Planning for Hampi trip a decade ago.
Notes from Tapan Mittal Deshpande.
Monday, October 24, 2022
Sunday, October 23, 2022
Tuesday, October 18, 2022
The Art of Spatial Representation
The Art of Spatial Representation
by Anuj Daga and Prashant Prabhu
presented at the Nine Fish Art Gallery, Byculla
16th November 2022, for Art35 event
The notion of "space" has been central to both; the discipline of art as well as architecture in equal measure. The creation of this framework of space is what essentially gives context and meaning to our material reality and built environment. Thus, the act of representation of this space is crucial in the way we come to perceive and thereby create our realities.
While Euclidean planar geometry in the west produced buildings such as the monumental Pyramids, Greek cultures introduced the principles of ideal proportions in the Parthenon. Artistic experiments in the perfection of perspective drawings during the Renaissance were reflected in the axial and symmetrical urban spaces whereas the development of Cartesian coordinate geometry resulted into the monotony of the modernist building blocks. Alongside in the East, the Mughal and Pahari miniature paintings beautifully interwove time and space into an indistinct continuum with their free form flattened and skewed perspectives while Chinese gardens seem to emerge from their own unique ways of oblique representations.
However in the present day, the predominant form of houses all over the globe appear to be homogeneous and cookie cutter representations of the “notion of a house”. Could this sameness around us be related to the way in which we have come to understand and visually represent space today? Through an overview of different visual traditions of spatial representation across time and cultures, this presentation/conversation attempts to lay out the shifts in conception and creation of the built environment.
How does the nature of representation of space affect the way in which we imagine and intervene within our creative practice? How can the existence of various artistic practices be crucial in order to interrogate the established norms through which architectural spaces get represented today? Conversely, how can artists employ techniques of spatial imagination within the conception/imagination of their own work? This presentation is an invitation to interrogate and rethink the modes and means of imagining spatial realities to locate contemporary practice in art and architecture.
by Anuj Daga and Prashant Prabhu
presented at the Nine Fish Art Gallery, Byculla
16th November 2022, for Art35 event
The notion of "space" has been central to both; the discipline of art as well as architecture in equal measure. The creation of this framework of space is what essentially gives context and meaning to our material reality and built environment. Thus, the act of representation of this space is crucial in the way we come to perceive and thereby create our realities.
While Euclidean planar geometry in the west produced buildings such as the monumental Pyramids, Greek cultures introduced the principles of ideal proportions in the Parthenon. Artistic experiments in the perfection of perspective drawings during the Renaissance were reflected in the axial and symmetrical urban spaces whereas the development of Cartesian coordinate geometry resulted into the monotony of the modernist building blocks. Alongside in the East, the Mughal and Pahari miniature paintings beautifully interwove time and space into an indistinct continuum with their free form flattened and skewed perspectives while Chinese gardens seem to emerge from their own unique ways of oblique representations.
However in the present day, the predominant form of houses all over the globe appear to be homogeneous and cookie cutter representations of the “notion of a house”. Could this sameness around us be related to the way in which we have come to understand and visually represent space today? Through an overview of different visual traditions of spatial representation across time and cultures, this presentation/conversation attempts to lay out the shifts in conception and creation of the built environment.
How does the nature of representation of space affect the way in which we imagine and intervene within our creative practice? How can the existence of various artistic practices be crucial in order to interrogate the established norms through which architectural spaces get represented today? Conversely, how can artists employ techniques of spatial imagination within the conception/imagination of their own work? This presentation is an invitation to interrogate and rethink the modes and means of imagining spatial realities to locate contemporary practice in art and architecture.
Download Presentation here
Monday, October 10, 2022
The Work of Culture
by Gananth Obeyesekere
Symbolic transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology
The Work of Culture is the process whereby symbolic forms existing on the cultural level get created and recreated through the minds of the people. It deals with the formation and transformation of symbolic forms, but it is not a transformation without a subject as in conventional structural analysis. Furthermore, the work of culture is not confined to deep motivation in the Freudian sense. While the symbolic transformation of the images of the unconscious into the public culture is the main focus of [the lectures in the book], I do not confine myself to this exclusive domain...
Thursday, October 06, 2022
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.
Saturday, September 24, 2022
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
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
Tuesday, September 20, 2022
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