Tower top study and trailing thoughts

 

What if top two sought after floors for Penthouses spread through, not two but 13-14 floors creating additional value through multiple duplex-penthouse like conditions. Is there a possibility to illustrate creation of greater value through eroding the top of a high end residential tower on prime city land?

A study I am doing while in Athens (Greece) surrounded by Athenian Polykatoikias that seem to rather nonchalantly provide much needed semi public open spaces in the form of terraces for predominant housing units in the city. A good book for reading up on these is The Public Private House: Modern Athens and its Polykatoikia by Dr Richard Woditsch. Some preview images in here.
What is interesting is Athens celebrates and appreciates terraces as an architectural element integrated within its urbanity while other cities have moved away from provision of terraces or balconies for their citizens and thereby leading to its value as a luxury add on (penthouse flats).
The terrace or the balcony works as a transitionary zone, neither completely public nor private it allows for a degree of openness towards the street frontage facilitating passive surveillance and safer streets, animates the façade and street section (vs brick clad "dignified" monoliths of London's new built developments), facilitates micro-climate through planting and thereby temperature variations, allows for distributing accessible per capita open space. What is most endearing is this element of architecture is not exclusive or luxury, it is available for most of the citizens who live in Athens.

There is value in this architectural element especially in post pandemic times, so as a design professional always ask why no terraces and balconies? Why could there be terraces during council estates or when they built the Barbican in London and not now? How did Charles Correa manage to give terraces in Mumbai to LIC residents and now they aren't possible despite the boom in real estate? and if someone responds the math doesn't add up...keep calm and carry on, but aware you are in less generous city.

Something about exclusivity of architectural elements by class that is rather pissing off, imagine if access to lifts were based on being wealthy and the rest had to take the stairs? or if there was segregation of toilets by class? because the math for providing everyone a higher spec did not add up? wouldn't that be outrageous?

Venice (11th - 13th Oct)

Nymphaea thermarum

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/13/rare-water-lily-stolen-kew-gardens

reads' "Police have launched an appeal to trace a rare plant that was stolen from Kew Gardens. A Nymphaea thermarum, the smallest water lily in the world and extinct in the wild, was taken from the south-west London visitor attraction. A Scotland Yard spokesman said the theft had occurred between 8.30am and 2.55pm on Thursday at the Princess of Wales Conservatory. Experts believe the culprits would have had to dig or pull up the plant from a shallow pond. Nymphaea thermarum was discovered in 1987 in just one location, Mashyuza in Rwanda. But it disappeared from there around two years ago because of the over-exploitation of a hot spring that kept the plants moist and at a constant temperature."

Carlos Magdalena and Lily, source: here 

Further reading find was,
"The plant's native habitat was damp mud formed by the overflow of a freshwater hot spring in Mashyuza, Rwanda. It became extinct in the wild about 2008 when local farmers began using the spring for agriculture. The farmers cut off the flow of the spring, which dried up the tiny area—just a few square metres—that was the lily's entire habitat. Before the plants became extinct, Fischer sent some specimens to Bonn Botanic Gardens when he saw that their habitat was so fragile. The plants were kept alive at the gardens, but botanists could not solve the problem of propagating them from seed.
Botanists were unable to germinate any seeds until Carlos Magdalena, at Kew, discovered the solution—only after he was down to his last 20 seeds. By placing the seeds and seedlings into pots of loam surrounded by water of the same level in a 25 °C environment, eight began to flourish and mature within weeks and in November 2009, the waterlilies flowered for the first time. Nymphaea species typically germinate deep under water. N. thermarum seeds are different, needing CO2 in order to germinate. Once Magdalena understood that difference, he was able to germinate the first seeds. During this time, a rat had eaten one of the last two surviving plants in Germany. With the germination problem solved, Magdalena says that the tiny plants are easy to grow, giving it potential to be grown as a houseplant."

There is an almost extinct Water Lily (gone extinct from the wild) being conserved in Kew Gardens, someone stole it and police are looking for the water lily thief...this world just got a little beautiful again.

The Ball Project

Prajakt Patil a friend and former classmate from KRVIA, has done something which very few of us have been able to, an active on field intervention within the context that we so dearly love and love to talk about.

While we remain bar-tendering each other various bottom up theories of understanding, mapping and intervening in a city like Mumbai without thinking of the interface or re-representation required so that these mappings go beyond the closed socio-economic circles and to the people, community and groups being mapped and represented, Prajakt and his colleague have done just the opposite. 

The sheer simplicity of their method and clarity of intent absolves them of any naivety that may get leveled onto them by anyone (bearded academician doing complex mapping exercises to gain funding from contradictory sources but intending to subvert the hierarchy through 'wink wink it could also be read otherwise' paraphrasing).

Vitriol aside, but this is a truly brilliant work that needs all the support and appreciation that it deserves. Here is a slide show that Prajakt was happy to share and explains the aim and method adopted. Truly brilliant work.

Rooster's Coop

In UK

(Data from HMRC 2004-2005; incomes are before tax for individuals. The personal allowance or income tax threshold was £4,745 (people with incomes below this level did not pay income tax). The mean income was £22,800 per year with the average Briton paying £4,060 in income tax.
Above are the tax ranges, by population and the percentage they constitute. This income does not cover assets owned.)

