Henri Fanthome Office for Architecture

Why I Design!

2011-11-10T18:36:00.004+05:30

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!

A revist in ways more than one!

2011-11-05T20:22:00.002+05:30

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.

And then I am reminded of the toilet at Humayun’s Tomb and the dastardly thing at the Royal Palace of Alwar.

Of Bread and Columns

2011-09-08T17:05:00.007+05:30

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.

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.

Power is a Wall

2011-06-18T23:04:00.004+05:30

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.

Nostaliga

2011-05-27T11:33:00.015+05:30

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.

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.

Two Toilets and Two Cities

2011-03-22T15:29:00.007+05:30

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.

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.

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.

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.

Two Lines

2010-12-18T00:02:00.005+05:30

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.

Holy Road

2010-10-21T00:21:00.003+05:30

I have been meaning to write this for a while. The thought occurred when on a late evening last month I was with a friend of mine in Dwarka. After block after block of suburban multi-storey grey housing, evenly distributed alongside wide motor ways we arrived at the market. A wide right-of-way with three storey arcade-like building lining the edge of wide open tarmac parking. Two mirror facades, facing each other, abuzz with the even shopping of the office-goer.

We got of our car, on the left and stepped out. Having taken directions to reach the Sector 6 market. Asked , only to be told this was Sector 10. Where was Sector 6 market then? It was fairly simple the directions – out of the gate, left, straight, left and then right, Sector 6 market – but where was it? Asked again? Only to be told, its across the road, the mirror facade facing us was Sector 6.

Like a lot of modern and post modern development of urbanism, the road seems to have come first. And seems to take precedence in the organisation of the idea of the city.

In the simple construction of the early city, the road was the path that lead to destinations, markets on the left and right of roads were the same place. I’m not sure I am making a strong argument here, but there is one. The image is of unconnected islands of habitation, connected to arteries of human transportation, with no sense of place or identity.

About a month ago I was reviewing a design project of a first year student, intervening at the AIIMS flyover area. Everything that could have been altered had been, but the road. The road remained as it was, unchanged, unaltered, with all nature of intervention around it attempting the navigate the 200-odd meter diameter cavity that it punches between four very important densely populated regions.
In the mind of the student ( and I believe in the minds of many!), the road is a given, the highest in an order of hierarchies that determine the nature of the urban environment. And the city finds in shape and purpose on the two sides of this unending strip of tarmac.

This is the great dream of the modern city, the motor-car city.The road first and then all else! The city as product of the means of getting there! The car the landmark, the holy road the “place”.

Taxonomy and City

2010-08-15T23:02:00.006+05:30

The measure of our lives has become the tabulation and catalogue of the locations we have been successful at placing our bodies in.

It sounds odd, or preposterous at the first instance. But more and more we have begun to value the record of having been able to place ourselves there. Of course that is not the complete measure: that is half. The other half is the further acknowledgment of having placed ourselves, by others who have before us, and yet other who will want to after us. Somehow the record of placing ourselves ‘there’ has become the extent of the interaction with place.

Our present lives consist of mad rushes from point to point, in fevered activity. And each day is repetition of the same idea. Abstracted, our lives could look like red dots spotted across the city with thin black lines that join them. Thin, black, economic and self referential lines. Each sealed in and isolated. These are paths of least resistance and thus of the least engagement that transport us from one controlled environment to another.

Each environment a clone of the other, the last or the next. Our lives then become the ticking off of these red dots on the map of our lives, the map-supreme in the making of the megalomania-cal city of the 21^st century.

Gradually the city and its architecture have morphed into vestibules of codified clones of standardized material, shape and image. And the visitation to these similar or same places seem to become the measure of a human life’s worth.

Unless coded, marked , and labeled it has no claim. And human life, seems like a ricochet between taxonomies spread within the labyrinth of (now)no particular consequence. With label removed, each immediately fades from memory and fuses into may similar and in-differentiable images , each without any claim to memory.

The city seems slowly to be heading to a state where without taxonomy it would fade into a placeless, un-remember-able, un-identifiable mass.

The name-tag now offers the future city’s claim to the human mind, much in the spirit of the four way cross road in the middle of a deserted plain , each as un-usable as the next without its special sign board.

Is this the city of the future, made of the architecture of the future?

A city from within which has been removed any idea of memory, and the human memory of the city itself. Where place has progressively been reduced to name . Where architecture relies not on its nature, but on a sign board or a visual naming device to lay claim to the human mind. A signboard without which that very same claim would be void. Without the necessary taxonomy, the architecture of the city would cease to exist.

What would we call landmark then? Similar places, same places, with a different name with the only recognizable mark of a flashing red arrow saying, “HERE”.

City Un-beautiful

2010-07-29T14:55:00.002+05:30

Our city is becoming less and less beautiful. That is what I feel as I walk around, or more correctly try, in a usually failed attempt, to walk its many streets.

I wish I could use another word, “Street” doesn’t exactly describe the nature of the city’s many roads that wind through colonies and markets and elsewhere that we wish to go. That is the word that persists from association although they largely look like parking lots with cars, and scarcely a place for your foot to fall unhindered allowing you the possibility to walk without having to look down to ascertain the nature of the surface for the step.

This city was not always un-beautiful, I use to the negative qualification because it has yet not reached a point where one can call it ugly, but I begin to feel, by and by, it will slowly acquire that description.

I would think there are possibly three reasons for this.

The first would be the sporadic nature of development or upgrade that the city experiences after a prolonged lapse of inactivity. Suddenly there are funds and there are avenues to which those funds can be assigned and then willy-nilly some new development is witnessed. Like the present making of numerous pavements of roads that lead to Commonwealth Games venues. Its isn’t as if I do not like a good pavement, but I see no merit in one that is designed to look good from the inside of a car. Two pavements on either side of a road that skirts a residential enclave, with a two feet high divider in between that makes road crossings almost impossible is in my opinion pavements meant to look good from the inside of a car. Of course could argue that at least we have pavements, and one could further then further argue that if we do make pavements for walking on , and no one walks on them, they will inevitably become parking lots for cars. Somehow one does feel little intelligence is being directed at the city and its many growing pains.

This automatically leads to the second reason. Cars. Our city has been and continues to be designed for cars. We have flyovers, expressways, and wide open promenades in central Delhi. But for the daily walker there is nothing. A case in point is the foot over bridges. A person needs to walk approximately ninety meters upwards then about thirty meters across and the then another ninety downwards to cross a road. I have of course as yet said nothing of how beautiful these steel, almost post –war structures might be. And neither have we mentioned that fact that ambient air temperatures above black tarred road surface would exceed the ambient air temperature by anywhere between 5^o to 10^o C. The public transport user and the self-propelled are treated as second citizens.

The third is a rather un-definable reason, but I could argue it is the most consequential. We have no time for our city. We spend no time in the city, engaging with it, or looking at it. We have no time to walk its streets, to shop at its local markets, to walk its parks, or visit its museums and institutions. Those that have the time are those that do not have cars, do not live in air-conditioned environments, and do not shop at the cities swanky new malls. More importantly those that have the time are those whose voice has no say in the city’s shaping. To the city-shaping high and mighty, the city as it looks to them from the inside of a car is beautiful.

Of course these troubles all trace back to the one seed, that of trying to build a beautiful sunny European city in the heart of the tropics. Newer troubles like absurd real estate values, completely unthinkable building controls only add to the woe.

Lutyens Delhi is supposed to be beautiful, but no-one lives there, not anyone who forms the teeming millions that live their lives through the city every day. It lies empty of the city walker, the everyday citizen, clean and sterile, preserved to no purpose. I wouldn’t call it beautiful any more. Every time I look at it on a map I see a huge hole cut into the torso of a far huger city, a dead heart in a body.

