Between Books & Buildings

Contemplations

The text starts behaving in a particular way when it is bound in the form of a book. The book has its own agency. The environment in which the book provokes the reader to be read and the manner in which the body engages with it talks about the body-space dynamic embedded in its form.The reception of text in a given environment - static or mobile - is a function of time. The body space rubric is thus also coupled with time, eventually describing time into the reading of the content. Text of the content has its own time (of reading and of its own place) the way text paces thought, which creates a certain environment. What happens when this transmission clashes or collapses with the time which the absorbing physical body is suspended in? Can the format of the book mediate time?

The table of books 

On books: Discussing with Poonam Jain

Participants making their own books

Participants working on their book projects

Artist Poonam Jain opens up ways of imagining books through her works.

Participants listening to Poonam

The team

Structuralism and Structuralists

Says Foucault:

"Imagine a photograph representing a face. If you make this image go from positive to negative, in a way all the dots of the picture are going to be modified. That is to say that all the points that were white will become black and that all the points that were black will become white. None of the points, none of the elements therefore remain identical. And yet you can recognize the face. And yet the face remains the same even though it has gone from positive to negative, and you can say that it stays the same; you recognize it because the relations between all these different elements have remained the same. Relations between the points have stayed the same, or relations of contrast and of opposition between white and black have remained the same, even though each of the dot that was white has become black, and each point that was black has become white.

Deep down in a very broad sense of what structuralism is , we can say that structuralism is the method of analysis that consists of drawing constant relations from elements that in themselves, in their own character, in their substance, can change.

Structuralists are people for whom what counts in essence, are systems of relations and thus not all the lived individual experience of people... what I do belongs at heart like structuralism to this great questioning of the sovereignty of the subject..."

Notes from the Serendipity Arts Festival 2016

India never evolves, it jumps. We have situations where one day there is no toilet and the other day, they are hundreds. We have situations where there is no electricity, but the person of the house has a mobile phone.
We are not going to ever have 240 museums - like London.

What we have to do is to open up locked up temporary infrastructure for arts and artists. Second is to open up / find patrons who will have something worthwhile to offer.

India is not necessarily an educated race, but we are highly intelligent.

Feroze Gujral

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What is the History of memory? How do we utilize memory?
The struggle of the archive is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
A shared history means a shared experience.

The phenomenon of Europe and America coming and "helping" us to discover our destiny.
Rise of extreme nationalism in our countries.

What kind of crisis emerge, what are the violent implications when a country wants to expand its economic might in its surrounding areas? The first 1857 nationalism movement was against the economic exploitation.  What are the ethics of working in a particular kind of political economy?

War has forced a lot of people to migrate. Migration to America and Europe have not yet been a big political question. But these questions are going to come up. Nepal is stuck between two world superpowers - India and China.

We have to learn to be silent and listen to our neighbour.

When you have no power to talk to the big, powerful people, the only way to probably talk to them is humour and satire. It completely undermines the political process and art can bring about some subtlty. You can be standing opposite to a very highly intelligent person who is opposing you and still not be bale to be do anything about it. It is here that art can intervene as a mediator. Art has influenced and shaped narratives in every culture - and it happens over a longer duration of time. Subtleties of political debate can be conducted only through art.

To be sure,  nation/states can't understand humour.

Amrith Lal

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If you are true to yourself, you are true to your political time. So this question will be inevitably there in your work. So you don't have to question consciously.

Riyas Komu

Notes from Marshall McLuhan

The people of the west developed their visual point of view and their acuity of vision along with Euclidean geometry. No other country in the world had Euclidean geometry except the country of the phonetic alphabet. without phonetic alphabet you don’t have euclidean space. there is no euclid in the orient. There's neither any individual identity, private identity in the orient. But the kinds of left and right hemisphere things coordinate quite well since the lineal nature of the left hemisphere is very visual - visual space is the only space that is lineal and connected. Acoustic space is not lineal or connected. The acoustic space is a sphere who we hear from all directions at once. Acoustic space is a sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose margin is no where. That is a simultaneous sound which creates that kind of space. It is the space of the sound bubble in rock space. But right hemisphere is simultaneous acoustic and this is very favourable to the corporate identity of oriental man. People who 'play it by the ear'. As opposed to those people who have a strong bias of 'point of view' and who play it by the eye and by logical connected estimate bottomline quantity and so on. This is all left hemisphere. But the right hemisphere has no bottom line and is interested only in quality, not in quantity. And so the other wordless, the non-worldly orient with its interest in the way of life rather than in the amount of product…you might say, polynesia, our various attempts have been made to organise the polynesian into the dynamic produces of this and that and they remain completely indifferent. They are very acoustically oriented people. Very right hemisphere. But the right and left hemispheres affect both of us to some degree. There, its not an plain either or. We use both the hemispheres to some degree. But in some cultures, the one or the other gets much stress, much play.

