Urban Floop

Siza Sings

2011-12-25T13:55:00.000-08:00

Siza sings | Film by Fernando Guerra from últimas reportagens on Vimeo.
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.

Guglee food cart and Menu

2011-12-25T05:26:00.000-08:00

Small project done few months back in collaboration with Nora.

Istanbul

2011-11-26T03:51:00.001-08:00

(Elevation of the Asian side of Istanbul as seen from the Bosphorus)
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....

Kiran's Window

2011-11-19T04:26:00.001-08:00

Windows to the city

2011-11-12T02:05:00.001-08:00

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'.

From Nora's student accommodation window (2008)

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...

Chomchon's window in Sheffield, UK

Hardik's window in Ahmedabad, India

Outside Hiroshi's window in Hirao, Yamaguchi, Japan

Hiroyuki's window NY, US

Kiavash's window Vancouver, Canada

Michelle's window in Hong Kong

Namrata's window in UC Berkeley, US

Panayiota's window in Nikosia, Cyprus

Ranjit's window during monsoon in Bombay, India

Sahil's window during Diwali in Bombay, India.

My window in Bombay, India

My window in London in 2009 during winter, UK

Dominyka's window in Vilnius, Lithuania

Cardiff

2011-08-25T11:53:00.000-07:00

The other day i got angry at a font...

2011-08-16T12:18:00.000-07:00

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!

Tadao Ando's Fountain on Mount St @ Mayfair

2011-08-15T14:49:00.000-07:00

City at crossroads

2011-08-14T02:16:00.000-07:00

While working on a regeneration project in Sao Paulo, its modernist grid, dense urban fabric and wide vehicular road network makes for obvious comparisons to New York. I have visited neither of the cities but only attempt to construct very vague ideas of them based on different media and people who do visit and narrate experiences of having been and lived there.

One of the few things that intrigued me during the course of the project was the difference in nature of the (Google) satellite images for New York and Sao Paulo. It isn't something that one notices immediately but I feel it could be metaphorical of the dissimilarity between the two cities. While the New York grid lies all in single plane, with every skyscraper casting its shadow at exactly the same angle as the entire city is bathed in the warm sunlight, Sao Paulo's multi coloured towers criss cross with one another to hide and reveal nooks and crevices, private courtyards, hidden pockets of lush greenery etc. The ground plane seems to modulate and fold as it attempts to balance these towers that like shards rise above in multiple directions. The schism between the overwhelming complexity of the site and an extremely advanced technology of 'eye' in the sky is apparent, as even such a technological advancement struggles to find apt representations for this particular human conglomeration. The acknowledgement of this complexity turns the satellite image into a multiple point perspective collage that attempts to voyeur into the 'local'.

Through the course of the project these confrontational complexities within the site seemed to seep not only in the satellite imagery but also within the design, the collaborations and finally the aggressive global capital that tries to spread its roots in the fabric of the city...making the site of urban intervention an extremely contested territory with multiple points of perspective.

One of the very few projects in the professional space that I thoroughly enjoyed working on. It was very similar to the Regeneration project that I was a part of in Bombay but with only more amplified conditions of densities, dilapidation and pressure towards urban cleansing.

Rooster's Coop

2011-08-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

In UK

(Data from HMRC 2004-2005; incomes are before tax for individuals. The personal allowance or income tax threshold was £4,745 (people with incomes below this level did not pay income tax). The mean income was £22,800 per year with the average Briton paying £4,060 in income tax.
Above are the tax ranges, by population and the percentage they constitute. This income does not cover assets owned.)

The difference in earnings is not a gradual gradient, it reveals numbers that are highly polarised. This rather vulgar statistic with top 5 percent earning 60-70% of the income while the rest having to share from the trickle down scraps according to me is far more violent than the London riots few days back.
A majority of rioters took to looting, as one of the article called them 'disqualified consumers' implying, they too like most of us were consumers but having lost the power to afford had been disqualified. In the absence of any support from the student unions or intellectuals in the city who have distanced themselves from this underclass, the only form of mass unrest possible will be the one with no structure, no intent and no meaning....in complete contradiction to the student protests that took place few months back. This contradiction makes it even more important for the two groups to come together...
While David Cameron made a speech filled with hate, and the opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband seemed to be weighing words completely based on popular public opinion, one person out there somewhere makes complete sense of what happened and why...below is the video of the interview.

In such a scenario I often find myself agreeing with Kostas's argumentum baculinum solutions.

James Sterling Exhibition at Tate Britain

2011-08-08T15:05:00.000-07:00

Eye in the Sky

2011-08-06T01:11:00.000-07:00

Sometimes while working as professionals designing urban spaces, operating from democratic regions, we often find ourselves designing for regions with dictatorships where mass congregation, demonstrations, spaces of expression are often seen as threats. But still funnily the standards of design and basic Kevin Lynchian assumptions of urban space are uniformly laid out on the site, having ideas of path, edge, node etc all in place matterless of if the site is located in UK, China or Libya. Maybe because this framework seems to be most apolitical and has the necessary simplicity of rationalizing the design without getting into the socio-cultural aspects that may only give rise to 'unnecessary' contradictions that a multinational design office may not be able to reconcile (though examples of designing a military camp for a dictatorial regime after clearing a part of virgin rain forest and getting platinum sustainability ratings for the development are in abundance).
But it would be certainly interesting to see if the arrangement of infrastructure or city forms can be indicative of the nature of administration that 'manages' the region. In other words do cities in Libya or Saudi Arabia show spatial signs of a dictatorial regimes? while cities in India or UK bear witness to democracies? And if not then why is it that the nature of contemporary urban spaces under different systems of governance is more or less the same?
Ofcourse, attempt to understand city geographies through purely satellite images is dangerous but one cannot ignore the difference in the satellite image of Detroit, Venice, Delhi or London is obvious enough to use only this as the most basic tool to start off for now
(At the same time one has to accept the stark similarity of city design and planning of new redeveloped areas across the globe...as if there is some process of homogenisation).
Infrastructure Grid:
(image of Nasa earth at night)
On TED talks, Paul Romer's analysis of NASA's Earth at night composite image and how the visible light grid of different regions could be seen as an indication of development facilitated by different administrations. It does not show the nature of governance but certainly provides one a broad overview of the scale and intensity of developments in different regions.
For further detailed urban light spectrum analysis see here.
Axes and Nodes:
In an article titled 'Roundabouts and Revolution: The "Arab Street" Begins and Ends in a Circle' talks about how the traffic circle becomes the most looked after 'open' spaces in regions where mass congregation of people is seen as a threat. But the author optimistically points to how these circles have become the very stages of demonstration.
Interestingly if one were to overlay this analysis on Canary Wharf development in London one can clearly see how the central axes leads from nowhere to nowhere, spanning between two traffic circles. Providing the area with sufficient road infrastructure to provide police access to control demonstrators. This does not really dilute the argument of spatial configuration and governance rather it poses the question why is there such a stark similarity in the spatial configuration of spaces of dictatorial regimes and a Financial Centre in a democracy?
Maybe the architecture of axes and nodes is designed around easy accessibility and readability of the 'local' enabling some kind of centralised consolidated power either financial, imperial, dictatorial or any other form of totalitarian authority to control a geography.
Water:
In Greece the tax authorities are using satellite images to catch tax evading rich elites in Athens suburbs through swimming pools. An article here states "Using satellite photos, the tax authority examined the claim of the residents of Athens's wealthy suburbs and discovered that, rather than the 324 swimming pools claimed by the locals, there were 16,974 of them". This may not be indicative of governance but certainly wealth distribution.
Interestingly the Bahrain revolution is said to have started when a set of Google Earth images mapped the 'rich oases' dotting the landscape belonging to various members of the royal family. But then again we converge on the question how did access and visibility of water come to be an indicator of wealth in a democracy as well as spaces formed under dictatorial regimes?
In present times where democracies have fascist policies and fascists hide behind veils of charities the boundaries often get blurred between the two, with similar requirements expected from the design of urban form like mass subjugation, crowd control, securing class struture through segregated class based developments and finally designing social condensers.
As a joke, I like to believe that out there in some office or a university our favourite underpaid intern is working on a street section or a built form typology after which the world will never be the same...

Peter Zumthor's Serpentine Pavilion

2011-08-04T13:43:00.000-07:00

London International Documentary Festival

2011-06-04T13:15:00.000-07:00

My friend Mukul had two of his film screenings at the London International Documentary Festival, Vertical City and Certified Universal both of which were being screened at the Horse Hospital. I could make it for the Certified Universal, a beautiful short film with the audience relishing every second of the film as images from films and the city fused together to form Bombay.
I remember reading Berger where he writes there are numerous paintings of water lilies, haystacks, sunflowers and nudes, but only a few come to be truly beautiful where the artist and art merge and are inseparable. For me Certified Universal was one such beautiful film in which I see the city, the film and Mukul, all tightly composed in 14 minutes.

Mao and Superman

2011-04-29T04:48:00.000-07:00

In the event of current global trends, Superman has decided to give up his US citizenship and become Chinese, and protect the country from evils of Ai weiwei, Ten Biao, Chen Guangcheng, Liu Xiabo and many others threatening democracy, justice and peace in the fine country of China. "He is strong but still few inches shorter than our lovely leader Mao as seen in image released by our state controlled media", exclaims a poor peasant kid.

And while we are on the topic of Supermen, here is a link to enjoy:

http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/

Collective Memories

2011-04-23T01:45:00.000-07:00

(images sourced from here, which has some more of Corinne Vionnet's works)
Every monument has a postcard and every postcard has its monument that can be viewed and recognised instantly by eyes of friends and family that may never visit it. But through the circulation of these postcards across the globe, not only the monument but even the vantage point from where to record it best have become a part of some sort of a collective memory of the 'networked' population of the human race.

(images sourced from here, which has some more of Corinne Vionnet's works)
Or maybe it isn't the postcards but it is the arrangement of the space that through the axes and imaginary lines that diverge from the subject makes certain angles universally comprehensive to the human eye constrained by its range of colour spectrum, cone of vision or depth of field and appealing to the mind that composes these invisible influences of space within the canvas of the frame.

(images sourced from here, which has some more of Corinne Vionnet's works)
We can not really say if it is the postcards or the space that have come to institutionalise the points of best views around monuments, but what we can say is when Switzerland-based artist Corinne Vionnet overlaps 200 to 300 photographs of the same monument taken by tourists across the world the result is a set of exquisitely ephemeral looking images of collective human memory. Some images where the frames record changes, they act like compact time-capsules recording changes as new silhouettes come into focus and older ones fade away.
The nature of images reminded me of Leonardo da Vinci's The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist charcoal sketch from the National Gallery that gets built through tedious layers of strokes that attempt to find the right form in the white space, while the area of focus or rather confidence stays clean, the hand that points skyward;

(photo of Taj Mahal with scaffoldings sourcedhere. The site also has photos of many more porcupined fuzzy looking buildings in various stages of existence)

Like humanity formulating these monuments through scaffoldings of collective memories.

