Architectural Diagrams - 1

 

Structures

Just Give Me Some Space: Panel Discussion

Transcript of the Panel Discussion organized at Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture, on the inauguration of 'Just Give me Some Space' authored by architect Suha Khopatkar. The discussion opens up ways of building empathies in academic practice, specially between teachers and students in an architecture school. The discussants include Vandana Ranjitsinh, Rohan Shivkumar, Nisha Nair, Suha Khopatkar, and Anuj Daga (moderator).

published in Indian Architect & Builder, November 2019.

Read full article with illustrations here.

What is a Diagram?

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We are often, time and again, posed the question of the 'diagram' in architecture in the course of our teaching. Inspite of the fact that there is generous discourse already available on the subject, even pretty articulate and thought-worthy; in pedagogy, mobilising the notion of a diagram seems extremely challenging.  When teaching undergraduates, to whom architectural methods, tools and terms are so new and abstract, so much of our talk ends up remaining rhetorical. Our use of the term 'diagram' when talking about the abstract relationships within a particular project - architecture or urban may sound rather incomprehensible, for at one instance we may be referring to the hidden formal logic of the building, whereas on the other, we may be thinking of it in a broader urban realm,  (wherein the project may be having a different dialogue). Sometimes, through diagrams, we indicate movement and encounter in a conceptual manner whereas at other times, we suggest volumetric rhythms which characterise a building. Needless to mention, all these are diagrammatic understandings through which we make a project amenable to the student, but all of these do not necessarily overlap into a single consolidate representation. Inevitably, in our discussion of building as a diagram , we keep changing our referential registers that overlap to (in)form, what one could call, an 'architectural composite'. In making sense of this representational multiplicity of such an architectural composite, students may be attributing the value of one diagram to another representation - that may fall short of making complete sense. It is perhaps in such confusion that the students beg the question "What is a diagram?"

Architectural diagrams are different from those used in engineering, economics, electronics, or other such disciplines. Linguistically thinking, 'architecture' and 'diagram' may almost seem tautological - for essentially, architecture is precisely the resultant act of bringing people or entities in a specified relationship. Think of it in terms of software or hardware, where the term architecture is particularly relevant. My father, an instrumentation engineer, would endlessly draw out circuits in drawings, replacing capacitors and resistors, in order to make a machine function more efficiently. There, the diagram was precisely the architecture of his work.  In a simplistic understanding, this singular diagram was the machine. This one to one co-relation of a digram to the real in the practice of electronics, for example, is often not the case for architecture of the built environment, for processes in a building or a city are layered with many systems and functions that have varying relationships. Thus buildings have multiple diagrams that are working together with each other.

We may borrow from the different disciplines to articulate a definition for diagramming in architecture. Each may seem applicable, but often these definitions become so abstract and theoretical to the extent of getting too subjective, and interpretive - and thus even debatable at times. This may happen due to the method in which one chooses to "read" a particular environment, thus removing an objectivity of the process of diagramming itself! But let us get back once again, to that innocent student asking, "what is a diagram" - where he is asking us to weed away our abstract and jargonized readings of a project to come to the point. What is being asked there?

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Let us now move to the architectural studio, in India. The question of diagram becomes particularly perplexing for the discipline at several registers. Diagrams, to be sure, are representations through which invisible relationships between ideas or objects may be explained and/or established. As architecture is far too obvious in its physical presence, often, to think of it as a diagram escapes imagination. (Often for students here, architecture, or building is the physical object in front of their eyes, and it is as objective a reality as it can be. There is certainly, nothing invisible about it!). Thus to think about them as diagram and decipher "invisible" relationships within them does not occur to them.

Secondly, diagrammatic thinking has not been an integral part of architectural education in India, the roots of which may be traced back to the manner of its colonial institutionalisation. Still largely taught in the mode of draughtsman's expertise, the design of building in India has largely remained a matter of aesthetic composition or construction. This is reflected in the kind of courses and emphasis laid on visual processes in most syllabi of architectural programs or teaching in India.

Thirdly, the knowledge of diagrams have primarily belonged to the domain of science and scientific thinking - a branch that explains phenomena that is not necessarily visible. Thus, its discussion and application in architectural pedagogy has been marginalised, even obliterated to a large extent. One may argue that the loss of diagram resulted in the loss of the political voice of the average architect, for he/she never could think of the intent of the building beyond the needs of the client, budget or demands of beauty. Neither thus, could one actualize one's agency as an architect.

