James Sterling Exhibition at Tate Britain

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...

Peter Zumthor's Serpentine Pavilion

 

London International Documentary Festival

My friend Mukul had two of his film screenings at the London International Documentary Festival, Vertical City and Certified Universal both of which were being screened at the Horse Hospital. I could make it for the Certified Universal, a beautiful short film with the audience relishing every second of the film as images from films and the city fused together to form Bombay.
I remember reading Berger where he writes there are numerous paintings of water lilies, haystacks, sunflowers and nudes, but only a few come to be truly beautiful where the artist and art merge and are inseparable. For me Certified Universal was one such beautiful film in which I see the city, the film and Mukul, all tightly composed in 14 minutes.

Mao and Superman

In the event of current global trends, Superman has decided to give up his  US citizenship and become Chinese, and protect the country from evils of Ai weiwei, Ten Biao, Chen Guangcheng, Liu Xiabo and many others threatening democracy, justice and peace in the fine country of China. "He is strong but still few inches shorter than our lovely leader Mao as seen in image released by our state controlled media", exclaims a poor peasant kid.

And while we are on the topic of Supermen, here is a link to enjoy:

http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/

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.

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.

Pale Blue Dot

Before sailing into the frigid, interstellar darkness a whimsical looking object carrying with it memories of home, mission to explore the unknown, floating in space, changed orientation as it fixed its electronic gaze on a tiny familiar speck. In the absence of sound its mechanics seemed to glide with balletic ease and precision, cutting through the dark ether, to look back and record a Las Meninas snapshot of a speck of reflected light. This snap came to be known as the Pale Blue Dot taken by a mechanical Astronaftis (literally meaning sailor of the stars) called Voyager 1.
While we are on the topic of scale of this pale blue dot, someone whom I had briefly worked with is on a bicycle trip from London to Kathmandu. Details of the trip and interesting geographies they cycled by have been recorded on their blog. The idea of such a trip is so intimidatingly abstract to me that I may never be able to muster courage to test my levels of patience, stamina and other things that go in such an endeavour, but over time I have come to understand and respect such aspirations. The distance between London to Kathmandu maybe an abstract number, most of us fly over but for Lonkat team it must be a far richer understanding of the scale of this number.
In the light of the past few weeks, when "there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen", this tiny blue speck seems to resonate with all its elemental spectrum as a group of people cycle across the globe, a tsunami and a earthquake causes destruction, some people protest for freedom and some wage wars.

Watercolours

I received this in my inbox today sent by a friend. If you are in Bombay and you were a student of Architecture or Arts sometime during the past 20 years, then this is an exhibition you would not want to miss.

Here is the rest of text from the email:

"Kamla Raheja Foundation presents an Exhibition of Prof. Shriniwas Kudalkar's Water Colours and Illustrations.

Shriniwas Ramchandra Kudalkar (b. 1934) is an alumnus of Sir JJ School of Architecture (Batch of 1954). Fondly called Kudalkar Sir, he is a teacher par excellence who has been teaching at KRVIA for the past seventeen years since 1994. He has also taught at Sir JJ School of Architecture since 1964. He is an inspiration for students and colleagues by virtue of his ability to craft each of his Building Technology lectures- beginning with the plans and fleshing out the details thus bringing to life the process of construction.

Not many people know that before commencing his education as an architect, he had already completed a certificate course in fine arts and also apprenticed with a commercial artist.  His students at the JJ school in his early years of teaching have had the good fortune to witness him painting during their study tours.

On behalf of the Kamla Raheja Foundation, It is with immense pleasure that we announce a public exhibition of his paintings in at least three locations beginning at KRVIA- 10th to 17th March 2011 (1pm to 7pm except on Sunday).

An inaugural function of the exhibition reminiscing his earlier years of teaching will be held at the KRVIA on 10th, thursday at 3pm, followed by tea at 4:30pm.

Out of a collection of 174 of the surviving paintings in his possession, we have selected around 50 paintings and a few artworks and illustrations."

I hope I get to see some images from the exhibition.

Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot

Around the time when I was a a kid and had started admiring the beauty of moving images, my dad with great efforts had put together some savings and bought a coloured TV, a novelty that few homes could enjoy. Being born in 80's in India meant you did not have cable tv, childhood life was co-ordinated around very few definite programs that used to be screened on Doordarshan, one of which was Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot (created by Mitsuteru Yokoyama). 
This was one of those many things that sent its influences across schools, playgrounds and other spaces infested with kids. A bunch of us doing a Giant Robo excercise before a showdown fight for the swing had always perplexed teachers and parents alike. But in the end we would be rest assured that the Robo would struggle through all sorts of acrobatic fights, be badly injured/broken, and still emerge victorious thanks to a combination of fast computing, secret alternative use of already existing weapons (mentioned in the manual, but Sokko and therefore the audience did not know of) and last but not the least sheer brute force.
But then we all grew up and read Kafka's Trial. I have been in one since 2 months now. Got an outcome yesterday, next steps involve further exploration of the labyrinthine corridors of bureaucracy. A Giant Robo would had been very very useful in such matters of the State.