Starman

2011-04-09T12:53:00.000-07:00

During the height of the Cold war and Space Race, on 12th april 1961,fifty years ago, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to journey into outerspace in Vostok 1, he returned back a soviet hero. After 6 years Soyuz 1 carried a cosmonaut who never returned. This cosmonaut was Yuri Gagarin's friend and maybe the only man to be well informed of his inevitable demise even before the launch, Vladmir Komarov.

(Vladmir Komarov's remains in an open casket. image sourced from Robert Krulwich's blog that runs the original post on Starman, here.)

I found this very very beautiful story of the Starman here.

Robert Krulwich writes:
"Starman tells the story of a friendship between two cosmonauts, Vladimir Kamarov and Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach outer space. The two men were close; they socialized, hunted and drank together.

In 1967, both men were assigned to the same Earth-orbiting mission, and both knew the space capsule was not safe to fly. Komarov told friends he knew he would probably die. But he wouldn't back out because he didn't want Gagarin to die. Gagarin would have been his replacement...

...Russayev asked, Why not refuse? According to the authors, Komarov answered: "If I don't make this flight, they'll send the backup pilot instead." That was Yuri Gagarin. Vladimir Komarov couldn't do that to his friend. "That's Yura," the book quotes him saying, "and he'll die instead of me. We've got to take care of him." Komarov then burst into tears."
Though there are lot of questions raised with regards to the validity of its sources by numerous historians, the story of Komarov sacrificing himself for his friend Yuri and the Soviet Motherland is an instant hit, it touches something within us that is a sucker for such heroism. Given an option between a history filled with blind spots and footnotes that turn it into just another event recorded on the time line of human existence and the history that Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony's Starman attempts to write, I will choose the later any day.

And all this is simply because just like Piscine Patel, we all have our Richard Parkers and given a choice we all will pick the story with animals, simply because it is beautiful. Speaking of Cosmonauts and beautiful stories, here is one in the making.

Sustainability as defined by Multinationals

2011-04-03T02:25:00.000-07:00

According to Novelist Edward Docx "In the forest, there are no horizons and so the dawn does not break but is instead born in the trees – a wan and smoky blue."
Here are fragmentary excerpts from an ongoing story of one such forest, The Niyamgiri and its inhabitants who call themselves Jharnia translating as 'protectors of streams' waging a struggle against a UK based multinational and their own government.
A, B, C, D, D2 and some other stories E, F.
...meanwhile in other places strange coincidences make wars for freedom worth the effort.
I have come to believe that these days most contradictions lie blatantly out in the open, it will just take one twig to snap and start a forest fire.

Pale Blue Dot

2011-03-20T15:23:00.000-07:00

Before sailing into the frigid, interstellar darkness a whimsical looking object carrying with it memories of home, mission to explore the unknown, floating in space, changed orientation as it fixed its electronic gaze on a tiny familiar speck. In the absence of sound its mechanics seemed to glide with balletic ease and precision, cutting through the dark ether, to look back and record a Las Meninas snapshot of a speck of reflected light. This snap came to be known as the Pale Blue Dot taken by a mechanical Astronaftis (literally meaning sailor of the stars) called Voyager 1.
While we are on the topic of scale of this pale blue dot, someone whom I had briefly worked with is on a bicycle trip from London to Kathmandu. Details of the trip and interesting geographies they cycled by have been recorded on their blog. The idea of such a trip is so intimidatingly abstract to me that I may never be able to muster courage to test my levels of patience, stamina and other things that go in such an endeavour, but over time I have come to understand and respect such aspirations. The distance between London to Kathmandu maybe an abstract number, most of us fly over but for Lonkat team it must be a far richer understanding of the scale of this number.
In the light of the past few weeks, when "there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen", this tiny blue speck seems to resonate with all its elemental spectrum as a group of people cycle across the globe, a tsunami and a earthquake causes destruction, some people protest for freedom and some wage wars.

Watercolours

2011-03-08T13:41:00.000-08:00

I received this in my inbox today sent by a friend. If you are in Bombay and you were a student of Architecture or Arts sometime during the past 20 years, then this is an exhibition you would not want to miss.

Here is the rest of text from the email:

"Kamla Raheja Foundation presents an Exhibition of Prof. Shriniwas Kudalkar's Water Colours and Illustrations.

Shriniwas Ramchandra Kudalkar (b. 1934) is an alumnus of Sir JJ School of Architecture (Batch of 1954). Fondly called Kudalkar Sir, he is a teacher par excellence who has been teaching at KRVIA for the past seventeen years since 1994. He has also taught at Sir JJ School of Architecture since 1964. He is an inspiration for students and colleagues by virtue of his ability to craft each of his Building Technology lectures- beginning with the plans and fleshing out the details thus bringing to life the process of construction.

Not many people know that before commencing his education as an architect, he had already completed a certificate course in fine arts and also apprenticed with a commercial artist. His students at the JJ school in his early years of teaching have had the good fortune to witness him painting during their study tours.

On behalf of the Kamla Raheja Foundation, It is with immense pleasure that we announce a public exhibition of his paintings in at least three locations beginning at KRVIA- 10th to 17th March 2011 (1pm to 7pm except on Sunday).

An inaugural function of the exhibition reminiscing his earlier years of teaching will be held at the KRVIA on 10th, thursday at 3pm, followed by tea at 4:30pm.

Out of a collection of 174 of the surviving paintings in his possession, we have selected around 50 paintings and a few artworks and illustrations."

I hope I get to see some images from the exhibition.

Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot

2011-03-05T04:41:00.000-08:00

Around the time when I was a a kid and had started admiring the beauty of moving images, my dad with great efforts had put together some savings and bought a coloured TV, a novelty that few homes could enjoy. Being born in 80's in India meant you did not have cable tv, childhood life was co-ordinated around very few definite programs that used to be screened on Doordarshan, one of which was Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot (created by Mitsuteru Yokoyama).
This was one of those many things that sent its influences across schools, playgrounds and other spaces infested with kids. A bunch of us doing a Giant Robo excercise before a showdown fight for the swing had always perplexed teachers and parents alike. But in the end we would be rest assured that the Robo would struggle through all sorts of acrobatic fights, be badly injured/broken, and still emerge victorious thanks to a combination of fast computing, secret alternative use of already existing weapons (mentioned in the manual, but Sokko and therefore the audience did not know of) and last but not the least sheer brute force.
But then we all grew up and read Kafka's Trial. I have been in one since 2 months now. Got an outcome yesterday, next steps involve further exploration of the labyrinthine corridors of bureaucracy. A Giant Robo would had been very very useful in such matters of the State.

Pots on the Horizon

2011-03-01T14:18:00.000-08:00

(Gladstone Pottery Museum, Image sourced from here)

(The Seven Chambers Art Gallery by Cheungvogl)
The act of making a pot involves having almost divine control over the four elements, Earth, Water, Air and Fire. It is the exact combinations of consistencies, proportions and time of these four elements that shall shape the pot which as much being a form from the outside will also be a space from the inside, a memory of a shape that the liquid poured inside will recollect.
Last week I came across two very beautiful buildings. The first one being the Gladstone Pottery (turned into a) Museum with its Bottle Ovens, an 18th century relic of the Industrial Revolution, while the other being a contemporary Art Gallery by design office Cheunvogl. It is interesting to see how the industrial revolution (England) shaped the phenomenology of such a space (for extremely pragmatic reasons) and passed it down the years to be inherited by a very beautiful self reflective private art gallery (China). Like Hands and Gravity that shape a pot, Subjectivity and Objectivity in equal measures seem to have shaped this space on the wheel of Time.

Update: came across us a black and white photograph in Tate Britain's James Sterling Exhibition (July 2011). The photo was titled 'Kilns Farm Buildings Oast House, UK 1950-70'. photo posted below:

V&A opens Architectural Gallery

2011-02-19T08:59:00.000-08:00

The V &A has opened a new Architectural Gallery in the Museum. For now its exhibits come across as a collage of different things with no apparent narrative.

As much as it looks rather accidental, to see a model of Bramante's Tempietto, next to Grimshaw's Eden Garden Dome design, that is next to Arup's Structural analysis model, one wonders if the V&A curators ambitiously desired to map the 'progress' of architecture or did they desire to come up with some kind of explanation for our current state of confusion.

But given the richness of every individual exhibit, the gallery is worth a visit as long as the visitor takes a deep breathe and a conscious 10 second break between seeing an exquisitely detailed hand drawn axonometric of St Paul's and laser cut 20 option-models of Foster's Gherkin.

(all photos in the post, photo courtesy of Nora)

Voynich Manuscript

2011-02-14T11:25:00.000-08:00

I have written before small, odd, confused articles on language (1, 2, 3, 4) and other speculations associated, one of which being erasure of language. To speculate on possibility of losing the memory of sounds and symbols that make up words and how to arrange these together. Being able to imagine an alternative history where Rosetta stone was never discovered and we are left with only encoded unrecognisable vast archives that look exquisitely rich in their meaning but undecipherable,quite similar to the symbol of human infertility, where Zizek talks about Art in the absence of its context in Children of Men.
I can only imagine the feeling cryptographers, ciphers, linguists and historians get when they study The Beinecke MS 408 or also popularly known as the Voynich manuscripts presently housed in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library building (designed by SOM). A treasure trove of history, symbols and science locked up meaningless without its codec. Some images below for visual intrigue and pleasure.

(All images for this post have been borrowed from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript online Archive, Yale University.)

Portrait of my Mother, Gioconda's Smile

2011-02-10T12:27:00.000-08:00

On the last evening of the Millennium, 31 December 1999 the Orchestra of Colours played Portrait of my Mother from Gioconda's Smile composed by Manos Hatzidakis to the setting sun of Santorini. It is late to be talking about it, but beautiful none the less.

La Vie Aquatique

2011-01-28T05:07:00.000-08:00

(The text below is not a description of London aquarium, but it was inspired by a recent visit to it)

(image of the Crystal Palace Aquarium sourced from here.)
Though designed by a name obscured by time and tides, the aquarium could be considered to be a dream project of curiosities, entertainment and science, set within the Victorian era that bravely peered into the oceans' depths. Oceans that unlike today's still nurtured within them the myths of mermaids, sea monsters,loch ness and science of species in equal proportions. The aquarium was indeed a small sample of this vast primordial soup of life that had abilities to shelter myth and science simultaneously, to be viewed and awed by the public, a television set of the 19th century!

