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.

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.