Tuesday, September 09, 2014
Zen Garden of Khel Gaon
So, I was visiting a client in Khel Gaon. And I happened to
see this.
On does then wonder and think.
What is a Zen Garden, is a pool with a rock and stone path
leading to red bridge?
Where do you find them? And why? And how do they find place
in Khel Gaon?
And more? What is Zen? Is it a red bridge? Or a Rock-strewn
path? Is it designed to evoke and induce a certain contemplation?
And if the label had not been there would it be apparent?
And then the most important? Why?
I will leave these as questions with no attempt at answers
Labels: architecture, asian games village, design, garden, khel gain, landscape, landscape design, new delhi, question, zen gardens
Saturday, June 14, 2014
THE CITY YOU PISSED IN
Case 1.The other day stopped at a red light, a few seconds
later an Audi A6 pulls up along side, the man at the wheel, well heeled with a Hublot
on his wrist, lowers the window and casually drops a disposable plastic glass
out the window.
Case 2.On Sunday last, I went to the Darya Ganj book market,
and I got there before time, the sweepers where still cleaning up, you could
see small piles gathered at regular intervals. Piles of dust and dirt,
wrappers, used condoms, syringes, stubbs, bandages, and unrecognizable things,
all being collected and then disposed of into a hand pushed cart – by hand.
Case 3.At the Mehrauli bus terminal, there are toilets, that
are not used, but a wall is – the toilets are kept locked. I wonder if they did
put up toilets would people use them?
My questions then –
A. If we throw garbage outside our gates on the street
side, or just some where when people are
not looking. And if we have no qualms about dropping the empty chips bag down
the side of the auto. Or out the window in the middle of wilderness on a train?
Would you piss in a toilet if there was one?
B. Is cleaning up some one else’s job- the governements? The
oppositions? The sweeper you so generously pay 50 rupees a month to carry your
dirt?
And so –
You can cry hoarse about how bad/unsafe/unlivable/uncivic and third
world the city is and so why you like London or Paris or whatever white skinned
city is vogue this season.
You can vote all you like for progress and development and
safety and whatever other Sh%# you would want - till the day you don’t drop the
disposable glass, or flick the wrapper or spit on the curb or stop right across
the zebra lines - the city will smell just as it does to me right now –
LIKE A
PLACE YOU PISSED IN!
POST SCRIPT:
The pattern of growth, urban development and progress of the
city doesn’t give you much choice in the matter. Needless to mention is the
abysmal lack of civic facilities or the upkeep of the miniscule number of those
provided, that is only the tip of the iceberg sized issue.
Systematic privatization and /or restricted access to the
city’s so called public spaces has reduced the actual truly democratic spaces
of the city into spaces that are often not accessed by and thus uncared for by
the citizens who most wield the power to have this spaces well kept.
(We do not want to be in our city any more. We don’t walk
its streets, we don’t play in its parks or stroll its boulevards. Our desire
for the more progressive energy burning and upmarket and marketable lifestyle
has removed us from the city into pockets of isolated synthetic environments
which we shudder to move out of. And as consequence the city becomes a monster,
not because it is but it is a sort of chicken and egg situation that once set
in motion the city presumably remains unsafe because those who want to/can make it safe are no longer willing to
be present in it.)
The only truly democratic space in the city is the street,
that the middle class and upwardly mobile would be loath to set foot on. They
are only fit to drive thru and to make condescending glances at the less
fortunate who have yet not risen to the point being able to drive through them.
Or the truly economically destitute – the homeless and the nomadic sellers at
street light and beggars.
Most public space in the city bears a stance of “Do Not
Enter” either in terms of access or
control or by a necessarily requiring financial transaction that in
self-reflexive manner polices and thus keeping large parts of population out.
So what is left of the city - that you, me, the guy in the
fancy imported car and the Metro, the homeless under the may flyovers and the
vegetable vendor is that common denominator that you cannot avoid but would
never want to possess – It would just be a place you would take a leak in if
you if you had to.
