David Chipperfield Lecture

David Chipperfield the last living specimen of a dying species articulated his practise as being the mediator between the symbolisms existing within the historic narratives and modern architecture. With enquiries of typology, space, form and order that derived their principles from modern architecture but at the same time got integrated with the context of culture and history to configure newer typologies of public and private buildings. He presented his projects as contemporary extensions to the narrative of modern architecture starting with Corbusier, Schinkel and Kahn.

I feel there is something about these modernists that is very inspiring, their sense of hope as they represent every building in the manner of the utopia they establish for the whole world, their constant negotiation with their practise and principles, their urge of constant invention. As if their sense of life stems from architecture, as every environment, every event and just about everything is realized within universal modularity, like the physicist explaining the structure of an atom and a solar system through a single formula...

Car Design @ RCA

Car designs at the Royal College of Arts annual exhibition

V&A

Set and Costume design exhibits at the Victoria and Albert Museum

City of Surveillance

Shape of Pocket

The other day I was reading John Berger’s Shape of Pocket, as I browsed through pages of extremely beautifully written letters and texts about artists and their work. A chapter for every artist as his work was very carefully composed through narratives of personal life, the context (but not context with a ‘capital’ C, rather a much softer almost an atmospheric idea), the emotional struggle, love, hate, drugs and everything else that went into the daubs of colour. I had loved it the first time I read it and is one of the books that I relish re-reading.
But somehow I couldn’t imagine a similar book on architects. Imagine John Berger the same person with the same analytical and linguistic sophistication writing a book of texts on Corbusier, Wright and Kahn. And I can’t help but cringe in disgust at the thought of it and say with the sourest face “oh god! This is so fucking patronizing man!” (In screechy voice, if you know what I mean)
When I watched Peter Greenway’s Belly of an architect, I realised while I saw the film as extremely hilarious parody of ‘the architect’, one of my friend had seen it as a story of serious struggle that an architect goes through in his life. No doubt I didn’t lose the opportunity of ruining it for him the very next day, but was left with a lot of self doubt after seeing how sad the conversation had rendered both of us. In the coming weeks we watched a movie on Frida Kahlo. I loved the film. My very same friend hated it, and was soon minced and devoured by women, feminist men, artists and accident victims with spinal cord injuries, from my class.
And so our last project is going to be an art installation on architecture!

Peter Doig

I very often find myself torn between the dialectics of being able to understand art and architecture through the context, and on the other hand being able to appreciate and asses it for its inherent beauty (if we acknowledge such a possibility exists). ‘A minute in the world’s life passes! To paint it in reality and forget everything for that! To become that minute, to be the sensitive plate....give the image of what we see, forgetting everything that has appeared before our time’ is the way Cezanne explains a painter’s attempt to depict a moment in time such that, its success depends on bringing the observer within the confines of that moment and closing the gap of time between the artist who witnessed it and the observer who centuries down stands and gazes at this moment. In such a case as Berger explains a very simple act of pouring milk (Vermeer) can be beautiful enough to be appreciated within itself, without being aware of Vermeer and women’s role in society.

I am not advocating being blind or ignorant to the politics that lie behind us, but after seeing an art exhibition by the artist Peter Doig (Tate Britain) I find myself a bit more disturbed and confused. I had no clue about him or the nature of his work, but I loved it, I felt happy and very refreshed and even more so, after I had agonized myself looking at some works by the Camden group downstairs. But I had to resolve this feeling of ‘liking’ in my head and somehow tame this stupid subjectivity under some kind of objective reasons. Few days after the exhibition, one morning, when I looked outside my window, I could see the world outside, overlapped by the glass that reflected my room on it and all this being bent by the warm vapour emitted by the heater and a mirage of my own thoughts. Peter Doig’s choice of subjects and their depiction I feel is similar to this experience that we all have, where our eyes lost in thought land on an obscure view of the world and languidly relish staring in air at the mad haze of colours that our unfocused (or politically myopic) retina tries to dwell on.

The most impressive of all the canvases was the painting that showed a view of La Marseilles’ Habitat (Corbusier) from a forest of maple trees. The hard architecture with defined edges and multi coloured patches being interspersed with the organic splatter of leaves and nature was simply beautiful. Also the painting of the Swamp with coloured flora and fauna merging with coloured atmosphere of fog, mist and smoke, being reflected in waters of the swamp influenced by the colour of the sky and the chemicals that make it, was very good. I think I liked it for the mad colours but beyond that there is no objective reason that I can find.
Over the next three months I and Kostas are planning to make a book of “invisible Cities” within London where, we plan to look at this relation between Surrealism, Language and Subjectivity.

The three Sirens of Altes - Amazon, Nefertiti and Nike

Embedded within Berlin’s masculine flesh of chauvinist architecture evolved through multiple palimpsests of memory and power, are three transplants that very gracefully tread the tight rope between the poles of elegant power and absolute beauty. Ironically all the three foreign feminine bodies belonging to different culture, space and time have lodged themselves within Schinkel’s Altes museum. Each of these three women to me seemed to emit an Aura Borealis that seemed to pass through every other artefact in stone, wood and clay and mesmerizing every visitor as they through their composure held the reigns of power and rode the chariots of beauty to become the very symbols of their civilizations within the space of the museum.

The first sculpture is along the steps guarding the gates of the museum. The sculpture of woman, stead and beast (by August Kiss and Albert Wolf) engaged in a battle for survival is frozen in a moment where the potential difference within the struggle has reached its peak and the very next instance the act of throwing of the spear will determine the outcome. The arm that holds the spear is stretched to its limit and points towards the heart of the beast with a calm composure that promises assurance of the outcome. The scale of the statue is about 1.5 times the life size, which makes it small enough for the observer to be a witness and at the same time big enough to restrict ones role only to that. This statue called ‘the Amazon’ beats most of the Victorian lion riders, golden angels, baby cherubs, grumpy queens, gate keepers etc hands down.

In contrast to this sculpture that bears the wind, rain and snow, the other two are highly prized and protected artefacts separated by level difference and civilizations- ground floor dedicated to the Greek civilization and the first floor to the Egyptian civilization. As one enters the central room on the first floor, which is comparatively dimly lit and has only one artefact- the bust of Nefertiti. Seeing it is like seeing the real queen and feeling her gaze on you, with her chin held high, sharp features, beautiful eyes and the head that bears the weight of the crown. She is encased in a glass box that tends to throw multiple reflections of her from different perspectives, in a manner such that one stops acknowledging it as an artefact but starts referring to it as ‘her’, the ultimate three dimensional Fayum portrait that comes to life and asserts to us that ‘I existed’ and ‘I was beautiful and powerful, behold me’.
The third sculpture is not something which is displayed as impressively as Nefertiti or is poised like the Amazon at the steps. The third is in the central rotunda arranged as one of the ten odd Greek gods of love, hate, sex and whatever that the Greeks worshiped.

One might even miss her, but if you do glance at her and especially her feet, all the images of present day science fiction and media’s portrayal of flight seem rather bland in comparison to this statue of Nike’ the goddess of flight (and victory). Looking straight ahead, her clothes flutter and show us the wind and her legs elevated above the ground by just a few inches, a detail I could never forget in my entire life! And then this piece of marble takes flight! I can only imagine what might be the impact of another such statue of the headless Nike in the Louvre in Paris that is positioned at the end of a long circulation axis and is in a pose that is about to leap and challenge gravity. Never before have I been so excited on seeing sculpture, but these three sirens are simply fabulous. Madly in love with all three.

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)