Excavating the Future

Our city is a spatial interpretation of a possible future community in the region of Poplar located north of Canary Wharf. From the present context to the frozen image of a possible future in 2088, the leap in time bridges the two moments and also produces a blind field in between. During these 80 years the community has transformed into a new spatial agglomeration. The project involved tracing one such possible trajectory of the future and imagining a ‘world’ born out of reaction / revolution against the unsustainable polarized geography being produced by the global capital.

(photo courtesy Nora Karastergiou)
The development neither has any singular narrative (history) nor any masterplan diagram (structure) to explain the formula of everything (strips, bar code, contraction, expansion, leaf, fingers, donut, computer chip and many other metaphors and patterns that we repeatedly use as architects or urban designers). The city has narrow dark alley ways of Paris (pre-haussmannization), Industrial pollution of Victorian London and Zeppelins that cast shadows below as they make their way to their destination within the city connecting this pocket of collective resistance to other places.

(photo courtesy Nora Karastergiou)
The representation of this unhygienic, unsustainable development with multiple poorly lit and ventilated spaces, crowded public realm and dangerous streets is attempted by us through multiple fragments of this M C Escherian Metamorphosis that has black, grey and white spaces housing fragments of history, narratives of future and glimpses of different spaces unearthed by us as we - the archaeologists of future excavate this future artifact and make our way back to the present......

(This is the brief of the project that I, Kostas and Barbara did for our final presentation with enough rhetoric and aggression ensuring our success at not being employed in any architectural or urban design office ever in our life time!!)

next plan is to illustrate a Fairy Tale book, design a city making machine and paint.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious,
Freedom is consciousness of the necessity.
-Marx

Images of Utopia

SNOW

migrant.

Utopias and Flying machines

Throughout history one can see visions, utopias and imagined futuristic landscape drawn by artists, architects and mad men, in an attempt to break away from the present. The positive spirit, Le Spirit Nouveau always seems to be communicated through three clear devices, the far distant horizon, the observer in the foreground seeing into the space of the drawing from a vantage point and the distant flying machine in the form of a gas balloon, hovering heli-car, zeppelin, etc. All these three elements placed within an atmosphere of fog, clouds and lines that manage to be hazy to allow multiple trajectories of the future but at the same time confident and precise about their intent. The distant horizons seem to reflect the very look in the eyes of Doge Leonardo Loredan, painted by Bellini, confident, meditative and composed. The observer to me is like a witness within a time bubble as he sees the emergence of a mega structure, a new world that rises in slow motion before him with promises to solve all the problems of the present. Unlike most drawings the human here is not used for scale, but this role gets taken up by the third element which is the flying machine. The flying machine, an element big enough to provide scale and also elegant enough to take up the role of being a symbol of the ultimate freedom, a metaphor for the moment in the future where the vision seems to be liberated even from the most basic force that shaped architecture through the ages, the force of gravity. Whether the future imagined is through a narrative of a disease, a natural disaster or a nuclear war, all these crises somehow provide a small window to imagine an alternative, out of a need / necessity for reconfiguring of society and life.