Of course another thing is that no one actually belongs to
Delhi – no one is a Delhi-ite if that is a tern you can use. You are either
Punjabi, or from UP or from Bihar or Bengal or Gujju, or from Kerala or from
Bangalore or Lucknow or some other place. Delhi Belongs to no one except the
Jatt boys riding about on 350 cc bullets without helmets! And even they are
dying to get out!
In some way its like a thru’ station – everyone is passing
through – here while it lasts , taking what they can while they can take it and
then heading out to some other place. Much like something/someone used.And that
doesn’t help.
It’s all cyclical – it’s a city you piss in, because it is a
city you piss in!
Labels: architecture, Delhi, Democratic Space, Future City, new delhi, Piss, Pissed, progress, Toilets in the City, urban development, Urban Planning
Thursday, January 10, 2013
IF IT WORKS YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL
So, I was taking a cab, to Brijvasan today, on the
expressway - an organised network of flyovers, and to my right is the Airport
Metro Line.
The shining icon of modern infrastructure in resurgent India
it has now been lying unused since July 2012. Built at a cost of 5700,00,00,000
rupees and operated for exactly 18 months. There is no telling if it will
operate again. There is no telling if there is any intention of making it
operable again. The news periodically informs us that the deadlines for re-instatement
of services will not be met (again), in a now accepted pattern of delays.
It is also widely rumoured that the technical aspect is is just a cover-up, the agency that runs the line found the operation running into huge losses and thus decided to shut it down!
It is also widely rumoured that the technical aspect is is just a cover-up, the agency that runs the line found the operation running into huge losses and thus decided to shut it down!
What happened to the commonwealth games projects, and
housing, that were ( if you use a slightly skewed logic) quite intentionally
not finished on time(And built at what the Business today estimated at
60,000,00,00,000 rupees)?
So what’s the story there? No one knows, and more
importantly no one cares! We have got used to that is what I begin to think. We
have got used to the flawed infrastructure, the pavements for parking and the
cycle lane for driving your car
Leads me to wonder how it is that we think and ponder our
many maneuvers and actions in the creation of the Urbanity of India. And only
one idea comes to mind
What can we get away with?
That is probably the question that defines our thinking.
When we drive, in the cities chaotic traffic, and the big
car overtakes from the left of a bus, right in from of a bus stop. Or the Auto swerves without warning making you
jam on your brakes
Or the biker, and driver who stops a few paces ahead of the
red-light, ahead of the zebra crossing. Or the jay walker, who will cross the
road willy-nilly, arm up in the air, with no concern for life or death, on the
long stretch of national highway.
Take for instance the posh locales of Greater Kailash or
Green Park, where there are more cars possibly than there are people. And
everybody parks on the pavement that was essentially made for walking.
Or take Khan Market, where there is barely a pavement to
speak of, the inner lane is mess of broken pavement, putrid odours and
air-conditioner compressors blowing hot hair.
Take Cannought Place, that has systematically been dug up,
laid back and re-dug so many times in
the last five years that it is almost un-navigable, and largely left to its
ways by most people.
Or take Defence Colony market, or the market in at GK1 M
block, where the high and mighty of South Delhi’s it brigade flaunt their cars, their bling,
and fortune. Where pavements are too
narrow to walk, honking cars jam the narrow lane that has other cars parked on
one side but the shoppers association refused to pedestrianise.
Take the large and iconic under and over pass at AIIMS crossing, that was
designed without a pedestrian way linking across it to the two hospitals,
the government housing and Dilli Haat.
Take DDA housing, with its Rolled steel windows, its falling
apart concrete and plaster, and complete lack of parking and play spaces. And the
fearful mess right outside the RWA gate, that you feel scared to venture into.
Take the builder apartments where the top floor has a
ceiling height 9 feet or less so that the builder can squeeze in one more floor
in the height restrictions that the bye laws prescribe.
Take the shoddy workmanship of the fly-overs in delhi where
you bounce on what should be a plane surface and are jolted every time you
cross an expansion joint.
