Gentrification panel 04

Past 4 decades of liberalisation has led us to where we are, privatised water supply sector that is dumping sewage in waterways, privatised energy providers profiteering from energy crisis, a liberalised housing market that has amplified the housing affordability and access crisis, a privatised railway network that prioritises dividends over investments, an NHS that is slowly being privatised through underfunding of the public component, a private postal service, a privatised educational sector that further increases disparity and polarisation. 

Is this conversation within the scope of an architect / planners / sustainability expert? We write long reports on textures, colours, placemaking..."happiness" even and yet we skirt the very foundations that exert direct influence on our lives.

An article on Canary Wharf and the tax break it received from the state.

Gentrification panel 03

 

Gentrification Cover Page

Liberty & Free Time

Years ago, when someone 6-8 years senior to me had returned from his Masters and started working, I had naively asked him what his plans were. Almost hoping to hear some grand plan that would guide me and my understanding of my own future prospects. Instead he said “currently I am just busy trying to manage everyday logistics of existing”. It was a short response but honest. The memory of that question and its response does surface frequently as I too like many before and after get busy within my preoccupations of everyday existence.

On a completely disconnected note I found this:

https://amp.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/apr/10/we-got-a-kick-out-of-it-art-forgers-reveal-secrets-of-paintings-that-fooled-experts

The last paragraph reads “Asked what most surprised her about the couple, Fischer said: “That they bought liberty and free time with the money they organised for themselves through the scam. No Ferrari, no Prada dresses, but free space to go to museums, to look after the children, to pursue their passion for research.”

Istanbul

Bosphorus

Buyukada

Galata Tower

Hagia Sophia

Levent

Naval Museum

Topkapi Palace

Ullus Savoy / Ullus Park

Venice (11th - 13th Oct)

Barcelonaaaaa!

Paris Trip

Day 1 (6th April 2012)
Arrival at Garde du Nord.
Monmarte, Basilique de Sacre Coeur,
Artists Square (Place du tertre)
Pigalle, Moulin Rouge.
Lunch @ Suffren on Avenue de la Motte Picquet
Tour Eiffel
Muse'e du Quai Branly (Jean Nouvel)
Rue Cler (pedestrian street with restaurants)

Day 2 (7th April 2012)
Centre Pompidou
Hotel de Ville
Walk around Notre Dame Cathedral
St. Louis, Siene Riverside, Islands
Cite Square
Walk along Bvld St Michel
Luxembourg Gardens
Odeon
Dinner @ St. Germaine

Day 3 (8th April 2012)
Place de la Concorde
Jardin des Tuileries
Place des Pyramides
Muse'e du Louvre
Institute du Monde Arab (Jean Nouvel)
Notre Dame Cathedral
Dinner @ Quartier Latin

Day 4 (9th April 2012)
Arc de Triumphe
Walk along Champs-E,lyse'e
Citroen building, Rond Point,
Grand Palais, Petit Palais
Av. Winston Churchill, Pont Alexandre 3 bridge,
Walked along river Cours la Reine
Jardin de Trocadero
Lunch @ Monmarte.

In Woody Alen's Midnight in Paris one of the character rhetorically asks "has there been any painting, movie, photograph, book or poem that can compete with a city?", One thing here is certain him asking this in Paris certainly strengthens his case. Beautiful city and a very appropriate one for a film that celebrates nostalgia and retreat from the present, just as we retreated from our present day routines of everyday life designing single serving city-like, banal geographies ...to Paris....

Windows to the city

The image of the window travelling across the room as the headlights from passing traffic projected a pattern of light and shadow, splicing the air in the room into thin slices, is a memory that I carry of the place I lived for the first 8-10 years of my life. Since then there have been many windows of many houses that framed my hopes, inspired new desires and provided voyeuristic vantage points of the places I inhabited.

The window becomes a plane on which our eyes often come to rest, framing the outside environment, superimposed by the reflections of the inside and all this further abstracted by our own contemplations, like Casper David Friedrich's 'Wanderer above the Sea of Fog' (1818) we look out towards the city taking pride in our vantage point and nurturing ambitions to understand and live the city, yet another day. No wonder the scene of Danny Boyle's Jamal Malik looking over Hiranandani landscape becomes an image that summarizes the scale of ambition.
And while we watch, the city too invades our most personal spaces like Umberto Boccioni's painting 'The Street Enters the House' (1911). It is this plane of the window that becomes the Wayang kulit stage for the different dialectics of inside/outside, private/public, us/them, etc to be shaped/narrated out by the dalang who sits behind the screen. 
It is no coincidence that the window is an important element in many surrealist paintings like Magritte's 'Promenades of Euclid' or Salvador Dali's 'Figure at the Window'.

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

Tadao Ando's Fountain on Mount St @ Mayfair

Peter Zumthor's Serpentine Pavilion

 

London International Documentary Festival

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.

Collective Memories

(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.