G20 summit

(group photo from previous summit)
As we are confronted by the global economic crises, the hypocrites of the world united, converge for the G20 summit to discuss creative ways to once again attempt to sell the classic oxymoron of "principled capitalism". Reforming International Financial Institution, the IMF and the World Bank seem to be some of the explicitly unavoidable points on the itinerary that shall get discussed in order to collaboratively plot more sophisticated adjustments to global economies to continue 'business as usual'.
Organizations by the name 'Put People First' described as "a coalition of development charities, trade unions, faith groups, environmentalists and other organisations, formed in response to call for a fair, sustainable route out of recession" on their website, have been successful in gathering a collective for a protest march involving thousands of people taking to the streets from Embankment to Hyde Park.
I personally don’t believe protests by themselves bring change, but they are very important and extremely instrumental in forming a collective conscience and asserting conspicuous pressure on representatives that we elect. This point in time, the protest is not for a comparatively small project affected population (Mill lands or Narmada Bachao Andolan), neither is it for a niche cause not apparent enough to our everyday lives (Purple snails in the 6 sector of Amazonian rainforest) but it may come to be one of the first truly global protest that may sow the seeds for further sporadic global representations of discontent against systems of state and private oppression. (please note as I desperately refrain from using the R word)

Silence

If silence had eyes it would had seen the world somewhat similar to Michael Kenna's photographs. The photographs are taken during dawn or night, under low light conditions with the exposure lasting sometimes upto 10 hours which gives the photographs an ethereal light and high contrast. They reminded me of some of Ranjit's paintings that had similar ideas of distant, secluded landscapes of silence.
On one of the sites one can see him having experimented with using similar technique for photographing cities, but the noise of the city seems to prevent the silence from being recorded.

Watchmen and Architects

We are all humans and so are the super humans, and to err IS human. But in a world that exists at the end of History 'to err' is filled with complications that can only be observed and comprehended as a viewer of the film. But in order to achieve such a vantage point of being able to comprehend (the oppression that one is inflicting and is being inflicted on) the choice lies between Rorschach and Dr Manhattan. Rorschach with his moral absolutism, operates at the scale of streets, alley ways and trail along local networks, thereby clearly defining the crime and judging the criminal. But at the same time he cannot have the view of geography and time as Dr. Manhattan, whose world unlike Rorschach's clear mirrored inkblots is filled with a spectrum of colours that he himself has no control over.

His powers make it necessary for him to intervene and his interventions provide him the power; Somewhat like Rem Koolhas's interventions in the Middle East. His ability to enter and cater to a closed circuit of rich oil barons, sheikhs, dictators in the middle east, provide him the power to voice opinion through his projects, but this voice is at the expense of supporting a dictatorial regime with all its flaws. These interventions provide his parallel journalistic endeavours with fertile data and statistics that further build a complex pattern of the world. A view informed by networks within inaccessible information circles of capital and power, highly skilled labour, hired specialised consultants and finally a lot of support lobbies among various states.

But at the end when the two dialectics meet and the choice of Right to Information has the possibility to result in complete chaos, the days of the small but sternly aligned architect are over. Rorschach loses his capacity to intervene and dies a hero. I wonder what the film would be like if instead of Rorschach, Dr Manhattan would had been the narrator/ the sutradhar...

Unfair and Square

I always believed no place could be considered to be Tabula Rasa in the present context, not even the desert, till I started working where I work. Somehow there are certain contexts where not only the geography but also social life is a desert devoid of public life, filled with suppression and a dictatorial administration asserting all forms of social injustice. In such a scenario it is not very surprising when numerous design offices come up with a square plan as a symbol of refuting the existing context, like a square floating raft (like Thomas Moore's Utopia) where the designer can build his own imagined worlds, where women have equal rights, spaces have active democratic public life and people earn and live with dignity. The square raft has public spaces, green spines, market squares, towers, villas, institutions of democracy and even artefacts and symbols of culture and history...roads and infrastructure spin out of this raft and anchor it within this sea of sand and oil that it desperately refuses to acknowledge.Below are some of the square master plans being developed in the middle east:

(image source Dezeen, which has renderings at street level)
in addition to this below are some video links advertising the city like one would advertise a new gadget like a mobile phone:
a) Masdar initiative
b) Design promotion by Foster
c) City aerial fly through
d) City zones
e) Masdar headquarters and built form branding
1) The plan of MASDAR (UAE, 2007), by Foster + Partners epitomizing creation of sustainable utopia with carbon neutral and zero waste community for UAE. All these good intentions surrounded by a property market already advertising this city as a brand to be sold and speculated in the name of sustainability!