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:

V&A opens Architectural Gallery

The V &A has opened a new Architectural Gallery in the Museum. For now its exhibits come across as a collage of different things with no apparent narrative. 

As much as it looks rather accidental, to see a model of Bramante's Tempietto, next to Grimshaw's Eden Garden Dome design, that is next to Arup's Structural analysis model, one wonders if the V&A curators ambitiously desired to map the 'progress' of architecture or did they desire to come up with some kind of explanation for our current state of confusion. 

But given the richness of every individual exhibit, the gallery is worth a visit as long as the visitor takes a deep breathe and a conscious 10 second break between seeing an exquisitely detailed hand drawn axonometric of St Paul's and laser cut 20 option-models of Foster's Gherkin.

(all photos in the post, photo courtesy of Nora)

Voynich Manuscript

I have written before small, odd, confused articles on language (1, 2, 3, 4) and other speculations associated, one of which being erasure of language. To speculate on possibility of losing the memory of sounds and symbols that make up words and how to arrange these together. Being able to imagine an alternative history where Rosetta stone was never discovered and we are left with only encoded unrecognisable vast archives that look exquisitely rich in their meaning but undecipherable,quite similar to the symbol of human infertility, where Zizek talks about Art in the absence of its context in Children of Men.
I can only imagine the feeling cryptographers, ciphers, linguists and historians get when they study The Beinecke MS 408 or also popularly known as the Voynich manuscripts presently housed in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library building (designed by SOM). A treasure trove of history, symbols and science locked up meaningless without its codec. Some images below for visual intrigue and pleasure.

(All images for this post have been borrowed from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript online Archive, Yale University.)

Portrait of my Mother, Gioconda's Smile

On the last evening of the Millennium, 31 December 1999 the Orchestra of Colours played Portrait of my Mother from Gioconda's Smile composed by Manos Hatzidakis to the setting sun of Santorini. It is late to be talking about it, but beautiful none the less.

La Vie Aquatique

(The text below is not a description of London aquarium, but it was inspired by a recent visit to it)

(image of the Crystal Palace Aquarium sourced from here.)
Though designed by a name obscured by time and tides, the aquarium could be considered to be a dream project of curiosities, entertainment and science, set within the Victorian era that bravely peered into the oceans' depths. Oceans that unlike today's still nurtured within them the myths of mermaids, sea monsters,loch ness and science of species in equal proportions. The aquarium was indeed a small sample of this vast primordial soup of life that had abilities to shelter myth and science simultaneously, to be viewed and awed by the public, a television set of the 19th century!

And so the stone facade of the aquarium building was an alto relievo jigsaw of two intertwining narratives, one of the oceans created and the other of the oceans formed. The Darwinian narrative covering the plinths of the building with relief work of smaller more intricate Crustaceans, Mollusks and Echinoderms that could be observed and displayed at human height, flowed along the stormy biblical waves of Philip Gosse as species got simultaneously created and evolved, with whales, squids and sharks forming support system for the rusting copper roof and sea monsters occupying the place of gargoyles that poured water out into various crevices of the facade to bring the oceans to life on a rainy day.

(Statue of Poseidon. Found on Milos with the statue of Amphitrite. In his raised right hand he will have held the trident. Next to his right leg is a support of in the form of a dolphin. 125-100 BC . National Archaeological Museum of Athens, sourced from http://www.greek-thesaurus.gr/hellenistic-age-marble-sculpture-statues-photo-gallery.html)
The entrance of the aquarium was a double height wooden dome with copper handrails, circular riveted portholes and other borrowings from Jules Verne's Nautilus, at the centre stood a six metre high black granite statue of Poseidon, whose beard, hair and cloth seemed to turn the air around into water. A recent material analysis had confirmed the stone came from the submerged monument of Yonaguni Jima, Japan. Our tickets came bundled up in mermaid's purse, an object that just like the facade embodied within it echoes of myths and science alike.

