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

Cardiff

The other day i got angry at a font...

I found here, that graphic designer by the name Wim Crouwel said "Helvetica was a real step from the 19th century typeface... We were impressed by that because it was more neutral, and neutralism was a word that we loved. It should be neutral. It shouldn't have a meaning in itself. The meaning is in the content of the text and not in the typeface."
This sentence to me sums up all efforts being made to design the ultimate neutrality right from fonts, built form to day to day conversations, a fantastic example of how in the absence of means to reconcile contradictions the only way forward is polite neutrality of liberal capitalism. And guess coincidentally which companies have it in their logos...
Fuck Helvetica!

Tadao Ando's Fountain on Mount St @ Mayfair

City at crossroads

While working on a regeneration project in Sao Paulo, its modernist grid, dense urban fabric and wide vehicular road network makes for obvious comparisons to New York. I have visited neither of the cities but only attempt to construct very vague ideas of them based on different media and people who do visit and narrate experiences of having been and lived there.

One of the few things that intrigued me during the course of the project was the difference in nature of the  (Google) satellite images for New York and Sao Paulo. It isn't something that one notices immediately but I feel it could be metaphorical of the dissimilarity between the two cities. While the New York grid lies all in single plane, with every skyscraper casting its shadow at exactly the same angle as the entire city is bathed in the warm sunlight, Sao Paulo's multi coloured towers criss cross with one another to hide and reveal nooks and crevices, private courtyards, hidden pockets of lush greenery etc. The ground plane seems to modulate and fold as it attempts to balance these towers that like shards rise above in multiple directions. The schism between the overwhelming complexity of the site and an extremely advanced technology of 'eye' in the sky is apparent, as even such a technological advancement struggles to find apt representations for this particular human conglomeration. The acknowledgement of this complexity turns the satellite image into a multiple point perspective collage that attempts to voyeur into the 'local'. 

Through the course of the project these confrontational complexities within the site seemed to seep not only in the satellite imagery but also within the design, the collaborations and finally the aggressive global capital that tries to spread its roots in the fabric of the city...making the site of urban intervention an extremely contested territory with multiple points of perspective.

One of the very few projects in the professional space that I thoroughly enjoyed working on. It was very similar to the Regeneration project that I was a part of in Bombay but with only more amplified conditions of densities, dilapidation and pressure towards urban cleansing.

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.

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: