Shivaji

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

Architectural Hygiene

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

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

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

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

Of Ships, Dreams & Tiphares

(Ships at Sitakunda ship breaking yard in Bangladesh)

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


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

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

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