And so the stone facade of the aquarium building was an alto relievo jigsaw of two intertwining narratives, one of the oceans created and the other of the oceans formed. The Darwinian narrative covering the plinths of the building with relief work of smaller more intricate Crustaceans, Mollusks and Echinoderms that could be observed and displayed at human height, flowed along the stormy biblical waves of Philip Gosse as species got simultaneously created and evolved, with whales, squids and sharks forming support system for the rusting copper roof and sea monsters occupying the place of gargoyles that poured water out into various crevices of the facade to bring the oceans to life on a rainy day.

(Statue of Poseidon. Found on Milos with the statue of Amphitrite. In his raised right hand he will have held the trident. Next to his right leg is a support of in the form of a dolphin. 125-100 BC . National Archaeological Museum of Athens, sourced from http://www.greek-thesaurus.gr/hellenistic-age-marble-sculpture-statues-photo-gallery.html)
The entrance of the aquarium was a double height wooden dome with copper handrails, circular riveted portholes and other borrowings from Jules Verne's Nautilus, at the centre stood a six metre high black granite statue of Poseidon, whose beard, hair and cloth seemed to turn the air around into water. A recent material analysis had confirmed the stone came from the submerged monument of Yonaguni Jima, Japan. Our tickets came bundled up in mermaid's purse, an object that just like the facade embodied within it echoes of myths and science alike.

(image of Ascidiae plate 85 from Kunstformen der Natur by Earnst Haeckel, sourced from here)
The first chamber was a gallery of original paintings by Earnst Haeckel, letters exchanged between Robert Warington and Gosse, a manuscript by Jules Verne's recently discovered book 'The seas of Neptune' by a great grand daughter of his editor Jules Hetzel, a fifteenth century Latin translation of Plato's Timaeus and Critias and lastly a final piece of this puzzle Alastair Pilkington and Kenneth Bickerstaff, the men who made the Crystal Palaces, and aquariums possible for the Victorians, the men who made glass visible or should i say invisible! In this room the life aquatic, science, art and most importantly men seemed to evolve and achieve greatness that challenge the world as we know it.

(Cover of "L'Algerie" Magazine, 15 June 1884, image from wikipedia article on Jules Verne)
The visitors could travel through a series of chambers. Each chamber had two identical doors, faith and fact, objectivity and subjectivity, etc and through the selection of each door the aquarium revealed itself as a labyrinth of multiple choices that single cell plankton to multi cell complex organisms had to make as they evolved newer appendages for their faiths or shed older organs to well known facts, thus contributing to the success of their future generations and building on the strengths of the past. The displays were a part of the labyrinth influencing the visitors' choices, presenting themselves as part fact part fiction, like the sea anemone that forms gardens of living tissue along coral reefs or the sleeping whale that formed an island in the first voyage of Sindabad. This Labyrinth had multiple glass stairs and corridors leading up or down between display rooms; these being completely made of glass were the only spaces from where one could peer out at the labyrinth, see silhouettes of other people moving and be conscious of its massive scale and complexity. Peering out of these glass spaces, sometimes littered with objects of everyday use, spoons, tables, books, toys, etc the visitor realises he too like the fishes is a part of this aquarium, not a visitor, not a witness but an active organism that has influenced the labyrinth of evolution through the choices made and an inseparable display like the rest.

At the end of the journey the visitors who had travelled each his unique distance and observed a unique set of sea creatures, all converged into a common egg shaped chamber which was newly added annexe to the aquarium building. This chamber unlike the others was an iridescent, seamless opaque space lit by fluorescent white light. The centre of the space had a six metre high white marble statue of Oceanus rumoured to be made from Golgotha stone. The statue was said to had been recently acquired by the aquarium with its origins traced to a Renaissance genius working in Florence around the beginning of sixteenth century. The display tank was located along the equatorial line of the geoid. A robotic arm above the tanks whizzed and dropped in creatures announcing ticket numbers corresponding to each creature. These were chimeras , being printed for each visitor based on the visitors journey and his choices. Some were grotesque nebular lumps of flesh where the choices of fact and fiction had made the organism incapable of living, some exquisitely beautiful where the two dialectics had stabilised in cohesive harmony. Due to Global genetic laws, the life span of these fantastic creatures created by man was to be only few minutes till they formed the display and had been seen by their creator. But so unique and powerful would be the relationship of this creature to the visitor who created it through his/her choices, that the image would form a part of the visitors sub conscious, influencing decisions for rest of his/her life. This was a consistent effect seen on all visitors who visited the aquarium. Some controversial psychoanalysts had gone to the extent of calling it a Lacanian mirror stage of the entire species, some pointed that we had discovered the Omphalos, the ultimate allegory of the creator allowing the creations to create.

(Double plate illustration showing embryos of ﬁsh (F), salamander (A), tur tle (T), chick (H), pig (S), cow (R), rabbit (K), and human (M), at "very early", "somewhat later" and "still later" stages, from Haeckel's Anthropogenie published in 1874, image sourced from here)
And so the visit to the aquarium in the 21st century had come to be a Hajj for the entire human race, balanced between scientific exploration and spirituality. Thus the aquarium, the least expected institution of Victorian curiosity and intrigue had come to negotiate differences between subjectivity and objectivity, between the church and the parliament, between inquisitions and justice. Like fishes aligning themselves to light in the absence of gravity, mankind was aligning itself to the sea within.

Collective Lost&Found Libraries and Insertions in Ideological Circuits

2010-11-14T04:49:00.000-08:00

When I lost a very good book few months back I remember one of my friends telling me not to grieve over it as it had only become one of the many articles that form a collective pool of lost objects and something had become little more public in a world infested with privatising even thoughts and ideas. For me it was nice to imagine a city where people would be conscious of these lost and found objects, where as a gesture one had to leave an 'exchange' for the object they wish to take with them only to be lost again when they desire. Or seeding a city with books purposefully lost along strategic locations on designed topics to be found by an unsuspecting audience member, could very well come to be a tool of revolution, atleast a literary one, maybe.

(one of the works of Cildo Meireles, with the question "Who killed Herzog?" stamped, refering to the suspicious death in prison of the journalist Wladimir Herzog sourced from TATE also a very good interview of the artist here)
One of the artists whose work I really enjoyed seeing at Tate Modern, Cildo Meireles believes in using pre-existing systems to ones advantage which he refers to as Insertions into Ideological Circuits. Where objects of daily use that get circulated through a huge number of people (currency, soft drink bottles, or maybe even the London tube free newspaper) can be appropriated to send messages to a far diverse and wider audience. In an interview the artist explains "While having a beer with a friend at a bar in Rio, he remarked that an olive stone could never be removed from a bottle unless the mechanical process for washing bottles was changed. As I pictured this olive stone inside a bottle, I concluded that there are circulation mechanisms within society which could be used by artists as counter-information. Newspapers, radio and television are circuits for transmission with a very broad reach, yet they are vulnerable – that is to say, they are easily controllable."
Another artist whose work comes close to this is Omer Fast whose work T3-Aeon involved altering the soundtrack of The Terminator movies rented from New York area video stores. The sound tracks were interviews that served as a secret anonymous record of incidences that had transpired in the private space. Like Michel Gondry's Hollywood comedy Be Kind Rewind the possibilities of remaking stories and inserting them within this system is infinite.

(image sourced from the artist's blog here)

(image sourced from the artist's blog here more images can be found here)
In present day digital age, while the corporate thugs go on a witch hunt to close down different services that allow free exchange of files that are private properties, I came across the DeadDrops project by Aram Bartholl! It is fantastically smart move in the present context, goes along the lines of juxtaposing two public spaces together and just plays along the "what is in the box" curiosity for people to start plugging in along walls, booths, curbs and all sorts of places to exchange files that they have no clue of. And yes there is always fear of catching viruses but that is true for even delicious looking street food! its public space so get over it!

1st para: found a nice blog, 2nd para: a long painful rant, 3rd para: Happy Diwali

2010-11-07T06:03:00.000-08:00

Of the different kinds of architectural drawings made during different stages of the project, there are two types that almost tend to sit on either side of the process establishing a dialectics. One conceptualising architecture as a form of knowledge while the other casting it as knowledge of form. To me it is the conceptual stage that is most intriguing, during which architecture formulates itself as a built indicator/critique of various socio-political and environmental trends. Sometimes the drawing that conceptualises the product is so exquisite that the built project is read as a representation of that drawing.

(borrowed from Nikita's blog Drawing Architecture, one of the many drawings found on her tumblr site. Above is drawing by Ivan Leonidov for Ministry of Heavy Industry)
If you too like me enjoy seeing these kind of conceptual drawings then I found a very nice tumblr blog maintained by Nikita a student of Architecture with a keen eye for good drawings, skilled doodler and with great sources for some really beautiful drawings that are not easily available on the net. Added to my sidebar under depositories, I hope she continues sharing some great drawings.

But if you are more into "i like getting things built and done man" (in the manner of a pass out with zero imagination and trying to earn some redemption through picking up some fairly conventional standard details from ridiculously predictable sources like your employer or worse, books recommended by your builder) then go read some Neuferts and hope that someday the house you build will have fantastically standard details that will work but will just be another standard house in the village and not Villa Savoy.

(sourced from Ghee Happy)
In order to end this post on a better note, now for something completely different, Wishing everyone A Very Happy Diwali!

Mapping

2010-10-30T07:12:00.000-07:00

"If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where the decline of the Empire sees this map become frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts — the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an Imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing) — then this fable has come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra."
Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra"

To Learners of New Languages and Old

2010-10-17T04:14:00.000-07:00

According to Foucault, the relationship between thought and language is that of geometry and algebra, where all the geometric shapes spontaneously pre-exist in nature waiting to be drawn and discovered but it is the algebric expression that provides the shape a meaning that is precise to its nature, where the spontaneity of the shapes' existence gets tuned in a mathematical meaning that when played will become that shape. And sometimes it is formulation of an algebric expression that could lead us to an undiscovered shape.
I loved this metaphor as it immediately makes one conscious of the proximity of language to space and social structure.This simultaneous Independence and symbiotic interdependence between language and thought I believe makes it even more crucial to conserve, learn, understand, speak and make new languages or else we lose out on all hopes of making something truly original that sprouts from the fertile soil of human conscience.
Some linguists estimate that a language dies every two weeks with the death of its last speaker. Apparently India tops the list with 196 endangered languages, geographically most of them located in the North and North-Eastern regions which had an interface with rest of the Asian landmass.
Maybe some decades down we may come to inherit a handful of fine words distilled to perfection by the utilitarian global culture, that quite ironic for their meaning sum up the true essence of human rot: LOL & LMAO!