Or for that matter the huge ditch that is left in the road
after the telephone department has dug it
upto lay a cable.
Or take your academic work or submissions that are usually a
“page 1” cut copy paste from a google search.
Or take for instance the garbage that plastic wrapper of the
packet of chips you casually chuck out of your window in a bus or in car on the roads of your city.
Or the random and wonton peeing on roadsides.
Take for instance the lack of toilets in public parks.
The list goes on. But what made me think of it most was the
Airport Express Metro Line, a collosal spend of public monies, lying there
unused, wasted, and possibly unusable. So whoever it was made their money, and
well, that’s pretty much the end of the tale, if it works you should be
grateful is what I hear people say.
IF IT WORKS YOU SHOULD BE
GRATEFUL
(enough said, if anything
works you should be grateful, the point is it was put up there for some one to
make money, that done, be grateful if it works! I might be a bit off but the
next time you see them replacing perfectly good pavements in New Delhi area, or
raising an already high boundary wall by two feet, think again! Also when the monsoons hit in august and you aren't walking in knee deep water, be grateful!)
Labels: airport metro, car parking, city, flyovers, grateful, indian urbanism, insfrastructure, lack of toilets, new delhi, pavements, urbanism, works
Friday, June 15, 2012
Two (retractable) Roofs (and a Third?)
In April of 2012, we executed a small walkway covering at 24 Sunder Nagar. In April 2010 we executed a small outdoor courtyard covering at 540 Khel Gaon. Two projects, with essentially similar briefs, separated by 24 months.
The Outdoor Room (as I like to call it) in Khel Gaon, would
arguably be my first built project, and so holds a certain dearness. It was
built, with a team of masons, and small-time steel fabricators. The design
hinges on two half –vault roofs in tensile fabric – one sliding over the other,
and the use of sliding channels -one right way up, and one upside down! It was
another experience to make drawings for someone untrained to read drawings that
would enable him to fabricate and construct a complicated sequence of
production and assemblies in steel, glass, bamboo-mat, stone, and engineered
tensile fabric. And a roof moved with
manually operated sliding mechanism. A
kit of available parts, some modified and then assembled.
The Walkway Canopy at 24 Sunder Nagar, is just what its name
says – a covering over a walkway. It covers a walkway, 21 feet long, from a
gate to a front door, on the southern edge of a garden. This covering too
moves, but more like an accordion, the 6 segments of fabric, each riveted to a
central spine, (when collected to one side) droop and collapse into a neat
little collection hanging below a quiet stainless steel archway. When stretched, the single cable that holds
the covering suspended over the walk almost completely disappears. The covering
feels more like a soft green vault –umbrella, floating gently in a garden.
But what makes the walkway covering a triumph of sorts, is
not that it was made, but how it was made**.It isn’t always hard and sweaty and
blood- drawing work.
The first time around at Khel Gaon, on a much simpler
assembly, it took six weeks of site visits almost every day to get it right. A
painful period of directing, convincing, and most of all overcoming the mason’s
staunch refusal to do things in ways he had not done before. And a lot of sweat
in the April sun.
The second time around, was a set of drawings, weekly site
visits to a small shanty, where things were cut shaped and fabricated. And
after 4 weeks of this, a truck loaded. A kit of parts dispatched to site, and
assembled there, from scratch to working retractable walkway canopy in 9 hours
flat.
That is why it is something you want to write home about. Things can be done, they take a little blood and sweating (the first time around), but they get better with practice. And once you have proved the point, a reluctant mason and doubting fabricator can become willing and keen collaborators to hair-brained, but awfully interesting design interventions. And then, when the opportunity presents itself, you can take the idea even further, (wait till you see our entry to the Jaipur ISBT Competition). Ideas grow!