But for the studio, diagrams for architecture are not limited to two dimensional representations. A range of things constitute diagrams that can be harnessed for architectural imagination today. These include art objects, stories, models, machines, and so on. This charged space of representation through which students are made to wade through is often too hurried given the constrained mass-education formats of architectural education. In such a scenario, the process of filtering that must take place towards the resolution of any project ends up in a mere groggy experience.

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As academicians, we passionately talk about building and its processes in metaphors using borrowed vocabularies from music, cooking, poetry or art (and other cultural domains). One wonders then, if architecture even has its own language? But it is here that we end up objectifying this fascinating act of architecture. To realise a building, is to realise precisely, how we bring the values in all of these acts of music, cooking, poetry or art in relationship with each other, only in a way that is visible and invisible at the same time for someone to read at yet relish, for someone to only smell and yet have the flower. Diagrams could then be those aromas which make up an environment and dissolve into the air. The only challenge is to bring students to breathe them. But can any one possibly teach someone how to smell diagrams off a building?

It is here that I am reminded of one of our first year design projects where we were to design a home for a comic character in the city. The character assigned to me was Chacha Chaudhary and Sabu - a short wise old man and his giant companion from Jupiter. What followed was a quick working of possible strategies into venn diagrams and their translation into three basic spatial types. When I presented these to my tutor, he was quite surprised at the clarity of my thought, to the extent that he asked me if I had been taught to do so earlier.

Diagrams for A House for Chacha Chaudhary & Sabu, 2004

To diagram is to prioritise, to decide and filter out anticipated redundancies within a given process. Diagraming is thus inducing a project with intent. What values do we read into built environment, and how do we charge them into architectural diagrams? These are aspects that need slow and careful discussions. Diagrams of architecture engineer values within environments. These can be experienced only with an attentive mind, and perceptive body. Pedagogical processes need to strengthen these channels. Diagrams, although, are not a formula, and thus they can not be learnt like theorems. They need to be practiced through observation and sensitivity.

The discourse on diagrams is rather convoluted for students. Perhaps, if students are able to voice their doubts with more honesty and eagerness, we may be able to develop sharper narratives to respond, and at the same time gauge the registers through which they approach the problem of diagram. However, the questions have to be deeper, and come from within them. Until then, we may keep asking, 'what is a diagram'?


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This essay has very little academic value and is written to surface my own doubts as a teacher. All the opinions and expressions are personal. The author is aware of the gross inconsistencies and jumps made through the writing.

Anecdotes to ponder

"What will the chair be for a frog?"

"If I and chair are the same thing, what can I afford for the chair?"

"How do you live in a house with three husbands?"

"Having your own room means being private or being in isolation? Does being private mean being isolated?"

- Prasad Shetty

Decolonizing Architecture

"It's like the person who had good handwriting was made the leader of Gram Panchayat."
- Prasad Shetty on the attitude in which architects were taught and imagined in the first few decades of the introduction of the profession in India.

"They were expected to execute the drawings to accuracy on site - so a person who could read drawings well and supervise sites was a good architect. But any good engineer can make a building. The architect must realise that his/her task is to craft space."

On 'Style' and 'Type' in architecture

In architecture, studies in image, iconography, symbols, style, and such other visual tropes are often seen as pejorative in the line of specific modern discourse that rejects ornament over building in the favour of studying its spatial configuration. To be sure, ornamentation over a building is the medium through which we "access" and "construct" historical narrative apparent in much of archaeological analysis. Can we consider the new urban motifs of the contemporary built forms for serious study in the present? How do we write histories of architecture by studying building ornamentations that get produced in the hypermediated space of information and exchange of images? My inquiry is triggered primarily in consideration of the question: how do the relief works at the two millennium old Kahneri caves in Mumbai gain more currency for architectural studies over the contemporary global fusion of plaster casts that are overlooked and dismissed culturally allegedly for their poor value?