Photography of Time Travel

2010-09-27T04:45:00.000-07:00

(the white lines in the sky are a result of the sun moving across the sky and variations in the sun path through the year. photograph sourced from here)
Recently I came across German photographer/artist Michael Wesley's monochromatic photographs that are a part of his open shutter project, which record the image over long periods of exposure sometimes lasting 3 years.
In the past I have also written of Michael Kenna's long exposure photographs in low light conditions giving absolutely stunning high contrast images that beautify the very constraint, the static nature of a photograph. Here the image isnt a split second capture but something that has been and will continue to be. The environments recorded are almost meditative minimal landscapes of silence.

(image sourced from here)
But when a similar methodology gets used in urban environments that attempts to record months of moving images in one frame the result is as magical. Within the greater Order of Things in the branch of still photography I believe it is like discovering dialectically opposite twins.

(image sourced from here)
Michael Wesley's monochrome photographs that continue capturing the image over a period of 2 to 3 years constantly as the glass eye of the camera gazes continuously at one focus and the world around it changes, it instantly transforms into a time machine with its precise control over the speed of light, absorbtion of the memory of the past, experience of the present and dreams of the future on the film. The images thus recorded are as magical as the moving pictures, they record the very ghosts of time, the paths of the sun as it speeds across the horizon, the glare of a glass window on a particuilar day in winter.

(image sourced from here)
I wonder what would it be to have a camera positioned whose exposure time will work through generations, what would one like to focus their eyes on for the next 80 years if they know it will only be their next generation that shall see what it looked like.

London Open House

2010-09-25T05:24:00.000-07:00

(Roger's Channel 4 building)

(Roger's Maggie centre, small and very beautiful building as opposed to the channel 4 building.)
The London Open House is one of a kind architectural event that celebrates the city and its endeavours in articulating its built environment. Inspite of being architectural it seems to work at an urban scale as the entire city is turned into a gallery / museum exhibiting different buildings of architectural importance with people walking, running, cycling and in case of lazier ones like me taking the tube between different buildings of their choice that are made open to public over this open house weekend.

(Building to the left with circular windows and hideously out of scale pattern is FOA design and next to it sit buildings by generic practices that decided to 'design elevations based on copy, paste and array commands in autocad' according to my fellow architectural photographer for the day Dominyka Togonidze)
The buildings vary in scale, typology, date of design and conception. The entire process of careful selection of buildings that intrigue you the most out of a list of 800 and imprinting them on the London map with a game plan based on your preferred order of tastes in the course of this architectural buffet and the desire to savour everything laid out on the table makes it a truly urban experience. This year we covered the Greenwich Yatch Club, Maggie's Centre designed by Richard Rogers & partners. Another building that we visited was Roger's Television Channel 4 building which again wasn't open on that particular day of the open house.

(some really interesting designs by Adjaye associates. All photos in this post including these are courtesy of Dominyka Togonidze)
Also visited two buildings by Adjaye Associates in Shoreditch which were the Rivington Place and Dirty house unfortunately both not listed on the open house this year. Both the buildings are black and very minimal with some interesting details, formal strategies and material palette. I think Adjaye's is one of the few new practices that we can look forward to for more interesting work.
On the whole it was a great day filled with archi- conversations, arguments and gossips while we went on a treasure hunt building to building collecting elements, details, materials, form and colours in our minds to be put to use in fantastically improvised versions when the time/project comes!

Concrete Flower to Death

2010-09-11T06:50:00.000-07:00

In the Park of Eternal Glory next to the Wall of Memory rests a white concrete building to Death. The Kiev Crematorium designed by Architect Avraham Miletsky in the year 1975. The dynamic spatial sculpturing of space makes one wonder if the building is in a constant state of infinitesimally slow motion as its white concrete petals bloom and rotate producing a meditative grinding sound, while warm Death embraces the body inside.

(image sourced from here. There are also some more images here and here)

Hiroyuki

2010-08-14T09:40:00.001-07:00

During my early days in architecture all of us during a brief phase had taken to worshipping Tadao Ando, which secretly we still do in some obscure corner of naivety unpolluted by the realisation that it cannot be that simple, life is far more complicated, filled with contradictions that need to be represented in our spaces, objects, skews and corners. Ando had been popular for quite sometime then but it was during my first year in Architecture that he built Church of the Light a building that worshipped space, made concrete an inch more beautiful than what the modernist had left it as and we drooled.

It is this rich simplicity that draws me to Hiroyuki's work of which I have written before.
Hiroyuki will be exhibiting three new pieces in his next show at Art Sites, a gallery in Riverhead, NY. If you are the lucky few around do visit...I personally would like to see the scale of these objects...and if they open up like loosely held 3d jigsaw puzzles, or do they crack like egg shells, are they hollow or filled with a heavy fluid, is there a temperature difference in the blacks and whites, browns and greys...I guess I will definitely be banned from entering the gallery or his workshop!
I hope the art work sells and and pray definitely not to clients who would use it as bourgeoisie conversational props with their boring guests in plush living rooms with matching minimal aesthetics.

Surreal House & the Third Manifesto

2010-08-01T13:56:00.000-07:00

For surrealists and people who love them, the Barbican's Surreal House is an exhibition you wouldn't want to miss. The exhibition is a collage of artists, filmmakers, architects and last but not the least Freud. It allows one to move around and pick and choose and relish what one desires from a buffet of anarchy, dreamscapes, metaphysics, sub conscious and pianos that hang upside down from ceilings making eerie sounds. Few rooms play short movies by the surrealists and people randomly stop by to peep in, look, maybe sit through the entire film (I couldn't help but sit through Jean Cocteau's very beautiful film La Belle et la Bete), or just leave half ways.

(one of the scenes from the movie Beauty and the Beast by Jean Cocteau)
For me personally the exhibition as well as the work displayed being able to allow the fractured pick-and-choose-help-yourself experience was very nice and only enhanced the nature of work for me. The focus stayed on the playfulness of the work as people genuinely seemed to smile, laugh and enjoy the films, sculptures and images.

(Tim Noble & Sue Websters scuplture "Metal fucking Rats" sourced from here is also a part of the show and one of my favourites)
If you are around and believe in Andre Breton and his deranged friends or just simply love Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte, Alberto Giacometti, Man Ray, Joseph Cornell or Louise Bourgeois then this exhibition is worth a visit, who knows you might be one of the fortunate few to come across some old pages from the draft of the third manifesto somewhere out there in the surreal house planted by one of the many living surrealists...in hopes that we may learn to dream again.
Talking of dreams, I wonder what Inception would had been, had the surrealist made it? With sleek, polished clear dreams corroded by Freudian psychoanalysis, where Joseph Cornellian objects in boxes retrieve different memories for different individuals sitting in the audience, where cities fold on itself but also cut, paste and form collages of resistance and revolt, with the audience contributing their own dreams to a narrative that unfolds like an exquisite corpse and the movie ending differently for different sittings, like Giacommetti's sculptures, Max Ernst's paintings and many other artifacts from the third manifesto. Now, that would be a good movie!

Red

2010-07-24T14:13:00.000-07:00

At the end of history we have two architectural caricatures the serpentine pavilion by Jean Nouvel and Anish Kapoor's ArcelorMittal Orbit (which has been very nicely covered by Martin of Kosmograd), that seem to embody fragments of Russian constructivism ironically sponsored by global capital. Instead of being monuments to the masses these are schrizophenic objects that represent the disjunction in architectural practise and its context. They neither have the sense of intrigue and adventure that Russian constructivism had nor the formal ambition of Tschumi's Parc de la Villette's Follies. We are in the process of evolving a language with no memory. And what is most intriguing is that these assemblages of red-confusion come through Jean Nouvel and Anish Kapoor who have works in their name that I personally find quite interesting.
But being red, the Serpentine Pavilion does give some good photos...

Letters from Zihuatanejo

2010-07-18T03:46:00.000-07:00

(photo "Rain" by Michelle Compton, UK, sourced from here)
Some years back I remember reading an excerpt from Murakami's After Dark, describing a street scene seen by one of the characters as "Even at a time like this, the street is bright enough and filled with people coming and going—people with places to go and people with no place to go; people with a purpose and people with no purpose; people trying to hold time back and people trying to urge it forward." I find the quote as beautiful as Wong Kar Wai's Chunking Express slow motion shots of Cop633 as he sips on his black coffee in the rain&people filled street of Hong Kong as the beautiful Faye Wong looks on, like Italo Calvino's Marco Polo experiencing different cities in the same city, as spatial explorations get entangled with time, memories, inhabitants and languages. For now it is summer here and happy memories, old friends and familiar places keep me company...while time passes in beautifully choreographed slow motioned shots.

Concrete Geometries

2010-05-27T08:11:00.000-07:00

Few weeks back Me and Kostas participated in a call for exhibition put out by the AA, called Concrete Geometries Spatial Form in Social and Aesthetic Processes.
Below is our entry which consisted of repackaging of our Master's thesis. We didn't get through, which may be one of the signs that we need to stop hamming around our thesis and find something new....I have also a put some text along which was submitted for the competition.

The world as we know it is being rapidly shaped by two major processes Globalization and Urbanization. These two processes are able to bring about social, cultural, political and physical changes within geographies that they touch . These changes in turn transform the geography into yet another specialized terrain constituent that fits within the mega mechanism of global processes, developing in trajectories different from rest of the surrounding region.

Metaphorically the form and mechanism of the Rubik’s cube allowed imagination of an object that drew parallels with this condition of transforming and shifting terrain through globalization. This was imagined to be a spatial experiment, where we could simulate conditions of symbiosis or parasitism between two or more geographies and social structures that cross path due to the turning of the Rubik’s cube. Each surface was imagined to be a city designed through Italo Calino like narratives designed based on our present conditions of existence and at the same time fractured by the rotational mechanism of the cube, that allowed for a deconstruction of these narratives similar to Calvino’s “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller” opening up numerous possibilities of interpretation based not only on the object to be read but also on the reader, the authors and the city outside.

