The Burning Man City

(image source: Telegraph. More images here)
The Burning Man annual event in the Black Rock Desert in Northern Nevada this year witnessed approximately 50,000 participants coming together and forming a temporary 8 day settlement with the wooden effigy of the burning man being the focus of the event and the settlement.

(image source: Telegraph)
The event is organized by Black Rock City LLC. With valid entry ticket being the only strand that facilitates the formation of this 'city' (the temporary settlement is named The Black Rock City, also one cant help but draw comparisons to Masdar city proposal which will be in the middle of the desert and is projected to have same population), in the absence of collective history, common aspirations and various other things that form a community, the result is an array of images with a Mad Max like post apocalyptic flavour.

The plan of the settlement is equally dystopian with street names of Hysteria, Fetish, Ego, Catharsia, Amnesia etc. The satellite images shows the settlement forming concentric circles like garden-city-dream-gone-sour in the middle of a a desert landscape and the Burning man as the centre.

(image source: wikipedia)

(image source: http://muller.lbl.gov/travel_photos/BurningMan007/BurningMan007.html
it also has some more images of the event)
50,000 Strangers brought together by an event managing company, The Burning Man festival according to me is a prime example of a festivity with no history, a carnival with no reason and ritual with no tribe, somewhat similar to contemporary City design proposals that attempt to form communities through a valid entry ticket of property ownership.

Rumination of Utopias

As Ian Macleod one of the speakers during the Thrilling Wonder Stories syposium had pointed out, that in the present context there are no trajectories left of a future that can promise designs of utopia. With strong global authoritarian systems in place it allows very little flexibility to imagine either the utopias of social hierarchy or technological revolutions to purge problems, on the contrary newer innovations in social networking and lab-made glowing mice only encourage an image of a dystopian future. The only way by which science fiction writers are able to circumvent the existing condition is to start with a clean slate, an apocalyptic event with strong gravitational force to bend light and future, one of the indicators being a string of Hollywood movies of floods, doomsday, diseases, meteors and other last-days-of-man-on-earth genre.
I don't know if such an event could trigger a formation of a real community or some sort of collective that is a fundamental backbone of all utopias right from Thomas Moore's Utopia island, William Morris's News from Nowhere to more contemporary Garden City masterplans, but Dutch artist Rob Voerman works around such an assumption.

(Image by Rob Voerman called The Epicentre, which reminds me of the nuclear explosion shot from Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira. Image sourced from Rob Voerman's website)
His website describes: "Some years ago, I started a body of work in which I try to create the architecture of fictive communities living in remote areas or occupying existing city-landscapes. The communities will consist of a mixture of utopia, destruction and beauty, a symbiosis of hippie-communities from the seventies, with their often highly decorated self-build structures, the cabin of the Uni-bomber hidden in the Montana forests, art-deco and other influences.

(untitled 2004, by Rob Voerman has some very good details)
Romanticism combined with the grim qualities of terror. It is often a direct translation of destruction in a purely aesthetic form..."

(sculpture works by Rob Voerman. The sculpture to the left is Annex#4 and was displayed at Bedford Square, London as part of the show at the Architectural Association. Images sourced from Rob Voermans site)
It reminded me of work that I and Kostas had done almost a year back on utopias and imagined communities, as we attempted to put together a Rubik's cube of different utopian ideas.

(the model of the cube done by me and Kostas for our final Masters thesis project titled ABBAU+, that presently lies at my house which soon will be sacrificed to recycling for something new to take its place...)
More photos and description of the project can be found on Kostas's blog here.
While I am on the topic of utopia, I came across:
1) Ananya Roy's lecture video (which also was her acceptance speech for the Golden Apple Award) where she elaborates on utopias.
2) The Self Sufficient City Competition (3rd Advanced Architecture Contest) organized by the IAAC, which sounds like an interesting competition to take part in.
This competition could be a good opportunity for people interested in different ideas of ideal cities and societies to test their schemes, constructing not only the inhabited but also the inhabitant.