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To Read means to guess.

Reading is an activity of rapid guessing.

Old English rǣdan, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch raden and German raten ‘advise, guess’. Early senses included ‘advise’ and ‘interpret (a riddle or dream’)

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...paradoxically, the clown was a person with a grievance. his role in medieval society was to be the voice of grievance. The clown's job was to tell the emperor or tell the royalty exactly what was wrong with the society. He often lost his head in this process. but the clown, the international , motley of our times, the clown is trying to tell us his grievance. the beards, the hairdos and the costumes of the young are  manifestations of grievance and anger. 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_383842&feature=iv&src_vid=ImaH51F4HBw&v=a11DEFm0WCw

Playing to the Politics of Pedagogy

We are in the review season for architectural schools. I was appointed to assess the works of two schools of architecture in Mumbai by the University: Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture and the Indian Education Society's (IES) College of Architecture. Both very different in their pedagogical approach, but tied by the syllabus and codes of Mumbai University.

At KRVIA, students are trained to look at design interventions (located in any place) through a predominantly urban focus. KRVIA's outlook to design; as the Director Aneeruddha Paul had once explained me long ago; does not treat architecture separate from urban design. It doesnot draw a line between the two disciplines, rather, thinks of architecture to be inherently inscribed within a larger set of urban forces. (Ofcourse, this comes from the school's own situated ness in the city of Mumbai). Thus, architectural responses articulated in the studios are necessarily thought and set within a theoretical trajectory of understanding cities. Rightfully so, and pedagogically innovative. For a long time, "city" had become a buzz word for the school. All projects were informed by a direct or pressed reading of urban conditions and urban studies. There was a moment in the life of KRVIA, aligned with the interest of the West, to generate tremendous studies on the city of Mumbai - that they are situated in - through their architectural design studio and research projects. Other schools were oblivious to the idea of the city until then. 

Other colleges, like the IES have been influenced by the loud and bold projects of KRVIA, only marginally. KRVIA, in my opinion, managed to draw attention to architecture as an urban function for many colleges of architecture around the city, as well as the country (?). As some of its faculty disintegrated or shared their knowledge with/in other schools, or made productive exchanges with other local colleges, thinking of architecture through the urban method became available to them. Colleges like Academy benefitted directly with professors like Prasad Shetty taking studios that anchored the experiences of students within the urbanity they grew up in. A few fresh graduates of KRVIA who taught at Academy of Architecture were able to inject methodical ways of working in their otherwise staling design studios. They were also able to expand the teachings of a particular 'urban' method to these colleges.

Over the years, KRVIA has become critical of its own 'urban' mode, although it has not completely given it away. The students often end up imagining programs and their architectural formulations thinking compulsively through this urban - as if it had become a universal standard, or sometimes, even as default. While they do get sensitive over the years, the confidence in the city and an architecture overtly situated in its dynamic, shapes an architecture that is obsessively ambitious. The evolution, if I may say, as been located in diagrammatizing the building, often a one-liner, with little emphasis to its architectural resolution. Some may say, that to think of buildings through diagrams of architectural intent is a virtue in itself, and that it must be to the credit of the college. That a building is an argument, that it has a larger urban function, that it is a cultural object - are all accepted. But I find it hard if these are not logically carried forward into a rigorous architectural resolution. To expect this in a system of mass education, and at the third year level is unfair. Further, I am more concerned about what kind of diagrams and what kinds of building types do come out of such approach, and how do we assert them as relevant?