Delhi is not yet ugly, but I could very easily argue that by the time the commonwealth games have faded from our memory and the city’s architect/planner/policymaker - gods have slipped back into their air-conditioned slumbers, un-beautiful will no longer be a word I could be able to use to describe it.

Of Newness (and monkeys)

2010-06-02T13:02:00.004+05:30

For a while now I have been noticing this. There is a certain suspicion, or can I call it hesitance, of development. This is think is the singular mark of our socio-cultural and architectural landscape.

Newness seems to have replaced progress. Or newness seems to be seen as synonymous with progress.

All across our cities, our towns and our villages we can see this now. This overarching desire for newness. A newness that seems to arise out of a strong and very clear perception of being left behind, of being poor runners in the great race to arrive.

Dotted across the landscape we see odd and sometimes unimaginable shapes, shining new aluminium and glass boxes. At other places novelties that are hard to fathom or explain, yet they seem to be sprouting like mushrooms, spawning newer and newer offspring almost every day.

And yet, every time the choice of something not encountered before, or without precedent, is put before us we chose the old accustomed way. The way we have seen it done, that way we have been told it is done or the way someone else has already done it.

The idea somehow seems to be the first to have something.

Progress, I believe cannot be shopped for(The first great faux pas of an emerging nation). Progress comes from a need and belief in human capacity and will. From a desire to push, to break forth, and light a way.

Sometimes I liken it all to train. You can be the train, or you can be the track or track layer. The train only goes where the track has been. It cannot steer clear, it cannot chose not to go, it cannot choose to rest a while, side step and walk another way, beaming its light into the limitless darkness. For the train, there is no darkness, there is no limitlessness, and there is no ambiguity of destination. The train merely gets there, and celebrates arrival, usually on time and sometimes (with the help of protective economic sanctions of governments) delayed.

But it arrives. At a new station, a new destination, and then chugs on: onto still newer rails.

But arriving is not progress. Arriving does not break new ground and does bring new hope. It only brings you to a point where you can choose from another set of destinations to chase.

This seems to be the story of progress we a writing as we journey, a decade into this new century.

In our villages they are doing what the towns did a decade ago. In the towns what the cities did a good five years ago or so. And our cities are chasing tran-atlantic/ trans-pacific even trance-yellow sea dreams.

We pride ourselves at our capacity to pluck and rehash, to have what we have seen others having.

But wanting to find something, make something, that no one else has ever thought possible regularly makes us shudder and slouch back into our chairs in the hope that someone else will lay out track and light our way.

Progress takes heart and indignation. And to use a word I read somewhere, Gumption. It also takes sweat and blood. And a certain fearlessness of bloodied noses.

As you look out into the landscape, of our cities and our lives and you will see a long assembly line of idea. Slowly being assembled and cast eastwards from the great continents of the west.

We can buy every damned Eiffel tower, every Empire State Building, every Lloyd's of London, every Bilbao. And we can pass it off as our own. Or we can make some sorry fusion and crow about it all day. And then dish it out for the next fifty years, as many of our now demising masters have done for so long. All in the hope that we will discover progress.

Progress is in the mind. And a mind filled with fear, of the white man’s disapproval, of his neighbors’ jeering, and of his own incapacity is hard pressed to progress at all.

So long as the others’ judgment is the measure of our worth, newness will be all we have. Like actors waiting, or worse. Like monkeys in a zoo waiting to be taught a new trick.

Living, Dying, and Somewhere, Rebirth

2010-05-29T19:34:00.009+05:30

(a much shorter version of this article appears in SPADE Vol.2, 2010. this is the unabridged text with photographs by the author)

In the many philosophical traditions that continue to direct our every day lives, birth is not the beginning and death is not the end. These are parts, of a larger cycle we believe is life. We see ourselves as ‘aatama’s that inhabit bodies or vehicles, that are born, grow to fullness, act out their purpose, and then when spent, perish.

Birth, death and rebirth are recurring themes in our lives. A chosen few are reincarnated, time and time again, to do the work of the gods. Some of us are born to other purposes, some to other life forms. (Some of us become architects!)

To the architect the object of all architectural practice seems to be the building. This building, that the architect occupies himself with, is always created(in a de-facto sort of way) to be timeless, or seeking to be timeless. That it may outlast the relative short span of the human life. And in that, deny time as a measure of the human life span. Thus the building possibly becomes timeless. The building becomes im-mortal to man. And man finds the vehicle to his own immortality. An indelibility of presence in a world we are no longer able to inhabit. Sometimes even kept alive, un-allowed to die: “Gerontion-ed” like Eliott’s “old man in a dry month waiting for rain”.

As architects we find comfort in the immortal building. It is a warm, reassuring relief in a life of ever present fear of erasure.There is no vision of a demise. Buildings are god-like, un-dying, un-aging, born to eternal life. We see them as permanent, everlasting and un-destructable. Life-span forms no part of the architects construction of a building.

I have no conception of the mortal building. I am not used to the building that dies, that is so willed to. A building that will live out its life, and when its many materials and parts start to fade, it will make way for a newer edifice, a son or daughter. A building that will exhaust itself and make way for the young of its kind. New buildings that will begin where their parents left off, in a tradition that, would deny not time, but would be timeless.

I cannot see buildings as dying (they are either decayed corpses, or veterans on life support.).This is the thinking I have schooled in, and practise in.

Somehwere in the old almost forgotten fabric of our built environment there is another thinking - of a craftsman in a centuries old tradition, that has erected edifices for generation upon generation, in a nameless, faceless, anonymous effort. A thinking I encountered over a year ago as I spent a few days with a team of these craftsmen at work in Sarahan.

Sitting with a wood carver as he engraved one of the final panels of four-petalled-flower reliefs from a plank of deo-dar, under the watchful eye of a silver bearded patriarch. I do not remember much of the conversations, but this one line remained ,

“har kisi cheej ko kabhi na kabhi marna hain”
(every thing must at some point perish or reach the end of its usefulness)”.

Words that have kept ringing in my head since. He said the temple was old, worn and had lived out its life. So they took it down and rebuilt it. That is what was done, in a tradition of craft that I encountered across the many settlements of Kinnaur. Here temples are reborn regularly.

The Bhimakali temple in Saharan, is one of the larger temples of Kinnaur, a splendid example of the Kinnaur Temple style. Legend has it that in an earthquake in the early 1900s this temple was shaken rather roughly and developed a sharp tilt. This tilt was corrected in a subsequent earthquake. But life, as it does with all things, took its toll.

I am not certain when (chronology not being a concern), the complex’s main temple to Bhimakali was dismantled, stripped down to its foundations. In October 2007, as I sat with these craftsmen, the rebuilding was almost complete.

To the rear south-east corner outside the temple wall in a large wood-working shed of G.I. sheet and tarpaulin, planks were being turned into floral reliefs, logs into columns, carved and ornamented. There were about 20 craftsmen working silently, as if they had the perfect knowledge of what to do. And every now and again a young man would walk through, pass a few instructions, turn a log over, mark a line or stroke on it and leave. The log would be cut, shaped and be taken away. And other such silent instructions passed.

Through a parting in the canvas sheets one could see the recently built upper storeys and roof of the new temple bathed in the mountain sunshine contrasted against the older outer structures and an older temple to its east.
The new temple at Sarahan is not the old temple, but it is not a new temple. Could one say the old temple has been reborn like some enlightened being who’s spirit attains release from his mortal body and has chosen a new body by which be renewed and carry on the holy work. It is new(and it is not), modelled on the edifice it replaces, yet not copy; subtle markings announce this rebirth.

