Daman Coastline

This is a Map of Daman coastline highlighting the fast transforming environmental features all the way from Bhilad to Nani Daman Fort, created by Vastavikta Bhagat during our field visit for the Environmental Design Studio during June 2022. 

The premise of the studio was to articulate environmental questions for the emerging consolidation of the 12km long coastline of the Union Territory of Daman along the coat of Arabian Sea that is primarily geared towards serving a middle and upper class tourism market; and thereby articulate architectural responses to soften the impacts due to such hardening of the edge. 

On Stories

Dushyant: (shares a meme) "In the end we all become stories."
Me: (In the end) Only powerful people become stories. The remaining become sea-salt.

Spatial Diagrams

Spatial Diagrams
workshop at Wadiyar Centre For Architecture, Mysore
27-29 May 2022

Spatial diagrams help reveal the hidden systems and patterns of social relations within a built form that index historical modes of spatial organization. They may also hold certain cultural codings of ideological beliefs within societies, in other words, institutionalised forms of practices that get encrusted into built form. Such knowledge is essential in order to develop a critical appraisal of the built environment on the one hand, as well as devising contextual and meaningful conditions for inhabitation on the other. The contention of this workshop is that these diagrams can be harnessed off the rhythms of objects, images and stories through which people “produce” their everyday life. These artefacts are not static, rather they move in time and space producing “heterotopic” conditions. A critical engagement with these artifacts allows us to make meaning into these heterotopias and further articulate contemporary arguments for spatial inhabitation. A careful deployment of these artefacts may allow us to articulate new ways of organizing spatial relationships in space.

How can these ideas within the built environment be extracted, appreciated and harnessed towards spatial processes? This workshop will focus on deciphering building grammars, and formulating architectural languages that generate possibilities for the experimentation of innovative spatial types that compliment, interrogate as well as critically inform the practices of inhabitation in a given place. These possibilities shall be expressed as a series of diagrams that encapsulate the spirit of place and their spatial dispositions.


Methodology
· Creating an archive of stories, objects and images (physical) that indicate their understanding of the town of Mysore
· Making of collage to articulate spatial arguments
· Spatial Diagrams: Translation of collages into material manifests

Deliverables
· Archive of the place
· Collage iterations
· Spatial Models



Schedule

DAY 1. 27 May 2022, Fri

Session 1 / 11 am to 1:30 am
Introduction: The Location of Place

Session 2 / 2:30 to 4:30 pm
Place as Archive: Stories, objects and Images

Session 3 / 5 pm to 7 pm
Spatial Translations: Collage as Method*


DAY 2. 28 May 2022, Sat

Session 4 / 9 am to 11 am
Making Collages and Spatial Arguments

Session 5 / 11.30 to 1.30
Finalisation of Collages and Extraction of Spatial Values

Session 6 / 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm
Material Translations: Model as Diagram*

Session 7 / 5 pm to 7 pm
Conceptual Models Iterations


DAY 3. 29 May 2022, Sun

Session 8 / 9 am to 11 am
Refinements and Spatial Articulations

Session 9 / 11:30 am to 1:30 pm
Space Syntax Scale

 

Archive as Home

If the condition of home is an imprint of collection of all things that help us find ourselves, and resonate with the world at large, could the making of archive be home-making / mirror the process of home-making itself? I still need to consider , rather reconsider if the title must be reversed, that is - to say 'Home as Archive' - but at this point of time, I am almost confident that hoe is not an archive, the homes that we occupy together with others (other to mean those who are not like us, and those who therefore do not think like us) - the home can therefore never reflect individuals purely. When people collect, they hold absolute agency of including precisely those things that give meaning to their lives and existence. Here of course, I am thinking of archive through a personalised act of collection - where the archive is not a general archive, but an accumulation of those things that matter to the collector. The archive in which the collector is able to mirror his/her self is thus a representation of home, for it sets the coordinates and conditions to feel comfort and security of containing a world view which cannot be necessarily challenged. 

"What is a screen Now-a-days?" by Francesco Casetti

On scientific thought

On Theory and Interdisciplinarity

Marxism

Earlier notes on my attempts to understand 'Who is a Marxist'?

Cultural Retrofits \ Insert Exhibition, 2014

Spatial Mapping Workshop

August 27-28, 2022
for Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts
Conducted by Anuj Daga

Background

Maps are primarily used by a vast majority of the urban population for navigation today. Most of us use them through our phones to move across places, book our rides with competitive fares, find places of interest around us to hang out or eat, or even decide whether to venture out after checking the amount of traffic enroute our destination. While we feel these services by various free apps convenience us (which they indeed do), it is precisely our location in space and time that feeds in their system to generate the geography of congestion, leisure, occupation or rest. Thus, we get mapped into the very object we are consuming.

Cartographic maps - the ones you see on Google Maps or such other services - emerged during the colonial period during the 1700s as a way of accurately (read: scientifically) surveying the extent of land. However, until today, they have remained as the key instruments through which spaces are imagined, represented and reorganized for people at large. The instrument of the cartographic map has been institutionalized as a way of defining and redefining territory by most planning and design bodies across the world. While maps give information about an environment to its users, they also control the way in which we come to inhabit spaces today. The spatial turn of the mid-20th century brought many disciplines of the humanities to critically consider the role of space and place within the social sciences through the interrogation of cartography. Subsequently, it has raised the key concerns regarding who-s and how-s of claiming space within a city/region.

This workshop will open up the ways in which cartographic maps record spatial information and understand what it may disclose about the way we inhabit our space. It introduces the participants to different forms of map making practices across history and potentials and problems of cartographic maps. Further, through mapping exercises, we will make our own maps that will dialogue with institutional maps. What latent aspects of inhabitation can mapping reveal to us? How does space construct power structures that our routines get scripted into? Lastly, how can the knowledge of spatial mapping enable social scientists to interrogate or invent ways of thinking about space?


OBJECTIVES

The workshop will aim at understanding:
● How space is represented in/through maps
● How to read spatial information using maps
● How to make one’s own maps
● How to draw conclusions from a map regarding space and behaviour.



SCHEDULE

DAY 1 / 27th August 2022 / Sat

Session 1 / 9:00 am - 11:00 am
Cartography and the Spatial Turn
What is a map and how does it represent geography? This session will open up the map as a conceptual tool by bringing various perspectives of participants into conversation and steer towards a historical evolution of technical maps that we access today. It will establish the categorical relationship between space and its representation.


Session 2 / 11:30 am to 1:30 pm
Maps and Forms
What are the different forms of maps across time? What do they tell us about space and human relationship with their surroundings? How can these readings be used? This session will look at maps as active tools of interacting and intervening into space. It will ask participants, in groups, to identify ideas that they would like to explore/study by map making.


DAY 2 / 28th August 2022 / Sun

Session 1 / 9:00 am - 11:00 am
Making Maps
In this session, participant groups will workshop their data into the maps and prepare visual representations of space. The session will collate all data within a map and prepare grounds for speculation through this evidence.

Session 2 / 11:30 am to 1:30 pm
Drawing Conclusions
Each student group will present their findings to each other and open up new directions/questions for further inquiry.