We know for a fact that iconographic scholarship has been a serious practice, and scholars have invested their lives in understanding how intangible ideas get moulded into shapes and material. Iconographers have helped us decode for example, languages, codes and deeper myths around which ancient or pre-modern societies were probably structured. Several cultural products, including buildings are dated based on the motifs they carry - for they index the advent of technique and expertise, as much as adaptation and civilizational movement in history.  In this vein, would the iconographies of today not be valuable to write histories of built environment for the future? Would the transport and assimilation of motifs within a building, even if hypermediated, not be of any value to the architect's role as a cultural commentator? Often, there is a prevailing anxiety to embrace the discussions of "style" within architectural studies today. Such aversion is understandable in the register that often these become ready templates for uncritical building authors who want to reproduce effectual experiences through gimmicks. However, the articulation of a certain idea into style (that which becomes material), also underpins the ideologies through which the society negotiates prevalent forces for a given building. To reject the notion of "style" completely may not be wise - for in being kitsch, pastiche or even gaudy, it still holds value and comments about the dominant mode of production in a society. Can/should a society really free itself from 'style'?

The much celebrated Mannerist architecture of 15th century brought out unique commentaries on existing political tensions within the then European society through the subtle and subversive play of building elements to defy existing norms and beliefs. Architectural iconography became a poignant way thereby to encode a script of resistance, yet open up new orders of space and experience. (Mannerist, in fact, came from Italian maneria, which means 'exaggerated style in speech, art or other behaviour'). In the 18th century, the reinvigoration of classical forms in a pronounced and provocative manner by architects like Claude Nicholas Leadoux, Boullee or Lequeue offered critical social commentaries through their often fantastical architecture. This was a period that we know of as 'Neo-classicism'. The "-ism" must not be confused here to indicate a "stylistic" discourse, rather, a way in which architecture materially became a vehicle for certain political and ideological mobilization. More recently, in the 1970s, Robert Venturi's 'Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture' argued for embracing a certain vocabulary of architectural elements that modernism famously rejected, in order to produce a plurality of meaning which offers play in the everyday experience of architecture. Often marked as the key moment for a 'post-modern' discourse in architecture, the book influenced several architects who went on to create, yet again, provocative, humorous - sometimes even kitchy reproductions of architecture. Despite the role of architecture that offers social commentary through the mobilization of ornamentation - structural or applied (and certainly not devoid and divorced of parallel typological changes), there is a tendency to suppress the symbolic role of architecture, which is essentially negotiated through style. On the other hand, sytlistic (mis)appropriations are common  and index a range of values. However, can its discussion be totally excluded from historical analysis and understanding of the architectural object?

The discussion of architecture through style can be problematic if it is not undertaken critically, and delivered as a template of design. Contrastingly, we can argue that the speculations on societal structures based on analysis of building 'type' may be grossly incorrect, for we do not know the practices and precise myths which shaped these spaces. For example, archaeologist Suraj Pandit in his analysis of certain cave at Kanheri expressed how difficult it was to figure the function of a long cave which had stone platform strips with carved cup-shaped depressions at regular intervals. Was it a dining hall, was it a library, was it a place of preparation, was it a place of group mediation - we do not know! The diagram for all the above activities could potentially be same. How do we rely on typological analysis in such situations? In the contemporary times, in India, very few architects understand the notion of "type" - and thus, we do not see its active mobilization within our buildings. Often, default, accepted, already-formulated ways of organisation are replicated neutrally without understanding new contextual settings. The malls, corporate office blocks, the BHK - all are examples that exist in our very own environment that have largely been uncritically adapted and multiplied. Would architectural historians discard 'type' as a legitimate frame of analysis in this vein?

The opening up of new frames of architectural analysis must not reject the older ones. In this case, there is no need to denigrate the scholarship of 'style' in order to bring to force the analytical order of 'type'. Historians must be generous in accepting new frames of references through which the object of architecture can yield knowledge. The rejection of one over the other is a modern symptom which flattens interpretation to singular way of living and thinking. If we consider ornament as an integral part of building, what kind of building could we craft? Does the over-emphasis of type force us to think of buildings as an organization of spaces, rather than its craft? How can we marry craft with type, how can we marry ornament with construction in a meaningful way - not simply as an application, but as a way of space making? And in that case, is there a way to bridge the discourses of 'style' and 'type' for a more wholesome architectural history?


I have not detailed here the definition of 'style' or 'type' and the theoretical discourse around them. However, I expect that the readers will look into their histories and the criticism around them. 

