Venice (11th - 13th Oct)

Santorini, Greece (23rd to 27th Aug)

Red Beach

Prehistoric Museum of Akrotiri

Fira

Oia or Ia, before and after sunset

view of volcanic caldera from Fira

Cambridge, UK

Time Capsule of Optimism: The New Architecture of Europe 1961

cover page image image sourced from: here

Sometimes when I come across books writing in present continuous tense about the present (then) recording the spirit of "here and now" but published long ago, they work as fantastic time capsules, to relish nostalgia and optimism in equal measure. The format, the style of writing, the buildings selected all come together to form one complete picture of optimism. The very same optimism that one senses while watching an old BBC documentary where the narrator explains the design of a brand new housing estate for communities built with miraculous new age materials that symbolise a collective spirit.

Recently I bought "The New Architecture of Europe" by G.E. Kidder Smith from a second hand book sale. The books introductions lays down the spirit of this new era as
"The introduction of rolled steel and reinforced concrete (both approximately 100 years ago), then plate glass, new forms of factory processed (i.e., laminated) wood, and most recently, plastics, has revolutionized man's building means. Moreover, when one demands totally fresh building types--skyscrapers, large hospitals, community halls, housing projects, expansive schools, industrial plants, and not forgetting that terror, the automobile, garages and suspension bridges--the result will inescapably and logically produce a new architecture. Furthermore, this has been and is being colored by a newly egalitarian society, one assailed by changes more profound and rapid than ever before in history."

This book published in 1961 attempts to map/analyse 225 most stimulating buildings from 16 countries of post war Europe. Selection of these new fantastic buildings is subjective, but as the author explains, "Merit alone is not sufficient for the inclusion of a building: it must have ideas and stimulation as well. In some cases a building that demonstrates fresh and constructive thinking, or explores a new facet of space, but suffers design weakness, has been chosen over similar example of routine thought but superior execution".
The chapters are by Country location, which starts with the Mr. Smith concisely explaining the state the country is in after the war and what are the developments that are facilitating these new experiments in architecture.

This book puts all the present day expensively printed and bound Phaidons ,World Atlases, Glossy design Magazines, hourly updated Design Blogs etc to shame. If you ever come across this book, you love modern architecture, and want to reinstate your faith in the collective spirit of architecture and design...Buy it! Enjoy it!

The presence of absence of presence....

Camels in Koran
Luis Borges in 'Argentine writer and Traditions' responds to Edward Gibbons doubts overs Koran being an Arabian work, "Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubts as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work", and further elaborating that camels being a part of everyday life, it may have never occurred to an Arab to mention it, and thus the absence actually is a stronger evidence than the animal being mentioned.

Canary Wharf

Trailing along this narrative we can say that the role of industry in Britain may have been such that it never felt any necessary need to invest energies in branding (a strategic word that comes into effect when people try to sell shit for more than what it is worth) itself, its role and relevance was rest assured within the bigger scheme  of things, say as against banking which comes across as a more abstract entity with people clueless about why banking is more precious to British economy than Industry that it gets a state intervention (bailout) when in need...or what is it that they produce? or make? that makes their presence in the middle of urban areas more legitimate than industry or agriculture especially in an era where the image of transaction of numbers with light speed can be done from and to any place on this networked globe.

Pages of record
In Tomas Alfredson's film, 'Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy' based on a book by John Le Carre, the audience is introduced right in midst of 1970s cold war era's British intelligence suffering through enemy infiltration and its efforts to purge this enemy within. This plot further layered with signs, symbols and dialogues that only arouse suspicion of every character, including the lead detective on the case George Smiley played by Gary Oldman, the audience by the middle of the film looks at every occurrence as a plot. But there is only one moment in the film where, both the audience so well trained in suspicion and the detective are absolutely sure of the evidence, which is the absence of pages that record Ricki Tarr's (played by Tom Hardy) message sent on the stated day. This absence of pages is a stronger evidence of his innocence than say them finding the pages with his stated message, wherein there would had always been doubt if this record too is a part of a bigger plot! 
Maybe it is this absence of industry that provides a stronger evidence of its sincerity to put it naively (In "Extracts from L'Organisateur" 1819, Claude-Henri de Saint Simon (1760-1825) having baptised by the French revolution in his lifetime makes a sharp distinction between the idle and the useful in society through the sincerity of effort of production/making). 

Einstein forward
In a viral anecdote that everyone receives sometime or the other as an email forward, an atheist professor trying to explain his students the absence of God through presence of evil, is proved wrong by a young student who replies back that the presence of cold is purely the absence of heat or presence of dark is only the absence of light, just as presence of evil is purely the absence of divinity. Maybe the absence of industry purely proves the absence of much needed state interventions of Olympian proportions to encourage industry, which instead were going towards development of special economic zones for the service industry?

Maybe all this tirade is only a reaction to my recent visit to the Olympic Park. Its landscape changed beyond recognition, having successfully turned into a place with no memories..a clean slate, we don't know the industry that existed here, the people who used to work, the inventions that took place here, nothing. The confidence provided by the massive investment of global capital is so strong that it was never felt at any point in time that maybe somethings could reflect the history or some idea of the past. The surrounding area which once was strongly integrated with people, their livelihood and the community is reduced to artificial manicured background landscape of canals, canal side walks, jogging tracks and bridges for the urban bourgeoisie content with having a matchbox house within a sketchup building surrounded by an equally sterile landscape devoid of any complexity/contradictions, to finally feel at home....smells like a rotten cat to me.

Kochi (Cochin) and Kozhikode (Calicut)

(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!

Industrial Artefacts

(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.

David Chipperfield Lecture

David Chipperfield the last living specimen of a dying species articulated his practise as being the mediator between the symbolisms existing within the historic narratives and modern architecture. With enquiries of typology, space, form and order that derived their principles from modern architecture but at the same time got integrated with the context of culture and history to configure newer typologies of public and private buildings. He presented his projects as contemporary extensions to the narrative of modern architecture starting with Corbusier, Schinkel and Kahn.

I feel there is something about these modernists that is very inspiring, their sense of hope as they represent every building in the manner of the utopia they establish for the whole world, their constant negotiation with their practise and principles, their urge of constant invention. As if their sense of life stems from architecture, as every environment, every event and just about everything is realized within universal modularity, like the physicist explaining the structure of an atom and a solar system through a single formula...