BERLIN

One’s ability to understand the present is strongly informed by the knowledge of the past and how deep does one perceive history through different events, people, stories and myths. No other city made me more conscious of this, as I struggled to grapple with the Berlin landscape of empty dark voids, glitzy global commerce, historical sites and the neon night life. I don’t know why but I sensed a strange melancholy in the city. Was it because of the extremely cold weather, the snow, its history or the Easter holidays, is something that I will have to leave to my future visits to this place.
As we entered Berlin from the Schonefeld airport, with the S and U Bahn heading towards Zinnovitzer Strasse on the U6 line, I saw huge empty plots of land, streets that were magnificent axes of power today dimly lit by street lights that would alternate on each side and distanced enough to create pockets of darkness and light, cold wind passing freely along fat masculine buildings separated by equally wide distances. As we reached our hostel, a booking misconception landed the 6 of us in a dormitory with 5 rows of bunk beds in a hall, each one of us having a number that we had to hang on our beds, just like the rest of the 50 odd transits who changed every night. To be sleeping in a room full of strangers, hearing them snore, cough, talk and seeing them brush, shave and change, exchanging uncomfortable glances of suspicion and self awareness was an experience that started my exploration of Berlin. As I observed people from my bed I could see each one of them being travellers, some in groups of two’s and three’s while most being a majority of solitary explorers with different places, experiences and environments etched on their skins.
Through our five day stay in Berlin, we successfully covered the usual suspects like the Reichstag with the Foster’s dome, Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial, Libeskind’s Jewish museum, Mies van der rohe’s National Art gallery, Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus at Dessau, Schinkel’s Altes museum, the Brandenburg gate, the East side art gallery on the Berlin wall, Postdamer platz, Alexanderplatz, etc. Each layer of history layering new assertions of power, like being able to cut through a sedimentary rock and read into the past when the region went through floods, droughts and climatic changes, I felt this city could be understood through these layers that knit together loosely held centres created through Berlin’s engagement with the global economy and empty dark voids that slowly undergo a process of rebuilding. The public realm seemed to take refuge in old buildings, pubs, bars with metal doors and plastic curtains in the form of a very active night life for goths, ping pong players, retired tram drivers, chain smokers, vegetarians, etc. Somehow my experience of Berlin has left me a bit disoriented, hope i get an opportunity to visit it again someday.

stair, clown, cyclops girl & city balcony

Mega structures, Public realm and the Collective

I had my pre final submission today. We are working on a project that gives proposal for the future of London. We have based our project within concerns of social sustainability but have taken up a distant futures in order to formulate visions of Utopias and be able to create a narrative where social unsustainability has become a crisis strong enough to form multiple collectives. I feel the thing with utopias is that it enables one to break away from present trends within the discipline and from all the discourses of practicalities but at the same time allows one to form a framework to manoeuvre around the concerns of the present, where idea of creating new imaginations for the future becomes the intervention...a birth for new set of sounds, grammar, language, society and civilizations.

(drawing courtesy Kostas)
It is during this presentation of ours that something amazing happened! For the first time our course director stood up and looked at our drawing, ...and then he spoke, but he did not speak as Colin Fournier the course director, trying to negotiate around different interest groups or diplomatically playing cards of offence and defence, but instead he was Colin Fournier from many years back, a young man who had just finished making a drawing with Peter Cook in the Archigram series, someone who had just assisted young Bernard Tschumi to formulate a project that will change ideas of context for ever. He spoke and described the continuous struggle between the socialist modern architect’s vision and the present day all facilitator, negotiator, open market, post modern architect’s systems and policies. We read the success of our presentation through Colin's transformation, and have come to realize the ordeal that lies ahead.......taaddaaaaaa!

Slice of Life

Language

Being surrounded by people from diverse regions of the world each having their own language, we often come across familiar sounds, words, proverbs and phrases that we discover and compare, revealing encoded moralities, ethics, value systems and perceptions of entire civilizations ingrained within the meaning of a single word. As if through the language we understand and build the world, through words with subtle differences that are so similar and often accidentally considered synonymous, but become exact in their meaning during a beautiful sunset or in the middle of a crisp argument.