Built Environment in South Asia

South Asian Architecture


In our close reconsideration of architectural history in the south Asian subcontinent, we have come to identify a huge lacuna in the availability of coherent content on the built environment in south Asia. Such an issue got articulated through multiple vectors. There is abundant scholarship on the built environment in Europe and Americas that facilitates discourse and dissemination of these landscapes and often becomes easily subsumed into pedagogical processes not only just in the above continents, but also all across the world. To be sure, architecture history students in the remaining part of the world have grown up to be architects only studying content that talks of buildings in other contexts that:

1. Defines the notion of what is “architecture” - in a certain way
2. Instills a certain value system through which built environment is appreciated
3. Desire for transforming their own, immediate landscapes to suit inherited frameworks
4. Aspiration to fit into the dominant discourse of architectural theory, seeking legitimization

Following similar parameters and methods, a number of surveys and books have been produced, often by non-native scholars, for the South Asian sub-continent. While the distance from a certain culture under observation offers critical objectivity, the material output invariably caters to an audience outside its own context and content. Such knowledge also has an alienating tendency for the natives in its consumption, because one is channeled to think through a methodology that may not be one’s own way of reading and understanding one’s context. In the lack of or absence of articulation of one’s own “method” – an epistemological notion that is deeply embedded in tenets of modern scholarship – often these ways of seeing are accepted as default. Nevertheless, my intent is not to devalue such ways of assimilating and making sense of the information around us. Rather, it is important to think, if there indeed is a way outside the ‘rational’ framework of legitimizing the knowledge that rests in different cultures.

Cultural interpretations of built environment and space in different contexts call for a nuanced translation, which in turn necessitate the mobilization of a specific kind of infrastructure. Given their unconsolidated political landscapes, many of the regions have not been able to realize the value in documentation of their architectural pasts, for that matter, in many cases, the preservation of many such places also remain vulnerable. Which aspects of built environment then, do people come to value and how? What aspects of “architecture” in this manner are regarded to be worthy of preservation in different cultures? What does it speak of these societies and their attitude to the material world? And lastly, are these attitudes evident in the architectural remains that are available today, and can they be read and studied?

How does one formulate sensitive methods in order to decipher these traits and attitudes? Where does one begin? How deep in history to go, how do we situate ourselves vis-à-vis history? How do we make sense of something that we haven’t experienced, or isn’t a part of our cultural ethos? How do you locate such a context, historically and geographically? And besides, how does this history inform the contemporary ways in which we assess architecture in different places?

drawing by Priyanshi Bagadia, SEA student

Mumbai Modern :: Death of Architecture

Rupali and I had vaguely discussed to do a project on documenting the modern buildings in the city of Mumbai for the sake of several visitors - architectural or otherwise. Inspite of knowing several buildings of interest, often we would find ourselves struggling with names when asked to recommend a friend. Besides, much travel books on Mumbai end up focusing too much on either the ancient heritage - the caves, the temples, the churches or else, the popular - Marine Drive, Nariman Point, Fort and so on. A whole range of built works that one passes by almost everyday comes to be grossly overlooked by visitors, or even architects for academic study. In Mumbai, studies of historical precincts have been done for long now. Entry points in understanding space through history in architectural academic discourses often don't work well given the new spatial orientation through which students associate with the built environment today. It takes a good amount of work to open students to certain characteristics of built settings that they often tend to take for granted, or even undervalue due to the overriding market-driven "cleansing" narratives. On of the initiatives in our History-Theory program at SEA was thus to make students look at their everyday neighbourhoods, their surroundings through a strategy of defamiliarization. I was keen to take this one step further into looking at specific buildings which shape Mumbai's modernity. "Let's do a 'Mumbai Modern'", came the idea.

Two years ago, our third year studio put together a study on about 24 modern buildings of Mumbai over the last 100 years that are often overseen as projects of value. The work culminated in a poster bringing together drawings and photographs of our modern heritage. The poster deliberately skipped some buildings like Kanchanjunga (by Charles Correa) and instead brought to light his LIC colony (in Borivali) and the Portuguese Salvacao Church (in Dadar) which often get missed out. Correa has done significant work in Mumbai - including the SNDT campus and the Dadar Catering College which do not get discussed as much as Kanchanjunga. Similarly, academia has missed discussing Uttam Jain and Kanvinde who contributed buildings like the Indira Gandhi Research and Development Centre (Goregaon) and Nehru Science Centre (Worli) respectively. One wonders why don't we take these projects seriously? The project thus became about creating a repository of everyday-modern buildings of Mumbai, and culminated into an A0 poster!