On the other hand, colleges like IES seem to have missed the bus completely. Today, we saw students dealing with a making an institution catering to the city inside the artificially created forest of Maharashtra Nature Park. While the brief aimed to achieve the objectives of generating an appropriate urban response, as well as tackling the issue of sensitivity to the natural surroundings of the site, the students seemed to have addressed neither. This, produced through an absolute lack of method, and through the guidance of faculty that has neither a focused 'urban', nor 'environmental' orientation of any sort made the student interventions miserable. Firstly, we failed to see architectural intent in any of the buildings. None of the projects established in what way would they like to respond to the nature around them. Certainly thus, there was no study whatsoever of the ecology of the place, or an understanding of the ways in which nature has been dealt with through built projects across the globe. Secondly, there was no clarity on what makes the building "urban"? What are forms of "urban" in a natural setting? How do we understand the "urban" within the rubric of environment? These questions don't seem to be even vaguely thought of through the studio mentors. The only idea to respond to "nature" was that of the "organic" - quickly resolved into a swirling shape - say a leave, or curve, or spiral or circle - purely in plan. Further, differently scaled outlines of these shapes were subdivided without any structural understanding into smaller "rooms".

The indifferent resolution of any shape or diagram into vacuumised rooms was common to both - IES and KRIVA. In KRVIA, students had invariably provided regular rooms - with one metre doors, even for cattle, goats, and other animals - reached through steps and ventilated by typical windows. In IES, all kinds of activities happened in rooms of more or less same size and shapes - a pottery workshop happens in a classroom with 40 seats and a teacher, as much as a bamboo workshop. Both have same facilities. Further, all rooms are 3 to 3.5 metres high. There is no volumetric sensitivity to room proportions with respect to their programs. The idea of architecture as volume is understood only by a few, since the volume is always dissected into the X & Y axis - the plan and the section. When dissociated, they hardly are perceived together, and fail to come together until the end. But what I primarily want to draw out here, is the generality and banality of form achieved through the urban method, in one case, or the uninformed urban mind on the other.

Over the span of three to four months, how can students merely expose themselves to merely two or three other architectural references, sometimes, none? To be sure, students certainly take on to the internet these days, but can't there be ways where digging out books and looking at building plans and photographs are integrated within the subject of design? Indeed, one can not deny that students today don't even know what to look at in a visual. Gone are the days when one could look at a Vitruvian Man and think of the proportions of one's own body and further the mathematical inscription of nature. It would take a lecture of 45 minutes to merely go over what the diagram means - even if it was so visually evident and obvious! The centrality of visual studies and ways of seeing to architecture can not be denied, and inevitably need to be drawn into understanding architecture. Values of composition, scale, proportion, aesthetics - those embedded in visual methods have to be made explicit, with critical and conscious knowledge of problematics of historical pedagogical modes of organization of forms (bauhaus / constructivism / structuralism / deconstructivism, etc.). The visual method has lost its importance for two reasons - the failed determinism of schools like the Bauhaus on one hand (as identified by colleges like KRVIA), and the failure to upgrade the very traditional workings of the same Bauhaus to the present (as apparent in colleges like IES).

Dilemmas occur when you have to grade students within the problematics of such pedagogical issues. One college suffers over-identification, while the other suffers indifference. Within the politics (of the failure thereof) of pedagogies, how do you evaluate the product? Evaluation here becomes so banal - for the student's project is merely the function of the pedagogical imperative.

The School of Environment & Architecture meanwhile attempts to wrestle between the urban and the environmental - constantly pulled between the ideologies garnered inevitably by its founders. Between excessive expectation and ambition to meet both, the school either tears down students or produces serendipitous conceptual innovations. The lack of architectural resolution or the ill representation of a well conceived project keeps me unsatisfied - not just at SEA, but at every place I go for an review. The studio I participate in at SEA has a heavy (unnecessary) urban focus - something that I do not particularly enjoy, or resonate with. With almost no space to experiment my own architectural questions - those which I once initiated at Academy - the last three years have left me academically frustrated between the urban and the environmental. After all, these are not the questions that excite me, neither are these my areas of expertise. These are not my inquiries. I am interested in exploring the absolute-ness of architecture and throwing it back in the space of the real, eventually learning how the ideal can find place in the practical.