The introduction of newer material is deliberate, clear in intention and adds to the historical narrative. The window shutters of the 3rd floor balcony have glass panes, and the relief work of the shutters reflects the new materials transparency. Alongside, an older edifice wears timber shutters, and the difference reads out beautifully. Lathed roundels hang from the eaves, shaped anew and marking their rebirth as if- proudly proclaiming their creation from newer tools for shaping. The temple is at once new-born as it is centuries old, effortlessly spanning time and change and technology in small gestures of material, craft, and detail that tell their story to the seeing eye.

But everything is not new, the walls are centuries old, but fresh deo-dar logs and chiselled stone tell of the new life. There is no obsession with the idea of symmetry, timber lengths determine the jointing of wood bands that make up the striking three floors of dhajji construction. And windows are placed as they have been for centuries, where needed, unapologetic and bold. Even the entrance is not centered. There is no desire for a formal symmetry, there is no need, and there is no place for what is not needed. The building displays a fine and deliberate balance between the materials at hand, a need and craft. Needs are informed by local materials and availability. And from these constarints a treasury of craftsmanship knits together a seamless expression of the wisdom and skill of centuries.

In the months that went before that October, a team under a master builder had rebuilt the central edifice of the temple. Striped it down, and rebuilt it, log for log, stone for stone. The Bhimakali temple had been reborn.

Like it was reborn before(?), in a craft tradition that has survived, and can be seen in the villages of Chitkul, Bhatseri, and elsewhere breathing new life into aged and weary temples built by the forefathers.

In the tradition of my education I am not used to the building as mortal, as replaceable, rebuildable, renewable, and perishable. I have no precedent to see the possibility of death and birth as acts of renewal.

At Bhimakali the rebirth of the central edifice tells a riveting story. And tells it casually, effortlessly, and with a brilliance difficult to imagine. It is an experience the encounter of which is truly humbling

The building is beautiful, every detail, crafted with exquisite skill and assembled as the work of human hands. The building is the living body of a tradition of craft, of life and possibly even philosophy. A tradition that looks at the building, even for the gods, as transient.

The idea that the building must outlive human life and thus be transformed into a vehicle for immortalization does not occupy the craftsmen. Neither does the sanctity of the motif deter him, it is altered to accommodate new material and new possibility of shape, from newer technology within a historically referenced framework. And by that carries it into the future

There was no attachment to the idea of the building. One sees no shot at fame or immortality for its maker. Each building is built as best it can. Built from need as much as with what is available. To last as long as nature and its material permit. To last as long as it might be needed. The building is a craft tradition, where nothing is larger than life and there is no attempt at any kind of monument. It does not have to be permanent. It will be rebuilt.

The built environment in the craft tradition is the result of a communal effort over centuries. A organism of continued growth, added to, and augmented. Where growth is born of necessity. Where each participant becomes a contributor in a long chain that continues to evolve with every craftsman who might choose to join in the practice of a living tradition. Here buildings cannot be born from individualistic tendencies. The idea of an individual ownership finds no platform. The individual human effort finds place, but no mention.

Neither is each building seen as individual, complete, or absolute in their own right. Each is a part of a larger whole. Each individual ownership is a tile in a large mosaic. The built environment draws on and from a collective, and culturally owned set of reference that have been developed for a specific place, and program that has remained largely unaltered for as long.

With every reflection new questions arise with new possibilities for anwers. With older learnings to rubbish the schooled opinion.

I am not certain how one reacts and so learns from such encounters. I feel a certain confusion. This might be made of three parts, the first being the act itself - of taking down and rebuilding a historically and culturally significant building in what we might call a casual manner. The second, that our education continuaously attempts to deny access to a body of learning that is more accessible than the Khans and Corbusiers and so does not equip me to assimilate it. And the third - a view that buildings must die and so be rebuilt. And that mortality, death and decay might be part of the answer to restore the disrupted balances of resources and establish a more sustainable future.

The western Christian world sees life as ending with death. Immortality is its response to the problem of being erased from the surface of the planet. Much of the architecture we practice, and the entire tradition we practice in operates within this theological construction.

In the Buddhist and Hindu tradition rebirth removes the need to be remembered. Life continues, in new forms, in new worlds, to new purpose. The last life is not ended, this life is not begun, each flows seamlessly from one into the other. And the permanent memory finds little relevance.

The coming of modernism to India, and its continued practice as an architectural idiom does some times hark back to a craft tradition.Where our many schools train students to produce and reproduce its many motifs, type, insignias, models and idioms. To commit to memory its syntax and order. Somewhere in that great moment of freedom and the emergence of the new India our great leader(s) failed to recognize that the temples of modern India are the temples of an ancient India.

We practice the modern Indian architecture with a continued detachment from what went before. How do we see ourselves? Is architecture is also about stance? What is my stand with reference to the world, the living or the non-living world? What is my stance with reference to the culture I live and operate in, and the traditions that have shaped its present.

And what is my stance as an intervening agent, as a operative in a larger history? How does one find relevance in the larger body of work or collective?
Or is the question irrelevant in our adoption of a uniform and common aesthetic and reference. Or is our pattern-book modernism the stance. Irreverent, sometimes illogical, some times and so schooled.

There are great lessons to be learnt from the age old building practices we encounter. Sophisticated and accurate, well beyond what any industry rating would have you believe. Answers which may be far more relevant now, in this age of critical environmental consequence, than they have been in the past. To hark back to centuries old traditions and sensibilities towards the built environment is not anti – progressive or anti- modern. The vernacular, needs-based architecture of our ancestors still might have answers we will need to examine to the questions of today. Answers we must be willing to see at the risk of rubbishing many dogmas and dictats of a modernism in a west-facing imperialistic hangover.

Those two days at Saharan, as I look back now, almost a year ago still ask sharp questions. Questions to which I am not certain I have answers, or will be capable of finding answers. It sometimes worries me, to think that I am possibly incapable of the answer any more. Some where in the desire to be turned modern, I had to loose the understanding of an architecture that was mine long before the modernist were born, long before architecture, in the guise we know it, came to India. Some where I lost what could have been my own.

Architecture that belonged to one-fifth of the world. Architecture that speaks of the billion we are. Of the many wonderful things, the cultures, crafts and colours and religions that make us, and the lives we live. Architecture that speaks of life: living, dying, and somewhere, rebirth.

A Certain Sameness

2010-03-21T22:44:00.004+05:30

It is hard not to notice that most of this country does not live by the aesthetic we wish for them. Neither do they ascribe to visual culture that we believe they should align to. Most of India lives a life that straddles the rashness of America inspired consumerism and eastern desist-ance in heady cocktail of popular culture where the old and the new though antoginising each other share a dodgy yet almost accepted coexistence . Somewhere in our eagerness to be counted among the forward thinking we have adopted the thinking of those we believe to be forward. We have begged, borrowed and stolen with a callous disregard of the over travelled (and over zealous-ness) of the globe trotting Jones-chaser. Often at the cost we seem unable to see or measure. Those of our own lives and the way we have lived them for centuries in our cultures of sufficiency and custodian ship. In almost 60 years of education we have been unable to establish a set of references or agendas by which to guide an education or establish any legitimacy and standing to a local cultural or aesthetic. We operate via a somewhat loose amalgamation of a western (read colonial) educational process and rhetoric without engaging in a similar rigorousness in the exploration or enquiry into our own.

Our education still relies on a case study of post war to contemporary European architecture and theory as largely expounded in Europe and the eastern united states for its foundations. Much like Aesop’s fables. Our architecture is like the legendary hero of the early coloured movies of Indian cinema, who never dies, even when the audience has sickened of that very longevity.

That is what you feel when you see the landscape of modern Indian architecture, dotted with the same signatures, the same columns, the same beams, the same syntaxes over periods of well over thirty five years. Like a scratched record.