(image of Ascidiae plate 85 from Kunstformen der Natur by Earnst Haeckel, sourced from here)
The first chamber was a gallery of original paintings by Earnst Haeckel, letters exchanged between Robert Warington and Gosse, a manuscript by Jules Verne's recently discovered book 'The seas of Neptune' by a great grand daughter of his editor Jules Hetzel, a fifteenth century Latin translation of Plato's Timaeus and Critias and lastly a final piece of this puzzle Alastair Pilkington and Kenneth Bickerstaff, the men who made the Crystal Palaces, and aquariums possible for the Victorians, the men who made glass visible or should i say invisible! In this room the life aquatic, science, art and most importantly men seemed to evolve and achieve greatness that challenge the world as we know it.

(Cover of "L'Algerie" Magazine, 15 June 1884, image from wikipedia article on Jules Verne)
The visitors could travel through a series of chambers. Each chamber had two identical doors, faith and fact, objectivity and subjectivity, etc and through the selection of each door the aquarium revealed itself as a labyrinth of multiple choices that single cell plankton to multi cell complex organisms had to make as they evolved newer appendages for their faiths or shed older organs to well known facts, thus contributing to the success of their future generations and building on the strengths of the past. The displays were a part of the labyrinth influencing the visitors' choices, presenting themselves as part fact part fiction, like the sea anemone that forms gardens of living tissue along coral reefs or the sleeping whale that formed an island in the first voyage of Sindabad. This Labyrinth had multiple glass stairs and corridors leading up or down between display rooms; these being completely made of glass were the only spaces from where one could peer out at the labyrinth, see silhouettes of other people moving and be conscious of its massive scale and complexity. Peering out of these glass spaces, sometimes littered with objects of everyday use, spoons, tables, books, toys, etc the visitor realises he too like the fishes is a part of this aquarium, not a visitor, not a witness but an active organism that has influenced the labyrinth of evolution through the choices made and an inseparable display like the rest.

At the end of the journey the visitors who had travelled each his unique distance and observed a unique set of sea creatures, all converged into a common egg shaped chamber which was newly added annexe to the aquarium building. This chamber unlike the others was an iridescent, seamless opaque space lit by fluorescent white light. The centre of the space had a six metre high white marble statue of Oceanus rumoured to be made from Golgotha stone. The statue was said to had been recently acquired by the aquarium with its origins traced to a Renaissance genius working in Florence around the beginning of sixteenth century. The display tank was located along the equatorial line of the geoid. A robotic arm above the tanks whizzed and dropped in creatures announcing ticket numbers corresponding to each creature. These were chimeras, being printed for each visitor based on the visitors journey and his choices. Some were grotesque nebular lumps of flesh where the choices of fact and fiction had made the organism incapable of living, some exquisitely beautiful where the two dialectics had stabilised in cohesive harmony. Due to Global genetic laws, the life span of these fantastic creatures created by man was to be only few minutes till they formed the display and had been seen by their creator. But so unique and powerful would be the relationship of this creature to the visitor who created it through his/her choices, that the image would form a part of the visitors sub conscious, influencing decisions for rest of his/her life. This was a consistent effect seen on all visitors who visited the aquarium. Some controversial psychoanalysts had gone to the extent of calling it a Lacanian mirror stage of the entire species, some pointed that we had discovered the Omphalos, the ultimate allegory of the creator allowing the creations to create.

(Double plate illustration showing embryos of fish (F), salamander (A), tur tle (T), chick (H), pig (S), cow (R), rabbit (K), and human (M), at "very early", "somewhat later" and "still later" stages, from Haeckel's Anthropogenie published in 1874, image sourced from here)
And so the visit to the aquarium in the 21st century had come to be a Hajj for the entire human race, balanced between scientific exploration and spirituality. Thus the aquarium, the least expected institution of Victorian curiosity and intrigue had come to negotiate differences between subjectivity and objectivity, between the church and the parliament, between inquisitions and justice. Like fishes aligning themselves to light in the absence of gravity, mankind was aligning itself to the sea within.

Collective Lost&Found Libraries and Insertions in Ideological Circuits

When I lost a very good book few months back I remember one of my friends telling me not to grieve over it as it had only become one of the many articles that form a collective pool of lost objects and something had become little more public in a world infested with privatising even thoughts and ideas. For me it was nice to imagine a city where people would be conscious of these lost and found objects, where as a gesture one had to leave an 'exchange' for the object they wish to take with them only to be lost again when they desire. Or seeding a city with books purposefully lost along strategic locations on designed topics to be found by an unsuspecting audience member, could very well come to be a tool of revolution, atleast a literary one, maybe.

