Between Books & Buildings

This workshop closely considers methods in which books and buildings become constructs of social and architectural discourse. By taking stock of specific books on architecture and allied fields; and studying the different ways in which they organize ideas, we will closely investigate relationships between the visual and the verbal, narrative and sequencing, argumentation and voice, technology and form, and so on. Some of the underpinning inquiries for this course begin to contemplate upon how do books and building interact with each other? How do they conceptually shape each other? What kind of spaces do books and buildings reveal to us? The course will explore the dialectic relationship between these two artefacts structured through common principles of materiality and visuality and excavate ways in which contemporary cultural, political, economic and technological forces get embodied into these forms. Further through such understanding, it intends to investigate if experiments in writing and representation can open up new concepts of imagining and recording space. How can narrative structures be challenged? Participants will develop ideas to occupy the space of representation through sessions that thematically explore and unpack the nature of books and buildings as objects of knowledge, as well as look closely into practices of archiving, exhibitions, writing and research that have emerged through critical engagements with these artefacts.

An Impromptu Manifesto

In truth, the city is dead. The city as scripted in the urban design narrative of the 20th century no longer holds as much value. It has to be rescripted in the language of globalization, media and technology where tenets of humanity and humanism have found a new relationship with the world. The city is now a place with people whose sense of self is no longer the same as in the regime of socialism. What do we make of "society" and "social" values in an age where there are more communities in the virtual world than real? Where does the city occur between the physical and the virtual? The urban theorists of the 20th century - those who had quickly moved to claim the city from modern totalitarian and deterministic projects to the tactical and messy still seem to push back its project into the domain of the classical social will no longer survive in time. This is a city with people who have a new sense of self, techno-lives of the nascent future. The emerging city demands a new society with one leg in the physical and the other in virtual, riding on techno-social values that shape a new sense of space.

The city of the 20th century urbanists is dead. Their claims to physical space, their claims to economy, their claims to opportunity and promise - all those assets that the city held are no longer in its physicality. With lowering population graph, with decreasing physical transactions, with the shift to service from manufacturing, with the conversion of industrial to cultural consumerism - the city can no longer be for the classical public. This is a new public enscripted with the values of computer and internet, smartphone and gadgetry.

Urbanists are merely turning into historians - merely collating the overwhelming change of the past two decades into neat narratives. Cities haven't ceased to deteriorate in their presence. Their contributions have only fed the academic world, with the real left to the political power, who has jumped its opportunity over technology - turning it into anomalous projects - the smart cities and so on. Today, urbanists tell us stories of nostalgia and decay. That is their only way to enthuse us about our cities, the only way to embed us into its reality. They have become conservationists of vast urbanscapes stitched with blanket narratives, none which help us to critically adapt the city to the future, but hook it on to a past that may no longer be as relevant.

We no longer occupy the bodies of the past - those that were shaped by the immediate society and families. Our skins and organs today are part technological constructs. We are an entity shaped by self initiated concerns - informed or otherwise. We consume data, we enact machines, we emote to believe we are different from instruments, we breathe information, we swim in microwaves. Plants, animals, people, resources, water, electricity, food - everything is numbers. We count minutes as much as money. We are bundled by infrastructure. We are tied together in our insecurities and opportunities. We are a different race, semi-cooked and still boiling in the bucket of techno-utopia.

Cities no longer are organs, nor gardens, nor societies or communities, or even hubs of exchange. they are organisms decaying into technoscripts, exploding their energies into the lights of media - shimmering and shining into a new future that blinds us day by day. We need to dilate our pupils enough to be in sync and make sense of this rapid transmutation, no longer trans'formation'. A new city charged with a different energy awaits to be embraced.

Centre for Environment Education, Ahmedabad

The Centre for Environment Education in Ahmedabad is an institute founded with a mandate to further environmental education by the Government of India. While CEE centres are spread all across India, the one at Ahmedabad, which is the headquarters, is about 32 years old now. Established in 1984, this building has been designed by architect Neelkanth Chhaya, former dean of CEPT university, when he was still a young architect. Spread over a site of about 14 acres, the CEE-Ahmedabad campus houses several functions catering to the programs of sustainability and environmental education.

It was imperative for the building for environment education must itself be an instrument of such learning. It is unfortunate that there exists hardly any literature on its own website about the architecture of the place itself, which is a sensitive as well as a sustainable response to the site. Built on a tekra - a mound in the north of the city - the structure follows the contours while embracing the natural landscape. Using the opportunity of the undulating site to create a variety of experiences, the building is almost a map of its landscape.

Simple square cubic spaces nested within each other enclose spaces in varying degrees of openness. Responding appropriately to the climate, the building offers enough release spaces into its heavily landscaped outdoor, which is never too warm under the thick canopy of trees. The multiple terraces under the tree cover are seemingly more habitable than the inside. They give different degrees of privacy and proximity with people. Three strategic sections give rise to distinct experiences:

1. Building fully / partially under the ground
2. Building leveled with the ground
3. Terracing the ground.

In each of the above cases, a unique relationship is established with the site. All blocks are entered differently. The building responds to site topography both outside and within. The sections of the inside are as dynamic as the outside creating difference in volume and light conditions. The complex becomes the framework for landscape in allowing trees and natural vegetation to grow on it. Different terraces are architecturally tied up using pergola pavilions. The embeddedness of the building thus releases into the air very subtly, almost like reducing itself to the bare branches of the overall form. The building becomes the new extended (?) ground for growth and movement. The inside and outside fold into each other in unique ways opening you up in new directions. Kachha and paved pathways transition into each other without interrupting movement.

This building is rhizomatic - the productive output of a mind filled with equal amount of clarity and confusion. It is hard to draw a clear straightforward diagram of the complex. At once Chhaya has folded in numerous concepts from regional architectural history together into the building. The tectonics of stepped wells, the Sarkhej terraces, Doshi's subterranean buildings, Correa's subtended heights (Gandhi ashram), Corbusier's exposed structural elements, and above all, the timeless forms of courtyards, the journeying through a forest making the building a process of discovery, the continuous Centering and decentering of focus are ideas enmeshed in a manner quite complex in this building. People emerge out of the building as if coming out of a cave. Occupying this building is like entering a red crafted mountain. The chaityas and viharas collect to a common courtyard and overlook large trees and vegetation. One can only imagine the beauty that this building would behold in the monsoon.