The purist in me doesn’t like this. But somewhere in the aftermath of heroic modernism and its orphaned twin ( that we so proudly profess in India) and the endless cat and mouse games that have characterized Indian architecture (or the mine is bigger than yours/ better than yours/ I also have what you have, games! ) the argument for the non-pure, the hybrid, the cockney, the converted and culturally appropriated modernism( if we must have modernism, that is) must be made.

It would be a far cry to say that its is practiced, or propagated to any great, or impressionable degree, however the argument must be made nonetheless.

The heroic age did not give us a new and heroic India nor did its cities represent the India of today. At some time we will need to stop this unnecessary obsession with the classical or canonical modernism that has populated our landscape in a dull unimaginative grey.

III

If we are to assume the premise that architecture is the vehicle of the cultural and aspirational ideals of a society.

Is what Indian architecture saying is that we want to be Dubai? Or New York or Shanghai? Or some anonymous world class city? Where the sidewalks are all world class, and so are the roads and the buildings, and the people, and pretty much everything else.

I have wondered what a word class Temple is? Or Mosque? What is a world class Rajput fort? Is the Taj Mahal world class? Or have we been told too long and by too many what is good for us, what we should wear, what we should eat, that wine is great drink, that suits are formal dressing in 48 degrees centigrade and that the great heroic modernism that our fore fathers in architecture were schooled in at the ivy-crested universities of what once used to be called New England was the magic trick that would suddenly bring us abreast with the advancing (and saved) western world.

And what we want now, is that truly new? And is it architecture, or is it still the wish to be counted amongst the counted, by those that will count? And us being neither the ones who count or the one who will be counted. I might have said this before but it doesn’t hurt to say it again, that we practice a sheep-in-wolf’s -clothing architecture. A sad apologetic attempt to talk a language and wear clothes we believe will make us more acceptable.

And where will this all lead to. I see the possibility of cities, where you cannot tell one from the other. Each having the same sky scrapers, the same glass menageries, the same sidewalks, the same edifices of power and might. With un-differentiable people on sidewalks and MRT. Will this be the great triumph of modernism and its post modern offspring? And the celebration (or despair) of a certain sameness.

Prakop (of holy forces and progress)

2010-01-18T08:43:00.007+05:30

With roads come displacement, villages leave their well watered fields in the valley and gather at the narrow edges of the highways of progress. Narrow edges that offer the new world’s promise of the big city life. And with the promise come steel and cement and brick, to build that dream.

I was at the village of Saur, in Uttarkhand, a village still de-peopled, but with all the reasons for its abandonment 20 years ago now removed. It now had a road, it had electricity and it had a natural source of water.

Walking around, we found a mistry (stone mason)repairing his house. He squatted, painfully assembling stone chip and large slabs in to a coursed stone masonry practiced for generations as the accepted building method. We struck up a conversation around the appropriateness of vernacular building methods, the inherent climatic suitability as compared to the newer age materials of concrete and brick in cold climates. And were quite pleased to find a general agreement from him.

A statement that followed ended all conversation, “Yes, the buildings of our fore-fathers suit the climate, but if I had the money I’d build a house with a linter (colloquial for reinforced concrete). I am poor so I just repair and maintain this house of my father.”

The idea of progress seems to have completely bypassed any comment/reflection on appropriateness, value or quality. Progress seems to have translated into the capacity to attain what previously was not attained. Reason seems of little consequence. Somehow the notion of education of an Imperialistic Britain which sought largely to devalue/destroy any idea of anything “local” ( for altogether anti-educational purposes) seems to continue in our way of thinking.

The idea of progress seems now to be, to move as far from ones roots or cultural markings as possible. Progress seems synonymous with abandoning where we came from in favour of where someone else( not us!) has come from or gone to. For us it is wearing suits, writing English literature, and speaking with an accent, not to mention the overarching desire to become London or New York. It doesn’t end there we live in swanky 21^st Century condominiums, that go by names of Richmond Park, The Aralias, Regent Park, and you can just go on. Some would say, “What’s in a name?”. Everything, if you go by the branding experts for car manufacturers in India.

Forward seems to be an idea of escape from what is, a continuous adoption of alien referances, in a continued and almost internalised desire to achieve the empires approval. So much so that our education system largely continues to value what an antiquated and sub standard british education (for its colonies) left behind, opposed to 5000 years of earlier wisdom. To an extent that even in the face of irrefutable logic this desire for progress seems to cause a sort of anomalous behavior across our cultures.

I remember about two and half years ago a young man at Kalpa, in Himachal Pradesh telling me of the Devi ka Prakop (the Devi’s holy force) that was causing them to shift to new concrete structures. (He said it was so strong that he remained sick till he had built and shifted in the new-age building.)

Prakop seems to be guise for an inherent psychological or peer pressure to progress, in the eyes of a multitude. To establish ones relevance. It is fascinating to think of at times, but one realises it is much in keeping with the ideological dream of New and Modern India. Very much in the intellectual tradition of the man after whom is named the Nehru-topi,“unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation's faith in the future” as he described the icon of the new and free India. One wonders what prakop pushed for a whole new city, by a French architect on a vast people-less plain, but it did, so there! Chandigarh was thereby progress to India, and that Prakop has remained so, ever since.

The Superlative New Architecture

2009-12-18T08:27:00.003+05:30

In my fourth year in the canteen over a lemon tea I asked one of the visiting faculty, “What are we trying to do as architects?”. It has been a long while since then, but I am not certain what I see will give me the clues to an answer.

In a modern, post colonial, resurgent, liberal, capitalistic India this seems a question that repeatedly wants to be asked of us.

In the last decade one could say that there has developed a trend of sorts between the cost of cheap airline tickets, bargain price package tours and the dominance of a certain shopping destinations on the imaginations and subsequent skyline of our cities . For the present it is wide-eyed desire for the “new-popular” not-so-far-west development.

Has the idea of value lost its place? In main-stream, contemporary architecture has the idea of value actually sunk rock bottom, to that of the morning clamour of the grocer trying to sell you his wares before the others.

A hundred acres of prime agricultural land now posh residential development; three and four bedroom flats, (nothing for two and one bedroom aspirations!) 21 kilometers from IGI etc, etc, etc. with sample flat ready. And it isn’t rare to find the furniture supplied by the biggest names in designer furniture. Showrooms that are asked to make the pieces some times even six inches shorter in plan dimensions so the rooms will look larger.

This isn’t so atypical of Gurgaon, where the expressway with all its clamour and glamour is a fitting metaphor for development/ growth / progress whatever you will, in India. Here you are allowed to build a 150 meter wide right of way, and no green belt, to sever a single settlement in two, with no concern for any thing other than the vehicles speeding to Jaipur. None at all for the foot borne poor who might need to cross the road (some one might have learnt from the absence of any footbridges, or underpasses at the AIIMS flyover). And still less even for traffic that might not have Jaipur on their minds.

This is the story of most contemporary architecture. RCC frame with single layer toughened glass façade and more air-conditioning than would make an HVAC engineers wildest dream, seems to be the preferred model of all commercial architectural enterprise in the wake of the ‘just completed’ shopping festival tour package. With an aluminium sandwich panel crown. Each building a pathetic reminder of every man’s hope of writing his name into immortality. Sad mishappen crusades to build another Taj Mahal. Architecture for the dead of

India

It is either that or an architecture that will systematically reduce architecture in India to a cloning exercise of western European, or American travel magazines or shopping festival brochure architecture from closer home – Dubai.