The difference in earnings is not a gradual gradient, it reveals numbers that are highly polarised. This rather vulgar statistic with top 5 percent earning 60-70% of the income while the rest having to share from the trickle down scraps according to me is far more violent than the London riots few days back. 
A majority of rioters took to looting, as one of the article called them 'disqualified consumers' implying, they too like most of us were consumers but having lost the power to afford had been disqualified. In the absence of any support from the student unions or intellectuals in the city who have distanced themselves from this underclass, the only form of mass unrest possible will be the one with no structure, no intent and no meaning....in complete contradiction to the student protests that took place few months back. This contradiction makes it even more important for the two groups to come together...
While David Cameron made a speech filled with hate, and the opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband seemed to be weighing words completely based on popular public opinion, one person out there somewhere makes complete sense of what happened and why...below is the video of the interview.

In such a scenario I often find myself agreeing with Kostas's argumentum baculinum solutions.

Sustainability as defined by Multinationals

According to Novelist Edward Docx "In the forest, there are no horizons and so the dawn does not break but is instead born in the trees – a wan and smoky blue."
Here are fragmentary excerpts from an ongoing story of one such forest, The Niyamgiri and its inhabitants who call themselves Jharnia translating as 'protectors of streams' waging a struggle against a UK based multinational and their own government.
A, B, C, D, D2 and some other stories E, F.
...meanwhile in other places strange coincidences make wars for freedom worth the effort.
I have come to believe that these days most contradictions lie blatantly out in the open, it will just take one twig to snap and start a forest fire.

Two Articles

2 very good articles by Arundhati Roy:
1) The Monster in the Mirror
Which is on the terrorist attack that took place in Bombay (hope the MNS isn't here)
2) The Greater Common Good
On the Narmada Dam project, forwarded to me by Aditya Sudhakar (Pottu).
update to the above post:
I found an article written by Ramachandra Guha reacting to Arundhati Roy's above article Greater Common Good...his article titled: The Arun Shourie of the Left
...to which she reacts in the following interview: Scimitars in the Sun

Cornwall

(Padstow fishing town port)
If you are around UK (or are privileged enough to travel here from anywhere else) and are looking to rejuvenate your nature-mana and reinstate faith in sustainability then Cornwall is the place to be. Thanks to Sarathi and Neha (the nature-loving couple) who invited me and Nora along on a road trip, we had the opportunity to explore the country side of Cornwall.

(Mevagissey port and town)
Our drive took us along small-sleepy fishing village-towns, the Carnglaze slate Caverns, tiny fishing ports of Padstow, Mevagissey, the beaches of Charlestown with its shipwreck centre, the Minack Theatre near Land's End, the Eden Garden project, St. Michael's Mount, St. Ives town & beach and finally on our way back a glimpse of the Stonehenge.

(Houses on a cliff at Mevagissey)

(Minack theatre built by Rowena Cade set within the cliffs next to the Porthcurno beach)
Cornwall does not have many densely populated areas, but has clusters of small towns and fishing villages linked to different local tourist attractions providing the local population some more opportunities. As Prajna told me later, Conservation here is a part of the Economic model for the area that not only facilitates opportunities for the local population but also contributes to a proper upkeep and maintenance of these heritage sites. Through different towns that we travelled I felt the local population had a strong sense of community with a consciousness of the importance of these heritage sites to their livelihood.

(Inside the tropical dome in the Eden Garden project designed by Nicholas Grimshaw)

This is definitely one of the places that can entice one's faith in working on a model which can be a mix of William Morris's (overtly) romantic utopian world of News from Nowhere and Gandhian model of self sufficient rural sustainability.

Of Ships, Dreams & Tiphares

(Ships at Sitakunda ship breaking yard in Bangladesh)

(Ships stacked together at Chittagong in Bangladesh, some more information related to the agencies, policies and different stages of ship breaking in Bangladesh is available here)


(Ships at Alang ship breaking yard in India. For people wanting to pursue researching on Alang, KRVIA has done a very good study of this place. Some more information here)
Like beached whales, these rusting giants of the seas come to breathe their last in the ship breaking yards of Asia. These Elephant's graveyards formed out of devouring and recycling these Goliaths lie at the extreme margins of the world, where cost of labour and environmental policies in contrast to the rest of the world facilitate exploitation. At present, most large scale ship breaking yards are in South Asia and specifically in:
India (Alang)
Pakistan (Gadani)
Bangladesh (Chittagong, Sitakunda)

Like the city of Tiphares from Yukito Kishiro's Battle Angel Alita ("A megalopolis 'Tiphares' in the air soars in the sky, and the town of scrap 'the Scrapyard' iron extends under that") , these terrains survive on the waste dumped by the floating world that upholds its morals of sustainability and equality by outsourcing the opposites to far off horizons away from its cone of vision.
Interestingly in Of other Spaces Foucault writes "...the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates." And if this is true then one can only imagine these spaces where boats (that are the very representatives of dreams of escape) are torn to pieces by the same prisoners (informal labourers) yearning to flee from these poisoned lands.

(image from http://www.cqc.org/gallery/keyday05/ which according to me is one of the very few good photographs available on the internet taken at Alang ship breaking yard)
But all these dialectics aside, I have never had the opportunity to go to any of these places, but I can imagine the sheer scale of these ships and human bodies working on them along a waterfront that keeps changing its configuration everyday as ships get cut into smaller pieces and new ships arrive. I am also curious of the nature of landuse and typologies where most population is informal labour, with skewed sex ratio and other population statistics that will give contemporary planners and urban designers a nightmare. But at the same time I instinctively want to believe that geographies like these that lie on the margins of our society may have within them clues for a completely new form of production of space.