Early this year, Rupali got me to present the work at the Death of Architecture exhibition that opened in Mumbai. I was a bit confused about how it would fit within the premise of "Death of Architecture" and because I was also unclear about its curation. But in beginning to make meaning, several things opened up and settled within the frame pleasantly. The fact that the work was presented in one of the buildings the poster included, the celebration of architecture, and the subversions on modernism had already created an uneven ground for its discussion. I took the opportunity to premise the relevance of the study through the mapping of a certain change in the idea of public space - seen in the built forms of a socialist-nationalist India, their communal disposition and a certain honesty of expression - to that of a consumptive, bounded, insecure enclaving of the city, covered in shiny masks and false skins. The work became an index of buildings that traced ideological transformation of space through architectural engagement. 

In such foregrounding of the work, I proposed three points of relevance for the discussion of the project within the framework of Death:

1. Death of anything/anyone inevitably brings us in to a state of contemplation. It creates a moment of rupture which allows for thought and reflection. The Mumbai Modern offers an opportunity to trace the transforming spirit of space, the changing face of architecture, and puts us in a position to decide what we really come to value within our architectural environment.

2. When thinking of death, one is compelled to recall an anecdote by Charles Correa, and one of the things he admired about India as a country. He said that "India grows in its own decay." It is much valuable to think of growth and decay as a continuum. And to think of built environment through the metaphor of the "swamp" is particularly interesting, for it elevates the work of building as an eco-system, which regulates itself through simultaneous rejection and acceptance of emerging values. A thousand deaths collapse, and several births reappear simultaneously. Such a consideration brings architects in a unique position with death.

3. Having said the above, the city we live in appears to be an emerging ruin, not because of destruction, but because of its constant evolution. The landscape of incomplete structures, left over mosaic and morphing redevelopments characterize a unique setting of a ruin that awaits itself to complete forever. This lack, or incompleteness is what brings us closer to the city, for we witness its growth, we witness its transformation and embrace its change. And here, one begins to think what possibility do we come to imagine when we look at the built environment through the putative anxiety of the death of architecture?

City-Ruin 1

City-Ruin 2

City-Ruin 3

Notes from Gubbi at SEA

In places like Germany, people are trying to find new ways of bringing land out from the developer's purview. Different ways of land pooling have been mobilized. Although most people in Germany dont live with the hope of owning land or property all over their lifetime. Unlike this, in India, we have a notion of owning something over your lifetime, this is also because there is no other form of social security.
Discussed Chitra Vishwanath and Sanjay Prakash

What are then, the different ways in which social security can be thought of?
asks CEPT Dean

What are the different ways in which the land over the road can be occupied?
asks founder of Good Earth

How can the structure of market and policies be changed by architects?
asks Himanshu Burte

The housing question has been hijacked by the question of affordability. A variety of conditions that are becoming context for housing, e.g. - the IT companies coming and going bringing specific people in the city, two friends coming together in a city - these are not often considered by architects, whereas the market has responded to it in different ways. Where do we thus reorient the focus of housing then?
articulated Prasad Shetty

Second Year Architectural Design 2017

I would begin to say that we culminated our Third Semester (2017) Architectural Design studio in quite a crescendo. All students had a reasonable amount of work in terms of drawings and models for fairly fleshed out schemes. Given that this was their first exercise in building-making, the final result was quite satisfying. The students seemed tired, but content - for they were able to see the promise in the work and realise their own potential. I have begun to believe that it is important for students to see well-finished final product - it note only gives them a sense of completion but also inspires them to evaluate themselves better, or even recalibrate their process strategies in subsequent projects.

If I was to however look at the studio from the pedagogic perspective (and not from the students' view), many other questions begin to emerge - a lot of which I keep aside which would otherwise interfere when conducting the studio. Recently, for example, Prasad asked the faculty at SEA to weigh the output of their modules against the objectives that were set for the individual studios. This question often gets (re)visited during the final reviews when you have to frame the module engagement to external jurors for a fair evaluation, or even reflect upon how successful the project was. Often, one realises that the objectives set for the studio did not really become the points of addressal for most design discussions with students. Rather, with varying intellectual and vocational potentials, the issues that we need to tackle for a given glass invariably have to be realigned.

