Lapod Diary: Part 2

The Built Environment

Architecture:


It is refreshing to see the modernity has yet not adulterated the village to a large extent. In whatever taste modernity has been appropriated, it doesnot really deface or affect the village adversely as a visual journey. People here are conscientious and understand how their building techniques help them contextually.
One can find few typologies of houses here (Drawings have been made by students which shall form a part of the official publication):

1. A basic enclosure with bare minimum rooms: This kind of house consists of an enclosing wall. This thick wall has niches carved inside it where people store all necessities for daily activities. The only covered spaces are the kitchen and living space, which too are sometimes open – depending on the season.

2. A minimum set of rooms with an open court in the centre: These are houses which are typical of joint families. Various rooms are shared by individual families and the courtyard is the common space. Such houses have made these rooms ‘pakka’ over time and thus have a common terrace over them. This terrace becomes space to store various things like pots, dry twigs, etc.

3. Havelis: There are smaller havelis and larger havelis. Havelis mostly are more than one floor. Both types have various sets of rooms. However, the size of the courtyard in the centre varies. Some courts are just for bringing in light while others are voluminous spaces that connect internal public spaces across various floors.

4. Those with storage: Based on occupations, houses have different storage areas. These storage areas include those for pots, livestock like sheep, cows, buffaloes, etc. etc. These areas are just added rooms which connect either from inside the house or outside for servicing the buyers.

Water Supply

Water is supplied to houses in the morning. Currently, few people collect water from the tubewells installed around the village or wells present in the village. Larger houses (more than one storey) have water tanks installed while other keep them stored in containers.The basic houses have a partitioned bathing area and sanitation facilities. Waste water is let out in open drains that can be seen throughout the village. Soil water is collected in grouped soak pits.

Construction

Houses in the villages are mostly made by the local material such as stones, bricks and timber. The roofing is done either in clay tiles or in weeds. Newer constructions are in concrete and hence hace beams and slabs. Concrete construction is mostly unfinished due to unskilled labour.

Floors use kota stone or dholpur stone. Pink seems to be a dominating colour of the buildings. However, many of the smaller self-made houses use cow dung plaster on floors.

The traditional choolha is still a part of their daily cooking activity. Women folk collect firewood from the nearby forest edge. The choolha brews out sweet smelling smoke which acts as a disinfectant and gives the houses a peculiar sweet smell.

One can find neem trees in the village. Generous plantations of bogain villa shrubs can be seen over the village. As mentioned earlier, there is a wheat farm that bounds the place.
Peacocks fly over the entire village, hiding themselves from the people.

Stray Dogs

Many a times, when I watch at the stray dogs on the streets, I end up involuntary comparing their lives to mine. Most of the times, I feel they are better off, because they do not have to answer any one around them: They can sleep any where, any time, they can eat any thing any time, they can choose their partner any where, any time; in fact they can also choose if they want to exist or not any time. Stray dogs are important cases to consider since dogs have been a part of our domestic lives for a long time now. One can associate them with having domestic sociable characteristics.

I think the best aspect about such animals is that they are left to their own once they grow up by their parents. Parents do not bother them any more! I am not sure if they follow the taboo of incest.

I wonder how dogs are never able to make or designate for themselves a living space. They choose to remain stray. Kennels, are but built by humans for them. Why don’t dogs, particularly stray ones, build themselves anything? Can we thus conclude that they choose to be stray? I have seldom seen them being possessive over territory. They must be perhaps. I  have not really invested in their behavioural patterns. But I have literally seen them eat, drink, breathe, stay in anything and anywhere. They even choose to defecate anywhere. Can life get more simpler? Seems like a joke!

I wonder why all of a sudden I chose to write about this today, and yet not well written. I shall need time to make it structurally strong and coherent. But I believe I have been procrastinating the elaboration of a lot of ideas. This is absolutely dangerous and I had to break out of it. When I am in no frame of mind, I do produce incoherent work like this. This is the reason why I avoid working without the right mood. But then, there is an aspect of practice which one needs to inculcate. If I must do something in writing, I have to constantly hone my skills in this field by constantly practicing this activity. I must be rigorous with it and produce profusely - especially when I have ideas. 

India's contribution to world culture

In the last two days; two people have raised the same question incidentally over our conversation on the practice of architecture in India.

"What essentially has India contributed in the last 500 years to world culture?"