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.

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...)

Almere

I came across this article, which talks about the trials and tribulations of a new city like Almere which is around 30 years old (7 - 8 years younger than New Bombay). My previous post on Almere was during my Master's trip to Netherlands. There is something disturbing about these new young cities, especially when they are spaces with no history, like airports where different strangers come together in a sterile generic environment with well oiled mechanisms of circuilation, surveillance and other scary instruments of planning. Or maybe given enough time these geographies may gather layers of history, the only problem will be that it will start with the opening of a new Burger King designed by a Starchitect with underpaid interns.
Maybe the sterility of these spaces is actually the revenge of the underpaid interns! Anyways here is a fantastic blog I found on Archidose, its called Architects who eat their young, I am sure we all have more than enough names to contribute, so do contribute.

Origamicity

(image of origami works by artist Ingrid Siliakus from his website)
With a growing technological progress in construction industry, easy access to exploitable labour and economic surges that allow for baroque extravagance, gone are the days of "Rome was not built in a day". Cities are no longer fixed geographies that will accumulate palimpsests of history, culture, people, flora and everything else to slowly form sediments of experience, memory and history, flourishing, thriving and decaying; But on the contrary the new Archigram cities are designed products, passed, made, sold and resold all in a day with deliciously pop-plastic-flavoured history of genuine intent to embody sustainability (imagine surgically beautified Gaia in D&G). With climate and economy following patterns of extremities, high property values that reduce life span of buildings to as little as 30 years, the process of urbanization is played in fast forward from conception on a tabula rasa site to its demise like the redundant empty American suburbs or some cities in the Middle East.

(image of origami works by artist Ingrid Siliakus from his website)
As people who from time to time envision ideas with regards to great design and save the world schemes, we may actually need to entertain the nightmare of designing single serving (say for a brief period of 50 years or in accordance to the bank loan schemes for housing) use and throw cities. Cities with no history, only props and people!

(image of origami works by artist Ingrid Siliakus from his website)
Cities made of paper that open and fold and disappear or get recycled (to be politically correct). When I came across works of Ingrid Siliakus, I was happy to find that origami, art and architecture had folded together so well to create complex spaces and forms through just cuts and folds.

(image of origami works by artist Ingrid Siliakus from his website)
This single- serving (Rem Koolhas: Generic city) city opens up ideas of temporal nature of architecture and cities, as Bruno-designers catwalk their styles along the flavour of the season (dainty designer proclaiming, “oh! Sustainability is so in! I laaav grass”). But the works of Ingrid Siliakus certainly provide some hope to have beauty in these single-serving difficult times and a regular supply of work for architects. We may even see the ephemeral nature of design reflected in design drawings somewhat similar to these images by another artist Simon Schubert whose folded paper space drawings are one of the most beautiful works I have come across, subtle, delicate and precise.

Wanted a Competent, Experienced, Professional Designer

FQDP Associates are looking for a competent enthusiastic RIBA, ARB qualified, LEEDS certified professional architect with 8 years of experience in International building guidelines, project management, Sustainable designing, construction details and facade structural analysis, with expertise in Vectorworks, Autocad, 3dMax, Microstation, Sketchup, GIS, V-Ray, Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator. Having fluency in English & Dutch is a must, but also knowing Chinese, Arabic or Spanish will be an advantage. Experience in Middle East, Hong Kong and China would be great! But you must also know local design guidelines up to date. We shall provide you with preliminary 2 months unpaid Internship training period after which you shall be employed on minimum wages providing you with valuable experience in our highly reputable design office. If you believe you satisfy all our above requirements, please send your CV, letter of Interest, Portfolio and Reference letters to Mrs Silverwoodsidebottam. We do not accept application by email! Please post printed application to the office address.
(Fumihiko Maki, left, Larry A. Silverstein, Gov. George E. Pataki, Daniel Libeskind, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. Image source: The New York Times)
Nothing has ever given me a bigger inferior complex than these design office advertisements expecting all knowing pure perfection not necessarily efficient in design but 'professionalism', in return for which one is said to be working for valuable experience and love of the profession. I don't have a problem with the best design offices having high expectations but when small, stupid, inconsequential dim wits ranting about fake sustainability and rendering views with green grass and happy people frolicking start talking about professionalism and design it is just hilarious.
Never before have I hated the design profession more...