During our meals we often have elaborate culinary conversations, with people talking about rotting, fermenting, aging of different expressions that describe fruits, vegetables, cuisines, and all this flavoured by prose communicating spices that many a times I feel reveal the spiciness simply through their phonetics. Like Italo Calvino’s story “Under the Jaguar Sun” words dissolve, marinate and become food, form and space. Kostas says language is like an organism, which requires people and food so that it survives and not by just talking or reading your language but engaging with it and giving birth to new words and new methods of arranging words so as to represent form and spaces and our new ideas about them. As I involve myself presently in the process of informally learning some light hearted Greek, I have become even more aware of how the structure of language even structures the experience of the world around. On comparing it to my mother tongue, I realise there are different objects, spaces, forms, our bodies, feelings etc that have been asserted the feminine or the masculine gender, my neck is feminine, the door is masculine, the tree is inanimate etc. With the pleasure of having a choice (and vice versa) between different words conveying the same meaning but to choose different genders I suppose turns the experience of the world into something much more beautiful than “it”.
In the Greek language different words with meanings get added and subtracted like a mathematical or design process in order to almost invent a new word like oplismeno skirodema......which is a word communicating reinforced concrete through combinations of “to support” +“strong”+”small stones” + “earth” and each of these words having multiple other connotations and references. The Spanish language seems to thrive on accents and slang that hides and reveals meanings based on which history one is a part of, but on most occasions everyone is your “socio”. The Japanese language through its words for numbers can reveal what is the nature of the object that is being counted and also sometimes its status simply through the number. When my Brit friend Tom asks “anyone fancies a drink?” at the end of a tiring day, I enjoy retorting “always a pleasure”......two sentences filled with enough desire, to turn going for drinks into a an absolute passion in a city with a fast eroding public realm.
So as we through language, assert pluralities, sexualities and history on forms and spaces, do our experiences of these spaces change as well? Is it that the very language used to construct and sell the idea of these spaces got reinforced through the process of their implementation? Or am I simply building myself an elaborate “baroque” trap that will keep me engaged in the process of ornamenting the language and convoluting the content?

Canary Wharf
(from Poplar and Stepney neighbourhood)

Sainsbury’s, Canary wharf and a Happy New Year!

I live in a beautiful city. A city where artists and musicians are most generously waged places along beautiful pavements, clean side walks and efficient underground tube station. Most of these obstinate rebels sincerely strive to be as innovative as possible in order to impress a banker, an accountant, a lawyer, a minister within a brief span of 10 seconds to earn a glance of pity, a smile of appreciation and some pennies. This hierarchy tends to repeat itself over and over again in the ugliest possible manner all over this beautiful city, safe guarded by sirens and dotted by museums. This beautiful city has CCTV cameras protecting the innocents from the violence of ‘stomping, whopping, stealing, singing, tap-dancing, violating, Derby-topped’ Clockwork Orange-hooligans who resist converting into straight forward, god fearing, taxpaying, credit card using, over consuming citizens.....inspite of the museums, galleries, libraries, monuments, gardens, lawns, Christmas trees, angels, churches, castles, villas, banks and one royal family complete with a queen! This global economic capital, a city with highest ethnic & cultural mix all over the world successfully manages to tame most of its tourists, migrants and residents, to steer clear of discontent and talk about discounts. As people from council housing and elite villas alike, plunge together on Boxing Day, passionately shopping for pieces of brands that will build their sense of identities when they travel in the tube to their homes. So it isn’t a surprise when most conversations of not so interesting people oscillate within a rather wide range of great deals in beautiful clothes, mugs, shoes and coffee powders........and environmental sustainability!

Jury and BBQ party

After fairly eventful presentations on London involving London being hit by, or on the brink of one global disaster or the other of scales to inspire some of the very best Hollywood movies, we had a barbecue party with lots of food, drinks and dance.

Interestingly we realised that the discipline of architecture and urban design here has been systematically disconnected from society and strongly wants to restrict itself to form making. It is something about these big global educational institutions, where for knowledge to become more knowledgeable, demands so much of resources that it gets tied up within these strings of funding and financing. And this step in many of our lives is the first step towards getting integrated within this system, where we too shall start exclaiming ‘everything is not so black and white!’.......

Some more trip details :)

Amsterdam & Rotterdam trip

Both the cities are extremely beautiful and very interesting. With manmade land that reclaims the sea, the cities are like a labyrinth of concentric canals and built form that float like rafts on water that have lost anchorage with reality and have floated far away with their coffee shops, red light areas and trams & tourists to become absolute global heterotopias (especially for Europe). The canals constantly cut through a fairly dense and ornate urban fabric consisting of different urban design and planning experiments carried out during various times by a state that has complete control over the land. This land fluctuates between being natural and artificial, frequently reminding its inhabitants of the pact with Mother Nature through quite amusing sustainability policies and principles.

