Being surrounded by people from diverse regions of the world each having their own language, we often come across familiar sounds, words, proverbs and phrases that we discover and compare, revealing encoded moralities, ethics, value systems and perceptions of entire civilizations ingrained within the meaning of a single word. As if through the language we understand and build the world, through words with subtle differences that are so similar and often accidentally considered synonymous, but become exact in their meaning during a beautiful sunset or in the middle of a crisp argument.
During our meals we often have elaborate culinary conversations, with people talking about rotting, fermenting, aging of different expressions that describe fruits, vegetables, cuisines, and all this flavoured by prose communicating spices that many a times I feel reveal the spiciness simply through their phonetics. Like Italo Calvino’s story “Under the Jaguar Sun” words dissolve, marinate and become food, form and space. Kostas says language is like an organism, which requires people and food so that it survives and not by just talking or reading your language but engaging with it and giving birth to new words and new methods of arranging words so as to represent form and spaces and our new ideas about them. As I involve myself presently in the process of informally learning some light hearted Greek, I have become even more aware of how the structure of language even structures the experience of the world around. On comparing it to my mother tongue, I realise there are different objects, spaces, forms, our bodies, feelings etc that have been asserted the feminine or the masculine gender, my neck is feminine, the door is masculine, the tree is inanimate etc. With the pleasure of having a choice (and vice versa) between different words conveying the same meaning but to choose different genders I suppose turns the experience of the world into something much more beautiful than “it”.
In the Greek language different words with meanings get added and subtracted like a mathematical or design process in order to almost invent a new word like oplismeno skirodema......which is a word communicating reinforced concrete through combinations of “to support” +“strong”+”small stones” + “earth” and each of these words having multiple other connotations and references. The Spanish language seems to thrive on accents and slang that hides and reveals meanings based on which history one is a part of, but on most occasions everyone is your “socio”. The Japanese language through its words for numbers can reveal what is the nature of the object that is being counted and also sometimes its status simply through the number. When my Brit friend Tom asks “anyone fancies a drink?” at the end of a tiring day, I enjoy retorting “always a pleasure”......two sentences filled with enough desire, to turn going for drinks into a an absolute passion in a city with a fast eroding public realm.
So as we through language, assert pluralities, sexualities and history on forms and spaces, do our experiences of these spaces change as well? Is it that the very language used to construct and sell the idea of these spaces got reinforced through the process of their implementation? Or am I simply building myself an elaborate “baroque” trap that will keep me engaged in the process of ornamenting the language and convoluting the content?
This contradiction of desiring segregation but aspiring for an image of public life for each of the three groups under consideration reminds me of China Mieville’s The City & The City, described here as “The City & the City takes place in the cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma. These two cities actually occupy much of the same geographical space, but via the volition of their citizens (and the threat of the secret power known as Breach), they are perceived as two different cities. A denizen of one city must dutifully 'unsee' (that is, consciously erase from their mind or fade into the background) the denizens, buildings, and events taking place in the other city – even if they are an inch away. The twin cities are composed of crosshatched, alter, and total areas. "Total" areas are entirely in one city, the city in which the observer currently resides. "Alter" areas are completely in the other city, and so must be completely avoided and ignored. Between these are areas of "crosshatch". These might be streets, parks or squares where denizens of both cities walk alongside one another, albeit "unseen." Areas that exist in both cities usually go under different names in each one. There is also Copula Hall, "one of the very few" buildings which exists in both cities under the same name. Rather than being cross-hatched, it essentially functions as a border. It is the only way in which one can legally and officially pass from one city to another. Passing through the border passage takes travellers, geographically (or "grosstopically"), to the exact place they started from – only in a different city”. Only in case of Doha it would be 3 cities interlocked within one another. For designers who don’t have the luxury of fighting social injustices or demand democracies, developing such self-indulgent design briefs is the only way to survive work in the middle east, which to be honest can be lot more interesting given the crazy money + ambition combination than do work in a democratic process with restricted budget, a 100000 page convoluted policy guidance, 1 km deep sub terrain infrastructure, public consultations and if that is not enough bunch of boring consultants who are hired to purely tick the boxes to give rise to a reasonably well reasoned masterplan that reeks of absence of any ambition for the built environment.