Each surface of the cube was to be one city, thus the 6 cities were:
1)Panopticon: The city of Surveillance
2)Heterotopia: The city of Gardens
3)Noah: The city of Archives
4)Alice: The city of Labyrinth
5)Leviathan: The city of Hierarchy
6)Celestial: Struggle against gravity

In the book “The Architecture of Deconstruction” by Mark Wigley the writer traces the architectural translation of the philosophical term deconstruction based on Heidegger’s rethinking of building in Destuktion und Abbau. Destruktion means “not destruction but precisely a de-structuring that dismantles the structural layers in the system” and Abbau means “to take apart an edifice in order to see how it is constituted or de-constituted”
With the above abstract as a prologue it is easier to clarify what the cube supposed to insinuate as form and structure. In remobilizing these terms we are trying to advocate that the cube is trying (at least) to construct first a series of contradictions between systems and forms.

Creating these crucial conditions of ambiguity each one of the cities that occupy the 6 faces of the cube they don’t remain attached as binary systems but they are subjects to external forces of un-building. Near the edges of the cube where the cities form the first inaccessible limits, each organism-community reached points of weakness, Weakness of adapting and merging with the other. So for us the process of contamination through the transformations of the Rubik’s cube is the construction of inner penetrations cracks and flaws. This is an operation that demonstrates the extent to which the structures depend on both of these flows and the way that are disguised.

The 6 cities were designed as narratives where one of the many forces that shape a city became crucial and amplified to an extent that it shaped the social and physical geography of the city. Thus the cities have been designed to a detail of a day in the life on a citizen in each of the city, witnessed by an observer who travels along all the cities that shift, collage, and re-assemble to generate parallel geographies of our global landscapes and at the same time speculative geographies that are in waiting....

Kochi (Cochin) and Kozhikode (Calicut)

2010-05-14T22:12:00.000-07:00

(The Chinese fishing nets along Kochi coast look like elaborate apparatus to do something more than simply catch fish, but this is one of the many living artifacts that have survived and become a part of everyday life here.)
Nora's first time visit to India started with us taking a fast-short trip to Kerala, specifically to two very beautiful town-cities Kochi and Kozhikode with travelling Sahil as our host, translator and glocal guide. This was my first trip to Kerala and had the best time.

A continuous blanket of dense tropical cover growing over red laterite soil, every now and then sparing space for houses, roads and small town centres that occur with calculated uniformity throughout the state get purged together by the heavy humid air that seems to blur boundaries between forest and the city. The two cities mostly lay hidden among the multi-storeyed emerald green foliage anchored to the sky by coconut palms and towering over a lush ecosystem inhabited by purple crested, yellow winged, orange bottomed birds, lizards and mammals all chirping, hooting, singing and laying equal claims to this "gods own country" and all spotted, classified and explained in precise detail by Sahil. The climate and soil lay the stage for fertility and its worship, nature grows and devours at the same pace that all man made gets eroded, corroded, mossed over adding to the green that seems to envelope and seep through just about every thing.

Kuttichira Jami Masjid in Kozhikode with its skew that changes the axis of the street.

(Sahil explained that this mosque, one of the many old mosques present in Kerala built by the Arab traders who were then provided to settle and have families here by the then ruler the Zamorins comes up in a time when Islam has not formalised its Islamic Architecture and so these mosques look completely different from present day mosque. Moreover the architecture of these mosques is also influenced by the local artisans and craftsmen more at comfort with making boats & Asian temples.)
Both the cities are port cities and have their genealogy influenced by global trade that assured their place in stories by travellers, map makers, explorers and historians. A place visited by Arabs, Chinese, Portuguese, Jews and many more people from different places which hadn't become nations, belonging to faiths that hadn't become religions and all in search of places that hadn't been seen on world maps. These two cities certainly took roots in a time when the world had a place for curiosity and cultures mixed more seamlessly, with one of the oldest Jewish synagogues having its floor adorned by Chinese tiles, some of the oldest mosques having pitched roofs and ornamentation done by Hindu boat making artisans, Portuguese churches responding to tropical climate, fishermen using Chinese fishing nets and Indian spices unifying all these differences, that got traded and bartered along the silk route.The experience of seeing oldest institutions, housing typologies, neolithic carvings, endemic flora and fauna and many other artifacts from a stage where man, nature and civilizations were swimming in primordial soup of forming our present is no short of magic, like an archeologist's dream of time evidenced by living fossils.

(The pedestrian path to the Jewish synagogue presently serves as a flea market for tourists but has very interesting shop and house typologies that contain elaborately carved and conserved smaller artifacts like wooden posts, statues, doors, windows, brass handles etc.)
The Jewish synagogue is a very good example of one such architecture formed out of mixing of historic and cultural narrative. The synagogue was originally built around 4th century by the Malabari Jews who had come to be a prosperous trading community in Kerala. This synagogue was destroyed by the Portuguese in 1500s. The second synagogue was built through Dutch patronage and with protection from the Raja of Cochin and so came to be known as Paradesi synagoge which translates as foreign synagogue.

(A houseboat on the Kochi backwaters.)
The Backwater is a labyrinth of lakes, canals, dykes, islands, rivers all separated and connected by nature and man strategically to channel tidal sea water and inland freshwater to form a very unique ecosystem of fantastic natural beauty. This was one of the highlights of the trip, that allowed us tourists to voyeur into this ecosystem while the locals went about their everyday lives.
P.S. Somewhere out there in Kerala is a grandma who makes the best prawn pickle, which I prescribe as the top of the list food that you pack in case of a nuclear winter, apocalypse, or in everyday life. Happiness guaranteed even if you don't see the sun for the rest of your life!

The Swan Song

2010-04-28T08:33:00.000-07:00

(The sounds were recorded by Mark Fischer an engineer who used to work on US Navy sonar and software for defence and aerospace companies but he now records the underwater conversations between whales and dolphins and transforms the waves into art.)
Hiroshi found himself anxiously rechecking calibrations on the piezoelectric transducers. The wavelet patterns of the specimen he had been studying for the past 12 years had changed its spectrogram in a matter of days. He had slowly become aware of the responsibility that had been entrusted to him. He was one of the 7 researchers across the globe given responsibility to record, study and archive the life of the last 7 animals of this dying species, the Megaptera novaeangliae.

(Fischer uses a a branch of maths dealing with wavelet that transforms sound to intricate patterns. The patterns look intricate and remind me of Yantras and Manadalas that always seem to be encoded with something more that what we can comprehend.)
Despite suggestions to attempt breeding programs, besides the scale, the sheer magnificence of these gentle giants made it almost immoral to reduce them to conserved specimens of the human guilt. Instead it was voted by the Councils, Corporates and Governments alike, to allow the animals to die in dignity. On their deaths, divers would dive to collect complete DNA samples to join the ranks of numerous other animals on the Noah's Arc a Cryoarchive Lab in the middle of the Indian Ocean that promised a day of resurrection. It was observed that all the 7 animals had started singing the same song over the past few months, the separation between the North Atlantic and the North Pacific songs had merged into a singular string of notes. Slowly the number had further reduced from 7 to 4 to the last.

(Fischer has taken advantage of the striking look of his graphs, selling them as art through his company Aguasonic Acoustics, based in San Francisco.)
Hiroshi knew it was the Humpback's Swansong, something that had to leave a lasting reverbrance in the oceans of time. He wondered what are the conscious dying words of the last animal. like the million languages that had slowly faded away over the last century, from the memory of human speech, to die at the hands of 2 global languages. what were the words of the last person of a dead language, knowing that he alone made sense of sounds that had earned their syntax over years of collective efforts. And it was then that Hiroshi realized the very nature of this tradition, the preparation towards the end, the making of the Fayyum potrait that will stay and tell beings to come that I was here, I swam through the oceans of time changing with the world around, from paws to wings, from mammal to fish. And the whale had selected Hiroshi as his artiste biographe.

(Came across Mark Fischer's blog here)
Hiroshi quickly ran sono-trans, a program that interpreted different sounds, ran a comparative meaning-sound analysis to provide the closest 'meaning/gesture' that it could mean and group these together to form what we could understand as sentences. But this time, it did not make any sense, the sounds were different, they never repeated. The sound had no semiotics, no syntax. With no one to sing to had the animal broken away from the very rules of its language?...Hiroshi ceaselessly recorded every sound, every song and every gesture made by Moby, his whale, with whom he had lived, slept and ate in a submersible, away from the world. It soon dawned upon Hiroshi that the whale was not an individual animal anymore but a representative of a collective that once was. It did not have the luxury of leaving behind a self indulgent fayyum potrait but what it was leaving behind was the Rosetta stone itself. The very genetic code of its language, its existence and the collective memory of the entire species. Hiroshi witnessed the last animal sleep, with its body swaying limply along the ocean floor that had suddenly lost its voice.

Rant #2367

2010-04-09T07:22:00.000-07:00

Over the past year and a half as the world rolled languidly through a long recession, and continues to do so we witnessed the practise of architecture at its innovative best, right from a sudden surge in design offices wanting to satisfy their social obligations by 'hiring/taking on board' unpaid interns to ideas competitions with the entry fee being almost the same as the winning prize.

(Description from whitehouse.gov - " President George W. Bush comments to the media as he tours the Masdar Exhibition Monday, January 14, 2008, at the Emirates Palace Hotel. Said the President, "I hope that my visit shines a spotlight on the Middle East, the opportunities to work constructively with our friends and allies, and shows people the truth about what life is like here in the United Arab Emirates. This is a remarkable place. Its architecture is beautiful. But the can-do spirit is amazing." White House photo by Eric Draper" January 14 2008)
To me George Bush visiting Masdar exhibition, Fred Goodwin being hired as the advisor to the RMJM group and finally Zaha Hadid's Petroleum Research Centre (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) aiming for a LEEDS exemplify the very crème de la crème of hypocrisy that got brewed to perfection during this recession.

(Architecture giant RMJM has hired disgraced former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Fred Goodwin to work as senior advisor on international business. Image sourced from: Architects Journal)
Unlike the last Slump this time there were no alternatives churned out through the crisis, there was no mass unrest, there were no social movements that could change the course of architecture. Instead the processes of outsourcing and back officing just got more finely tuned to exploit the difference in labour cost through technological innovations like Revit, turning third world cheap labour into cad-monkeys.
While many out there eagerly crusade for architecture to be understood as a more diverse field than just the business of built environment, the production of built environment is still controlled by a certain nature of practice and all diversity sits on its fringes throwing paper balls of criticism/influences that hits its double glazed curtain walls and fall into the bin. These diverse alternatives are not really alternatives within the practice but just alternatives of personal choices, as we negotiate around our everyday needs and ethics.
The field that once had the modernists is now a collaborative of bunch of technical experts, consultants, speculators, agents and most importantly managers putting together a historically, socially and culturally acontextual box that is not a building but has been reduced to being just another consumer product like an ipod, car or toothbrush.