With second year design modules at SEA, I have never felt a sense of meeting pedagogical expectations. The projects are often framed through objectives that are far too out of the reach of students to even engage at their level of understanding. In my opinion, they are forcefully placed in the realm of "city" and "institution". For example, our objective for the third semester Architectural Design is that to deal with the "type" and the "institution". To be sure, the concepts of "type" and "institution" can be intervened only once one has a clear understanding of what they mean, and how they operate. The idea of a "building type" or "diagram", we noted in our History/Theory module, can be approached in many ways - both formal and programmatic. Its explication can happen through multiple theoretical frames. In the third semester, just the second year of their architectural studies, students are still familiarising themselves to the variety of architectural examples across the world, studying how spaces have been folded in across history. They are also beginning to merely understand and attune themselves to theoretical frameworks through which one can approach the appreciation and designing of architectural forms. What should be the optimum expectation from a student of architecture during this stage?

In the present exercise, we realised that students were still working towards improving their skills of two and three dimensional representations. It is often argued that most architecture institutes lay overemphasis on skill, in the process of which they lose out on the exploratory inventiveness of students' own ways of seeing and thereby representing the world. this process, however, is fairly dialectical. I have to confess, that as architects teaching a design studio, the visual language we best understand is that of orthography - one which generates for us technical drawings of the visualisation of the building. When students don't fall in place with orthographic representations, a subversive aversion to discussion gets built up in the studio due to amplified miscommunications, and the focus shifts from teaching design to representation.

Most ideas about resolution, detail, articulation or structure actually belong to the realm of representation. Think about it - the obsession of alignments, following grids, maintaining order, or balancing rhythm all occur primarily in the visual space. In other words, much of these aspects that control the aesthetics of a building are the prime prerogative of the design studio. There is immense denial within architectural studio on the prerogative of aesthetics. When we are critiquing students on their work, we are often trying to bring their ideas into an aesthetic order. In the present studio, we hardly discussed with them the notion of type, or the institution. The discussion was always veered towards how the building could be composed, or ordered more correctly. Most of our design methods, thus, are processes to codify a certain aesthetic.

Often when teaching, you realise that the student is not even prepared to meet the first objective. So you beginning from the beginning. Further, teaching strategies change with every student depending upon the direction in which they need attention. In my observation, students arrive an the studio objective without necessarily engaging with the questions set out for them. They are not talking to the mentor on the terms of 'type' or 'institution', rather, often merely to be able to take the next step in their design process. Thus, students may only realise the objective when they are intellectually ready, and in their state of reflection. In the meanwhile, we simply follow the method of copying. This is a characteristic of "practice" - an apprenticeship model which isn't bad either. I true sense, Riyaz.

But then whom are these objectives really framed for? I think objectives are for teachers, not students. Prasad playfully poked to this response on our whatsapp conversation, "You mean that you will learn how to discern type?" In his rhetoric, one can reaffirm an age old observation: Teaching merely helps you clear your own notions about things. Objectives are framed so that we can test their validity and expound upon their potentials in experimenting ideas with the students. Further, objectives delineate the framework of one's feedback to students in the broader scheme of things. Once you find the student having understood the basics of a given process, you step up the difficulty level of your engagement, pushing them to think through their work in a differently plane of thought.

We had a great set of jurors for our final review: Sameep Padora, Quaid Doongerwala, Samira Rathod and Praveen Alva. I was accompanying the team of Quaid and Samira as they went along with the review, and we had some interesting pedagogic discussions over a few projects. Samira understands and values the architect's agency in crafting form, whereas Quaid was looking at the relevance of languages that different students dealt with in their design projects. One of the questions that we debated, for example was the invention versus discovery of form. I had to interrogate Samira's search for an unconventional form in projects that were conceived quite traditionally - those that focused on simple ordering and arrangement of space. I had to bring up the fact that often, there is a subversive denial of conventional form or structure in the validation of the "new". There's a strange affinity for currently for that which appears asymmetric and the absurd. In studying ancient buildings of architectural importance, or modern precedents, however, we are reminded about qualities of order and rhythm - moreso, their spatial invocations. These experiences are not free of their structural imbrications, and thus, are often employed through what we may now understand as "conventional". In our discussion, we clarified, that there is nothing wrong, thus, in bringing back the old - pejoratively understood as "copying". It is a matter of language, Quaid asserted - and how it can benefit the student's way of thinking through a building.

Our negative attitudes to evaluating processes as "copied" are a colonial legacy. It was the renaissance that emphasised upon the birth of the individual, to whom authorship was of utmost importance. The social and economic machinery of renaissance was centered acutely around the human - as an individual, which gradually led to the undervaluing of the guild. The introduction of the machine and assembly line completely destroyed any passage of knowledge through practice. In the eastern cultures though, copying has been the only way of learning. Take for example Chinese painting, which was only about repeating a process set by the master. The student iterates the painting as many times, over which, the subject under investigation itself undergoes transformation, resulting into a completely new masterpiece, a new original. In the same way, the knowledge of Indian Classical Music is passed on only in its rehearsal, or riyaz - iterating it time and again until one is able to resonate with a given tone. It is a skill honed only in practice, in copying, without any written notations.

