sunrise at chandigarh
photo courtesy namrata

happy birthday namrata...*

Souperr Heroes

day before yesterday I happened to go for a Saskia Sassen’s lecture (author of Cities in a World Economy) arranged by ‘P’ people. Unfortunately everyone around the city was there for the lecture, except her. Sitting through ‘acceptable risks, and advantages of planting grass on rooftops’, ‘city B had problems just like yours come together and join hands’ and lastly a very funny question and answer session… I wondered the cost of hiring an auditorium in ncpa. So sitting with a bunch of people in a closed auditorium in ncpa located at the tip of the city (quite literally), talking about democracy and dissipation of information I felt privileged. Had I been staying at Virar I might not have made it home…but anyways no one was talking about Virar…we were more into the ‘bombhai city’ (unintentional mispronunciation by the ‘imports’).
I have realized after the floods anyone and everyone is getting into city planning and dragging their own set of solutions for the city…everyone’s mutated and turned into soofer heroes, everyone wants to save ‘the city’. Now there are just too many soofer heroes!

In the entire soofer hero summit I liked Mr. Shirish’s talk (very crisp and clear) and also his proposal regarding the updating of the rent control act to solve housing problems in the city (I have my own set of problems with it but I liked it anyways).

MVRDV

I really like these people's (MVRDV) work, inspite of knowing that the dutch do not have to face population problems, they as a nation have lot of money being pumped into institutions and so called town centres and every other reason justifying how all that is one big hoax.
Both the places on the globe which (i think) have really good 'architecture' seem to be hoaxes - Netherlands and Auroville ...damn.

Happy Birthdays!

Happy birthday to Ubaid and Aditya, 2 of my very close friends born on the same day
(1 aug-1981);

Always around surviving my ‘acid tests of friendship’. Both extremely different in their skills of articulation, perspectives to life and architecture in general…having done their fellowship and research from our college KRVIA at the same time; I wish them luck in the world outside. The photograph above was taken during Benares study tour (the semester in which strange -people -configurations were happening) at Charles Correa’s Bharat Bhavan. A place where all of us sat at the amphitheatre…entire class in an amphitheatre in Bharat Bhavan looking at the sunset (it can’t get any cornier than this) something that we as a class may never witness again.