Update to the above post:
came across a blog post by a student from The Bartlett, Chris Hildrey on the Archinects School blog Project. The post summarizes the contradictions within the academic and professional spaces ..."The source of my nervousness is that the move from uni to practice is, in my case at least, one from a world where it is possible to get away with useless beauty, to one where is it possible to get away with ugly utility. And neither world will tolerate the others’ vice well."
continue reading here.

Lebenswelt

2010-03-28T05:04:00.000-07:00

I came across works by two very interesting artists last week, Nicolas Moulin who envisages ruins of mega monolithic concrete blocks in a deserted landscape while the other being Hiroyuki Hamada who designs comparatively small, vaguely futurist looking monoliths.

(Some of the many Hiroyuki's tablets that could easily come to be a parts of totem pole of a dystopian space age civilization, whose technological advancement has come at the price of erosion of memory of history and language...where technology is god. Images sourced from: http://acidolatte.blogspot.com/2010/02/hiroyuki-hamada.html?zx=883872d53fad4dd5)
Hiroyuki's artifacts that seem to draw semantic nourishment from manga, minimalism, space debris, Japanese Zen, Buddhism, God particles, Shivalingam, crustaceans, Mars and brush by closely to Nicolas's Béton Brut work that sends roots to Normandy Bunkers, Corbusier, Oplismeno skirodema, Berlin Wall, Moai, Rosetta stone, Noah's Arc etc according to me are not thriving on but are just the opposite. They are soil samples of the very ground that anchors the tree of Being, from where all these references germinate.

(Images of Nicolas Moulin's collages sourced from Vulgare one can also find an online blog recording by the artist and Amanda Crawley Jackson called Beton brut)
The ability of both these artist to have art works that spread roots through history and simultaneously come across as being so basic that it forms a part of Lebenswelt, the very ground of universality which anchors the roots of metaphysics, to be understood in equal ways by every member of the human race is according to me the true essence of their work.
Scale, texture and form, that is all to it, as wise old university stalwarts would put it, which according to me has more truth to it than the combined cacophony that we seem to have inherited from the circus that was post modernism and these two artists working independently in different circles and continents seem to echo just that. The simplicity of works is refreshing and it just looks very very sexy.

Lavasa

2010-03-26T23:58:00.000-07:00

As much as I resist the idea of design of completely new cities in my posts here, here and here...I am curious to see how will these developments grow. Recently I had an opportunity to visit Lavasa one of the new city-like developments in India. The development is an hour away from Pune by road, which provides it a locational advantage to attract the critical mass of population required to trigger the first steps towards urbanization of these peri urban fringes.

Quite contrary to the Modernist cities that were designed in newly formed nation states after the second world war (Chandigarh, Brasilia) with their sense of socialist utopia, the new cities are private investments finding more ease dealing with environmental sustainability than social sustainability. In such a scenario where, the new processes of urbanization are reconfiguring the hierarchy between people through redistribution of natural resources specifically land and water based on property ownership, environmental sustainability becomes the only tool capable of assimilating the schizophrenia born out of the inherent contradictions between the desire of design and interest of enterprise.
How will the development achieve cultural diversity inspite of selective citizenship awarded based on ownerships? How will rights to the city be decided after complete occupancy is achieved? or what will be the 'social condensers' required in such cities? are some things that we will have to wait and watch.
Maybe over a period of time the informal may take over the concrete, the mud may soil the paved to blur the all encompassing designers' lines, maybe these new-single serving cities too may grow over their long multi-generational life to become something completely different...but for now they remain selective with regards to their citizenship and embedded with many maybes.

Lions of Baghdad

2010-02-26T22:23:00.000-08:00

(Rene Magritte's painting titled Homesickness, done in 1941. Image source: http://www.surrealists.co.uk/viewPicture/131/)
During the Iraq invasion/genocide one of the bombs happened to fall on the Baghdad zoo, granting some surviving animals a taste of sudden 'freedom'. A daily carried an article on this incidence of lions in the middle of Baghdad very similar to the cover photograph of Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes (from the Gulf War) but only more surreal due to the city around. The juxtaposing of the beast, the war and the urban area around made up for a very surreal image that till date only existed in Rene Magritte's Homesickness. The atmosphere/subject of a surreal painting had come to be our present state of existence, where freedom is an abstract concept and democracies have become just another tool of subjugation.

(Images from the Graphic Novel "The Pride of Baghdad" by Brian K. Vaughan & Niko Henrichon)
This incidence has inspired two things, a graphic novel called "The Pride of Baghdad" and a recently released Greek play with the name translating as "Lions". Both the mediums, the graphic novel and the play choose to look at concepts of freedom through this incidence, with narration from the lions' point of views as they witness the war, escape to freedom and stroll along the burning streets of war inflicted Baghdad only to die at the hands of American soldiers who appreciate the beauty of the beasts but have to kill them to protect themselves. After the war, Iraq is being rehabilitated, the animals have been domesticated and the zoo itself is being 'Disneylanded' with American Freedom.

(some images from the greek play "Lions" by Vassilis Mavrogeorgiou and Kostas Gakis, with a google translate here and a greek review here)
My own sense of freedom seems to have been stripped off and every day pushes me a little more to get institutionalised within the rush hour jostling, tiffin carrying, law abiding Dilbertian office going crowd for whom living dangerously constitutes giving a print command without a preview...

Architecture in HD-Hyper-Reality

2010-01-30T09:16:00.000-08:00

Recently a friend of mine forwarded me this link a short film by artist Alex Roman. His profile describes the film to be "A full-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal."
The film covers atmospheric shots with calculated lighting parameters to a level where it is designed to perfection. Never ever will we have opportunity to see these architectural projects at a moment in time when light, season, weather and the world that surrounds it is in such precise harmony that we see the project not as a painting, sketch or a photograph but a completely new form of abstraction that is absolutely hyper real. Some screen shots from the film below.

It takes a while for the video to load, but its worth the wait.

Oil painting

2010-01-24T07:44:00.001-08:00

My first oil paint attempt on canvas. I learned how to paint air, clouds, tree, giraffe and squid. Oil painting allows the luxury to maintain the never drying canvas in a constant state of change, which I relished. The medium gives one enough space to wage internal battles between objectivity and subjectivity, the squid and the giraffe that come face to face over industrial Berlin.

This painting changed only on sunny days. Now it is taking a break and drying some place else only to re-continue changing after I meet it again...

Europan 10

2010-01-23T21:20:00.000-08:00

Me and Nora had participated in Europan 10 competition few months back.The results were on the 18th of Jan.

(a low res composite of all the 3 A0 panels submitted for the competition)
Our site was located in Spain, at Elda a small town known for its shoe making industry. You can find the design brief here. We didn't win the competition, most of the winners for Spanish sites were Jose, Javier, Alejandro, Diego and Carlos who were local and seemed to have more familiarity with the site.
(3d view through the design intervention, site and the existing hill that was to be developed as a open space for the surrounding neighbourhoods)

(housing with productive landscape and other collective resources)
But inspite of an un-win, it was good fun! and I hope we win something soon in the next few competitions that we are presently participating...

Paint Archaeology

2009-12-25T20:00:00.000-08:00

(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

2009-12-23T22:36:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-26T22:49:00.000-08:00

(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

2009-11-09T21:32:00.000-08:00

(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

2009-10-17T07:56:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-10-16T06:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-29T06:59:00.000-07:00

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.

Back

2009-09-24T11:42:00.000-07:00

my past two years have been some of the most beautiful and fun times I had in my life. I made some great friends, visited magical places, learned some cooking, travelled and most importantly enjoyed living in one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the world-London.
I shall miss living in a city with a meandering river, the underground with its multilingual silence, the musical of sirens, the crisp dry English humour as it competes with the constantly drizzling humidity, public spaces dotted with children, dogs & tourists, long discussions with friends at various pubs, a regular nourishment of events, talks, screenings, exhibitions, carnivals and other festivities big and small that occupied my life here. My experiences of different spaces in this city from Brick lane, china town, Covent Garden, parks, theatres, universities, offices to homes were intertwined with friends who offered familiarity to this geography.
I shall miss my friends who too like me studied, struggled, worked, lived and loved in this city under the CCTVs, through the winters, under the rains, along the sirens, dispersed in various zones as strangers, migrants, musicians, researchers, philosophers, guerillas and other self proclaimed titles that we lovingly conferred upon each other in customary processions more sillier than the graduation day. I shall miss London, my friends and most dearest of them all Nora who made this city even more beautiful than what it is.
Hope to see all of you soon, sometime, someplace beautiful!
Ghiasoo!Filakyaa!

Industrial Artefacts

2009-09-16T14:33:00.000-07:00

(A photograph by Angela Inglis, of King's Cross Gas Holders also called the Siamese triplets. the photograph has been sourced from Angela Inglis's website which has some more photographs of the King's Cross and other railway/industrial artefacts)
I came across a very good interview with Photographer Herald Finster by Tommy Manuel. what struck me most can be summed up where Herald Finster (whose work involves photographing industrial ruins) explains: "In most cases I do some research in order to answer the “how did it work” question, but the “who did the work” question remains unanswered in most cases and remains open to imagination." With number of city governments (London-Lea Valley, Bombay-Eastern Waterfronts, Athens-Gazi, Bilbao-port area etc) feeling an urgent need to regenerate their industrial past it becomes even more important to be aware of the nature of transformation.

(image sourced from AJ, showing Feix and Merlin's proposal for Gas holder number 8)

(image sourced from AJ, showing proposal by Hakes Associates for Gas holder number 8. These 2 are of the five short listed entries selected from 80 entries for a competition, you can find the complete article and other entries here on the AJ website)
In context to these transformations or rather conservation of industrial ruins through injecting hybrid programmes as some architects prefer describing it, Herald Finster explains "Essen and the Ruhr area will be “Kulturhauptstadt Europa 2010? (Capital of Culture 2010). The official pamphlet says “Die Identität dieser Metropole ist nicht mehr geprägt von Arbeit, sondern von Kultur” (the identity of this metropolis is no longer characterized by work, but by culture). This statement declares an antagonism between work and culture. It expresses the arrogance of the authorities and the powerful who feel themselves superior to the working class, if you permit me to use this old-fashioned term. They deny the merits of millions of people, who laid the ground for our welfare. These are the sorts of people who abuse industrial installations as vehicles. They cannot deny the existence of industrial architecture (although they do the best to wipe out as much of it as possible), but they try to pervert the original meaning of the installations. They add futuristic architectural elements, they pull out historic machinery to make the interior look “nice and modern” and they turn former work places into meaningless Disney Land like amusement parks."