(image source from Archidose who also gives a glimpse into the petty fight between 2 starchitects over originality of idea)

(images sourced from Dezeen, the site also provides ideas of concept, landuse and project teams)

2) OMA's plan for CITY IN THE DESERT, (UAE, 2006) Ras Al-Khaimah, in the northern part of the UAE. coincidently OMA provides a brief that represents the city building activity as a design enquiry and not an urge to do social or environmental good.

(images sourced from Dezeen which also provides details of areas, floor space, projected populations and other interesting statistics, in addition to the rendered views of the project)

3) This is another plan developed by OMA called the WATERFRONT CITY (Dubai,2008), that floats within the lagoon formed by the crazy embroidery of egos that surround it.

(image courtesy B&M architects)

4) This plan is done by B&M architects for Jeddah harbour area master plan .Their website has very little description of design development or brief but it being designed in the year 1996, clearly makes it a predecessor to most other square plans being developed in the middle eastern context or should I say acontext.

Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.
-Marx

China Photography

For people who are interested in hyper densities, manufacturing sector, people and images from china but have always been stopped by the inaccessible Chinese wall of media control and censorship, Michael Wolf's photography website might be an important source of visual images.His website describes him as having "born in Munich, Germany. He grew up in the USA and studied at UC Berkley and at the University of Essen in Germany. He has been living and working as a photographer and author in China for ten years...Wolf has been intensively concerned with the topic of vernacular culture for many years. His most recent work deals with the issue of the cultural identity of the city of Hong Kong. The exhibition "Architecture of Density" shown in New York in February 2004 is a part of Michael Wolf's Hong Kong project. Thames and Hudson will publish Michael Wolf’s new work "Hong Kong, The Front Door/The Back Door” in 2005".

On his website the section particularly dealing with Hong Kong contains some really beautiful images that seem to smoothly balance between art, archive and politics of image making. Within his China editorial work, his classifications of images and the archive itself is simple but extremely powerful. This seems to be one of the very few sites spared by the Chinese authorities. Below are some of the images by Michael Wolf from his website (the Hong Kong hyper density section)...

Recession as an excuse for exploitation

The economic recession and reduction in the global job market has created extreme competition within people (with different priorities and access to opportunities) for jobs. This in turn has led to the recession being used as an excuse by the employer to negotiate with the employee for the cost of his / her labour. If you are one of the many professionals being exploited by recession, it is important that you do not allow this to devalue (if you are thinking about working for free) or undervalue your skills and capabilities. Form small groups with your equals or friends, work for a competition or towards developing visions and ideas, take shelter within academic spaces and find venues through floating culture capital but by no means let your value be decided by a desperate employer wanting to keep his office profits afloat at your expense. So beware of underpaid office internships promising a learning experience!

Pictures of the Floating World (Ukiyo-e)

An art form that grew with the 'floating' and unbound (from the traditional Japanese class structure) merchant class between the 17th and 20th century came to be known as Ukiyo-e literally translating as pictures from the floating world. These being wood block prints could be mass produced and were affordable. The subjects for the images range from Japanese urban life, landscapes, everyday activities, public spectacles like sumo matches etc. As this art form also started with the intention of being illustrations to books, stories, theatre scripts that were being churned out by the merchant class, the paintings are easy to comprehend, simple but powerful in their compositions and carry some amount of text explaining the plot of the image. Around the mid 18th century certain technological advancements allowed production of full colour prints that came to be known as nishiki-e which are my personal favourites especially the ones of Hiroshige and Hokusai.
One of my Japanese friends Hiroshi also informed me that these prints were also used as covers of wrapping papers to protect the official document, making the protective cover as important as the document. Maybe it is exactly this combination of mass production, beauty and easy comprehension that must have made this art form most threatening to the state and higher classes that asserted strict rules against use of political subjects, individuals above the lowest strata of society (courtesans, wrestlers and actors) and sex as subjects for the prints. Going by present times and an urgent need for Agitprop this may be a very important tool for designers to contribute through.
Below are some of my favourite Ukiyo-e prints.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861)

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)

Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858)