I believe this second year studio turned out to be much like an arena of riyaz. I am not particularly sure how much students absorbed. What I am sure of, although, is that there was an induction of rigour, and its possibility. We left out the questions set out in the objectives. Perhaps, those will be taken up later when students have a method and space to reflect. It is in that time when the objective of the studio will be truly realised. Meanwhile, I still wonder if the objectives can be made integral to the evolution of the design process.

Three Contentions: Critical Regionalism

Three contentions on the study of theory of Critical Regionalism in architecture today:

1. That Critical Regionalism (especially Frampton's version) became a framework through which many architects of South Asia could place their works in the main stream architectural discourse of the west. On the other hand it enabled the West with a linguistic vocabulary (terms) through which works of South Asia and regions around could be discussed.

2. While the idea of critical regionalism, as framed by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in their original work suggested a kind of critical continuum of the theory itself - one where architecture must constantly revise itself and address its own epoch, Frampton's formulation deduced it into six points - often consumed as a formula. Frampton's framing of critical regionalism has been critiqued by Fredric Jameson for its stylizing tendency seen in the way in which the text was pedagogically deployed in many South Asian contexts, and sometimes evident in the works of architects working within the purview, themselves.

3. Critical Regionalism must be seen as a corrective theory against the free and careless appropriation of symbols and signs from history within architecture that had a banalizing tendency of postmodern thought - primarily for the South Asian counter parts who were far removed and dissociated from the discursive context of the West.


thoughts developed with discussants: Shreyank Khemlapure, Dushyant Asher

Perspectives: A Reflection

This is a compilation of forty-or-so perspectives drawn by first year architecture students. Given to them as one of the first exercises of technically drawing a simple object bound by two vanishing points, the exercise comes to offer much more. Or rather, should I press that one can read much more? After all they are perspectives.

In addition to the original oblong (elongated cube) object, I suggested students to put additional features, partly so that each student applies the principles just learnt to exercise their knowledge of the subject and so that each of their objects is unique, almost creating an “alien” object – an object that is unknown to us. Creating an object without visual precedent is much difficult, for how does one draw something that one has never seen, and how does one even perceive and make an object that must never be familiar? In the present case however, one did not pre-decide on making alien objects. It was merely about evolving a known, standard and mundane shape into the undecipherable. This exercise has thus culminated into the hybridization of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Can there be a possibility where two known objects come together to generate a stranger? How would one go about employing this thought? Is there a method? Has this intention been fulfilled here? In this ambiguity, I am eager to find from the readers if the objects here are able to generate a sense of the uncanny.

The outcomes presented here begin to hint different patterns. While some additions seem like evident detached outgrowths from the basic oblong, few examples show how even smaller alterations can change the fundamental perception of the object. There are others where the oblong has merely remained a notion, and instances where its reading has further compounded. In my personal pursuit of achieving “aliens”, the basic object has grown different extensions to itself, those which can be read as organs that may perform imaginary functions, or sometimes even remain redundant.

Often the overall object becomes vividly impressionistic reminding of a figure, icon or gesture. This brings me to notice how each object demands for itself a particular scale it must be seen in. Is the notion of scale embedded in the object; is it constructed through our years of visual training or do we impose scale on to the objects? To be sure, the interpretation of the same drawing at multiple scales is facilitated due to the absence of any reference to human scale. While it may seem to be a toy-like object in a quick glance, the drawing soon becomes spatial and inhabitable when subject to a slow meandering gaze.

Further, it is interesting to compare one drawing to another. Since each drawing is produced by an individual, and each addition / amendment to the basic figure is mostly personal, some of these drawings strangely begin to talk with each other. One will observe how, for example, few drawings are same configurations merely rotated, some fit into each other as positives and negatives and some others could easily be seen as a kit of parts. They could join each other to form a larger whole. How do these “communications” happen? Are these resultant compatibilities purely accidental? Do people work with a common notional repository of forms? If so, what are the mechanisms through which such a repository gets activated?