The Modernist movement and its heroic architecture of the 1900s was probably the most misappropriated of all in

India

. Not in its syntax or geometry or construction ( if anything, you cannot fault us on construction technique) but in its advent or arrival. It was as if it was conjured up by some magic trick, snatched out of the blueness of the sky and wham- there you have it- modernism came to India.

The call for the “Temples of Modern India” has nothing but strong, unforesightly, political desire of the also-us. Although it might be fitting to note that what was promoted as the temples of modern

India

were the massive concrete marvels that are our hydroelectric projects in the Punjab. They would make for some temples by a good stretch of the imagination! But the claim would forever echo in the “sheep - in - wolf’s – clothing” stance that many practices have made ever since to the wide eyed world.

It is some times sad to see most new edifices make an almost apologetic “also-me”. Not unlike an advertisement on national television for a certain brand of sanitary napkin that ran a jingle, “ Unhe bhi to pata chale, hum bhi modern hain”( Let them know, that we are modern also).

In the great speech of the temples of modern

India

, we at once forgot that

India

unlike

Britain

America

(no I will not write Dubai, because we did not even know if it existed then), is a nation of centuries of history, culture and traditions. And nobody, not even an oxonian, shervani clad, royalty of Indian real-politic was going to change that. The temples of modern

India

are the temples of not-modern

India

or the temples of old

India

; more correctly the temples of Ancient India. But from here was born the schizophrenic character that troubles all contemporary architectural traditions in

India

We have Corbusier clones, Kahn clones, Gaudi and Bota clones, and now Shanghai and

Singapore

clones. Some of us will swear by Koolhaas and Liebeskind, by Hadid and even Moss. Adding slowly to the numbers of half-ling orphaned children of a learned-by-rot modernism that fell out of the sky.

The same sky I looked up at and swore, against none in particular for the half hours waiting on that morning on the Gurgaon Expressway many months ago. Finally I had paid my passage and was relieved to look out over a patch of tarmac large enough for eight football fields simmering in the heat. Ahead atop towering pillars into the blue blue sky two sign boards answered my question.

The Largest Mall in India

1 Km of Shopping on Every Floor

The Mall of India

This was not the answer I was looking for. None the less it was an answer. As a country, and a consciusness, our only measure of value has turned very measurable, empirical, and direct, the measure of quantity.

For a country that has changed science, shaped consciousness, nurtured cultures and still holds a lamp to the human race it is a come down indeed.

How much am I getting for a single rupee? Am I getting the most for my rupee? Is this the biggest I can get with my rupee? Is the newest I can buy with my rupee? Can you make it wider? Or Taller? Or Bigger? Higher? Can you make it cheap(est) and best so I can get most for my rupee. The tallest building, the biggest mall, the highest housing tower, the widest roads. The unquestionable superlative new architecture.

Looking Back

2009-12-13T23:49:00.006+05:30

At Fatehpur-Sikri, un-learnt lessons and looking forward.

Not So Long Ago

2009-11-01T21:53:00.007+05:30

Not so long ago in the plains of the great nation of India, there lived some very educated Indian people. They had travelled far and wide, spoke may languages, and some of them had even had tea with the queen of England.

It so happened that at that time, the great nation had just liberated itself of the clutches of the British empire. A man in a white dhoti, of home spun Indian cloth, and wooden staff and wire framed spectacles had swayed the subcontinent. A very good thing, most people said, so now we could finally be the nation we were always supposed to be, but were never quite, before the british took us over and hammered us into one shape on a map.

I am not sure when, but one day, some of these people,(sitting around sipping their freshly brewed tea-pot tea), were having a conversation. Some one asked, so what do we do now that we are free, what do we build as the Symbol of the new India.

For a while every one was flummoxed. They sipped a few sips of tea, and when it had gone cold and needed refreshing they began thinking in murmurs, in a bit they turned quite audible and the conversation got on in true earnest.

Lets build a grand railway, said one. Another was quick to point out, that the British had already done that. Well, how about a great great road, that cuts across India and links across it to the great sea ports. The same gent very politely pointed out, that Alexander(was it Sher Shah Suri? I can't recall but that is besides he point!) had done that long long ago. A small silence followed. Then someone said let’s build a new capital complex. There was huge sign from almost the whole audience. So that was dropped before even a word could be uttered! Just then a freshly brewed pot of tea was carried in and the conversation ended there.

No one really gave it thought after that. Except one man, he kept thinking of the problem. How were we to tell the world we had arrived, that India was a free nation. What could be the face of the new modern India? , he thought. He scratched his graying head, adjusted his Gandhi/ Nehru topi (that now only peons in government office seem inclined to wear!) and cried out loud in dismay.

And then it struck him, before the reverberation of the dismayed cry could subside. The symbol of the new India would be a city like a no other. A modern city for a modern India. And the world would sit up and take notice as the land of snake charmers and dhotis would thunder through centuries of history and stand abreast with the torchbearers of the first world. India as he saw it would have arrived. This would be no mean city, not like the ones the brits or their halflings had spawned across Delhi or DC, no this would be different.

And so the next evening he invited the great gathering to tea, with a promise that he would unfold to them the great vision he had had.

It was a nice autumn evening in Delhi, (so at least I wish it was, Delhi looks it best in that season, with the million rust coloured leaves strewn on the sidewalks),when they walked in and sat about the well appointed drawing room.

And then he gave it to them, the many wise men, his great vision. A vision to herald in the New India. The India free, of oppression, of rule, of empire. An India for its teeming millions, that could do as it wished.

A new India. An India with no one to tell us what to do, who we are, what we should do. An India that could make its own future, and carve its own place.Give itself an identity that the world would stand up and take notice.

And in the great wisdom of his grey hair, and the many many years of travel and higher learning. In that great moment, of people defining history…..

He chose French!

Prestigious

2009-10-08T20:43:00.004+05:30

In the days of the SPAtalli, before facebook and twitter, I read this one post. One of those many adverts, from one of those many offices looking for one of those many architects. An invisible office, making and obscure call for an ambiguous employment opportunity.

“ Architect wanted, with 5 to 6 years experience to work on prestigious projects”

I read it. What firm? No answer. Kind of work? No answer. Pay ? No answer. Location? No. Stature of work. PRESTIGIOUS.

From there followed a barrage of questions. The first, attacking my own(misplaced?) belief in my intelligence. I must be missing some thing, I thought. This was obvious, expected, normal and effective communication. What was rankling me then? In my own preoccupation with an economy of means, and pointedness of purpose had I lost the ability to see what was completetly obvious?

Is prestigious a universally defined, unalterable, and immutable classification? One word, absolute in its defining powers of a project ,unknown, unseen, at an undisclosed location by an anonymous architect?

So I made a post and got this for a reply? (as has been said, “when unable to answer, ask another question”) and got asked back the same question. “What do you think a prestigious project is, fanthome?”

I was quite stumped.

The O.E.D. p-r-e-s-t-i-g-i-o-u-s. That didn’t help.

So what would I call prestigious? Maybe I would arrive at it by progressive elimination! The answer seemed as un-coming as before. The following morning, as I was sitting in the office, skimming through the offices pile of prestigious magazines looking for some defining parameters when a young boy with a New Kids on The Block hairstyle and oversized shorts walked into the office. He scanned the models, the many sheets pinned on tack boards. After a bit came his question, “what’s the biggest building Babu’s built?”

I had no idea, I began to mentally scan through the office work, trying now to judge the portfolio on this one simple criteria of sizing.

The biggest, and there it struck me – PRESTIGIOUS, for the unknown, unclassified, un-locatable, ambiguous, had found meaning. Loosely, - very large. Scale was everything. In a world of assembly, standard detail, standard plan, standard fee, standard façade - size was prestigious.