(photo sourced from official website for Zollverein coke plant and colliery. The industrial site is a UNESCO world cultural heritage site, to which Herald Finster is refering to while talking about Essen- the city in which it is located. One can also find more sites like this on the European Route of Industrial Heritage website.)
The interview is very good and very well articulated using simple language, it raises important questions like..
1) how do we as architects/designers acknowledge our industrial past not just for the empty shells and aesthetics but for the history and people? or
2) how can we really avoid this "pervert" commodification of history? or
3) Is museum-ification the only response to conserving the industrial relic?
4) What does turning an industrial ruins into a public space achieve?
I believe these questions become even more difficult to deal with if one is from the design profession. It questions our contentment at transforming an old industrial shed into a plush restaurant or an art gallery.

Normandy Bunkers

2009-09-13T03:38:00.000-07:00

(image sourced from: here)
With the nature and sheer volume of history behind every artefact of war, especially the architecture produced during a state of absolute war that blurs the distinction between civilian and military resource, I believe it would be unfair to adopt (only) phenomenology as a lens of understanding and representing these building. A personal experiential narrative of these built forms is meaningless given the complex collective history that has sculpted them. To further appropriate these artefacts of war along imaginations of science fiction writings (even if it is someone as good as J.G. Ballard) would be like making a comedy (Life is Beautiful) around the holocaust. The tourist and media both seemed to have turned history into something that we feel about rather than think about, but I guess the notion of collective memory does provide that overlap between history and experience.

(images sourced from: here)
Maybe due to the collective memory that we accumulate of these events it may be possible to have similar reactions of awe and wonder on seeing the Bunkers of Normandy or the sea forts of Maunsell mentioned recently on the BldgBlog (the post also has some very beautiful images of the sea forts from the outside and some interior spaces).

(images sourced from: here)
But one such person who is able to manage writing about this architecture carefully balancing between the two dialectics is Paul Virilio. Here is a very good interview I came across called 'The Kosovo War took Place in Orbital Space'. Throughout his works Virilio's combination of military conception of history and use of theory of perception, I believe allows one to truly appreciate the architecture of Normandy Bunkers.

The Burning Man City

2009-09-07T03:40:00.000-07:00

(image source: Telegraph. More images here)
The Burning Man annual event in the Black Rock Desert in Northern Nevada this year witnessed approximately 50,000 participants coming together and forming a temporary 8 day settlement with the wooden effigy of the burning man being the focus of the event and the settlement.

(image source: Telegraph)
The event is organized by Black Rock City LLC. With valid entry ticket being the only strand that facilitates the formation of this 'city' (the temporary settlement is named The Black Rock City, also one cant help but draw comparisons to Masdar city proposal which will be in the middle of the desert and is projected to have same population), in the absence of collective history, common aspirations and various other things that form a community, the result is an array of images with a Mad Max like post apocalyptic flavour.

The plan of the settlement is equally dystopian with street names of Hysteria, Fetish, Ego, Catharsia, Amnesia etc. The satellite images shows the settlement forming concentric circles like garden-city-dream-gone-sour in the middle of a a desert landscape and the Burning man as the centre.

(image source: wikipedia)

(image source: http://muller.lbl.gov/travel_photos/BurningMan007/BurningMan007.html
it also has some more images of the event)
50,000 Strangers brought together by an event managing company, The Burning Man festival according to me is a prime example of a festivity with no history, a carnival with no reason and ritual with no tribe, somewhat similar to contemporary City design proposals that attempt to form communities through a valid entry ticket of property ownership.

Rumination of Utopias

2009-09-01T15:51:00.000-07:00

As Ian Macleod one of the speakers during the Thrilling Wonder Stories syposium had pointed out, that in the present context there are no trajectories left of a future that can promise designs of utopia. With strong global authoritarian systems in place it allows very little flexibility to imagine either the utopias of social hierarchy or technological revolutions to purge problems, on the contrary newer innovations in social networking and lab-made glowing mice only encourage an image of a dystopian future. The only way by which science fiction writers are able to circumvent the existing condition is to start with a clean slate, an apocalyptic event with strong gravitational force to bend light and future, one of the indicators being a string of Hollywood movies of floods, doomsday, diseases, meteors and other last-days-of-man-on-earth genre.
I don't know if such an event could trigger a formation of a real community or some sort of collective that is a fundamental backbone of all utopias right from Thomas Moore's Utopia island, William Morris's News from Nowhere to more contemporary Garden City masterplans, but Dutch artist Rob Voerman works around such an assumption.

(Image by Rob Voerman called The Epicentre, which reminds me of the nuclear explosion shot from Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira. Image sourced from Rob Voerman's website)
His website describes: "Some years ago, I started a body of work in which I try to create the architecture of fictive communities living in remote areas or occupying existing city-landscapes. The communities will consist of a mixture of utopia, destruction and beauty, a symbiosis of hippie-communities from the seventies, with their often highly decorated self-build structures, the cabin of the Uni-bomber hidden in the Montana forests, art-deco and other influences.

(untitled 2004, by Rob Voerman has some very good details)
Romanticism combined with the grim qualities of terror. It is often a direct translation of destruction in a purely aesthetic form..."

(sculpture works by Rob Voerman. The sculpture to the left is Annex#4 and was displayed at Bedford Square, London as part of the show at the Architectural Association. Images sourced from Rob Voermans site)
It reminded me of work that I and Kostas had done almost a year back on utopias and imagined communities, as we attempted to put together a Rubik's cube of different utopian ideas.

(the model of the cube done by me and Kostas for our final Masters thesis project titled ABBAU+, that presently lies at my house which soon will be sacrificed to recycling for something new to take its place...)
More photos and description of the project can be found on Kostas's blog here.
While I am on the topic of utopia, I came across:
1) Ananya Roy's lecture video (which also was her acceptance speech for the Golden Apple Award) where she elaborates on utopias.
2) The Self Sufficient City Competition (3rd Advanced Architecture Contest) organized by the IAAC, which sounds like an interesting competition to take part in.
This competition could be a good opportunity for people interested in different ideas of ideal cities and societies to test their schemes, constructing not only the inhabited but also the inhabitant.

Cornwall

2009-08-25T11:26:00.000-07:00

(Padstow fishing town port)
If you are around UK (or are privileged enough to travel here from anywhere else) and are looking to rejuvenate your nature-mana and reinstate faith in sustainability then Cornwall is the place to be. Thanks to Sarathi and Neha (the nature-loving couple) who invited me and Nora along on a road trip, we had the opportunity to explore the country side of Cornwall.

(Mevagissey port and town)
Our drive took us along small-sleepy fishing village-towns, the Carnglaze slate Caverns, tiny fishing ports of Padstow, Mevagissey, the beaches of Charlestown with its shipwreck centre, the Minack Theatre near Land's End, the Eden Garden project, St. Michael's Mount, St. Ives town & beach and finally on our way back a glimpse of the Stonehenge.

(Houses on a cliff at Mevagissey)

(Minack theatre built by Rowena Cade set within the cliffs next to the Porthcurno beach)
Cornwall does not have many densely populated areas, but has clusters of small towns and fishing villages linked to different local tourist attractions providing the local population some more opportunities. As Prajna told me later, Conservation here is a part of the Economic model for the area that not only facilitates opportunities for the local population but also contributes to a proper upkeep and maintenance of these heritage sites. Through different towns that we travelled I felt the local population had a strong sense of community with a consciousness of the importance of these heritage sites to their livelihood.

(Inside the tropical dome in the Eden Garden project designed by Nicholas Grimshaw)

This is definitely one of the places that can entice one's faith in working on a model which can be a mix of William Morris's (overtly) romantic utopian world of News from Nowhere and Gandhian model of self sufficient rural sustainability.

Paper Architecture: Urban Utopias exhibition @ The Royal Academy of Arts

2009-08-18T09:53:00.000-07:00

I had been to the Royal Academy of Arts recently with my friend Neha (Gupta-Chatterjee) to see the ongoing Paper City: Urban Utopias exhibition. My present readings of The Faber book of Utopias (edited by John Carey), Utopias Deferred: Writings from Utopie by Jean Baudrillard and Ruth Eaton's Ideal Cities had greatly increased my expectations from people who generally like to imagine and represent ideal conditions for human existence.
But quite contrary to my expectations and the impression that the larger than life and quite explicit name the exhibition labels itself with, it turned out to be an extremely ordinary exhibition tucked somewhere in the corridor between the ladies toilet and the restaurant. The drawings were done by a range of people from different backgrounds, from the C-grade student with a D-grade imagination, a house wife to Peter Cook(who according to me had successfully created one of the worst images in his career) and James Wines. The drawing by James Wines was quite beautiful, but the rest seemed personal graffiti oblivious of any historical or theoretical context of utopias or architecture or technology.
But the highlight of the exhibition was exactly that! Anyone and everyone had quite quickly contributed to this exercise of imagining their individual utopias, someone got them printed on A4 stacks of paper pads and hung them within an exhibition space for people to admire and tear off a copy of the ones they liked and take it home. I am sure its not an Avante Garde idea and is generously used in departmental stores but to have it in the Royal Academy with Pre-Raphaelite artist, John William Waterhouse RA (1849-1917) in the neighbouring hall is quite impressive. I guess one could even measure the popularity of each art work within the exhibition based on the number of copies. It could be a market survey for utopia!
This exercise somehow reminded me of some photographs I had seen on facebook of students from my Architectural school, painting a wall that was worked out like an event. Unaware of the impact an image can have within the public domain and the privilege of being in a position to design a more meaningful drawing in such a space (i don't mean painting a Monet but it could definitely had been a Banksy), most seemed to take pleasure in painting mediocre images of guitarists, flowers, cartoons and other things that seemed to fail in front of the pan splatters which did a better job of occupying the wall. But I guess one is allowed to do such things as a student and it is after all only a wall and maybe I am over reacting.
But any ways back to the topic, the exhibition also has a small competition as an extension which invites people to contribute their ideas for Paper Cities and will be judged by architect Peter Cook, illustrator Sara Fenelli, Blueprint editor Vicky Richardson and the RA’s Architecture Programme Curator Kate Goodwin.
(will be posting some images from the exhibition soon...)

Almere

2009-08-10T08:51:00.000-07:00

I came across this article, which talks about the trials and tribulations of a new city like Almere which is around 30 years old (7 - 8 years younger than New Bombay). My previous post on Almere was during my Master's trip to Netherlands. There is something disturbing about these new young cities, especially when they are spaces with no history, like airports where different strangers come together in a sterile generic environment with well oiled mechanisms of circuilation, surveillance and other scary instruments of planning. Or maybe given enough time these geographies may gather layers of history, the only problem will be that it will start with the opening of a new Burger King designed by a Starchitect with underpaid interns.
Maybe the sterility of these spaces is actually the revenge of the underpaid interns! Anyways here is a fantastic blog I found on Archidose, its called Architects who eat their young, I am sure we all have more than enough names to contribute, so do contribute.

