Thursday, November 10, 2011
Why I Design!
I have wondered why it is that I like to design. I am not so sure, but I think a lot of it has to do with pencils. I was always fascinated by the way the pencil marks paper. How the tracing of its charcoal, or graphite lead would gradually make things appear on paper. Things, which I had otherwise no way of seeing. Things, which somehow would magically embody themselves from the space between the pencil tip and the white sheet below.
I remember even at an age of about five, very consciously drawing only on plain paper, not ruled sheets.
Of course my love for pencils, has everything to do with my father. Before I learnt to write, he taught me how to sharpen a pencil- with a barber’s blade. A meticulous process of care, skill and patience. The marking of a clear line, with the blade edge, while slowly rotating the hexagonal pencil with the left hand. And then the slow and minute shaving off of wood to reveal the core. He did not use sharpeners, or sand paper ( as some faculty would have you believe in art/ architecture school).
He taught me to appreciate a finely shaped point, carved perfectly, to leave, on the paper the lines I would grow immediately to love.
Once I had perfected the pencil, then I was shown how to write. It was always engaging, fascinating, and hugely absorbing, as I traced invisible ideas(?) and watched them appear as lines and shapes and forms on up-till then white sheets.
When I put pen or pencil to paper, there isn’t always a thought, or a reason. Many-a-time it is just to watch, what the meeting of the marker and the (yet to be) marked will yield. A pencil in my hand, floating over white paper, and then marking it, slowly bringing things to the world that were not there.
A slow, but always fascinating, discovery.
The shapes where not always perfect, that was not the point, the image was not always complete, and most often I left off once the initial vision had formed, and I could understand the new appearance. I would even get bored.
But the fascination never really left. Every now and again, I would find some new toy, a thicker pencil, a harder lead, an oil pastel, paint , and watch how it would reveal new magic as it black marked paper. How it marked the paper in its own special way. Different from he way some thing else would have marked it
Later the fasciation grew to include pens, with ink, and nibs. ( though never felt tips or ball-points). The obsession was still the same, the flow, the mark, the appearance of things, where there was none, the appearance of things that had never been.
The appearance of things at the tip of my fingers, from nowhere.
There were worlds there to be found, shapes, ideas, lines, worlds, all slowly flowing out, with the deftness of a hand. It was always spellbinding almost.
It still is. Every time I hold pencil or pen over paper, I do not always know what I am want to do, or draw. Some times the hand takes it own course, sometimes the pen lets its ink flow, the pencil moves to uncover things. It is still a tantalizing thing. The pencil and the plain sheet.
And then, some times you want to know what it would be like to actually do that thing, make it, erect it, see it for real, build it. Make it stand, and look at it, and make others look at it. (Walk into it, look out of it, stand on top of it, look into it.)
And find joy, the same joy I found when it flowed out the tip of the pencil onto paper. Find that joy again. Paper wasn’t enough any more. It had to be out there, that would be pure happiness. The same happiness, as when it first appeared under the pencil tip on the sheet of paper.
I design to re-live that discovery one more time.
I (also) design because I just love pencils (and notebooks), I also design because it just makes me happy!
Saturday, November 05, 2011
A revist in ways more than one!
I did not expect this to happen. No, not exactly, but it is happy coincidence. I am sitting in the shade, this an early November afternoon, on a bench overlooking the little pond that dominates the main square in Paragpur a village in Himachal Pradesh. The water is still, behind a low pale blue wall, and gives no impression at all of life until the first of the fairly huge fish chooses to make its occasional loud splash and disappear again.
Across from me on the other side is a 2 storied building, grey slate tiled roof, white painted upper floor, and earthy red painted ground floor, a neat little projecting marking the separation of the two colours. Red, white and grey – a set of rather formal and complimenting colours. What strikes me slowly is their universality.
At the first instance this isn’t so apparent. But think again, red and white and grey, the Buddhist monasteries of Tibet, of Ladhak and Dharamasala, of Bhutan. The temples of Nepal. The Dzongs of Bhutan, the peoples’ houses, The colonial British buildings of the Raj, the Indo-Sarascenic Style, the Scot- inspired architecture of Shimla and Nainital, red-white- grey, St. Joseph’s College Nainital 1890, Dolmaling Nunnery, Dharamsala 1990.
This is not why I started to write, I started to write, because as I sit on the bench, to my right is a Sulabh Sauchalay, ( yes, I am coming back to that old post out of alwar: see blog post for March 2011) It isn’t out of place, it doesn’t jar, frankly other than an identifiable signboard one can barely tell the toilet from the rest of the place. No eyesore, no jarring, you wouldn’t notice it until you needed it.