The IIM Ahmedabad is a prestigious place, but was the project prestigious? Or was the architect prestigious? What makes for this prestige, the institution, or the architect or the edifice? Architectural practices are prestigious. And so are client institutions? And are projects prestigious? Or projects by prestigious architects turn prestigious. Or is the prestigious-ness acquired post building or bestowed?

In an eclectic, pluralistic public opinion, is prestigious an ascertainable classification? Are all projects prestigious and the classification a dubious description? Or in the democratic social system are no projects prestigious?

What would the prestigious project, of an unknown firm, at an unknown site, building the unknown building project, in an unknown style, be?

What should I have written back?

“Sir,

I am an architect with some experience, having worked on some projects, in some offices, I would be very interested in being part of your team to work on some prestigious projects.

I hope to hear from you some time soon

Thank you,

Some architect”

I have long cherished the dream of working on something prestigious. Who would not want his name to be taken in the same breath as Kahn, or Stien or Doshi or Correa. And who would not like to build a Bharat Bhavan, GLI or the IIC. But I could not bear the ignominy of sending a resume, with my name on it, to an anonymous post-office box.

Cities and Seepage and Architects

2009-08-31T09:35:00.012+05:30

The India Habitat Centre along with some partners is organising the Habitat Summit some time in late September 2009. Building up to the Summit, was an “in conversation” evening between Manit Rastogi , one of the founding partners of Morphgenisis , and Prof. Ashish Ganju, Founding Director of TVB Scholl of Habitat Studies, discussing the trends, developments, and over-all direction of the Indian Urbanism.

The conversation was an interesting one, as a tussle of fact versus story, of real world versus utopia, the conversation covered much ground. And served to instigated thought on the largely lamentable state of urbanism, and the more lamented stature (read absence) of the architects in the process of that urbanism.

The audience was a 60 strong contingent of largely under thirty-five “yet to do their thing” architects and a few fuddy-duddy academics, and one exceptional woman who had made it through rush hour traffic to ask these two architects a very important question.

I was surprised by the attendance, with the number of firms in Delhi, its four architecture schools, its teeming academics, and to add to it the fact that this was the Habitat Centre, 60 odd reflected poorly. It is hard to imagine, with the sheer number of practices, many engaged with issues of urbanism, many more changing the face of India across it many cities - designing new airports, new urban facilities, metro stations, and bringing a new imageability to India -that an Audience of so few assembled. More surprising was the fact that the orgainisers expected few more, a small hall with a capacity of maybe a 100 at most was the venue. It says something I would prefer not to acknowledge about the perception or the manner of architectural practice in India.

The conversation ended, with an idea of including the audience in a larger debate on the state of urbanism, throwing the house open to questions. And a older than middle aged lady asked a question that had the audience in fits of laughter.

She said she had travelled a great distance, to ask these two a pressing question, “ How can I stop the Seepage in the walls of my house in New Friends Colony? I have tried plasters, cladding, chemicals, but nothing helps. Cab you solve my problem?”. I mean no dis-respect, but when you have spent the last one and a half hours discussing the state of the modern Indian urbanism, to hear a question like that makes you think.

Somewhere it said to me that architects are meant to build buildings, solve problems and thus-like. All engagement in conversation, hogwash etc, are idle deviations. There is no agenda, appreciation or necessity for architects to imagine they need or can play a role in the definition of the urban India. We build buildings; make drawings, models and beautiful presentations. I can remember a perticular grey-haired scion addressing the convocation of the SPA in 2005 where he ,reminiscing his years spent at the then Delhi School of Architecture, said he didn’t know if he designed great buildings, "but at least they don’t leak". Is there a connection between seepage and the architects work or is the seepage a result of a botched engineering exercise? There will be contradicting answers to that as any architect will know. The more urgent question is, Who is the architect? Is the architect what comes between your house and the leak? Is the architect what gives you the pretty picture you plaster across your office as your next great condominium housing project? The one who give you the front porch that you picked out of the catalogue or some glossy French magazine? Who is the architect in the mind of the millions that make up this city?

With the JNNURM, the “Make Delhi a World Class City by 2010” propaganda, the MPD 2021, the architect still seems to be the editor of the cityscape’s glossies in the mind of its millions. In our minds the engineers still build our cities – our roads, our flyovers, our hospitals, our great metro stations and pretty much all else. As architects we occupy an obscure and misinterpreted seat in the mind of our city’s citizens. Most do not know what the architect does - Something like an engineer, but not quite! We spend more money trying to make things beautiful!

The fact that architecture is seen as a technical profession, like civil engineering, mechanical engineering or welding, hasn’t helped. To add to it, in the now over sixty years since independence architects have been too busy building buildings, largely at the mercy of a more powerful civil engineering establishment. As a profession we have not used the time or the publicity offered by the act of building the numerous edifices of modern India to carve out a separate identity, we remain somewhere ambiguously immersed in the larger building industry.

After Corbusier, Kahn, Baker and Stien, who did great service to the cause of Indian Architecture (modernism coming to India as an act of God is another debate- that we shall not get into now) and to the possible impressibility of the architect on the Indian mind. Few have stepped into the shoes to be flag bearers of a profession still in its infancy across the Indian landscape.

Ours is amongst very few countries, where the architectural profession is surprisingly younger than engineering . This of course came from the british empire's need to set up schools to train engineering clerks, foremen, and drafting assistants to the british engineer working in the continent from the late 19^th century. Architecture arrived almost eight decades later! The engineer had already established his throne as the “Builder of the Future”. And little has changed since.

And somewhere one feel it is our fault, as architects we have spent the last six decades, painstaking reinterpreting what the stalwarts of the west had interpreted already. Feverishly building buildings, in the best traditions that they had schooled in. Each to his own. Somewhere we failed to see that a child in its infancy needs its hands held to walk. We didn’t hold hands then, we still don’t.

I remember once asking a professor of mine (and I think I’ve mentioned it before), “As architects what are we trying to do?”. I look around, and barring a few I can count on my finger tips, I still see no answer. And till that answer comes, our cities will continue to be the product of civil engineering endevours and we will have to content ourselves with making building, drawings and such like. And still be held responsible for buildings that leak.

Looking for Delhi

2009-08-22T22:15:00.011+05:30

It was the 27^th of July , I was Coming into Delhi at 3:30 am from Helsinki. Looking down just as I had for the whole 7 hour flight I tried to find markers in the unending ocean of lights that was, by the pilots description, Delhi.

We were coming in at some 400km an hour, maintaining level then dropping, then holding then dropping, and all the while I tried to find some thing I could recognise- CP, India Gate, IG Airport, any thing. The plane dipped sharply to the right and I looked even harder, determined to find something.

Another sharp dip, and a large river, with an almost estuarine form bottled in at a tight dam, bridges, a long sweeping curve across it, with traffic- the DND flyway, the power stations, then I saw the Apollo Hospital, Nehru place. Yes I had come home, come home to my Delhi. I watched the outer ring road, the Vasant Continental Hotel, the familiar shape of Vasant Vihar from the Eisher City Map. One last dip, and the reassuring rumble of tyres as they hit tarmac.

I still remember how in my first year at the SPA, I discovered Karol Bagh. On assignment during ragging, we were asked by a senior to get cloth dyes to make a stage set. Krishna and I were packed off, with a map, a pair of helmets, and our dear senior’s trusty scooter, and cash to make the purchases. It was one ride, with me driving and Krishna giving directions. We were stopped for not having a number plate in front, but let off after sharing a Pepsi and an assurance that the error would be rectified forthwith. We made it there and back, Koral bagh was Discovery!

But between auto rides from Maharani bagh to IP estate, and visits to South Ex and Nehru Place Mandi House and CP we slowly settled into a comfortable illusion of our own Delhi.