Shinkre sir said that most of what we have produced is in the ancient ages. Referring to the practice of architecture, he questioned if we have been able to produce even a single exemplar building in the period after independence that we can look up to?

Diagonally substantiating it, Chaitanya critially pointed out that our discussion of architectural critique only falls within that limited cultural range of golden age. We have only been able to contribute what our great old forefathers did. There is hardly any thing intellectually culturally that the recent generations have given to the world that becomes a part of a global discussion.

I am not able to recall detailed discussions that we have had. I shall ask both, Shinkre sir and Chaitanya to elaborate and see if they can substantiate this dialogue further.

But the only thing that I kept recalling in the above context (see if you can find the clip with the preceding dialogue that instigates this song) - which may not be enough - is the following clip. And that is what Chaitanya criticises:

On sketching

Looking at Dhaval's sketch (or seeing him sketching), I feel we at the end of five years have internalized the art of sketching. We use one stick/medium in different ways to bring out different characters of lines. This in turn suggests a variety of materials and textures that the real space is made up of. In twisting turning the pencils or pens, we make it interact with the paper in a variety of ways. This sometimes generates interesting effects. This stylization in our drawing using limited mediums is the forte of an experienced sketcher.

Another aspect is framing one's drawing or choosing to ignore what is not to become the content of the image. The sketcher, more than depicting the reality must bring out the feel or essence of the space or object he/she is sketching. An architectural sketch is often a personal analysis. It must bring out, the essential character of the space the architect perceives.

This is often ignored in the elementary and intermediate drawing classes that are held during primary / secondary school days. The obsession with depicting reality is a preoccupation of the past - the renaissance period which was soon obliterated by the invent of the camera. The pursuit of sketching at its heart has always remained to observe, but the whole act of observation has taken an intellectual meaning in the modern age. This intellectualism, one feels, must reflect in what we draw today. But this calls for two things to happen - one, that you possess drawing skill; and two that you have a heightened sense of observation or understanding the surrounds. But another important skill one needs to possess is the ability to translate the intellectual observation into a drawing. Or, to make a prolific (intellectually skilled) drawing.

To take the example of Dhaval's drawings: he drew a balloon with a very soft hand - that emphasized on one part of the curve, a shadow through increasing pressure and density of line while made the line lighter and non existent on the opposite side. This made the balloon look floating and in tension. When he drew the cylindrical country tiles in elevation of a building, he kept balancing the pressure of the pencil in a way which brought out the curve of the tiles. When he draws out a perspective, he knows the details to put in.

Most students who come to architecture come with a heavy baggage of the elementary drawing classes. Actually it helps to be trained, but it is impediment for ways of seeing. They do not understand line intensities and that those can help conveying expressions. What voice modulation does in speech, line intensity does that in drawing. Exactly that is that the students have to understand. I have seen mostly that students draw caricatures / caricaturist drawings - where flat lines define form and content. I was explaining the student the other day how caricature is a medium for the masses, and it has to therefore flatten a lot of expression. A lot of such techniques result into mundane drawings because drawing techniques have been codified (institutionalized) into step by step kind of teaching methods / learn it yourself sketching books, which one can find every where. However, this is not to say that those are bad, but these books have to spell out that techniques are only methods, and tools have to be further explored by those who wish to develop their own ways of working.

As architects, we can not draw flat. Flatness has become the trend of drawings today. Very few teachers in graphics understand tonality and expression. The flatness in technical drawings has resulted into flat buildings and flat understanding of objects and built environments. It is therefore, that we draw a mundane skyline (a zigzag line - check images below) as a representative of the city. This does two things:
1. Gives an impression that skyline is a line of the buildings lying on the face
2. That the face is important and it must have a shape.

The problem with the above is that it ignores that:
1. Skyline is a photographic feature - that it is extracted from a photograph which is a two dimensional medium (even we see in two dimension)
2. That the skyline is essentially a layered set of buildings.

The flatness forgets the layers and results into viewing and intervention in the city as a flat enterprise.

Dhaval never draws flat. He brings out the tonality of a drawing very essentially. I shall request him to send over some of his drawings to publish here. And I shall try to put more examples of what I am trying to communicate.

