A Recent Spat

A recent spat between Chipperfield and Wolf Prix over the brief for Venice biennale  represents the contradiction that exist within our profession. There are architects who believe their contribution works towards making this world a better place, while some like me are always suspicious that we are assisting in creation of environments that will only assert and strengthen the same socio-economic hierarchy, so the true exploration of 'Common Grounds' should be represented differently.

RIBA as an institute that provides licences to architects to practise in the UK and thereby maintains quality but has very little power when it comes to the market forces that govern the price or even the size of the dwellings. According to a recent survey the dwelling sizes in many cases are as low as 77% of the recommended size. so in such cases the 'element of humanitarian effort' is often shouldered at an individualistic level, in the spirit of trying to do our best within the constraints which ofcourse comes with an asterisk of if the developer permits. These endeavours often become personal battles waged with option 1 which is more profitable and option 2,3,4 and 5 developed during late after office hours by some underpaid intern or worse, a slaving optimist, to have the opportunity to do some good. The choice of the preferred option is determined by the profitability, so option 1 wins, but there is always a warm feeling that we tried out best, and the saving grace skewed block from option 2 did get accepted in option 1. So it wasn't all that bad, we lose some we gain some...and many other self congratulatory phrases that I feel go along the lines of Zizek's anecdote on subversive politics.

To be blatantly honest as architects we have very little control over the environments we design, if the economy and market forces facilitate shoebox houses with bad light and ventilation and on the condition they start selling, we would be very soon presenting each other case studies and precedents of such "interesting high density" housing types.

A very basic preliminary survey of all the new developments taking place around London mostly due to the coalition government's policies geared towards first time buyers and faith in the idea that we can build ourselves out of recession, shows a considerable reduction in floor heights, this in itself is an excellent example of how even the best practise standards are manipulated by the market, so if an architect were to design such a residential project, he/she would ofcourse do the best one can but within the specifications of low ceiling heights as kindly requested by the developer, or if you are BIG who follow the motto Yes if More, you could reduce the height even more so that ones hair brushes against the ceiling, but with an advantage of a beautiful lush garden on the rooftop with collages of happy families enjoying the views to the city.

So what should we do? one friend suggested, "just make a choice, either this side or that". I wish it were as simple. to print my ticket to global occupy movement and become a farmer, or take refuge within academic space.

Another said think of it as subversive..with and against, fighting the system from inside, this unfortunately keeps bringing the happy Russian farmer (from Zizek's link above) to my mind...or the example of university professors who teach in Columbia but their true heart resides in Cuba. (Zizek you bastard! I was happy once!)

Though another friend who was more sympathetic to the confusions brewing in my head explained, life is like driving, if everyone drives strictly by the rules there will be accidents all around, so instead we look around, negotiate with the context and continue driving, but with an acknowledgement that contradictions do exist and we have to drive none the less, because there is no choice.

I hope by the end of our drive, atleast some of us, reach a destination that we pride in as architects living lives filled with constraints, complexities and most importantly contradictions.

The presence of absence of presence....

Camels in Koran
Luis Borges in 'Argentine writer and Traditions' responds to Edward Gibbons doubts overs Koran being an Arabian work, "Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubts as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work", and further elaborating that camels being a part of everyday life, it may have never occurred to an Arab to mention it, and thus the absence actually is a stronger evidence than the animal being mentioned.

Canary Wharf

Trailing along this narrative we can say that the role of industry in Britain may have been such that it never felt any necessary need to invest energies in branding (a strategic word that comes into effect when people try to sell shit for more than what it is worth) itself, its role and relevance was rest assured within the bigger scheme  of things, say as against banking which comes across as a more abstract entity with people clueless about why banking is more precious to British economy than Industry that it gets a state intervention (bailout) when in need...or what is it that they produce? or make? that makes their presence in the middle of urban areas more legitimate than industry or agriculture especially in an era where the image of transaction of numbers with light speed can be done from and to any place on this networked globe.

Pages of record
In Tomas Alfredson's film, 'Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy' based on a book by John Le Carre, the audience is introduced right in midst of 1970s cold war era's British intelligence suffering through enemy infiltration and its efforts to purge this enemy within. This plot further layered with signs, symbols and dialogues that only arouse suspicion of every character, including the lead detective on the case George Smiley played by Gary Oldman, the audience by the middle of the film looks at every occurrence as a plot. But there is only one moment in the film where, both the audience so well trained in suspicion and the detective are absolutely sure of the evidence, which is the absence of pages that record Ricki Tarr's (played by Tom Hardy) message sent on the stated day. This absence of pages is a stronger evidence of his innocence than say them finding the pages with his stated message, wherein there would had always been doubt if this record too is a part of a bigger plot! 
Maybe it is this absence of industry that provides a stronger evidence of its sincerity to put it naively (In "Extracts from L'Organisateur" 1819, Claude-Henri de Saint Simon (1760-1825) having baptised by the French revolution in his lifetime makes a sharp distinction between the idle and the useful in society through the sincerity of effort of production/making). 