It is quiet, it effortlessly finds its way into the frame of an ancient and delicately balanced village. With no disruption or intrusion into the spatial or visual experience of the village chowk and pond.
I have been sitting here for roughly three hours. Yes, the toilet is exactly 20 feet from where I sit, and feels perfectly in place. So does the red white and grey building across the pond, so does the pale blue pond wall, and the fish.
There are now four men sitting on the thin edge between the pond and the building, playing cards. The picture and the place both seem complete, and and yet in that complete-ness they seem like the perfect frame.
There is a reflection of the men playing cards on the waters surface, and I watch it from where I sit. A while ago there was an incessant whirring of the numerous toilors’ sewing machines on the street that leads out left from here.
In a quiet square, a quiet toilet, tucked quietly behind a well kept building.
Labels: heritage village, Paragpur, pond, Public toilet, public toilets, quiet, seamless
Thursday, September 08, 2011
Of Bread and Columns
A building, carefully designed and well done, is always a pleasure to walk into. Many-a-time the sheer complexity of project realities see a well-intentioned idea rubbished as it is built in haste and hurry.
Making good architecture is like baking bread. The most simple of ingredients – flour, yeast, salt, water - there are no one million recipes to chose from, and yet there is bread and there is bread. The making, the ferment, the kneading, and the sheer utter patience of waiting for the honest dough to rise oftentimes make the difference between one loaf and the next. Between bread, and bread.
Making good architecture is like baking bread. The most simple of ingredients – flour, yeast, salt, water - there are no one million recipes to chose from, and yet there is bread and there is bread. The making, the ferment, the kneading, and the sheer utter patience of waiting for the honest dough to rise oftentimes make the difference between one loaf and the next. Between bread, and bread.
If you have eaten bread baked at home, made from yeast watched over till it rose to the perfect height and then kneaded with love and effort into the perfect ball of dough, and then baked for an hour and half, to then turned out and glazed with butter and egg-white, you will know what I mean.
So too, I think, it is with buildings, what goes in is usually the same, but the skill and the patience of the kneading hand has, always, a telling consequence on the aftermath.
That is what I encounter every time I walk into one of J A Stein’s buildings. Their simplicity, and directness of address never fail to amaze me.
But what makes me write this post are the columns at the gymnasium of the American Embassy School. Simple, stark, purpose-shaped concrete, beautiful and solid, yet elegant. Standing robust and proud, to the eye that cared to notice, and not doing more.
A simple column, in a gymnasium can be an architectural delight, a sheer pleasure to behold. I, for one, stood there, amazed for a good few minutes. This, a hall of very beautiful columns in concrete, a rare pleasure. The brilliance is hard to miss. The sheer clarity of purpose, in shape, in form, in feel, in colour, in scale, all suddenly unfolds, like layer upon layer of carefully crafted toffee in the mouth.
There is very little that separates good architecture from bad buildings, and yet there is so much. Simplicity most often, and that is the hardest thing to do. In an age of visual gymnastics, even harder.
There is always some thing to take back from a walk in any of Stein’s works. Something always makes space in the memory. Like now, a fair–faced concrete column, they don’t make them like that anymore.
Or, do they? But you will have to look. Or wait for the smell to waft through the air, and pull you there, like good bread.
Labels: architecture, building, cast, column, concrete, concrete column, design, fair-faced, purpose, school, Stein
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Power is a Wall
One of the truly great things about Lutyen’s Delhi is its non-jamming traffic, even at peak hours traffic might crawl but it never stops. So unlike the rest of our more recently designed and realized city.
Yes it has tree-lined avenues. Each fancifully planted to give joy to the motorist with their planned flowering and shedding of leaves. These roads are beautiful, and so is the stately Rajpath. But the rest of Lutyen’s, the famous Bungalow Zone, how many of us know what it looks like?
To the citizen the LBZ is a beautiful tree-lined hexagonal grid of pleasure drives. The roads are lined by tall, almost ancient trees, and over-preserved side-walks *, edged by fifteen feet high walls. What lies beyond the walls we will never know.
The LBZ is like a well kept secret, only revealed to the favoured eyes to behold. Old photographs tell a different tale, of stately edifices and well manicured lawns, behind polite fences. Setting a standard for living it up in a great capital.
It is funny how the Masterplan of Delhi, and architect after architect seem to moon over this hallowed precinct of the capital city – preserving, studying eulogizing, when all there is to it is a wall.Yes a wall is all that Lutyen’s Bungalow Zone is to anyone who cares to walk, see and look at this great city in decline.
If we lift our noses from our British History and its many eloquently written books and our own nostalgia ( for nostalgia read the previous post, and forgive the re-mentioning) that is what the objective eye finds. The “Lutyen’s Bungalow Zone” is a ghost town behind fifteen foot or higher walls. One does not even know if it is there anymore. I could just as well say that and there would be no way of telling if I was wrong or right.