Map maker's Archive of Urban Dreams

(The city of Saintes, France drawing by Joris Hoefnagel, 1560, in the centre of the city marked I. one can see the Saintes Cathedral or the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Saintes before going in state of ruins later)
Before Rene Descartes' Cartesian co-ordinate system secularised space along the three axes of sterile certainty, the task of mapping cities in the Early Modern Era was encouraging city maps being conceptualised as collages of spatial experiences, bird’s eye views, mental maps, landuses and also sometimes a calendar of day today/ seasonal events.

(map of densely packed Cairo, admitted to Matteo Pagano, 1549 showing the agrarian canal irrigation network from the Nile, the Pyramids and the Sphinx to the right and if one zooms into the far left just where the river forms a delta island one can even see the Nile crocodiles)
The foreground usually had the citizens/nobles/patrons of the map looking towards the city. The surrounding context of the river, sea, fort wall and the ports was drawn with intricate details not only to communicate but also assert identity.

(map of Bordeaux by Antoine du Pinet, 1564)
For people who derive pleasure in going through detailed old city maps, I found an online archive of mostly European cities (though you may find Goa, Istanbul, Cairo and other exceptions) published between 1572 and 1617 in volumes titled Civitates orbis terrarum edited and engraved by Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg. The Archive allows searching a map by geography, dates and even by map makers. The maps are available for download in high resolution format (the ones I have used are low resolution preview quality), which is really good and are mostly copyrighted to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem & The Jewish National & University Library. A link above on the same page takes you to the Historic cities: Maps and Documents main page but the Braun and Hogenberg branch is the most elaborate one.

(The map of Venice admitted to Bolognino Zaltieri, 1565 is one of my favourite, showing details of water and land circulation network. I am not sure, but I believe the map also through the roof colours demarcates residential and public buildings)
The Venetian Canal system, the Pyramids of Egypt, the settlement along the Nile, the agrarian plots, the fort walls, streets, naval ships, and every house in the city drawn in axonometric grandeur to enable an observer a glimpse of cities in their nebular stage of development.

(map of Rome admitted to Pirro Ligorio, 1552 and 1570, showing the public buildings and the fort walls)

Les Machines

(Vladimir Gvozdariki's rhino kept reminding me of Albrecht Durer's rhino, so thought I should put the two together)
Every now and then biologists discover strange-new, never before seen animal specimens (my personal favourite being Macropinna microstoma) that have evolved in isolation from rest of the world and challenge taxonomical tables through their glass tentacles, sonar vision and telepathic brains. I have come to believe the same being true of Russian artists who seem to do their own thing untouched by global rhetoric art, making drawings and artwork that have reference points within their introvert floating islands.

(some very beautiful drawings by Vladimir Gvozdariki from his website of machine animals that seem to come out from some Industrial utopian world.)

One such newly discovered specimen is artist Vladimir Gvozdariki whose mechanical animal drawings continue to intrigue me. Like the animal machines of Les Machines de L'Ile Nantes the drawings seem to graft mechanical details to appendages, eyes and metal plates that form the skin.