(one of the works of Cildo Meireles, with the question "Who killed Herzog?" stamped, refering to the suspicious death in prison of the journalist Wladimir Herzog sourced from TATE also a very good interview of the artist here)
One of the artists whose work I really enjoyed seeing at Tate Modern, Cildo Meireles believes in using pre-existing systems to ones advantage which he refers to as Insertions into Ideological Circuits. Where objects of daily use that get circulated through a huge number of people (currency, soft drink bottles, or maybe even the London tube free newspaper) can be appropriated to send messages to a far diverse and wider audience. In an interview the artist explains "While having a beer with a friend at a bar in Rio, he remarked that an olive stone could never be removed from a bottle unless the mechanical process for washing bottles was changed. As I pictured this olive stone inside a bottle, I concluded that there are circulation mechanisms within society which could be used by artists as counter-information. Newspapers, radio and television are circuits for transmission with a very broad reach, yet they are vulnerable – that is to say, they are easily controllable."
Another artist whose work comes close to this is Omer Fast whose work T3-Aeon involved altering the soundtrack of The Terminator movies rented from New York area video stores. The sound tracks were interviews that served as a secret anonymous record of incidences that had transpired in the private space. Like Michel Gondry's Hollywood comedy Be Kind Rewind the possibilities of remaking stories and inserting them within this system is infinite.

(image sourced from the artist's blog here)

(image sourced from the artist's blog here more images can be found here)
In present day digital age, while the corporate thugs go on a witch hunt to close down different services that allow free exchange of files that are private properties, I came across the DeadDrops project by Aram Bartholl! It is fantastically smart move in the present context, goes along the lines of juxtaposing two public spaces together and just plays along the "what is in the box" curiosity for people to start plugging in along walls, booths, curbs and all sorts of places to exchange files that they have no clue of. And yes there is always fear of catching viruses but that is true for even delicious looking street food! its public space so get over it!

1st para: found a nice blog, 2nd para: a long painful rant, 3rd para: Happy Diwali

Of the different kinds of architectural drawings made during different stages of the project, there are two types that almost tend to sit on either side of the process establishing a dialectics. One conceptualising architecture as a form of knowledge while the other casting it as knowledge of form. To me it is the conceptual stage that is most intriguing, during which architecture formulates itself as a built indicator/critique of various socio-political and environmental trends. Sometimes the drawing that conceptualises the product is so exquisite that the built project is read as a representation of that drawing.

(borrowed from Nikita's blog Drawing Architecture, one of the many drawings found on her tumblr site. Above is drawing by Ivan Leonidov for Ministry of Heavy Industry)
If you too like me enjoy seeing these kind of conceptual drawings then I found a very nice tumblr blog maintained by Nikita a student of Architecture with a keen eye for good drawings, skilled doodler and with great sources for some really beautiful drawings that are not easily available on the net. Added to my sidebar under depositories, I hope she continues sharing some great drawings.

But if you are more into "i like getting things built and done man" (in the manner of a pass out with zero imagination and trying to earn some redemption through picking up some fairly conventional standard details from ridiculously predictable sources like your employer or worse, books recommended by your builder) then go read some Neuferts and hope that someday the house you build will have fantastically standard details that will work but will just be another standard house in the village and not Villa Savoy.


(sourced from Ghee Happy)
In order to end this post on a better note, now for something completely different, Wishing everyone A Very Happy Diwali!

Mapping

"If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where the decline of the Empire sees this map become frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts — the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an Imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing) — then this fable has come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra."
Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra"

To Learners of New Languages and Old

According to Foucault, the relationship between thought and language is that of geometry and algebra, where all the geometric shapes spontaneously pre-exist in nature waiting to be drawn and discovered but it is the algebric expression that provides the shape a meaning that is precise to its nature, where the spontaneity of the shapes' existence gets tuned in a mathematical meaning that when played will become that shape. And sometimes it is formulation of an algebric expression that could lead us to an undiscovered shape.
I loved this metaphor as it immediately makes one conscious of the proximity of language to space and social structure.This simultaneous Independence and symbiotic interdependence between language and thought I believe makes it even more crucial to conserve, learn, understand, speak and make new languages or else we lose out on all hopes of making something truly original that sprouts from the fertile soil of human conscience.
Some linguists estimate that a language dies every two weeks with the death of its last speaker. Apparently India tops the list with 196 endangered languages, geographically most of them located in the North and North-Eastern regions which had an interface with rest of the Asian landmass.
Maybe some decades down we may come to inherit a handful of fine words distilled to perfection by the utilitarian global culture, that quite ironic for their meaning sum up the true essence of human rot: LOL & LMAO!