Culture of Reading

Prakriti told me some very interesting things about the culture of reading. She said that she prefers reading physical books rather than reading them on screen or online. She said she likes the experience of the weight of the book transferring from her right hand to her left as she finishes it over time. She enjoys the smell, the texture of the paper and the size of the book in hand.

On screen, she said, is a different culture of reading. Neither do you experience the above, nor it is anything more than a visual interface. The intensity of the screen, the brightness of different displays are not suited to reading. Reading is also about seeing a certain text on a paper in a certain kind of light. Moreover, you keep on zooming in and out of the screen. Computers do not even help bookmarking. 

Thus, books may not be completely erased. They shall exist for the archaic reader, for readers like me and Prakriti. For many more like us. The generation who is already born in the age of computer and the mobile shall definitely take up to the culture of carrying e books! I must say Prakriti's observations are very sensitive.

Band-Aid

My old house

A cross section of my old house, where each space came to life because of a variety of activity patterns.

Above is a section of my old building (the grey-ed rectangle being my house). The building was somewhere between a chawl and apartment-type of structures we have today. The way to the building was difficult to spot. I always thought that all spaces in the building are used to live. However, as I grew old, I realized that my building was a mixed use building with a toy-shop, a flour mill and a sugarcane juice shop on the ground floor, spaces which faced the road. As I began to navigate places on my own on growing old, I started reading addresses on sign boards of shops, and found the name of my building on these shops. It may sound really silly, but I always felt before studying architecture that buildings are houses, to live, to stay. Shops are different from houses, and that they can not be a part of living/housing.


Gradually, as I started to understand, and thanks to my architectural education, a whole new building revealed to me. Every person in this building used the space of the home to work! Right from my father to the last person on the ground - all were working. Work was a part of living. All kinds of things were manufactured in the tenements - food items, clay works, art works, drawings (architect / arthouse / advertising), gold-works, electrical works, tube-lights - everything. It was a part of my living. Architecture separated (classified) this absolute space of mine.


However,


Architecturally, the building allowed transparency of activities between the vertical floors. Each floor's terrace overlooked below, and a (loud) call would be enough to communicate with anyone in the building. There were thus, live patterns in the building, which made the whole building active all the time. The activities were porous, the spaces more fluid, as they opened on to private barsatis, which still could be shared. During rains, all people would get out playing in the water, and housekeepers would pull out buckets and place them under corrugated sheet coverings to collect water which was cool and fresh. During the summers, people staying below would come up on the wider terrace for drying papads, chaklis and home made masalas. All children would collect together on any of the terraces and start a play during their vacation. The neighbours would also use the staircase during the afternoon because it was cool and calm to study. The little corners of these terraces would be used for plantations. All houses opened on to an open space, which was private and public at the same time. It was easy to peep into others' house, and people did not really feel offended.

Staircases were study rooms, terraces were play grounds, and sometimes gardens too, rooms were interconnected....fights were public, homes were public, backyards were dustbins, smells were democratic, rains were for all, windows were personal, cats lived in houses, stray dogs guarded the building...

more stories to tell!

Constraints in effective Indian Pedagogy

These days, talking about pedagogy, we at Academy seem to be extremely concerned about motivating the students to take initiatives to learn and grow on their own. We realized that it is far more difficult than any other college abroad, or for that matter even other colleges in the city to understand the student groups in Academy. Being a 60 year old institution, rooted in marathi blood, affiliated to the government and owing to its popularity, the Institution attracts a large number of people from different strata of the society. The multitude of students coming into the college can not be dealt with flatly. There are cultural, caste, class and educational differences between students. Some have problems in language, others have problems with understanding, some have landed up in the field because they could not enroll in any other course of their choice. There are issues of affordability, compulsions, reservations and a host of other legal issues. This forms the mixed student group in a class. How do you deliver a lecture to a class which is so disparate at intellectual levels and skill set?

We can not select students we would like to work with since we have to accept the students based on a merit rank calculated on the basis of an average of 12th std marks and a drawing test. These generalized standards do not necessarily profile the student we wish to work with at Academy. How are we to then tackle issues of interest levels on one hand and producing better professionals or thinkers on the other? In colleges abroad, the student community is grossly flat. They all speak English and are taught in English, so the basic level of understanding is quite high. On the other hand, since students are well trained in humanities, they take their own decisions (which over here, are guided by parents, on the basis of generalized career prospects). Thus, most people are able to figure out their interests and also pursue them as they wish to. There are large biases and stigmas associated with certain professions here. Amongst these complexities, what does one make out of the students or even the education system here?

We are dealing with lots of layers of complexities. At many autonomous institutions, which are able to decide upon the kind of students they wish to work with, along with the kind of course they want to teach, a lot of this complexity can be avoided. We at Academy have to not only follow the orthodox prescriptions of the Mumbai University, but also deal with the students sent over the by the University. This is not to undermine the students' potential or to show them down, but to make them aware that there is only this much that an Institution can do. It is largely for students to make a career successful for themselves.

A course like architecture becomes even more tricky because there is no one answer to any question. There is no one solution to a problem, and that things can be interpreted in so many ways. Thus, the framework that the university provides is redundant. The state of architecture in the country is low because Institutions and teachers have failed to update themselves regularly. Those who do update themselves unavoidably become "too different" to face criticism for not following the prescribed norms. In the bureaucracy of the system, the level of education becomes the least common denominator of the bare minimum and almost become a pitiful exercise of enabling students to pass by gaining minimum marks. 

All who return from their masters (from abroad or better institutions) want to teach! Many a times, people join teaching to assume the fashionable  position of the Intellect. But on other occasions, they also realize what is lacking in the education system, what they can contribute to it and therefore use the space of the academia to fulfil or perform experiments that they could not do during their time. All this, at the cost of the student's future. Some students gain, others manage ways out.

However, this debate needs serious thinking. Not only the teachers need to evaluate their positions, the students need to understand their goals and roles as students...Students can push their teachers to perform. This is not to say that they themselves must become their own teachers. Teachers have to be seen as facilitators for students' ideas. But teachers must collaborate with students to find new directions to venture into. For this, the student community has to not only forget this layered division amongst themselves but also realize to respect their own social positions and operate accordingly. This could be possibly one way of raising the architectural standards (for that matter, educational standards) of a place like ours.

The Passage of Modernism in India

It's sad that Indians dont know about India.
It's sad that the Britisher's dont know about the good works they did in India.
The latter is excusable, the former is not!

quoted Sudhir Deshpande.

I didn't quite understand what he meant by the second statement. I asked him: "What do you refer to when you say that the Britisher's don't know about their 'good' work in India?"

He explained:

It was Lord Curzon who formalized and revived the intensive work of archeology in India. Lord Curzon proposed the British Queen to grant some financial aid for carrying out archeological surveys in the country. On investigation of his proposal, the Queen offered some 80000 pounds for this work, which was extremely insufficient and impractical. Curzon suggested that this was not enough, and reflected of a poor geographical understanding and expanse of Indian territory on the Queen's part. Later on, realizing the significance of the work, the Queen proposed to send some people to help with the archaeological works in India. Curzon refused and said. "Me and my Indian brothers will handle this." Thus was the setting up of the Archaeological Survey of India. It was thereby only in 1915 some time that the historic sites of Mohenjo Daro were excavated! Later on , this wing gave boost to the development of new surveying equipments in India for matters of survey and measurement of topography and landform.

The Britishers experimented the first electrical train in India. India was like a laboratory for them! It was only later that they took this technology elsewhere including their own land. The research for Malaria was carried out first in India. It was from this fact that the combination of Jin and Tonic was produced. There was only one way that they could feed the Indian masses the malaria drug - by mixing it with alcohol. Later, this tonic became a drink.

The postal services were developed extensively in India to reach the deepest places in the country. This system helped them to establish a strong communication setup in the country. They developed roads and railways to further support this system.

Such was perhaps the entry of Modernism in India. The "unorganized" India was systematized through the rationally enlightened thoughts of Western world. India was made to think like the west. In fact, it was not even "India" then. The definition of India itself is encompassed in the Enlightened movement! In their study of the Orient; was it created. I can recall Ateya's Masters thesis on Modernity which spoke about roads as the 'development pathways' of the nation...

Lots of thoughts. And all of above is to be historically verified and facts may be grossly mis-stated. The writing primarily records my understanding of the passage of modernity in India. 
more precise history of ASI here.

Imagining through (non) images

Day before yesterday, I visited Ratan j Batliboi's office. Neha and Akhil almost directly took me to his library first. It was a spacious room with about 3000 books on subjects primarily pertaining to architecture, art and probably management. Behind it was a collapsable huge material library. I was more fascinated with the collapsable racks than the library of materials. However, the main book library had no window, and hence i felt the library was a bit dull.

I browsed through most titles in the library. I knew many books - most of them on architects and their works. Quite big ones, hard bound, with lots of pictures. There were hardly any books that probably interested me...perhaps I had seen much of it! The master painters, the urban design ones, the architects....and of course the data manuals. What I then realised what that all architects' offices are laden with books which contain a lot of pictures, photos and visual material. Architects crave for visual references.

Architects constantly produce images. Most architectural practices produce images by churning the earlier ones. The source for their images is other images. They collect this image database from referring to hundreds of other architectural practices, images and works. However, how can practices produce newer image banks which do not really have any referentials?

Literature, poetry, text, music - all can be converted to images. What methods can we choose to do such translations? Why don't architects fill up their libraries with all such kinds of books - on philosophy, social sciences, music, audio etc. That architecture offices and practices are loaded with such visual material proves the profession to be too image heavy. For that matter, an institute like Academy of Architecture is filled with such image heavy visual material. What if architectural libraries dedicated more space to non-visual works? Can a same non visual work produce different images and different times using various methods? This would be an interesting aspect to investigate.

Buildings are the most visible cultural objects and they can not embody only visual aspects of a culture. It would be interesting if buildings embodied rituals, practices and phenomenological characteristics of cultures. Then, the debate would not be about images, but about cultures, about people, about lives...

An 80 - year old Churchgate station need not then drape itself up in railway track patterns. That's absolutely banal. Dont the people who use it everyday have any claim over it? Is it not them, who really make the station space? No, I am not suggesting that people suggest ideas for it! Infact, what if its skin engaged people in newer ways...I don't know how it could be done...but I am sure it could do much more than cladding itself in good looking sheets to make itself sculptural...

However, the point is, it ended up being too visual as an urban response. Most urban responses in architecture end up being visual. That's the libraries they refer to. Their knowledge is a derivative of chewed up ideas of other practices which are situated abroad. These ideas are chewed out into images. These images are very unidimensional - they are real and allow only one interpretation. Drawings like those of Archigram do not commit to an absolute form and hence allow multiple readings. On the other hand, music generates moods, texts have layers of meanings. Architects seldom engage with such forms of works. Therefore art practices are interesting - because artists find their own ways of engaging with an idea and generate new images. They don't reproduce images by seeing other images.

Two important points therefore to conclude:
1. What must libraries for architects consist of?
2. How do you generate images from non visual material?

Other corollaries:

Why are we not able to generate images without reference? why do we hesitate?

How does this system work? 

I think it shall take significant time and effort to study the above...