Einstein forward
In a viral anecdote that everyone receives sometime or the other as an email forward, an atheist professor trying to explain his students the absence of God through presence of evil, is proved wrong by a young student who replies back that the presence of cold is purely the absence of heat or presence of dark is only the absence of light, just as presence of evil is purely the absence of divinity. Maybe the absence of industry purely proves the absence of much needed state interventions of Olympian proportions to encourage industry, which instead were going towards development of special economic zones for the service industry?

Maybe all this tirade is only a reaction to my recent visit to the Olympic Park. Its landscape changed beyond recognition, having successfully turned into a place with no memories..a clean slate, we don't know the industry that existed here, the people who used to work, the inventions that took place here, nothing. The confidence provided by the massive investment of global capital is so strong that it was never felt at any point in time that maybe somethings could reflect the history or some idea of the past. The surrounding area which once was strongly integrated with people, their livelihood and the community is reduced to artificial manicured background landscape of canals, canal side walks, jogging tracks and bridges for the urban bourgeoisie content with having a matchbox house within a sketchup building surrounded by an equally sterile landscape devoid of any complexity/contradictions, to finally feel at home....smells like a rotten cat to me.

Barcelonaaaaa!

Guglee 2

Recently Nora and me collaborated to design a 50 seater Indian restaurant  with live kitchen by the name Guglee located in West Hampstead, London. The client team is a group of young enterprising people from various streams of restaurant and hotel industry who have come together to form a combination that provides good food, great service and most importantly facilitates opportunities to fresh ideas. The design is a result of us as designers and them as clients working together towards a constructive buildup of the final product.

The restaurant opened few weeks back and was well received by the customers, so if you do happen to be around west hampstead do drop by and let me know what you feel.

Additional drawings, details, 3ds and photos to follow very soon.

Paris Trip

Day 1 (6th April 2012)
Arrival at Garde du Nord.
Monmarte, Basilique de Sacre Coeur,
Artists Square (Place du tertre)
Pigalle, Moulin Rouge.
Lunch @ Suffren on Avenue de la Motte Picquet
Tour Eiffel
Muse'e du Quai Branly (Jean Nouvel)
Rue Cler (pedestrian street with restaurants)

Day 2 (7th April 2012)
Centre Pompidou
Hotel de Ville
Walk around Notre Dame Cathedral
St. Louis, Siene Riverside, Islands
Cite Square
Walk along Bvld St Michel
Luxembourg Gardens
Odeon
Dinner @ St. Germaine

Day 3 (8th April 2012)
Place de la Concorde
Jardin des Tuileries
Place des Pyramides
Muse'e du Louvre
Institute du Monde Arab (Jean Nouvel)
Notre Dame Cathedral
Dinner @ Quartier Latin

Day 4 (9th April 2012)
Arc de Triumphe
Walk along Champs-E,lyse'e
Citroen building, Rond Point,
Grand Palais, Petit Palais
Av. Winston Churchill, Pont Alexandre 3 bridge,
Walked along river Cours la Reine
Jardin de Trocadero
Lunch @ Monmarte.

In Woody Alen's Midnight in Paris one of the character rhetorically asks "has there been any painting, movie, photograph, book or poem that can compete with a city?", One thing here is certain him asking this in Paris certainly strengthens his case. Beautiful city and a very appropriate one for a film that celebrates nostalgia and retreat from the present, just as we retreated from our present day routines of everyday life designing single serving city-like, banal geographies ...to Paris....

ArchLeaks

In the world of our friendly neighbourhood underpaid intern or rather intern who pays to work...a world where architects eat their young, and RIBA cant do shit...and magazines are filled with glorified egos of slave driving practices...there is some hope for venting frustration if not changing situations...Archleaks.

Red Reacting to Red

Kosmograd on ArcelorMittal Orbit
me on Jean Nouvel Pavillion
ABBAU+ on RCA's Talin's Tower Model

Siza Sings

Siza sings | Film by Fernando Guerra from últimas reportagens on Vimeo.
The delight of design...or maybe he is just working on labour hours, resourcing, project management, budgeting and other things of "real" consequence and importance in global design offices?
Merry Christmas & A Happy New Year.

Guglee food cart and Menu

Small project done few months back in collaboration with Nora.

Istanbul

(Elevation of the Asian side of Istanbul as seen from the Bosphorus)
Few weeks back in India some of my friends (who are planners) and me were involved in a debate around possible development trajectory for cities with large percentage of informal housing, multiple tenancies, incremental development etc. Our discussion was mostly around Bombay and how 67% of it is informal with an additional 20% old city housing and so acknowledging it to be a 'slum city' or 'informal city' could be a first step towards finding the right solutions. Seeing the role of the designer under threat and not really believing in 'people / community knows best' I tried to defend otherwise, but after my recent visit to Istanbul, I believe maybe there is a possibility of developing multiple decentralised solutions that incorporate the presence of the informal and at the same time have a diversity of design intervention that plug into such a landscape...
...its all up to our favourite underpaid intern sitting in some basement to crack this now....

Kiran's Window

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