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.

Veliko Tarnovo Competition for New Urban Centre

Design plan for Veliko Tarnovo Competition for New Urban Centre done in collaboration with Chris Cornelissen.

Venice (11th - 13th Oct)

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!

Elephants in Bombay

1) A City Ages

City:
Mumbai over the past few years has come to be a city that is in a constant state of construction. As if the audacious concretization aspires to compete with the speed and scale of natural deterioration within the city, where built forms catch dust, moss, cracks and crumble, very often at a rate faster than the human bodies that inhabit it. Signs of age seem to climb over every object, building and person like creepers that grow slowly but with a fierce determination rooted in consciousness of the inevitable outcome.
Presently raising the FAR/FSI is seen as a solution to trigger regeneration, but I only wonder what would happen in another 40 to 50 years when these 20 to 25 storey towers grow old and are crumbling, what would be the collateral then? How would the deficit between the true cost of maintenance and affordability based on earning capacities be rationalized  What kind of maintenance model will be required if the option of raising FSI is no longer viable? Or will a constant flow of infrastructure projects allow continuous expansion? Either which ways, this dialectics of ageing and reconstruction are here to tango till the bubble bursts or life here becomes unbearably agonizing and people migrate to second tier cities.
Through this turmoil of injections of new infrastructure, new construction, old decaying fabric, the city is in a state of constant change and that too with rapid speed, making it unable for someone to completely be able to grasp or even conjecture the nature of an intermediate state it tries to evolve towards.

Most of the spaces of my childhood memories have been forgotten by the city only to be replaced by skeletal concrete monoliths that form a wall depriving the city the very symbol of future hope, the line where the sea and sky meet, the horizon.

Friends:
Most of us are now old enough to savour nostalgia, a feeling that comes when the balance between past reaches a critical limit in relation to the future, enjoying memories of what it used to be like and city that Bombay once was and how it has come to be Mumbai. The utopian optimism of being able to fight back, small intervention-big change attitude has been replaced by either proposals that are geared towards damage control (Zizek's capitalism but with a human face) or intense mapping exercises (AMO's this is the present, now and here and no use resisting it), and so interestingly most sentences in most conversation seem to start with the word "interestingly", summing up the total disconnection that professionals have from the built environment, restricted to purely being witnesses that record, re-record and represent these recording in subversive ways to balance the guilt of impotency.
Like everything else, age has caught up if not with them then with people close to them, as they try to find solutions to the state of ageing in this city.

Grandparents:
My grandmother who has crossed 85, recently moved in our home. Her frail and fragile body bears witness to this city she lived in, her entire life, Dadar Shivaji Park (1937 to 1951),Thane Charai (1951 to 1960), Goregaon Pandurangwadi (1960 to 1962), Cotton Green Kala Chowki (1963 to 1985), Mulund (1986 to 2012),Borivali (2012 onwards). Having short term memory she constantly enquires of her grandchildren once an hour which my father patiently responds to, in manner as if the question was never asked before.
My maternal grandfather lives with my aunt and struggles through with similar problems of age.
This state of vulnerability and return to innocence according to me is the most merciless but yet in some ways appropriate form of redemption to our existence, and deserves the dignity that this fast paced, aggressive city very often cannot afford.

A Thesis on old age homes:
A friend of mine, Namrata Kapoor, few years back had researched and designed an old age home as a thesis topic. One of the issues that she dealt with was the relevance of having old age and its supporting institutions within the city and and not exiled outside the city limits as is the case with lots of old age homes here. I wonder given the changes that have taken place within this city and the aggression that seem to increase exponentially with increase in density and shortage of resources, would the question of "is old age relevant to this city?" needs to be reframed as "is this city relevant for old age?"

The process/state of ageing here is not a noble one, dignified with responsibilities of holding our collective past, neither is it Clint Eastwood commanding respect and a farewell with a finale, rather it is a sad process of decay and suffering and old age only inhibiting memories...bearing witness to this nature of change to me is somewhat like asking a grandparent do you remember me and seeing their eyes desperately search for signs of recognition in your face, just as i search for fast eroding spaces from my childhood in the city of Mumbai.

2) A City comes of Age
Optimism:
As Bombay grows in infrastructure and density, amid all the chaos there seems to be a sense of optimism from some people whom i spoke to, of things changing rapidly (for good or for worse was not of much concern, but the speed), and within that rapidity one has to fish opportunity at the precise moment it jumps towards you (think of Alaskan bears catching salmon). This strange optimism only seems to be growing, as if with a little more toil, little more risk and little more compromises the battle with the city would be won; dreams, desires and aspirations fulfilled. As one of my friend back in Bombay said, over the past 1 year he can see the boom of a booming economy. 

Faith:
Another one explained that a lot of things presently seem to work purely out of good faith, like the experience of crossing a highway and having good faith in the driver that he wont run over you, while the driver having complete faith in you breaking the traffic signal and crossing from unexpected places, so his speed is slow and he is more alert than an average driver abroad. 
The complexity that Bombay shelters provides for a constant source of study, research, mapping, representation and interventions, built and unbuilt, professional and academic of various scales. the opportunities and potentials are endless..the unrest will follow..."it is only a matter of time...have faith..."

3) Elephants in the City

To me witnessing changes in Bombay is like the experience of seeing elephants in the middle of the city. One is immediately struck by awe at the magnificence of the beast, only to dwell on how the animal survives and then looking carefully at damages that the city life has done to it. It is surreal experience with certain sense of strange optimism mixed with melancholia(?). There are no absolutes here, as even elephants dissolve away in the noise and smog of the city.

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.

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....

Istanbul

(Elevation of the Asian side of Istanbul as seen from the Bosphorus)
Few weeks back in India some of my friends (who are planners) and me were involved in a debate around possible development trajectory for cities with large percentage of informal housing, multiple tenancies, incremental development etc. Our discussion was mostly around Bombay and how 67% of it is informal with an additional 20% old city housing and so acknowledging it to be a 'slum city' or 'informal city' could be a first step towards finding the right solutions. Seeing the role of the designer under threat and not really believing in 'people / community knows best' I tried to defend otherwise, but after my recent visit to Istanbul, I believe maybe there is a possibility of developing multiple decentralised solutions that incorporate the presence of the informal and at the same time have a diversity of design intervention that plug into such a landscape...
...its all up to our favourite underpaid intern sitting in some basement to crack this now....

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

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.