Amsterdam: The area of the old city (Amsterdam Central Station) has narrow old ornate buildings that mange to stand delicately, along canals. Each building standing gracefully along the canal like a beautiful aging starlet in front of the mirror looking for signs of age to be brushed off with some paint and maintenance, to win a precious glance of appreciation from a transient admirer.

Further out of the old city one sees experiments that have failed and succeeded, with the Dutch ceaselessly attempting big and small utopias through design and planning strategies that respond to nature, locals and the market.

Almere: Almere is one such Dutch experiment in the modern times, which in creation of a new city centre with shopping malls and retail designed by well known architects to create according to me a highly nauseous environment. While most of my classmates were cribbing about coming to a place like this, Kostas and me were discussing how it was extremely important to come to this place and take up the role of silent witnesses to one such experiment that attempts to ask the age old question of do cities create jobs or jobs create cities, so that our recordings will be useful in the future when we would be called to the stands, of our disciplines.

Rotterdam: I absolutely loved the city, probably the most of all the places I had seen. It seemed to me like the absolute urban laboratory where numerous experiments were attempted with different results that had collaged an urban fabric of exquisite success and failures but both contributing to a knowledge base. It was very interesting, and most importantly I felt at home as I could sleep peacefully while hearing sounds of bells, people, traffic , the street and the city....

Besides all of the above I and my friends enthusiastically discussed about the Kunsthal, Le Corbusier, Global capital, prime minister of Iran, Thai food and very marvellously designed Dutch women.

Bernard Tschumi

Few days back I had the opportunity of attending a lecture by Bernard Tschumi at the AA. As he started his presentation with saying ‘Architecture is not knowledge of Form... but a form of Knowledge, and its role is not to just make buildings... but to raise questions’... (especially within the space of an institution that has quite skilfully reduced the entire field of architecture into an orgy of form making exercises) he was an instant hit with me and my Greek friend Kostas. He went ahead with explaining the context within architectural scenario and each of his project right from Parc de la Villette to the more recent ones like his museum in Athens responding to those contexts. What was interesting was when he spoke about the project he was able to talk about THE project (and not how it was built and how was it managed and how many agencies worked)...But as Colin, our course director and his then partner during Parc de la Villette, observed that he had successfully for the sake of the presentation had forged every project into the ‘Context & Concept’ framework leaving out all the Joker cards, all the aberrations, all the unexpected skews and scratches....On the whole it was a very interesting lecture followed by an equally interesting question and answer session wherein Mr. Tschumi was able to provide quite intelligent answers to some of the most stupid questions I had ever heard of. Very interesting and very inspiring.

a house on a hill...

My Room

I stay at Swiss Cottage, a tube station that lies in privileged zone 2 of London on the Jubilee line, which is the grey line on the ‘transport for London (TFL)’ map. It being a student’s accommodation I have the leisure of one small-cozy-tiny-but-still-cozy-room, one window and shared kitchen that I use very rarely. My room has a blue-green carpet on the floor, pale yellow walls and light brown laminated furniture. The main door to my room is wooden and is painted in apple green. It is a clean room and all the signs of someone having lived here before me have been successfully erased, moped, dried and painted. The absence of traffic sounds, mixers, pressure cookers, bells, radio etc is further amplified by the silence here, it gets too quite sometimes...but fortunately the refrigerator in my room has started making some sound that reassures me of the world’s existence on very quite nights. The first model I have made after coming here sits on the bookshelf along with wooden Ganapati (lovingly named Gumpoo) guarded by some members of Justice League of America and CCTVs downstairs. Most of my room is still in default mode but every weekend it blooms in all its glory, with a carnival of the entire week’s laundry. Great weather, Amazing Brit cuisine and a very accommodating city....what can I say people.....I miss home.