My Delhi, that ran from Rastrapati Bhavan, to CP on one hand with the Theatre Circuit of Mandi house and Bengali Market, and stayed stuck to the two sides of the ring road from South Ex to Majnu ka Tila on the other. This was Delhi. An out of the way place was St. Stephen’s College where all of my three other brothers went to college.

Eleven years on from the summer of 1998, my Delhi hasn’t grown much. Chandni Chowk has been added, for the Camera wali gali , and the Jalebi wala, and Chowri Bazar . Khan market and lodhi road too have found their place. But by large my Delhi is the Delhi of the South Delhi wala, for whom the rest of Delhi north of CP and west of Dhaula Kuan is some ancient forgotten world that is best avoided.

There are others like my uncle who lives in the heart of Darya Gunj for whom south Delhi is for the Dead, no self-respecting Dilliwala would live there. South Delhi was made for the dead or so it seems by the ways of the Mughal Rulers, flood plain and forest, where the spirits of the mighty and not so mighty were set free to roam in the here-after.

Delhi is like some ancient ghost to me or folklore. Hidden away, pushed to edges of our conscious lives and daily reflections. The city of Delhi lives in books by foreign authors, travel guides and photo albums.

And yet in its vastness, in its magnitude and in its centuries of being here, it offers stories, wisdom, insight and new discovery to any who cares to look.

And so it happened, a collegue of mine and I decided, ten years after my first encountering it in a book on Delhi, to find the Khirki Masjid.

How many of us know it exists? Sitting in the heart of the village which has turned it back on it, so much so that that bearded banana seller didn’t even know such a thing existed. It sits a stones throw from the swanky Select City Walk mall at the Saket District Centre. The masjid is a revalation to any one who might like to find the beginning of an explorations of an Architecture of “India” or the City of Delhi.

Hidden away behind the mass of irreverent construction that has somehow turned its back on this monument the mosque answers numerous questions that have plagued architecture since the import of alien cultural influences into our landscape.

But like much all else in Delhi, we seem to be looking elsewhere, across the Arabian Sea, or further across the English channel or even further across the Pacific.

In a curious way, just the search for it and finding it will make for a commentary on our attitudes. The short term memory and a never-ending willingness to chase images, often the first and the most easily encountered! After the Khirki Masjiid, even the the celebrated Mughal Architecture of Delhi will look like image-chasing vanity.

And as has been the fashion of empire, we have had centuries of Architectural image thrust upon us. So much so that it is hard for the colonized mind to think otherwise even when free, chasing after the images that give you the glitzy architecture of a resurgent, mindlessly consumptive, India with its catastrophic 8% growth story.

I will not go and say there is an Indian Architecture, there is a lot of architecture that is Indian. I will not say that you cannot have a modern Indian Architecture either. I think we can, if we want it. But first we must want an India, not a Singapore or Dubai or a London or New York. We must want New Delhi first, and not some sad half-assed replica of the last city you saw on your Dubai Shopping Festival trip.

Some where in our driving, fast roads and flyovers , in our great spending and gratification the city has receeded into a blankness that few of us seem inclined to hold a light to. The seven cities of Delhi, its lofty citadels and clamourous villages have all but faded from consciousness.

If you love Delhi, find it!

An Agenda for Design

2008-06-29T22:49:00.001+05:30

Architecture is the act of sheltering in its most basic description. Yet architecture is not the creation of shelters. I see it as the engendering of the act of occupation or ownership of a loci where a physical site, a building program and human use come together to create an environment for activity/habitation.
It is not the construction of physical/engineered shells and surfaces that act as barriers to the weather forces, but the visioning of space and activities within and without them and the interaction/relationship with an external condition that architecture seeks to describe.

The physically built, or materially present expression is the means or the ink that seeks by their nature /placement / size / visual to describe that vision.

Architecture in a manner talks around the idea of living or lives as we choose to live them. It represents and speaks for our choices, our concerns, or visions and most of all our attitudes and response/ responsibility to the wider world we inhabit and participate in.

In an age of serious environmental consequence, exceedingly high cost of living, ever increasing costs of material (aside of their environmental costs),rising energy prices and a scarcity of renewable fuel sources we see a clear need to build responsibly.

Responsibility is the word. To be responsible is to examine the choices we make from the sizing of our spaces and their numbers, it also means to maximizing passive climatic responsiveness to reduce the energy loads required to maintain comfortable living conditions indoors. To integrate the use and propagate alternative forms of energy to reduce the cost of running and maintaining buildings. Using natural lighting and ventilation systems the exploit the local climatic character. In a country of labour intensive highly sophisticated building traditions it could also mean the use of local skills and local materials for their centuries of wisdom and appropriateness. These provide low-tech non-energy-intensive materials and solutions and help keep crafts traditions alive. To choose materials for their qualities of weathering, life, maintenance, but also transportation costs, and the possible use of locally available substitute to develop a more holistic view on material selections for building projects instead of isolated, visually informed or industry propagated choices.

To build with an economy of means - by curtailing use to the bare necessity, not necessarily rustic, but well researched and carefully engendered. So materials and choices display an utmost efficiency in usage and expression - aesthetically, structurally and economically. An attitude that tries to reduce waste, of material, of space, of energy, of resource.

An attitude of sufficiency but not of glamorous excess and consequent waste.
An architecture that seeks to maintain and maybe reinforce the connections of man, the site of his habitation and the participation in the larger vision, be it urban, ecological, cultural and environmental. Architecture that reflects this certain sensibility.

The Rise of the Cellular City

2007-02-04T22:59:00.000+05:30

Most of Delhi looks like a Concrete wall at the edge of the pavement. I could say that and I would not be wrong. Or Delhi is largely 6 lane tarmac. I would not be wrong again.

In the past eight years, I have progressively, turned ignorant of what most Delhi neighbour-hoods look like. This is not the outcome of less travel. With the increasing number of cars, and the decreasing average occupancy of these cars, one has to spend large parts of the day entirely on the roads. And yet, I still know little of what Delhi looks like.

The explanation is simple. Delhi is an unsafe city. And a warped understanding of personal safety is wrapping whole chunks of the city into psychological safety cocoons linked to each other by all that is now left of the cities public space, the black tarred transportation networks.

But Delhi wasn’t always unsafe. The last 10 years have seen a marked rise in the perception of Delhi as unsafe. How safe it is or is not lies entirely outside this debate. Delhi is considered unsafe.

Delhi is a city of immigrants. Where the alien far outnumbers the domicle. There is no dominant culture, or dynamic or in another alternative interpretation there exists now a dominanat culture in steady decline. It is a sort of cultural eclectic or a social anarchy. The ultimate democracy, ready to collapse under its own virtual perfectness. Any one can do any thing here, and that gives most fear.

Delhi is unsafe because you do not know what your neighbour is doing. Or worse you do not even know who your neighbour is or far worse you are scared to find out who your neighbour is.

And that brings me back to the very first idea of this article. I do not know what most of Delhi looks like because I cannot pass through gates that remain locked though peak hour traffic, or are manned by questioning guards. And even after these guards, you cannot look over a 15 foot solid concrete wall.

Delhi is a land of opportunity and new money. A city that has suddenly engendered a new type of urban inhabitant. Delhi now has three types of people. The haves, the have-nots, and an enormous number of immigrant have-nots who suddenly can-have.

A hoard of refugees. An uncomfortable other who continually threaten the system and wreck havoc with its power and political balances by the sheer strenght of their numbers. However the minority of haves are usually the ones who influence most policy decisions and their fear shows. Delhi thus develops gated colonies, public roads turn private with controlled access, and the side walk is now the only public space left.

Delhi then builds high walls, locks doors, and puts up steel grills that keep people outside and themsleves in a cell, with a 6 inch checker- board view of their garden and the sky.