I had asked the students to reproduce their working sketches into final drawings on square tracing papers. While my original intention was to save them the labour and allow them to quickly trace their final work, I realized that the translucency of the paper lent me several further comparative readings on being overlapped. For instance, I observed that many of these drawings of the same specified object (the one before addition of parts) did not coincide with each other. The dimensions of many outlines differed. In addition, their view points and horizons constantly shifted. What added dynamism to the entire compilation are the students’ varying compositions of their drawing on the small canvas. All these reflections indicate the inherent nature of perspectives – the manifold ways in which standard instructions get interpreted, executed and a singular object in the head gets transmitted and reproduced.

Washing machines, paper weights, acupressure tools, milk cans, building blocks, household furniture – these drawings will remind you of all such objects. Yet, they are not those, or perhaps they share a familiarity with all of them? How do we look at these products, or even reflect upon this exercise? The execution of this exercise, if one may excuse, can be observed in line with the history of perspective drawing. While much of the initial effort in renaissance art was to understand the principles of vision in order to replicate reality as it is, architects of the period furthered this technique to prepare realistic visions of the future. In a similar way, students prepared an object that was made available to them as a drawing but took it in a direction of the unknown mostly following their (own) aesthetic logics. The only difference in this case, perhaps was the freedom for students to be not bounded in imagination by scale, utility or gravity. Yet, this leeway is only to playfully sustain the spirit of the contemporary times, when almost everything seems possible – from future machines to transmutability of objects.

I will be cheating if I said that all parts of all these objects are technically drafted. In times when computer softwares aid more than realistic visualizations and renderings of spaces and objects, what does a class on hand-drafting perspective involving meticulous measurements on paper actually mean? Machines have certainly reoriented the value we put on traditional techniques of creating imaginations on paper. And we would be expecting too much from students to relive the passion of Albrecht Durer who tirelessly built machines to understand how, after all, the magnanimity of the world converged into his eyeball! Such curiosity neither fits contemporary zeitgeist, and nor can it be sustained in a world scattered within technological distractions.

In such a view, these drawings are to be appreciated with a pinch of salt. While many are sincere, some drawings here are opportunistic - those which have been crafted to please the eye, or even finish the god-damn alien. These probably come from different evaluations of the machine-manual debate, and further the multiple ways in which students come to develop interest in the varied aspects of architecture. Many drawings here also contest the intention of applying the skills to be learnt through this exercise, putting primary thrust on the imagination (which assumedly is free of skill). A closer reading of these drawings will bring us to an understanding of how the relationship between skill and imagination gets negotiated in the works of students.

Yet we are fortunate to live in times when the expert who once produced perspectives by hand lives alongside his/her technological counterpart. In the course of this studio, the students got a chance to interact and learn the way in which perspective was traditionally deployed by draughtsmen or skilled architects or artists into making architectural renderings. Those renderings, to a keen observer would be venerable. Today however, the demonstration of skills, instead of the art itself, becomes the product of exhibition. The act of witnessing the art emerge makes us wonder! Whether the art or the act inspire us to pick up a pencil and produce art is an open question. One will quickly find oneself in the dilemma whether such a decision even makes sense in the age of the computer.

The computer still allows one to undo, redo and alter parts of drawings easily until one achieves the desired image. It is not easy to put oneself through multiple iterations, like the computer, until perfection. Many works here are witness to such struggle of achieving perfection. Errors and erasures have thus remained a part of this compilation. What attitudes do students have towards achieving perfection? One of my friends, in order to mitigate the trouble due to my idealism for perfection, would console saying that if you can’t achieve the expected, lower your standards. Perhaps many of us, in our times, were brought up with values of getting everything right, perfect. This often burdened us with a lot of self-expectation. Today, many students are freer, filled with enthusiasm and positive hope to perfect themselves over time. Errors or imperfections in their works do not bother them as they did to us. This allows them space and time and confidence to keep going.

These drawings thus bring many of such experiences to me, which I anticipate, will be one of the many readings you will also have. You will align with my thoughts if you are an architect, and more importantly a person teaching architecture. Moreso, I believe the thoughts shared above are also a result of subjecting architectural drawings to an art historical lens. I wonder if such an analysis brings to us any value in our teaching or making of architecture. Otherwise, this essay can be just left as a perspective.

a reflection on drawing studio works of SEA students
2015 | Anuj Daga


School of Environment & Architecture, 

Eksar Road, Borivali West,
Mumbai – 400 091. INDIA.