Day before yesterday, I visited Ratan j Batliboi's office. Neha and Akhil almost directly took me to his library first. It was a spacious room with about 3000 books on subjects primarily pertaining to architecture, art and probably management. Behind it was a collapsable huge material library. I was more fascinated with the collapsable racks than the library of materials. However, the main book library had no window, and hence i felt the library was a bit dull.
I browsed through most titles in the library. I knew many books - most of them on architects and their works. Quite big ones, hard bound, with lots of pictures. There were hardly any books that probably interested me...perhaps I had seen much of it! The master painters, the urban design ones, the architects....and of course the data manuals. What I then realised what that all architects' offices are laden with books which contain a lot of pictures, photos and visual material. Architects crave for visual references.
Architects constantly produce images. Most architectural practices produce images by churning the earlier ones. The source for their images is other images. They collect this image database from referring to hundreds of other architectural practices, images and works. However, how can practices produce newer image banks which do not really have any referentials?
Literature, poetry, text, music - all can be converted to images. What methods can we choose to do such translations? Why don't architects fill up their libraries with all such kinds of books - on philosophy, social sciences, music, audio etc. That architecture offices and practices are loaded with such visual material proves the profession to be too image heavy. For that matter, an institute like Academy of Architecture is filled with such image heavy visual material. What if architectural libraries dedicated more space to non-visual works? Can a same non visual work produce different images and different times using various methods? This would be an interesting aspect to investigate.
Buildings are the most visible cultural objects and they can not embody only visual aspects of a culture. It would be interesting if buildings embodied rituals, practices and phenomenological characteristics of cultures. Then, the debate would not be about images, but about cultures, about people, about lives...
An 80 - year old Churchgate station need not then drape itself up in railway track patterns. That's absolutely banal. Dont the people who use it everyday have any claim over it? Is it not them, who really make the station space? No, I am not suggesting that people suggest ideas for it! Infact, what if its skin engaged people in newer ways...I don't know how it could be done...but I am sure it could do much more than cladding itself in good looking sheets to make itself sculptural...
However, the point is, it ended up being too visual as an urban response. Most urban responses in architecture end up being visual. That's the libraries they refer to. Their knowledge is a derivative of chewed up ideas of other practices which are situated abroad. These ideas are chewed out into images. These images are very unidimensional - they are real and allow only one interpretation. Drawings like those of Archigram do not commit to an absolute form and hence allow multiple readings. On the other hand, music generates moods, texts have layers of meanings. Architects seldom engage with such forms of works. Therefore art practices are interesting - because artists find their own ways of engaging with an idea and generate new images. They don't reproduce images by seeing other images.
Two important points therefore to conclude:
1. What must libraries for architects consist of?
2. How do you generate images from non visual material?
Other corollaries:
Why are we not able to generate images without reference? why do we hesitate?
I think it shall take significant time and effort to study the above...
I browsed through most titles in the library. I knew many books - most of them on architects and their works. Quite big ones, hard bound, with lots of pictures. There were hardly any books that probably interested me...perhaps I had seen much of it! The master painters, the urban design ones, the architects....and of course the data manuals. What I then realised what that all architects' offices are laden with books which contain a lot of pictures, photos and visual material. Architects crave for visual references.
Architects constantly produce images. Most architectural practices produce images by churning the earlier ones. The source for their images is other images. They collect this image database from referring to hundreds of other architectural practices, images and works. However, how can practices produce newer image banks which do not really have any referentials?
Literature, poetry, text, music - all can be converted to images. What methods can we choose to do such translations? Why don't architects fill up their libraries with all such kinds of books - on philosophy, social sciences, music, audio etc. That architecture offices and practices are loaded with such visual material proves the profession to be too image heavy. For that matter, an institute like Academy of Architecture is filled with such image heavy visual material. What if architectural libraries dedicated more space to non-visual works? Can a same non visual work produce different images and different times using various methods? This would be an interesting aspect to investigate.
Buildings are the most visible cultural objects and they can not embody only visual aspects of a culture. It would be interesting if buildings embodied rituals, practices and phenomenological characteristics of cultures. Then, the debate would not be about images, but about cultures, about people, about lives...
An 80 - year old Churchgate station need not then drape itself up in railway track patterns. That's absolutely banal. Dont the people who use it everyday have any claim over it? Is it not them, who really make the station space? No, I am not suggesting that people suggest ideas for it! Infact, what if its skin engaged people in newer ways...I don't know how it could be done...but I am sure it could do much more than cladding itself in good looking sheets to make itself sculptural...
However, the point is, it ended up being too visual as an urban response. Most urban responses in architecture end up being visual. That's the libraries they refer to. Their knowledge is a derivative of chewed up ideas of other practices which are situated abroad. These ideas are chewed out into images. These images are very unidimensional - they are real and allow only one interpretation. Drawings like those of Archigram do not commit to an absolute form and hence allow multiple readings. On the other hand, music generates moods, texts have layers of meanings. Architects seldom engage with such forms of works. Therefore art practices are interesting - because artists find their own ways of engaging with an idea and generate new images. They don't reproduce images by seeing other images.
Two important points therefore to conclude:
1. What must libraries for architects consist of?
2. How do you generate images from non visual material?
Other corollaries:
Why are we not able to generate images without reference? why do we hesitate?
How does this system work?
2 comments:
When I went to join rjbx first...I waited in library as I was early for interview...only thing I noticed is most of the books are unused packed up in a corner...
I realized its a library no one has time for...
secondly I mentioned to few of my colleagues then that, the library should be open central place in the office... so that people pick up the books more unknowingly, knowingly...but there were few great things about that office, one of them was their internal mail and few great people around, whom I'll never forget as great human beings...I loved my seniors there...
the question about the imagery abundant books found in offices is basically to assure an impatient Architect, that this is possible, and this is how it looks, seeing book with imagery while in design process gives him a comfort like a drug...
Its a bad habit, if one is habitual to it and does the exact referencing...but if one is seeing doshi's, correa's work, how does one see...drawings are no more than imagery??
but if you start with a exact diagram and every project is an experiment and totally a new birth...then the imagery might get redundant, and this might be ultimate aim...but its a tough call, and needs strong heart to go through such process...offices mostly chuck such people out one way or other...
You bring up many things, and i shall elaborate on them later.
Meanwhile, precisely my argument for the "impatient architect's dream to make things possible" - we play too safe and why don't those who can afford to risk ideas take risks?
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