But what got me thinking about this was a recent visit to Lucknow, to sit in the verandah of my mother’s ancestral home in the heart of the city. To sit there and look out, across the front yard, a small lawn, a low fence with a green hedge and a transparent gate, to the street out. And across into the park, at the phenomenally huge tree ( that even my grandfather remembered being there).
And then later driving past the latest and largest urban development project to be undertaken in the capital of the most populous state of India. One of present government’s numerous memorial parks to Kanshi Ram, the Buddha and the Chief Minister herself. Great monuments of celebration, almost hewn out of solid beige sandstone. A mammoth exercise of paving streets, carving out roads and building parks and adjunct buildings in vast landscapes for memory. Vast landscapes of memory behind walls.
Large, impervious, in-accessible, and unfriendly. In the hot north-indian summer, not a tree on the street, not a bench, but mile after mile of polished granite underfoot. Five feet at most six, and edged with immovable, impenetrable and colossal wall.
There is no apology in the stone walls stance, either at these great parks of modern Indian memory that rudely divide the city-scape, or in the walls in New Delhi’s Lutyen’s Bungalow Zone.
The powers that be very clearly drawing lines, between “their” and “our” city. Very clearly marking the point till which you are allowed access. Very clearly telling the citizen this is not where you belong. This does not belong to you,” Stay out!”. Drawing lines with tall, blank, insurmountable dividers.
It is hard not to notice this, but in the city of today and our lives, Power is(the right to build) a wall.
* Side walks in a land where few , a) can walk and b) are required to walk or c) even need to walk – depending on whether, a) you are a common citizen or b) need to get somewhere in the LBZ or c) live in one of the aforementioned bungalows.
Labels: capital, city in decline, history, lucknow, Lutyen's Bunglow Zone, memory, new delhi, urban development, wall
Friday, May 27, 2011
Nostaliga
The uncomfortable serpent raised its head again.
The question of an Indian-ness, or an absence of it surely will raise itself time and time again as architects discourse or rubbish the work of contemporaries and past masters. Some of us will lament it, and others will justify the absence as a direct consequence of the hand-me-down “modernism” we were schooled in at the highest alters of architectural education in this country.
A large part of the reason, I have come to believe, is political or more correctly rooted in the politics of the making of the modern India. Our own industrial revolution, green revolution and the great Nehruvian idea of Modern Indian Nation.
India has never had a modernism. It never could : thought, public opinion and judgement were schooled to us on deliberately substandard education system designed to keep colonies as colonies. Men are colonized in the mind. And we are standing proof to that idea even today. That however is another debate, but it has consequence in the act of the making of a modern India.
It has consequence in the fact, that great politics believed that by bringing “modernisn” to India, India would have no choice but to turn modern. Or so we all, as architects, believe it did. So we believe. But what is this modernism? Where did it come from? Where does it go to? The Indian modernism and its edifice, that still stands many decades after its many siblings have either died or mutated into various new creatures still carries on. But it is an odd sort of modernism that has a vacuous space both before it and after, and no one quite seems to know how it was arrived at. Although there is not one architect who doesn’t know what it is or more correctly what it looks like.
And then there is the vernacular, systematically schooled out of our intellectual awareness (and reduced to a token of apologetic homage to the land we are born to) in schools across the country. A whole way of thinking, making and imagining, and purposing is all but erased. The backward ideas of craft and hand held tools, and the imperfection of the artisan, seemed all too embarrassing for an “in- the-making industrial super-power”. A thing to be shunned, and disavowed in the posturing and political correctness of a new independent India.
And so too today, we must have our postmodernism now, and what ever else it is they are doing in all those places we so wish we were but just are not. We are not to be left behind.
And often the uncomfortable serpent raises its head and asks the same question again.
I see us living a life with two laments, or two nostalgia.
I see us living a life with two laments, or two nostalgia.
The first nostalgia for an Indian-ness we had (a richness , a humanity and craft) and the second nostalgia for Modernism that we never will.
Labels: architecture, craft, indian-ness, moderism, modern architecture in india, nostalgia, search, vernacular
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Two Toilets and Two Cities
Two public toilets. In two cities, 175 kilometers apart.
One at UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the other at a Historic Palace, slowly crumbling from government apathy and public indifference.
