was his personal struggle to re-conceptualize all his work within The Four Books of Architecture.He died in Maser in 1580, while he had just begun working on the fifth volume that his sons planned to expand after his death, but the project never completed.
Material
Antoni Gaudi (1852 - 1926)
There can be no better example than Antoni Gaudi, of an architect who knew the materials he worked with, to their smallest behavioural property. This dust of construction materials within which he often worked hazed the boundary between art and architecture, with Gaudi till date being classified and reclassified somewhere between being an architect, artisan, artist etc. But it was exactly this construction dust and attire of an artisan that proved fatal.

(Photo of Casa Mila, Barcelona, Spain by David Iliff sourced from here)
On 7 June 1926 Gaudí was run over by a tram. Because of his ragged attire and empty pockets, many cab drivers refused to pick him up for fear that he would be unable to pay the fare. He was eventually taken to a paupers' hospital in Barcelona. Nobody recognized the injured artist until his friends found him the next day. When they tried to move him into a nicer hospital, Gaudí refused, reportedly saying "I belong here among the poor." He died three days later.
Detail
Carlo Scarpa (1906 - 1978)
In 1978, while in Sendai, Japan, Scarpa died after falling down a flight of concrete stairs. He survived for ten days in a hospital before succumbing to the injuries of his fall. We don't really know Scarpa's true purpose of his last journey to Japan and we dont even know what was he doing so far away from the traditional places of interest...some speculate he was following the itinerary of a journey by Basho, a 16th century Haiku poet.

(Photo of Scarpa's Castelvecchio Museum, Verona, Italy sourced from here which has some more nice photographs of his work)
Scarpa is buried standing up, in the outside corner (that was once a spot where dead flowers used to be thrown away) of his L-shaped Brion family cemetery.
"If there was an elegant way to die, it was his: he died in Japan in the land he had loved most, after Veneto where he first saw the light. He was wrapped in a great Kimono, an honour the people of that far off land reserve for their greatest sons and laid in a wooden box, a bed, a cradle, as the poet Ungaretti called it- not a coffin- sealed with flowing white ribbons. For five years there was only earth over his body..."
-Francesco Dal Co and Giuseppe Mazzariol - 1984, Carlo Scarpa, The complete works, Electa/Rizzoli
Project Cost
Louis Kahn (1901 - 1974)
Maybe it was him being a great architect that made him a bad businessman. His dislike to compromise his design ideas to satisfy his client's wishes and frequent change of design made him unpopular with the clients. For this reason Kahn did not make many buildings. His design company did not always have many jobs or much money.

(image of the Dhaka National Assembly building by Louis Kahn from Nathaniel Kahn's film My Architect sourced from here)
In the year 1974, Louis Kahn died of a heart attack in a men's restroom in Pennsylvania Station in New York City. He was not identified for three days, as he had crossed out the home address on his passport. He had just returned from a work trip, and despite his long career,spanning through design of some of the most beautiful buildings, he was deeply in debt ($500,000) when he died.
In today's context where architecture is not so much about design but management of it, where client satisfaction, timely completion, finishing specifications and budgeting precedes the need to design something that shall push the narrative of architectural history a little further, we don't commit the follies that the masters committed, but neither do we design buildings that form history.

...Architects no longer die by Design, but by the stress of Managing it.

Moon

(A topogeoid map showing the Topology of the moon through a spectrum of colours indicating the difference in heights. In this case the colour coded topography is overlaid on a shaded relief map to give rise to the above composite. sourced from: here)
Somewhere during the mid 14th century when Knowledge was laying down foundations for Modern Sciences through Nicolaus Copernicus, Andreas Vesalius, Rene Descartes and many others who liberated the human body and space from being private properties of religion to secular entities...little did she know that sometime down to the present the same sciences will become tools to reclaiming the same body and space as private properties, right from the Human Genome to the Moon!

(Moon map from the United States Geological Survey produced in partnership with NASA between 1971 and 1998, showing "the moon’s dark side, with colours correlating to geological materials and phenomena" sourced from Wired Magazine)
Few days back I came across this website called "Earth's Leading Lunar RealEstate Agency". Its tag line reads: Nothing could be Greater, than to own your own Crater, followed by: "It's not just a piece of paper. It's a ticket to the future. In much the same way that major corporations — such as IBM or General Electric — offer shares of stock to raise capital, we are offering a limited number of land claims ("shares") in lunar property in order to fund privatized exploration, settlement and development of the Moon. The value of lunar real estate claims are directly related to their location on the Moon, and the growth of their value is directly dependent upon successfully achieving our goal of permanently inhabiting the Moon by 2015. Officially authorized by the Lunar Republic Society, the leading advocacy group for private ownership of land on the Moon, and in accordance with the Lunar Settlement Initiative, your lunar land claim purchase benefits the Kennedy 2 Lunar Exploration Project and other public-private programs to return humans to the Moon."

(image from MoonBell site that illustrates how the Lunar terrain being mapped by Lunar orbiting satellite Kaguya (SELENE), launched from Tanegashima Space Center on September 14, 2007 is being used to generate coded sound in the orbital play mode! One can also listen to the noise/sound/voice of the Moon here)
...for now we can just listen to the Moon...sing its swansong...

Material World

(Generic building typologies in Bombay, First image is Raheja Universal Towers, Second image is of Ariisto Heaven I coming up at Mulund West. Image source: http://www.skyscrapercity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1234)
Adolf Loos rolled in his grave and maybe dug deeper, while Mumbai Architects, Contractors and Builders actively participated in ornate material orgy at the ACE Architectural Materials Exhibition in the NSE Grounds, Goregaon. Except for a few technological innovations most stalls exhibited cladding, draping and tiling materials. Finishes of various textures, colours and ornaments to clad generic designs and make them true reflections of different individuals' equally generic identities.