The political play of pedagogies prevents such exploration - where does one find space to explore ideas? How does one deploy them outside these mega constructs controlled by those in the hands of whom institutional power vests? Hopefully, I will find my space. For while I was once in search of an academic space, today, it has completely trapped me within its own constraining ideology, expecting me to play to it. A day will come, and I'll snap!

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.

  

Squeeze lime in your Eye - Kaushik Mukhopadhyay

It might sound far too obvious to some, that the title of Kaushik's show asks the viewers to look closely, bringing near your two eye lids to each other (when thinking of actually squeezing lime in your eyes), reducing the focal length, and moving closer to the intricacies of the work that have been presented at the Chatterjee and Lal gallery. At once, you will notice the compounded nature of things that were packaged for you as a black box. We never dared to open them up, the gadgets produced in the electrical age, just before or alongside the first age of modern technology, did we? The television box, the computer motherboards, the printers, scanners and all sorts of gadgets that mediated our lives into the virtual world of the digital. Kaushik turns this world inside out, making the gallery into a laboratory of sorts where he jumps two steps at once. The first as I mentioned before, of opening up the machines inviting us to observe closely their anatomy. The second is to reconfigure them into new relationships through an inflected human agency. Challenging the autonomous world of machines, the new arrangements are left naked for a brave investigation of parts and pieces that we would never otherwise fiddle with.

In peeling off their outer skins, the artist converts the interior landscape of the gallery into an orgy of sorts, where different machinic components hybridize in unexpected ways. At once echoing the technological version of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, the exhibition whispers loudly the subterranean construct of our recent domesticity. Further, by fusing them with phenomenal experiences together, the project talks of machines as human extensions, and our cyborg-esque lives. A certain grim critique emerges in the creation of several pieces. The objects from the first section bring together the delicate and the robust in strange ways, where each material of either category have taken the characteristics of the other in a compelling way. The pink plastic flower-like fan stands on three fragile spider-like wooden legs, while restrained in lateral motion through a metal axle. The dangling scaled plastic water tank on an intricately wire-mesh crafted vertical structure reminds of the complex housing forms that people have shaped themselves in certain parts of the city. The precarious nature of the entire installation exclaims the exigencies of living conditions in the city. In the same section, another installation reworks a machine to lift a small load, albeit so slowly that it can almost be missed. However, engaging patiently with the work will bring to you everyday scenes of watching the heavy materials slowly lifted by cranes that can be spotted on construction sites all across the city.

Such parallels may be obvious on two fronts - firstly, from my own architectural training and reading of these works, but more importantly, from Kaushik's close pedagogical engagement at the architecture school where he has been teaching visual studies for about more than twenty years. An "architectural" reading brings out questions of form, space and their experiential relationships with human beings that seem to be embedded in most of these works. These may be explored and understood at two evident levels - the objectual as well as the representational. Scaled models are the most used instruments in spatial and form-al studies in architectural studios. When viewed as heuristic architectural devices, Kaushik's machines bring up complex narratives of city life - the manner in which the city sustains and decays at the same time. On the other hand, the exhibition provokes us to think how living for thus long with and around machines have immuned us to their voices, effects and the imbibed corporeal transfigurations that were never a part of our bodies and everyday experiences. Open display of bundles of wires, the array of screens, the series of bulbs and such other fields of spare parts shall certainly bring us to reconsider the world of gadgets that surrounds us. Today, we perform with these machines without necessarily questioning them.

At regular intervals, the entire space begins to chatter and clang with sounds and lights, perplexing and exciting you to capture the many minute movements that occur across all machines that seem to be invisibly connected. The bulbed spraying fountain, the waterjet scanner, the rotating disc, the ringing telephone, the hammering axles, the glowing bulbs simultaneously come to life, creating an environment of chaos and stimulatory excess.  It is here that Kaushik hints to the squeezing lime once again - to the tendency of resistance that may cause ourselves to shut off to such world of simulation. This exhibition may not point at, or even address ideas about aesthetic in the sphere of the visual. It is visibly chaotic, where no contraption shall offer you a pleasing background to take a picture. Each machine is seen in the backdrop of the other. It will not offer you easy answers. It begs yet again, to squeeze lime in your eye.