Corbusier @ the Barbican

There could have been no better venue to exhibit works by Le Corbusier in London other than the Barbican. The Barbican estate came into being just after the WW2 between 1965 and 1976, on a 35-acre site, designed by architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon. The central water body, the podium connected with numerous and often confusing bridges as public spaces and grey towers that form walls protecting this concrete utopia are prime example of Modern Brutalist architecture. Interestingly the conception of this estate started in the same year when Le Corbusier had his last swim towards the setting sun in the Mediterranean Sea on 27th august 1965.
The exhibition includes some really good drawings and models besides the modular furniture and some art works. A dark monochrome wooden block model approximately 2 X 2 meters with Chandigarh city being represented through carved relief work was beautiful, reminded me of the time when I had the opportunity to look at the Chandigarh complex from the terrace of the secretariat building. The models of Ronchamp and the recently completed Sainte Pierre in a small French town of Firminy were stunning. The exhibition also has some really interesting models and drawings of unrealized mega visions like plan Obus in Algiers and Ville Contemporaine in Paris.
If we go by the words of Ludwig von Mises "[The planners] are driven by the dictatorial complex. They want to deal with their fellow men in the way an engineer deals with the materials out of which he builds houses, bridges, and machines. They want to substitute "social engineering" for the actions of their fellow citizens and their own unique all-comprehensive plan for the plans of all other people. They see themselves in the role of the dictator—the duce, the Führer, the production tsar—in whose hands all other specimens of mankind are merely pawns. If they refer to society as an acting agent, they mean themselves. If they say that conscious action of society is to be substituted for the prevailing anarchy of individualism, they mean their own consciousness alone and not that of anybody else" (The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science) I believe Le Corbusier fits this profile, every time he left architecture and went for urban planning and design, but none the less this man did it with suave!

A lot of us urban planners and designers get such opportunities while we cater to benevolent dictators, rich clients and even important institutions of democracies but very rarely do we see such cohesive utopian visions formulated and asserted on the urban landscape. Most of the times it lands up becoming a muddled up patchwork of egos, bureaucracy, client's desires, miscommunication, regional and global political upheavals and we land up with a Frankenstein of a plan that no one and sometimes not even the design firm is responsible for. One thing we have to accept is Le Corbusier can be critiqued because he designed and design is commitment that goes beyond statistics and words and he seemed to have managed the design part of his life quite successfully.

Fairy tales & Illustrations

In the book store not so surprisingly I often find myself spending more time in the children’s section. I relish going through very minutely detailed illustrations of surreal narratives that have taken root in various cultures and time periods, and stand to reflect the value systems embodied within every society. The text and illustrations feed on each other but at the same time possess the ability to be independent works. The illustrations sometimes do not necessarily illustrate the text but build their own narratives to play a game of curiosity and intrigue, where one leaves the text and gets engrossed within the illustration, absorbing every line, detail, colour and composition. But of recently I find the pages having become glossier and the illustrations less detailed, with the narratives sterilized by our political righteousness. The stories seem to have lost their sense of imagination, .Maybe these new glossy, simple, sterile fairy tales are reflections of our current society...
Some illustrations by Ivan Bilbin (1876 – 1942) and Arthur Rackham (1867 – 1939) two of my favourite illustrators, who played an important role in rendering some of the most beautiful stories with their imagination.

snow

Instant image Unreal

Yet another form of photography, called tilt shift photography that makes the real photograph look like plastic models. As much as I like it I also get a bit scared of how today, with everything possible the product is no longer a reflection of technological evolution or artistic development, but different aesthetics of imagery have been reduced to fetishized styles of personal indulgences. Like interior designers providing the client ideas for houses as sincere reflections of the clients personality through appropriation of classicism, art deco, regionalism etc.
Parallel to this I also happened to discover 'Steam Punk', a science fiction sub genre, especially within product and graphic design that imagines an alternative development of the present future based on industrial Victorian aesthetics, where language of technology and machines has been developed by steam power. But in this as well the adoption of aesthetics is somewhat synonymous to the skins of steel, glass, optic cables, stone tiles etc that our environments are getting clad in. I can imagine architects like Herzog de Meuron (no offence to them or their fans, I love their work) going through an array of cladding materials in the manner of a pernickety fashion designer, desperately trying to form a language. The tool of perception or design of cities after having passed through ages of perspectives and axonometrics has finally come to be a flat all surveying google earth jpeg, or set of arrows on direction guiding GPS device.

(Below are some of my own photo examples of tilt shift photography, which of course have been achieved through photoshop as the lens is extremely expensive.)

Rothko and Cildo Meireles (Tate Modern)

I and Nora had been to Rothko exhibition a week back, but somehow did not enjoy seeing his work. According to Rothko, “The progression of a painter’s work…will be towards clarity; toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer…to achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.” Probably it is this removal of all obstacles and turning it into absolute clarity is what I did not understand. People were seen closely observing red on yellow, purple on black, black on grey and all kinds of colour combinations on huge canvases with mystified reverence. Adding to this was the gallery’s low lighting exactly “as had been requested by Rothko himself”. The exhibition also had Rothko’s work photographed under ultra violet light, to explain the numerous layers of colours, pigments and mediums that he used, which somehow seem to mystify the art work further. The exhibition illustrated the politics of art and the art gallery to its best.