(Vladimir Gvozdariki's drawing of elephant with a photograph of the Great Elephant of Les Machines de L'Ile Nantes in London. The Elephant Celebes by Max Earnst is one such drawing that collaged the animal and machine together in surreal dreamlike world)

The machine becomes the animal, as if the drawings mirror Rene' Descartes’ Animals are Machines, that further blur the dialectics between nature and machine.
Another artist fusing animals and machines is Mike Libby whose website "Insect Lab" describes its work as "Insect Lab customizes real insect specimens with antique watch parts and other technological components. From ladybugs to grasshoppers, each is individually hand adorned, and original- a unique celebration of the contradictions and confluences between nature and technology." But coincidentally these speculative futures and art projects seem to have just been appropriated by the US military attempting to develop "insect cyborgs"! Somehow some very powerful entrepreneurship always have a knack of destroying everything beautiful and putting it for sale on E-Bay.

Black & White inspirations for a Graphic Novelist: Brodsky, Utkin, Urbicande

Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin's paper Architecture was first brought to my notice by my friend Sahil who happened to have this book. The pair created very detailed conceptual etchings between 1981 and 1990.


The drawings are very beautiful, story like, with details and narratives both designed with poetic rigour. The drawings are one of the best examples of work that manages to retain its sense of beauty, poetry and everything subjective inspite of its objective intent to critique the then existing architectural trends during Brezhnev in Soviet Russia. There is a very nice writeup about them and their work by Kim Bennett that I found here.
Though not completely connected the dystopian visions and the nature of narrative remind me of small fragmented description I came across of a Belgian graphic novel series The Obscure Cities with one of the titles being La fièvre d'Urbicande.The city's introduction by the creators François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is:
"This city might have been called Florence, London or Mostar, but its name was Urbicande meaning City of Cities.
It spread out on either side of a broad river where two townships had long developed separately, their independence tinged with mutual suspicion. On the more prosperous south bank was Bartoline; on the gloomier and more deprived north bank was Urania. A ferry was the sole link between the two.
It was shortly after the construction of the first bridge that the two communities decided to unite. The Commission of High Authorities watching over the destiny of the new city set out to rebuild everything on completely new principles.
Absolute trust was placed in a young architect, Eugen Robick. He drew all the plans, designing the tiniest details with the same enthusiasm as the widest vistas. But these grandiose works, although they made the name of Urbicande famous throughout the continent, sharply accentuated the contrast between the two banks.
The north bank slumped into direr poverty than ever, while on the other side the wildest rumours began to spread. The Commission of High Authorities feared looting and placed traffic across the two bridges under strict control. Urbicande’s two halves became two distinct towns once more, with almost no contact between the two.

Who knows what might have happened had the city not been turned topsy-turvy by the colossal development of a cubic structure (known afterwards as the Urbicande Network). The original cube had begun growing in Robick’s own office and multiplying as it grew. Neither the arrest of the Urbatecht nor the canon shots fired at the Network could stop the continued expansion of the gigantic structure.

Only on reaching the north bank did the Network become stable, as inexplicably as it had begun to grow. Crossings over it were wary and few at first then ever more numerous. Atop the verticals overhanging the river beat the city’s new heart — and to the deep despair of the Commission of High Authorities, Urbicande soon became known as the City of a thousand Bridges."
Similar to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the two Russians (Brodsky and Utkin) and two Belgian artists (François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters) designed dystopian narratives and images of cities shaped by multiple palimpsest of histories that allowed design to adopt different trajectories of the urban form. Maybe the current global economic and environmental crisis carry promises of inspiring newer forms of urban fabric on paper if not in practise.
Great work, one cant help but be inspired.

Lets get Steampunked!

