Friday, February 06, 2015
OF A KNIFE AND A WINDOW
I have always been fascinated by knives, the clear purpose
of blade, as an implement to part, cleave, sever. Designed to held by hand and deployed by a
stoking motion. Stylized and fashioned over time, and yet the the purpose built
directness of knife is a joy when encountered. One that does its job perfectly,
a balance of shape, weight and
proportion. So a sugar cane stripper, in a village in Bengal completely
had me.
I cannot entirely explain its beauty, one has to see it
used, the effortlessness and the appropriateness to task and skill of hand. And
fit. The Crudeness only ramifies it “perfection” if you could call it that.
The knife here, is one side or edge of an unfolding. One
where I want to talk about directness of purpose, shape, use and response. The
other edge is a window. The connection
may seem a bit farfetched, bu I hope I can string together a certain aesthetic
argument.
History and theory, somehow have a knack of complexifying
things. And often to a point where the conversation becomes hard to follow,
laborious and altogether disjointed from the simple pleasure that the practice
of architecture and its obvious aftermath – the building , are supposed to
enable
Design is most often a search, an enquiry into the nature of
things and their relationships as part and whole which together provide a
framework for expression and creation of both the built and the not built. I
use the word not built, as different to Un-built, to clearly identify the act
or decision of not building certain things or parts of buildings or space – like
not building a wall in certain parts to provide apertures that can act as point
of entry – doors, or communication – windows.
These decisions sometimes are results of stand points and
intellectual exercises and some times of a considered and carefully mediated
response to condition of site or location or topography or geography that
inform the omission.
Much of the time, the articulation of the omission is guided
by our altogether urban (and thus fairly sophisticated responses of form and
function that are created from a surfeit of resources and technologies), born
in synthesized environments that are completely controlled and regulated and
overflowing with choice.
Our obsession with systems and technologies sometimes I feel
lend a certain sterility, and disconnect. We become of higher orders than the
environments we live in.
With this background then, when one encounters the primitive
answer it is both satisfying and liberating.
A window, doing what it must - made from what is available, with no
desire for beauty or celebration, no call for intellectual validation or flag
waving. Nothing but pure window. And when you look closer then, a story
unfolds.
Labels: architecture, BAMBOO, BENGAL, BLADE, DIRECTNESS, FENESTRATION, FUNCTION, GRILL, IMPLEMENT, KNIFE, MUD ARCHITECTURE, MUD HUT, purpose, RURAL BUILDINGS, shape, SUNDERBANS, TOOL, VILLAGE HUT, WINDOW
Thursday, September 08, 2011
Of Bread and Columns
A building, carefully designed and well done, is always a pleasure to walk into. Many-a-time the sheer complexity of project realities see a well-intentioned idea rubbished as it is built in haste and hurry.
Making good architecture is like baking bread. The most simple of ingredients – flour, yeast, salt, water - there are no one million recipes to chose from, and yet there is bread and there is bread. The making, the ferment, the kneading, and the sheer utter patience of waiting for the honest dough to rise oftentimes make the difference between one loaf and the next. Between bread, and bread.
Making good architecture is like baking bread. The most simple of ingredients – flour, yeast, salt, water - there are no one million recipes to chose from, and yet there is bread and there is bread. The making, the ferment, the kneading, and the sheer utter patience of waiting for the honest dough to rise oftentimes make the difference between one loaf and the next. Between bread, and bread.
If you have eaten bread baked at home, made from yeast watched over till it rose to the perfect height and then kneaded with love and effort into the perfect ball of dough, and then baked for an hour and half, to then turned out and glazed with butter and egg-white, you will know what I mean.
So too, I think, it is with buildings, what goes in is usually the same, but the skill and the patience of the kneading hand has, always, a telling consequence on the aftermath.
That is what I encounter every time I walk into one of J A Stein’s buildings. Their simplicity, and directness of address never fail to amaze me.
But what makes me write this post are the columns at the gymnasium of the American Embassy School. Simple, stark, purpose-shaped concrete, beautiful and solid, yet elegant. Standing robust and proud, to the eye that cared to notice, and not doing more.
A simple column, in a gymnasium can be an architectural delight, a sheer pleasure to behold. I, for one, stood there, amazed for a good few minutes. This, a hall of very beautiful columns in concrete, a rare pleasure. The brilliance is hard to miss. The sheer clarity of purpose, in shape, in form, in feel, in colour, in scale, all suddenly unfolds, like layer upon layer of carefully crafted toffee in the mouth.
There is very little that separates good architecture from bad buildings, and yet there is so much. Simplicity most often, and that is the hardest thing to do. In an age of visual gymnastics, even harder.
There is always some thing to take back from a walk in any of Stein’s works. Something always makes space in the memory. Like now, a fair–faced concrete column, they don’t make them like that anymore.
Or, do they? But you will have to look. Or wait for the smell to waft through the air, and pull you there, like good bread.
Labels: architecture, building, cast, column, concrete, concrete column, design, fair-faced, purpose, school, Stein