In complete contradiction to this was Cildo Meireles’s work (born half a century after Rothko) which was absolutely stunning to engage with. Most exhibits were playful and at the same time political. For me Meireles managed the balance between politics and poetry beautifully. The rhetoric at no point in time took over the beauty of the form, which sometimes is very difficult especially when the art work is to represent a strong alignment within a highly political issue. It was nice. Inspite of the gallery having stationed public policing volunteers to stop people from taking photographs, I surreptitiously managed to take some snaps as a gesture of my support for the art work.

Furcht

Having lived in Bombay all my life and lived through, the 1992 communal riots (900 dead, 2000 injured), the Bombay blast (thirteen in total) of 1993 (approx. 300 dead, 1400 injured), 11th July 2006 train bombings (209 dead, 700 injured), and other acts of violence like slum clearance, urban renewal, building collapse, flooding etc.which get skipped by the media looking for more sensational numbers, I feel we become numb to these incidences. We awake or take notice only when the violence reaches our door steps. Just like everyone else, when I heard the news, I called home to be reassured of my family’s well being, then discussed about how bad the incidence was with various people over the next few days and read a little of Salvoj Zizek. Somehow I had become apolitical (well I was indeed political enough to watch the news, be reading the right book at the right time and have a great theoretical framework to explain my take on the terror attack, but...), I could not do anything. It was as if, we have a lot to lose if we become political, our careers, our jobs, our friends, families, our lives. I wondered what was it like for these kids to do what they did, to become 20 year old terrorists and symbols of absolute horror. To feel as if they had nothing to lose, to take lives and end their own with so much ease. I believe the difference between the bomb yielding terrorist and the gun carrying is the same difference that lies in the sentence of death through the guillotine and one at the hands of an executioner...the later brings the locus of public attention from the instrument of death to the executioner, and in this case the executioners were some kids with guns with little to lose and in all probabilities with minds incapable of comprehending the strings that connected them to a much bigger web. A web made out of numerous strings of national interests, communal discontent, personal greed into which all of us contribute, as highly trained professionals designing cities in poorer nations governed by dictator, redesigning urban spaces to facilitate entry of real estate market, drawing substantial profits from the exploitation of unskilled labour working under us and continuing being numb, brain dead consumers infested by desires that turn us into individuals and not a collective (with me along with many more of you, being guilty to all of the above). I believe ‘terror’ is not this ridiculous entity outside us, or some random followers of abstract ideology, but it is a part of our everyday, just like the financial crisis, we have done our bit to contribute to it in one form or the other. And even if we do muster a collectivity we will be still clueless about what to do....maybe make a painting, light a candle, write a book, an article or probably vent out frustration through a blog post, the way I have done.

“We are overcome by anguish at this illogical moment of humanity.”
-Ernesto

Francis Bacon

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see a collection of Francis Bacon’s artworks in an ongoing exhibition at the Tate Britain. The exhibition had a fairly big body of work that successfully represented the stormy life that Bacon fleshed on most of his canvases. Huge canvases representing the apathy and sorrowful existence of humanity had me successfully suffocated and tired. But within the representation of human existence as “raw material for carcases”, one can’t negate the fact that there was some odd sense of beauty that made people stare at it longer, trying to see details of deformation carefully collaged and constructed from (little known) photographic archive that Bacon had in his studio.

Of all the art works the two series of triptychs by the name Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, first done in 1944 and the next done in 1988 were particularly striking to me. They allowed for a certain sense of dualism within repulsion and horror. The three figures (based on the Eumenides—or Furies—in Aeschylus’ Oresteia) are deformed, anthropomorphic creatures with hanging flesh, skinless muscles that sit on platforms and stools as they bare teeth at the observer.

In the first instance the three images come across as creatures filled with rabid rage waiting to tear away from their orange and red environments, but as one observes them for longer the creatures also seem to be writhing in pain, as if being ordered and twisted and contorted to fit within environments and act out a circus before visitors of the art gallery. This feeling of simultaneous fear and pity that the triptych provokes within the observer seemed to be much more valuable to me than some of his other works. Within these two series both being more or less identical I liked the later one but couldn’t help thinking, if it was my architectural education that naively demands a certain aesthetic of colour combination, proportions, finish and frame style.

ABBAU+

ABBAU (Final Master's Thesis Project images)
in collaboration with Konstantinos Dimitrianzos