Nice quote on History

Eric Hobsbawm in his book Age of Capital quotes Pierre Nora as having written “Memory is life. It is always carried by groups of living people, and therefore it is in permanent evolution. It is subject to the dialectics of remembering and forgetting, unaware if its successive deformations, open to all kinds of use and manipulation. Sometimes it remains latent for long periods, then suddenly revives. History is always incomplete and problematic reconstruction of what is no longer there. Memory always belongs to our time and forms a lived bond with the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.”

Given the current times we live in, with ever increasing polarised world, with events and the past constantly being reconceptualised, one would assume studying history becomes ever more important, but we all know, there are very few professional historians and even lesser poets. World in state of global amnesia.

Nice quote / gloomy thoughts.

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.

Delhi-Mathura-Agra-Fatehpur Sikri-Abhaneri-Jaipur

Water Axis as a Landscape element in Charbaug, Delhi

Humayun's Tomb, Delhi

Courtyard of Delhi Crafts Museum

Ugrasen ki Bawli, Delhi

Chand Bawli, Abhaneri

View of Amber Fort from Nahargad, Jaipur

View of Jaipur city from Jaigad

Qutub Minar, Mehrauli, Delhi

Humayun's Tomb, Delhi

Bada Gumbhad in Lodhi Gardens, Delhi

Lotus Temple, Delhi

Oarsman at Mathura

Taj Mahal, Agra

Fatehpur Sikri

Parrots at Abhaneri

Inside Pura Quila, Delhi

Camel at Jaigad, Jaipur

Purana Quila, Delhi

Sleeping Macaques at Jaigad, Jaipur

Guard at Nahargad, Jaipur

Lodhi Gardens, Delhi

Snake Charmer at Amber Fort, Jaipur

Jal Mahal, Jaipur

Eye in the Sky

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...

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.

Starman

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.

Pots on the Horizon

(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:

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!

Lebenswelt

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.

Lions of Baghdad

(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...