The city then installs video phones at gates. And infrared motion detectors.

In five years your gate is now the fifth gate from the colony entrance at the main road. So now when you are slaughtered like a lamb in your own back yard your neighbour can’t see, or hear, or notice.

Houses in the better colonies of Delhi seem to resemble bunkers. One would imagine New Friends Colony were preparing for Civil war and wide spread arson.

In the whole mad obsession with personal preservation the idea of a societal structure seems to have been lost. The idea of collective safety seems to have completely disappeared.

It becomes quite apparent that the fictitious land use plan has been a complete failure. The city is less efficient than 50 years a go. You no longer can work where you live. You spend more time traveling, and less at your desk. And invariably most work has to be redone. It takes four times as long now to get any where. Every vehicle needs two and half parking spaces. Localities now have eight hour activity cycles. The other hours these lie largely de- peopled, un- used, un- observed and thus pregnant with the possibility of crime. Modern day city planning has coffers filling, but has every one fearing for their lives.

It might be pertinent to observe that the crime rate might be decreasing as statistic. If you look closer, there is an alarming increase in one kind of crime. Crimes of familiarity. Victims found dead, with no witness, no observable intrusion or trespassing. On the outside the same regulars come and go, the same trusted work force, service providers, friendly neighbours, and milkmen. Yet we read of retired couples found battered, or lonely grand mothers slashed to their deaths.

And no one seems to know. Neightbours have no idea, no one unfamiliar passed , and nothing was seen.If you cannot see you cannot tell.

If you could see your neighbour, you can tell that he is safe. And if he can see you he knows you are safe too. Visibility and awareness are regulatory activities - social policing. You feel safer. It is almost as simple as that. No miscreant can get at you behind your four foot open wire fence. But if you lived in fort Bharatpur I wouldn’t know when someone got in and chopped you up like your favorite tandoori chicken: and invariably it’s some one on the inside who does the job on you. No one can see you any way and if I can’t hear you 2400 watt p.m.p.o. sound system on new years from behind your wall there is little chance any one will hear you scream.

The rest of the city is Social Housing Society Model that seems to be just another gated colony where rents are cheaper and no one knows any one. And if you happen to know your neighbour its invariably because you live in an insular, insecure, cultural ghetto like Zakir nagar or Chitaranjan Park. With its own guard and draw bridge.

The denizens of the city no more live their lives out in the city space, but in their private safe houses, behind closed doors and barred window. Each in his own bunkered world.

The city as a participatory exercise seems to have died an unnoticed death. Delhi’s side walks are vanishing. The roads have no pavement but no one seems to mind because they haven’t stepped out in years. Shops open right off the tarmac, even in places as elite as Khan Market. All open space is parking lot, like Connaught Place, and the throngs are squeezed between the parking lot and the shop window. No one notices the absence of trees along sidewalks in a climate that hits 50 degress Centigrade in summer. The aseptic new urbanism that the city is turning to seems to be designed more to keep people off than on it.

We have hue and cry about the Master plan, the allowing of mixed land use, better real estate. Delhi will not become a better city by these, and not be these alone.

It is a city witness to insular, self obsessing, and pathetically insecure urbanism, that has systematically broken down and subverted the very foundations of what civil society is built on. Delhi denies belonging, refuses identity, and disallows ownership.
Delhi is a city of psychological violence. A city of fear and exploitation. A city feared by itself first and most of all. A city turned on itself. A people turned on themselves in confused and misguided good intention.

The city lives through its people. So long as they have no life we cannot expect much from the city. What Delhi lacks is a feeling of collective safety. A feeling of small town familiarity and comfort. A reason and an identity to belong to. A feeling of home, where you do not need your 150 square meter unit of cellular city to know you are alive.

Delhi is a ghost that haunts most of us. Delhi needs, not building up, if it wishes to thrive (not survive as the basal reality) but breaking down. A demolition would do the city a world of good.

De-Controlling the Place

2006-09-15T14:36:00.001+05:30

The city is slowly witnessing a kind of perfection in the expression of its surface. Observed closely what could be termed as civic “development” could also be seen as the slow but certain disappearance of the “unfinished” from our everyday experience.

There is suddenly a marked rise in the Engineered, “programmed” surfaces. It appears desirable now that at no point does the city user get to interact/commune with “raw surface”. A manicured interface as seal as if enclosing, with no room for the original. The engineered surface becomes the reference model of the planet. Nature assumes a fictitious, mathematical homogeneity. There is an altered model of “environmental” referance.

With the last two decades obsessive fear (of architects) of the ambiguous space, the modern day city has turned more and more rigid. The loop hole, the faux pas, the erratic, which would have been responsible for the chance happening seem to be altogether disappearing from the public realm.

The surgical precision of designed intervention and desired control over the place and space, seem to render almost all public space near sterile.

There seems no room for the non-agenda. The city seems to have no regard for the space without program or the space that denies program. The urbanity seems to eschew the lack of definition as dangerous. Almost unlawful, unsafe and pregnant with imminent crime. The physical construct must be definitive; the human being must be, at all times, subject to a directing influence. Autonomy is undesirable. The experience must be homogeneous. There is no room for the independent reading or alternate interpretation.

Architecture, if understood beyond the process of expressing it, is the scene for action. It is not event, but accomplice. A loci that facilitates, advocates and then continuously informs the event.

The event, however, is not discreet. One might argue that the event might be absent, yet, the possibility, or imminence might not be negated. Then absence of event might also be treated as interstitial event, or event per se.(Human presence or absence unrequited to formulate event.

The existence of place thereby directly and automatically translates into event. There is no choice or debate, or sanction. Space directly causes event. Space and event are synonymous.

Architecture must be aware of this possibility of event. And architecture must allow for the event. Event as the uncalculated human activity that will (once played out) add further dimensions, signification, memory, association and subsequently icon/identity.

The architecture makes for the event(architecture is not the event). Event is what architecture allowed, or what the architecture is not.

Event is where the architecture is not, the interstitial mediation between, within or without the physical construct that is architecture. Arising out of the conscious act of removal or non provision of the physical that allows for action to unfold and thus create event. Yet the architecture and the event it fosters are inseparable. Each symbiotically embedded into the others construction. Thereby architecture seeks relevance or import by/ via the loci of its absence or where it is not. A calculated removal of definition that allows for a definition of ambiguity pregnant with possibility. That allows for a human ingenuity, combination, and permutation that would be called event.

Thus the event is not architecture. The event is non architecture. The event is between architecture, within architecture but not architecture. Architecture is the non event.

In the future urbanism there seems no place for event. The excessive control seems to point at Urban system and a collection of human codified activities and set directives within its confines.

Calculated activity, regulated, quantified and defined is not event. These are process. Embedded into, and coded into the physical construct.

Where intended process is absent, event is possible. The new Urbanism seeks to “make” space for process. The new Urbanism seeks to establish process and deny possibility.

Possibility is event. The event makes place.

Architecture (to generate place) must allow for the subversion of process. It must allow for usurp-tion by other consciousness or chaos.

The appropriation of the place by use, and varying collective memory and consequently varying individual association.

loci : process : Architecture : process : architecture : process
_____________________________________________________
loci : architecture : no-process : event : memory : place

To generate successful place one must limit its architecture. One must establish limits it must not transgress. And at the same time define models or strategies by which it is to engage not oppose and antagonise the uncontrolled space.

The process leads to knowledge of process or activity. Process becomes everything . The machine is perfect the architecture is absent.

The absence of process allows for self determination. The possibility of the multiple and variation. The possibility of experience and event. The birth of association and eventually memory.

The beginning of Place

(The manifesto for de-processing space).

The need to de-control the (architectural) place.