(Image of NG Royal Heights at Andheri, image source: http://www.skyscrapercity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1234)

(Flat Layout diagram of VS Group of builder's, image source: http://www.vsgroup1.com/floor_plan.php )
Interior design as a field here has become something that validates exploitative building trends like reduced ceiling heights, smaller rooms, bad construction quality etc. and works around these "challenges" to change finishes, break some walls, invent 'innovative' furniture (maybe cupboard during the day and your bed during the night kind of bullshit) and turn one generic space into another.
Modernists have died, instead what remain are petty contractors bickering over percentages of material costs, whose interiors are expensive, impressive to look at but still very very generic, sterile and with no formal imagination, and this exhibition reflected all that.
Or maybe it is just me...

Bridges over Chronopolis

(Collage by artist Boris Bilinsky, City Art work for Metropolis c.1926-7, sourced from the Tate Liverpool website: here)
Like the Overload device from Surrogates (where every individual experiences the environment through a robotic surrogate), Bombay's density ensures that every facet of life is pickled with an overloaded complexity, sometimes irritatingly to an extent where everything is an abstraction of an abstraction, a post production of sorts that has completely forgotten its borrowed source. The combination of massive densities (12 million of us in 30 degree Celsius, shit, sweat and dust) and less resources turns the train stations into highly contested spots where concerned 'citizens' (local residents claiming authority/ ownership through their rights towards property), shopkeepers, hawkers, cops, eunuchs, beggars and commuters all stage a daily show of physical endurance, of Olympian proportions.

(Art work by Hugh Ferriss done for the Metropolis of Tomorrow. More images uploaded by Kosmograd here)
So in such a scenario the State Government attempting to untangle this complexity by distributing people in various levels through pedestrian bridges is hilarious and amazing at the same time. If the government goes as crazy with these pedestrian bridges as it went with the paver blocks, then we may even have an amazing cobweb of bridges crisscrossing above the city. In case of Bombay I believe, various bridge typologies like the flyovers, sky-walks, highway pedestrian bridges etc are similar to Viktor Ramos's Bypass Urbanism project, where the urge to bypass the chaotic complexity below is more stronger than desire to bridge places.
It would be interesting to see what nocturnal activities find refuge in these bridges and would they turn into corridors of sleeping, homeless bodies or isolated echo-tubes reverberating with memories of the morning stampede.

(Photo by Ranjit Kandalgaonkar of Skywalk bridge at Borivali)
Contrary to the delicate, minimal almost invisible structures preferred in European context, I like these elephant foot, over-reinforced columned bridges (a "creative" response to a design challenge by a Municipal engineer no doubt) which in some odd way celebrate the half a million people-crowd marching to their jobs everyday, every year and rest of their lives, like some Soviet monuments.

(Photo by Ranjit Kandalgaonkar of Skywalk bridge at Borivali)
I also wonder if finally the pedestrian too, like the motorist has found a good vantage point to enjoy the city but from a comfortable distance without getting his feet dirty. Maybe in some more years we may witness the first ever pedestrian traffic jam on one of these bridges with people stuck for 4 - 5 hours due to someone walking in the wrong direction.


(Photo by Ranjit Kandalgaonkar of Skywalk bridge at Borivali)
Few years back I had also heard a proposal to deal with the train crowding during peak hours, where various government and private offices could be told to stagger their opening and closing hours by half an hour, thereby distributing densities in different time slots. What is amazing is this possibility where the city continues to accommodate higher densities but divides those densities through time and space, different populations of the same city living in different time zones staggered by half an hour and different levels that get built slowly one above the other, somewhat like a combination of J G Ballard's Chronopolis and Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City. The level and time occupied by a person would be based on the economic status.
The only question is at which level and time zone difference will the city be when Violence erupts...

Two Articles

2 very good articles by Arundhati Roy:
1) The Monster in the Mirror
Which is on the terrorist attack that took place in Bombay (hope the MNS isn't here)
2) The Greater Common Good
On the Narmada Dam project, forwarded to me by Aditya Sudhakar (Pottu).
update to the above post:
I found an article written by Ramachandra Guha reacting to Arundhati Roy's above article Greater Common Good...his article titled: The Arun Shourie of the Left
...to which she reacts in the following interview: Scimitars in the Sun

Pixel contributions, Spectral Residues & Rome

A new computer algorithm developed at the University of Washington, using millions of online photographs from Flickr is able to construct a 3d model of various popular tourist sites. They are presently using the cities of Rome, Venice and Dubrovnik as examples to demonstrate and test the application that could allow a direct conversion of images to 3d models. The program is said to work based on its ability to calculate exact spots from where photographs were taken and then arranging various pixels to construct the 3d model (I am sure it isn't as simple as it sounds).
The 3d models somehow seem to embody the fragile translucent membrane quality, result of borrowing, selecting and careful arranging of pixels from an archive of images that are a result of a combination of eye, machine and experience, of the Colosseum, Trevi fountain, St. Peter's Basilica etc. by multiple visitors. To me it is like programming a flash mob with paint brushes carrying specific colours and co-ordinates on a canvas coming together to contribute a dot each and making Water Lilies (which too isn't as simple as it looks, but with some help from an ever growing community of Managers equipped with Excel, iPhones and Twitter, I don't think it should be a problem).
In one of the photographs of the Trevi fountain, one can also see a crowd that forms a pixel cloud/ghost that works like a contribution of remnant reverberation or rather spectral residues of different users who photographed themselves at various spots. Also, based on the popularity the city's visual modeling changes pixel density, and in some places dissolving completely in thin air.