What first struck me was the sheer disregard and almost un-thought(if there is such a word!) placing of the toilet complex at the Humayun’s Tomb, (a monument much in the news for its recently completed restoration by the ASI, Aga Khan Trust for Culture, and the National Culture Fund). The toilet complex stands left of the entrance gate to the Char Bagh at the centre of which is placed the tomb. The placement surprises me. After the 650,000 USD that were spent on the restoration, a toilet so callously placed seems to leave a jarring note. It’s not just the placement that irritates, but the almost everything about it seems to spell some sort of absolute architectural incapacity and blindness or administrative apathy, or worse oversight of the conservation exercise in the first instance ( thereby requiring of the administration of the ASI to add a toilet as retrofit).
Frankly I am not concerned with how it came about, but what really does annoy is that IT DID come about. The toilet seems to have been designed with the opinion that all structures in historic precincts must be built in rubble masonry, and all roofs, slabs etc. must be camouflaged with an over-pink plaster. Of course that the doors are of aluminium frame with cheap white PVC infill panels, with rudely scrawled “ GENTS” and “LADIES” in black paint is something we have come to accept of all municipal toilets strewn across the city. The huge vinyl poster on the side wall does little to apologise for the toilets presence.
It doesn’t really stop there, when you exit the toilet, you are greeted by the ghastly site of the water coolers. I could go on and describe that ugliness but I shall let the one picture suffice.
Frankly I am not concerned with how it came about, but what really does annoy is that IT DID come about. The toilet seems to have been designed with the opinion that all structures in historic precincts must be built in rubble masonry, and all roofs, slabs etc. must be camouflaged with an over-pink plaster. Of course that the doors are of aluminium frame with cheap white PVC infill panels, with rudely scrawled “ GENTS” and “LADIES” in black paint is something we have come to accept of all municipal toilets strewn across the city. The huge vinyl poster on the side wall does little to apologise for the toilets presence.
It doesn’t really stop there, when you exit the toilet, you are greeted by the ghastly site of the water coolers. I could go on and describe that ugliness but I shall let the one picture suffice.
If the experience at Humayun’s Tomb had been an isolated incident, I might not have been so bothered by it. But 175 Km south of Delhi, in a town still quite unpopular with tourists stands another public toilet of similar consequence.
This is the Sulabh Toilet Complex at the City Palace of Alwar, the earstwhile seat to Sawai Jai Singh, Maharaja of Alwar.
This is the Sulabh Toilet Complex at the City Palace of Alwar, the earstwhile seat to Sawai Jai Singh, Maharaja of Alwar.
When one enters the main gate of the palace compounds, this would arguably be the most prominent structure you see. Its stands before the main entrance ( marked by a blue sign board over a dark door way leading into a winding corridor) to the Alwar Museum and Law Courts and other district machinery . Ways and directions are hard to figure out in this complex, but the toilet, a red, ugly, edifice sits centre stage and calls the visitors attention with little other competition. One could argue this toilet as the centerpiece of the fore-court!
I could rave and rant, I am sure, and I would not be un-justified in doing so. But I fear the argument might be lost. So I will just let the pictures do the talking.
There isn’t much that separates the two toilets. Both ugly, both badly placed, and both impressive and unforgettable.
The placing of toilets, and their consequence on the public memory of the (public) place seems to be a worrisome reality in the realm of the historic landscape. A reality I have no idea how/ or by what process it is arrived at. And a reality I am quite certain we should want to alter.
The placing of toilets, and their consequence on the public memory of the (public) place seems to be a worrisome reality in the realm of the historic landscape. A reality I have no idea how/ or by what process it is arrived at. And a reality I am quite certain we should want to alter.
p.s. The derelict Alwar Museum houses a fascinating collection of artifacts, miniatures and weapons. A sliver Dining Table, a vast collection of Persian manuscripts, and Sawai Jai Singh’s all chrome bicycle are amongst a fascinating collection of exhibits.
Labels: Alwar, ASI, Bad design, Conservation, Heritage conservation, Heritage sites, Public toilet, Toilets, ugly
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Two Lines
Its funny, or more correctly, odd, that there are these things one believes as a designer or an architect, but rarely do we find the exact word to express the idea in its purity. In some manner the pencil and the clarity with which it marks paper renders many of us mute. The idea the shape it gives rise to, or the form it engenders seem to arise of a direct and un-mediated connection that perfects itself over years of training, and practice.
And at the unexpected moment, a piece of paper with the words of some till then unknown person find their way into your hands. And those words make perfect, absolute sense, words which you had been looking for, thinking of, dreaming of but never found.
Two lines in a poem, written by some one, found by some one else, printed and handed over to yet another person, and in that moment when they fall into your own hands and you read them they take new life.
“….But the thing worth doing well done
Has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident…”
Marge Piercy
Words that explain the idea I chase through every line I draw and everything I endeavor to do and of how I think of myself and the architect I strive to be.
Labels: design, expression, idea, shape, value