Hell is very badly done // First year AD

Over the year, we have conducted architectural design projects based on representation and city, making life size models for hawkers (understanding anthropometrics and the body) and dealing with architectonics through crafting light. Thus, in some or the other way we kept making the course very formal. In the current project, we wanted to open up the dimension of imagination for architecture through everyday mythical spaces. We wanted students to think beyond the existing conventional ways of conceiving space. 

We introduced the students to the following:

"Hell is very badly done"

-Maxim Gorky

This one line statement was the brief that would drive the project.

Methodology:

We introduced the students to surrealist works of various artists (like Dali, Margritte, Dunchamp etc.) who have brought together different kinds of ideas together and other works. The students were asked to do the following stepwise:

1. Bring an interpretation, in any form (image, text, collage, painting, drawing, sketch, etc.) of the above line. (Note that we consciously played with the nuances of the statement - whether to prove or improve the claim)

2. Formalizing a single image using charcoal on large news print paper(s)

3. Detailing spatial character of this generated image

4. Asking students to get drawings of ten objects that come from their spatial imagination and further select a few to detail and hybridize to explore semantics and form.

5. Working with details of space - mechanics and function taking further hybridized concepts.

6. Translation of images into three dimensional models

7. Exploring models for materials, textures and further concepts through materiality of things.

8. Translating model back into a perceptive drawing of space.

As a part of the final work, the students were asked to present a single A1 sheet which explained the spatial character of their idea along with a brief write-up on the way they perceived "Hell"

Postscript:

"Hell" has remained a concept in the mythological narratives of most religions. It has been a part of all of our childhood imagnation. Our grandmothers and  mothers induced in us fear for this place thus preventing us from engaging in any 'wrong' acts. In doing so, they created within our minds an imagination of a specific place that equally evoked feeling of repulsion and interest to know more about. It was perhaps the curious mind wanting to expand its boundaries of visualization. Every grandmother created a new 'place' of hell through her description and programmatization - whether it be the devils who punish you by dipping you in hot oils or contraptions that chopped off your body parts. All of these activities were contained in a space or created a space of its own. However, we have never acknowledged and explored hell as a space having a definite program. A program that has been overtly described in various mythological texts seems to have no architectural / visual imagination. This dilemma of a concept that seemed present in our everyday mythical imagination, and so spatial, not having any visual imagination made us pursue it as an architectural project.

Although, we did caution ourselves of getting into too many of cutting-chopping projects. We definitely wanted to avoid dealing with bloodshed and physical torture: after all, architecture is a humanist practice (and I do not intend any ironies or paradoxes here). So Gorky's statement, which was essentially expressed in a different context, was chosen to be explored for the universal idea of 'Hell'. Here students explored ideas of a space that evoked tendencies that may seem socially, physically, behaviourally or logically misfit in the real world. 

We often mix up architectural programs with architectural aesthetic. This is not to say that each program has its own (or creates its own) aesthetic - that a school must 'look like' a school and a hospital must 'look like' a hospital. This project was critical for the fact that it allowed a difficult program to continue having a pleasing aesthetic. The core question is whether the difficult could also be beautiful? Or what could be an aesthetic of the unpleasing? (I am not using 'aesthetic' in the same way as 'beauty'). Thus, in doing so, we also challenged our own notions of beautiful. 

To talk of  beauty (which is more often understood as visual) in context of the questions above, we discussed ideas like "why are we not able to see a dead rat ran over by a truck lying on the street - with its blood spilling out and intestines all split apart? Why are we not able to engage with a heap of garbage containing all kinds of waste lying on the roadside, why don't we like the idea of sleeping on organic waste?" Haven't we seen crows feeding on human spit or vomit?; haven't we seen dogs sleeping on litter, haven't we seen vultures preying over the dead or haven't we seen micro-organisms creating spaces within garbage dumps? The comparison of  engagement of animals with things we reject raises the question of validation of beauty. To me, this project opened up methods through which one could face the other side of conventional aesthetic. 

Further, this project reminds me arguments of Georges Bataille and the surrealists who emphasized on the dual role of the perception; the question of disciplining the senses. Bataille raises many important questions. One of which includes reference to the Cross we see in most Churches - that which depicts Chirst is nailed onto it, he asks, what makes such a horrific image acceptable? What is so sacred about such an image? What provides pleasure in this image for worship? In his writings, Bataille explores the notion of guilt, of what goes on with negative emotions...

However, the project for Hell developed its own trajectories and aesthetic. We shall try and compile it for future discourse and archive. Following are some process images of student works: