Notes from Marshall McLuhan

The people of the west developed their visual point of view and their acuity of vision along with Euclidean geometry. No other country in the world had Euclidean geometry except the country of the phonetic alphabet. without phonetic alphabet you don’t have euclidean space. there is no euclid in the orient. There's neither any individual identity, private identity in the orient. But the kinds of left and right hemisphere things coordinate quite well since the lineal nature of the left hemisphere is very visual - visual space is the only space that is lineal and connected. Acoustic space is not lineal or connected. The acoustic space is a sphere who we hear from all directions at once. Acoustic space is a sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose margin is no where. That is a simultaneous sound which creates that kind of space. It is the space of the sound bubble in rock space. But right hemisphere is simultaneous acoustic and this is very favourable to the corporate identity of oriental man. People who 'play it by the ear'. As opposed to those people who have a strong bias of 'point of view' and who play it by the eye and by logical connected estimate bottomline quantity and so on. This is all left hemisphere. But the right hemisphere has no bottom line and is interested only in quality, not in quantity. And so the other wordless, the non-worldly orient with its interest in the way of life rather than in the amount of product…you might say, polynesia, our various attempts have been made to organise the polynesian into the dynamic produces of this and that and they remain completely indifferent. They are very acoustically oriented people. Very right hemisphere. But the right and left hemispheres affect both of us to some degree. There, its not an plain either or. We use both the hemispheres to some degree. But in some cultures, the one or the other gets much stress, much play.

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To Read means to guess.

Reading is an activity of rapid guessing.

Old English rǣdan, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch raden and German raten ‘advise, guess’. Early senses included ‘advise’ and ‘interpret (a riddle or dream’)

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...paradoxically, the clown was a person with a grievance. his role in medieval society was to be the voice of grievance. The clown's job was to tell the emperor or tell the royalty exactly what was wrong with the society. He often lost his head in this process. but the clown, the international , motley of our times, the clown is trying to tell us his grievance. the beards, the hairdos and the costumes of the young are  manifestations of grievance and anger. 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_383842&feature=iv&src_vid=ImaH51F4HBw&v=a11DEFm0WCw

Playing to the Politics of Pedagogy

We are in the review season for architectural schools. I was appointed to assess the works of two schools of architecture in Mumbai by the University: Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture and the Indian Education Society's (IES) College of Architecture. Both very different in their pedagogical approach, but tied by the syllabus and codes of Mumbai University.

At KRVIA, students are trained to look at design interventions (located in any place) through a predominantly urban focus. KRVIA's outlook to design; as the Director Aneeruddha Paul had once explained me long ago; does not treat architecture separate from urban design. It doesnot draw a line between the two disciplines, rather, thinks of architecture to be inherently inscribed within a larger set of urban forces. (Ofcourse, this comes from the school's own situated ness in the city of Mumbai). Thus, architectural responses articulated in the studios are necessarily thought and set within a theoretical trajectory of understanding cities. Rightfully so, and pedagogically innovative. For a long time, "city" had become a buzz word for the school. All projects were informed by a direct or pressed reading of urban conditions and urban studies. There was a moment in the life of KRVIA, aligned with the interest of the West, to generate tremendous studies on the city of Mumbai - that they are situated in - through their architectural design studio and research projects. Other schools were oblivious to the idea of the city until then. 

Other colleges, like the IES have been influenced by the loud and bold projects of KRVIA, only marginally. KRVIA, in my opinion, managed to draw attention to architecture as an urban function for many colleges of architecture around the city, as well as the country (?). As some of its faculty disintegrated or shared their knowledge with/in other schools, or made productive exchanges with other local colleges, thinking of architecture through the urban method became available to them. Colleges like Academy benefitted directly with professors like Prasad Shetty taking studios that anchored the experiences of students within the urbanity they grew up in. A few fresh graduates of KRVIA who taught at Academy of Architecture were able to inject methodical ways of working in their otherwise staling design studios. They were also able to expand the teachings of a particular 'urban' method to these colleges.

Over the years, KRVIA has become critical of its own 'urban' mode, although it has not completely given it away. The students often end up imagining programs and their architectural formulations thinking compulsively through this urban - as if it had become a universal standard, or sometimes, even as default. While they do get sensitive over the years, the confidence in the city and an architecture overtly situated in its dynamic, shapes an architecture that is obsessively ambitious. The evolution, if I may say, as been located in diagrammatizing the building, often a one-liner, with little emphasis to its architectural resolution. Some may say, that to think of buildings through diagrams of architectural intent is a virtue in itself, and that it must be to the credit of the college. That a building is an argument, that it has a larger urban function, that it is a cultural object - are all accepted. But I find it hard if these are not logically carried forward into a rigorous architectural resolution. To expect this in a system of mass education, and at the third year level is unfair. Further, I am more concerned about what kind of diagrams and what kinds of building types do come out of such approach, and how do we assert them as relevant?