Origamicity

2009-08-05T12:49:00.000-07:00

(image of origami works by artist Ingrid Siliakus from his website)
With a growing technological progress in construction industry, easy access to exploitable labour and economic surges that allow for baroque extravagance, gone are the days of "Rome was not built in a day". Cities are no longer fixed geographies that will accumulate palimpsests of history, culture, people, flora and everything else to slowly form sediments of experience, memory and history, flourishing, thriving and decaying; But on the contrary the new Archigram cities are designed products, passed, made, sold and resold all in a day with deliciously pop-plastic-flavoured history of genuine intent to embody sustainability (imagine surgically beautified Gaia in D&G). With climate and economy following patterns of extremities, high property values that reduce life span of buildings to as little as 30 years, the process of urbanization is played in fast forward from conception on a tabula rasa site to its demise like the redundant empty American suburbs or some cities in the Middle East.

(image of origami works by artist Ingrid Siliakus from his website)
As people who from time to time envision ideas with regards to great design and save the world schemes, we may actually need to entertain the nightmare of designing single serving (say for a brief period of 50 years or in accordance to the bank loan schemes for housing) use and throw cities. Cities with no history, only props and people!

(image of origami works by artist Ingrid Siliakus from his website)
Cities made of paper that open and fold and disappear or get recycled (to be politically correct). When I came across works of Ingrid Siliakus, I was happy to find that origami, art and architecture had folded together so well to create complex spaces and forms through just cuts and folds.

(image of origami works by artist Ingrid Siliakus from his website)
This single- serving (Rem Koolhas: Generic city) city opens up ideas of temporal nature of architecture and cities, as Bruno-designers catwalk their styles along the flavour of the season (dainty designer proclaiming, “oh! Sustainability is so in! I laaav grass”). But the works of Ingrid Siliakus certainly provide some hope to have beauty in these single-serving difficult times and a regular supply of work for architects. We may even see the ephemeral nature of design reflected in design drawings somewhat similar to these images by another artist Simon Schubert whose folded paper space drawings are one of the most beautiful works I have come across, subtle, delicate and precise.

Wanted a Competent, Experienced, Professional Designer

2009-08-03T03:33:00.000-07:00

FQDP Associates are looking for a competent enthusiastic RIBA, ARB qualified, LEEDS certified professional architect with 8 years of experience in International building guidelines, project management, Sustainable designing, construction details and facade structural analysis, with expertise in Vectorworks, Autocad, 3dMax, Microstation, Sketchup, GIS, V-Ray, Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator. Having fluency in English & Dutch is a must, but also knowing Chinese, Arabic or Spanish will be an advantage. Experience in Middle East, Hong Kong and China would be great! But you must also know local design guidelines up to date. We shall provide you with preliminary 2 months unpaid Internship training period after which you shall be employed on minimum wages providing you with valuable experience in our highly reputable design office. If you believe you satisfy all our above requirements, please send your CV, letter of Interest, Portfolio and Reference letters to Mrs Silverwoodsidebottam. We do not accept application by email! Please post printed application to the office address.
(Fumihiko Maki, left, Larry A. Silverstein, Gov. George E. Pataki, Daniel Libeskind, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. Image source: The New York Times)
Nothing has ever given me a bigger inferior complex than these design office advertisements expecting all knowing pure perfection not necessarily efficient in design but 'professionalism', in return for which one is said to be working for valuable experience and love of the profession. I don't have a problem with the best design offices having high expectations but when small, stupid, inconsequential dim wits ranting about fake sustainability and rendering views with green grass and happy people frolicking start talking about professionalism and design it is just hilarious.
Never before have I hated the design profession more...

Map maker's Archive of Urban Dreams

2009-07-25T03:11:00.000-07:00

(The city of Saintes, France drawing by Joris Hoefnagel, 1560, in the centre of the city marked I. one can see the Saintes Cathedral or the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Saintes before going in state of ruins later)
Before Rene Descartes' Cartesian co-ordinate system secularised space along the three axes of sterile certainty, the task of mapping cities in the Early Modern Era was encouraging city maps being conceptualised as collages of spatial experiences, bird’s eye views, mental maps, landuses and also sometimes a calendar of day today/ seasonal events.

(map of densely packed Cairo, admitted to Matteo Pagano, 1549 showing the agrarian canal irrigation network from the Nile, the Pyramids and the Sphinx to the right and if one zooms into the far left just where the river forms a delta island one can even see the Nile crocodiles)
The foreground usually had the citizens/nobles/patrons of the map looking towards the city. The surrounding context of the river, sea, fort wall and the ports was drawn with intricate details not only to communicate but also assert identity.

(map of Bordeaux by Antoine du Pinet, 1564)
For people who derive pleasure in going through detailed old city maps, I found an online archive of mostly European cities (though you may find Goa, Istanbul, Cairo and other exceptions) published between 1572 and 1617 in volumes titled Civitates orbis terrarum edited and engraved by Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg. The Archive allows searching a map by geography, dates and even by map makers. The maps are available for download in high resolution format (the ones I have used are low resolution preview quality), which is really good and are mostly copyrighted to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem & The Jewish National & University Library. A link above on the same page takes you to the Historic cities: Maps and Documents main page but the Braun and Hogenberg branch is the most elaborate one.

(The map of Venice admitted to Bolognino Zaltieri, 1565 is one of my favourite, showing details of water and land circulation network. I am not sure, but I believe the map also through the roof colours demarcates residential and public buildings)
The Venetian Canal system, the Pyramids of Egypt, the settlement along the Nile, the agrarian plots, the fort walls, streets, naval ships, and every house in the city drawn in axonometric grandeur to enable an observer a glimpse of cities in their nebular stage of development.

(map of Rome admitted to Pirro Ligorio, 1552 and 1570, showing the public buildings and the fort walls)

Les Machines

2009-07-17T03:10:00.000-07:00

(Vladimir Gvozdariki's rhino kept reminding me of Albrecht Durer's rhino, so thought I should put the two together)
Every now and then biologists discover strange-new, never before seen animal specimens (my personal favourite being Macropinna microstoma) that have evolved in isolation from rest of the world and challenge taxonomical tables through their glass tentacles, sonar vision and telepathic brains. I have come to believe the same being true of Russian artists who seem to do their own thing untouched by global rhetoric art, making drawings and artwork that have reference points within their introvert floating islands.

(some very beautiful drawings by Vladimir Gvozdariki from his website of machine animals that seem to come out from some Industrial utopian world.)

One such newly discovered specimen is artist Vladimir Gvozdariki whose mechanical animal drawings continue to intrigue me. Like the animal machines of Les Machines de L'Ile Nantes the drawings seem to graft mechanical details to appendages, eyes and metal plates that form the skin.

(Vladimir Gvozdariki's drawing of elephant with a photograph of the Great Elephant of Les Machines de L'Ile Nantes in London. The Elephant Celebes by Max Earnst is one such drawing that collaged the animal and machine together in surreal dreamlike world)

The machine becomes the animal, as if the drawings mirror Rene' Descartes’ Animals are Machines, that further blur the dialectics between nature and machine.
Another artist fusing animals and machines is Mike Libby whose website "Insect Lab" describes its work as "Insect Lab customizes real insect specimens with antique watch parts and other technological components. From ladybugs to grasshoppers, each is individually hand adorned, and original- a unique celebration of the contradictions and confluences between nature and technology." But coincidentally these speculative futures and art projects seem to have just been appropriated by the US military attempting to develop "insect cyborgs"! Somehow some very powerful entrepreneurship always have a knack of destroying everything beautiful and putting it for sale on E-Bay.

Black & White inspirations for a Graphic Novelist: Brodsky, Utkin, Urbicande

2009-07-10T02:45:00.000-07:00

Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin's paper Architecture was first brought to my notice by my friend Sahil who happened to have this book. The pair created very detailed conceptual etchings between 1981 and 1990.

The drawings are very beautiful, story like, with details and narratives both designed with poetic rigour. The drawings are one of the best examples of work that manages to retain its sense of beauty, poetry and everything subjective inspite of its objective intent to critique the then existing architectural trends during Brezhnev in Soviet Russia. There is a very nice writeup about them and their work by Kim Bennett that I found here.
Though not completely connected the dystopian visions and the nature of narrative remind me of small fragmented description I came across of a Belgian graphic novel series The Obscure Cities with one of the titles being La fièvre d'Urbicande.The city's introduction by the creators François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is:
"This city might have been called Florence, London or Mostar, but its name was Urbicande meaning City of Cities.
It spread out on either side of a broad river where two townships had long developed separately, their independence tinged with mutual suspicion. On the more prosperous south bank was Bartoline; on the gloomier and more deprived north bank was Urania. A ferry was the sole link between the two.
It was shortly after the construction of the first bridge that the two communities decided to unite. The Commission of High Authorities watching over the destiny of the new city set out to rebuild everything on completely new principles.
Absolute trust was placed in a young architect, Eugen Robick. He drew all the plans, designing the tiniest details with the same enthusiasm as the widest vistas. But these grandiose works, although they made the name of Urbicande famous throughout the continent, sharply accentuated the contrast between the two banks.
The north bank slumped into direr poverty than ever, while on the other side the wildest rumours began to spread. The Commission of High Authorities feared looting and placed traffic across the two bridges under strict control. Urbicande’s two halves became two distinct towns once more, with almost no contact between the two.

Who knows what might have happened had the city not been turned topsy-turvy by the colossal development of a cubic structure (known afterwards as the Urbicande Network). The original cube had begun growing in Robick’s own office and multiplying as it grew. Neither the arrest of the Urbatecht nor the canon shots fired at the Network could stop the continued expansion of the gigantic structure.

Only on reaching the north bank did the Network become stable, as inexplicably as it had begun to grow. Crossings over it were wary and few at first then ever more numerous. Atop the verticals overhanging the river beat the city’s new heart — and to the deep despair of the Commission of High Authorities, Urbicande soon became known as the City of a thousand Bridges."
Similar to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the two Russians (Brodsky and Utkin) and two Belgian artists (François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters) designed dystopian narratives and images of cities shaped by multiple palimpsest of histories that allowed design to adopt different trajectories of the urban form. Maybe the current global economic and environmental crisis carry promises of inspiring newer forms of urban fabric on paper if not in practise.
Great work, one cant help but be inspired.

Lets get Steampunked!

2009-07-03T12:04:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-06-14T04:56:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-11T13:10:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-08T01:58:00.000-07:00

(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.