(English artist Alex CF's 'inquisitor' eyepiece which belong to a series of mechanical devices based on writings of Jules Verne and HG Wells)
With mankind's sudden discovery of environmental conscience over the past decade, heightened by apocalyptic zombie laced dystopian visions of dying mother Earth, sustainability has become the new post-political world religion. Humanity already running late on the 2001 Space Odyssey schedule and having no scope of space-escape, its has become even more urgent to engineer a more balanced retrofitting for the climate that so badly needs to be managed into obedient submission. Presently most nature & god fearing nations (even the middle east) having expressed their desire to shift away from fossil fuels and towards more greener technologies, we can expect a planned 'rehabilitation' if not an electronic revolution. But I believe like many other products even this green technology will manifest itself through economic hierarchy, like organic-inorganic, leaded-unleaded, tap water-mineral water and finally electric solar powered and steam-punk! Steam punk is a science fiction sub genre that speculates on alternative reality where steam power and mechanics most often styled along Victorian Industrial aesthetics is the predominant technology used in day to day life. Anthony Lucas's 'The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello' with its exquisitely detailed animation (you can find a good description of this one on Lines and Colour blog) or Katsuhiro Otomo's Steamboy are some examples that employ the steampunk genre of conceptualising the environment. Due to the high cost of solar panels, Windows programming and Apple motion sensitive microchips that can detect smell, water, missiles and dust particles this part of technology will be affordable to a selective few (who can afford to be fashionably green with matching emeralds and jades) while the rest of the majority will certainly revert to steampunk technology.

(Steampunk watch by Cabestan Watches, their website also has other alternative designs)
My personal bias towards this genre is due to its easy readability, as if however technologically sophisticated mechanics gets one can see the moving parts and understand what moves what and how each part influences the other, like opening up a watch and being able to understand the gear box.

(model used in the 2002 Time Machine movie)
As if technology has been made open source with different people adding and subtracting making changes, customizing their own computo-abacus and not requiring Windows Vista Firewall anti piracy programmers.

(A robot from the Golden Army from Hellboy 2: The golden army by Guillermo Del Toro)
I also like the visual richness the representation has with mechanical details that stand proof of its workability and also in some cases the choreography of all these parts together in the manner of old industrial Victorian machines with brass knobs, glass lenses, silver chains and wooden programming plates etc. Bjorn Hurri's revisualization of Star Wars characters, Stephen Rothwell's strange surreal collages, Lawrence Northey's playful sculptures, to some extent Arthur Ganson's Kinetic sculptures etc are some of the many artworks that derive inspiration from this genre.

(An artwork named 'The Fishing complex' by David Trautrimas, whose this particular series named Habitat Machines includes a composition of everyday objects carefully arranged and collaged within a background to distort their scales and make these household objects appear to shelter the house. Though the artist does not confirm to steampunk, his work comes very close in terms of its visuals)
Few more years and soon it will be time to start pedalling, running, skipping, turning and arm oneself with kinky accessories all in the name of sustainability! I don't know if mechanization of technology will actually democratize it making it more accessible and comprehensible, but if we miss this speculative future and gears turn little wrongly we might even find ourselves pedalling electricity for ourselves and the Bank. Boom! boom! boom! row your boats!

Shivaji

The State Government of Maharashtra after making a provision of Rs 200 crore (almost 4.5 million US Dollars) in its budget, appointed a technical committee headed by Chief Minister Ashok Chavan that has selected 3 architects from among 11 competing firms for the project of installing a 305 feet high (92.69 metres) statue of the Maratha king Shivaji. The statue will be on an artificial island off the shore of Marine Drive in the Arabian Sea and will also accommodate a library, a museum and an amphitheatre.
The short-listed firms include RG Patki Architects Pvt Ltd, Nitin Parulekar Architects Pvt Ltd and Team One Architects (Bharat S. Yamsanwar). In a state starved for infrastructure, amenities, social housing, with a growing farmer suicides this project is a strong indication of the sorry state of our so called democracy. The Indian Institute of Architects has approved of this so called "International Architectural Competition PWD Maharashtra" on their website.
Maybe in due course of time going by the nature of interstate politics we might have the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal littered with statues of different sword yielding, gun aiming and finger pointing local leaders representing different groups of politics, religion, caste, sub caste, tribe, race, language, region and everything that constitutes our cultural diversity. Sad, we can just stand and watch, while our representative-goons in politics recast history into skewed monstrosities. It is time to dress in white, hold hands, light candles and throw flowers (dominantly fashionable method of protest adopted by the very aggressive urban bourgeoisie in Bombay). Idiots.