On the other hand, colleges like IES seem to have missed the bus completely. Today, we saw students dealing with a making an institution catering to the city inside the artificially created forest of Maharashtra Nature Park. While the brief aimed to achieve the objectives of generating an appropriate urban response, as well as tackling the issue of sensitivity to the natural surroundings of the site, the students seemed to have addressed neither. This, produced through an absolute lack of method, and through the guidance of faculty that has neither a focused 'urban', nor 'environmental' orientation of any sort made the student interventions miserable. Firstly, we failed to see architectural intent in any of the buildings. None of the projects established in what way would they like to respond to the nature around them. Certainly thus, there was no study whatsoever of the ecology of the place, or an understanding of the ways in which nature has been dealt with through built projects across the globe. Secondly, there was no clarity on what makes the building "urban"? What are forms of "urban" in a natural setting? How do we understand the "urban" within the rubric of environment? These questions don't seem to be even vaguely thought of through the studio mentors. The only idea to respond to "nature" was that of the "organic" - quickly resolved into a swirling shape - say a leave, or curve, or spiral or circle - purely in plan. Further, differently scaled outlines of these shapes were subdivided without any structural understanding into smaller "rooms".

The indifferent resolution of any shape or diagram into vacuumised rooms was common to both - IES and KRIVA. In KRVIA, students had invariably provided regular rooms - with one metre doors, even for cattle, goats, and other animals - reached through steps and ventilated by typical windows. In IES, all kinds of activities happened in rooms of more or less same size and shapes - a pottery workshop happens in a classroom with 40 seats and a teacher, as much as a bamboo workshop. Both have same facilities. Further, all rooms are 3 to 3.5 metres high. There is no volumetric sensitivity to room proportions with respect to their programs. The idea of architecture as volume is understood only by a few, since the volume is always dissected into the X & Y axis - the plan and the section. When dissociated, they hardly are perceived together, and fail to come together until the end. But what I primarily want to draw out here, is the generality and banality of form achieved through the urban method, in one case, or the uninformed urban mind on the other.

Over the span of three to four months, how can students merely expose themselves to merely two or three other architectural references, sometimes, none? To be sure, students certainly take on to the internet these days, but can't there be ways where digging out books and looking at building plans and photographs are integrated within the subject of design? Indeed, one can not deny that students today don't even know what to look at in a visual. Gone are the days when one could look at a Vitruvian Man and think of the proportions of one's own body and further the mathematical inscription of nature. It would take a lecture of 45 minutes to merely go over what the diagram means - even if it was so visually evident and obvious! The centrality of visual studies and ways of seeing to architecture can not be denied, and inevitably need to be drawn into understanding architecture. Values of composition, scale, proportion, aesthetics - those embedded in visual methods have to be made explicit, with critical and conscious knowledge of problematics of historical pedagogical modes of organization of forms (bauhaus / constructivism / structuralism / deconstructivism, etc.). The visual method has lost its importance for two reasons - the failed determinism of schools like the Bauhaus on one hand (as identified by colleges like KRVIA), and the failure to upgrade the very traditional workings of the same Bauhaus to the present (as apparent in colleges like IES).

Dilemmas occur when you have to grade students within the problematics of such pedagogical issues. One college suffers over-identification, while the other suffers indifference. Within the politics (of the failure thereof) of pedagogies, how do you evaluate the product? Evaluation here becomes so banal - for the student's project is merely the function of the pedagogical imperative.

The School of Environment & Architecture meanwhile attempts to wrestle between the urban and the environmental - constantly pulled between the ideologies garnered inevitably by its founders. Between excessive expectation and ambition to meet both, the school either tears down students or produces serendipitous conceptual innovations. The lack of architectural resolution or the ill representation of a well conceived project keeps me unsatisfied - not just at SEA, but at every place I go for an review. The studio I participate in at SEA has a heavy (unnecessary) urban focus - something that I do not particularly enjoy, or resonate with. With almost no space to experiment my own architectural questions - those which I once initiated at Academy - the last three years have left me academically frustrated between the urban and the environmental. After all, these are not the questions that excite me, neither are these my areas of expertise. These are not my inquiries. I am interested in exploring the absolute-ness of architecture and throwing it back in the space of the real, eventually learning how the ideal can find place in the practical.

The political play of pedagogies prevents such exploration - where does one find space to explore ideas? How does one deploy them outside these mega constructs controlled by those in the hands of whom institutional power vests? Hopefully, I will find my space. For while I was once in search of an academic space, today, it has completely trapped me within its own constraining ideology, expecting me to play to it. A day will come, and I'll snap!

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.