**Having used the same team on other occasions, post the roof in Khel Gaon, I realized one could get a little more adventurous. Here though it was not out of choice, but necessity. Considering the brief’s explicit requirement for no columns, and as little interference in the garden, the only options was to attach to existing structures, the gate and the house itself. And use a spine between them as the mainstay. Sliding on a cable is an easy enough idea, till you discover a) you do not get grooved pulley wheels in 3 inch diameters, with in built sealed ball-bearings (these were made out of Royal Enfield axle bearings, with steel bushes mounted on them and lathed), b) you do not get assemblies to hang spines from the cable, c) Well I could go on, but the point being, everything, barring the cable, and the turn-buckles, every single component was customized.
Labels: architecture, custom, Customised, Fabrication, India, Khel Gaon, new delhi, Retractable Roof, Roof Design, Roofs, Sliding Roof, Tensile Roof
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Power is a Wall
One of the truly great things about Lutyen’s Delhi is its non-jamming traffic, even at peak hours traffic might crawl but it never stops. So unlike the rest of our more recently designed and realized city.
Yes it has tree-lined avenues. Each fancifully planted to give joy to the motorist with their planned flowering and shedding of leaves. These roads are beautiful, and so is the stately Rajpath. But the rest of Lutyen’s, the famous Bungalow Zone, how many of us know what it looks like?
To the citizen the LBZ is a beautiful tree-lined hexagonal grid of pleasure drives. The roads are lined by tall, almost ancient trees, and over-preserved side-walks *, edged by fifteen feet high walls. What lies beyond the walls we will never know.
The LBZ is like a well kept secret, only revealed to the favoured eyes to behold. Old photographs tell a different tale, of stately edifices and well manicured lawns, behind polite fences. Setting a standard for living it up in a great capital.
It is funny how the Masterplan of Delhi, and architect after architect seem to moon over this hallowed precinct of the capital city – preserving, studying eulogizing, when all there is to it is a wall.Yes a wall is all that Lutyen’s Bungalow Zone is to anyone who cares to walk, see and look at this great city in decline.
If we lift our noses from our British History and its many eloquently written books and our own nostalgia ( for nostalgia read the previous post, and forgive the re-mentioning) that is what the objective eye finds. The “Lutyen’s Bungalow Zone” is a ghost town behind fifteen foot or higher walls. One does not even know if it is there anymore. I could just as well say that and there would be no way of telling if I was wrong or right.
But what got me thinking about this was a recent visit to Lucknow, to sit in the verandah of my mother’s ancestral home in the heart of the city. To sit there and look out, across the front yard, a small lawn, a low fence with a green hedge and a transparent gate, to the street out. And across into the park, at the phenomenally huge tree ( that even my grandfather remembered being there).
And then later driving past the latest and largest urban development project to be undertaken in the capital of the most populous state of India. One of present government’s numerous memorial parks to Kanshi Ram, the Buddha and the Chief Minister herself. Great monuments of celebration, almost hewn out of solid beige sandstone. A mammoth exercise of paving streets, carving out roads and building parks and adjunct buildings in vast landscapes for memory. Vast landscapes of memory behind walls.
Large, impervious, in-accessible, and unfriendly. In the hot north-indian summer, not a tree on the street, not a bench, but mile after mile of polished granite underfoot. Five feet at most six, and edged with immovable, impenetrable and colossal wall.
There is no apology in the stone walls stance, either at these great parks of modern Indian memory that rudely divide the city-scape, or in the walls in New Delhi’s Lutyen’s Bungalow Zone.
The powers that be very clearly drawing lines, between “their” and “our” city. Very clearly marking the point till which you are allowed access. Very clearly telling the citizen this is not where you belong. This does not belong to you,” Stay out!”. Drawing lines with tall, blank, insurmountable dividers.
It is hard not to notice this, but in the city of today and our lives, Power is(the right to build) a wall.
* Side walks in a land where few , a) can walk and b) are required to walk or c) even need to walk – depending on whether, a) you are a common citizen or b) need to get somewhere in the LBZ or c) live in one of the aforementioned bungalows.
Labels: capital, city in decline, history, lucknow, Lutyen's Bunglow Zone, memory, new delhi, urban development, wall
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Taxonomy and City
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 21st 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”.Labels: architecture, city, landmark, new delhi, placeless-ness, taxonomy, urbanism
