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.”

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

James Sterling Exhibition at Tate Britain

Peter Zumthor's Serpentine Pavilion

 

V&A opens Architectural Gallery

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)

London Open House

(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!

Surreal House & the Third Manifesto

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!

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

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...)

Edinburgh

(source: Edinburgh tourist guide map)
If any city can claim to inspire magic, it is Edinburgh. Here History finds solace within crevices of tectonic plates, near lava mounds, between valleys, above dead volcanic mountains, along the river & shore and everything else sculpted and chiselled by Geography. This aventure amoureuse of the narrative and the terrain forms a compact jigsaw in the city centre making the entire city walkable and therefore encouraging exploration of every nook and corner to its fullest. The castle, the port, the galleries, the parliament and gardens and bridges were some of the many nooks and corners that my & Nora's feet trod along a span of three days. My well trained sense of misdirection and Nora's inbuilt GPS capacity to absorb city geography, maps and directions as a combination, facilitated us covering more ground but with style.


The first day was spent in visiting the Princess garden that sits within the valley dividing the new city and the old city in the centre. The lowest point in the valley accommodates the rail tracks that cut in between the green slopes that hide the city. The old city, sitting along a rising slope comes across as Les Triplettes de Bellevillian city shot with diverse elevations arranged one over the other.

The exploration of The Royal Mile with its sloping cobbled streets, incidental public squares and an occasional view of the castle, the sea and Arthur's Seat was an absolute pleasure. All these experiences were constantly punctuated by etchings on wooden benches, names on trees and a huge number of cemeteries with old tomb stones turning the city into a depository of memories of names, people, friends, families and loved ones all long gone and immortal at the same time.

The city was once a home to writer Robert Louis Stevenson and I could only imagine its influence in his classics like The strange case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde and Treasure Island.



The second day began with the climb to the Edinburgh Castle which provides some great views of the city. The castle madly reminded me of Hayao Miyazaki's Laputa: Castle in the Sky illustrations further reinforced by the illustration on the tourist guide map. The visits to the National Gallery of Scotland proved extremely fruitful. This gallery has some really good paintings by El Greco, Rembrandt, Cezanne and Diego Velazquez.

The next on the itinerary was the Scottish Parliament designed by Enric Miralles, which is one of the few parliament buildings that seem to merge in scale with the surrounding landscape, sits in close proximity to the rest of the urban fabric and has an image made up of collage of various elements that are in complete contradiction to the State's image of power and authority, which makes this a building a good example of architectural interpretation of true democracy. We ended the day at the port which is an antithesis of the city centre, an eerie space confused by negation of history and planting of a multi complex shopping mall giant of a building along the water front.

The third day was invested in visiting the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art flanked by a Landscape design done by architect Charles Jencks, which was discovered by us during the trip. But most surprising was an amazing collection of art works the gallery had put together for a temporary exhibition. This was the first time I got to see Damien Hirst’s art works, Away from the Flock, Grey Periodic Table, Pharmacology- Physiology- Pathology, Monument to the Living & Dead, Something & Nothing and the Wretched War to name a few. The works had a certain playful quality about them fantastically packaged with flushed details. Also got to see Man Ray’s Iron with Nails, which was an image I had seen numerous times before but had never seen the object. But it was Ellen Gallagher’s work that I loved the most, a set of images titled Deluxe and madly reminded me of Kaushik’s ‘Unbook’ collages. After this a quick visit to the Dean Gallery across the road and marinating ourselves in bit more of art, we were ready for some evening wine and oysters.
I don’t know if it was the spring weather, my own craving for a break from London or something else, but the city of Edinburgh was just beautiful, probably one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen, no short of magic.