Friday, April 17, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
the power of ten
This is Charles and Ray Eames' short film on scale from the '60/ '70's. As with the eames' architecture and furniture, the film still has its relevance in todays age of accessible digital technology...
Black
‘...and in Greece the Parthenon, marked the pinnacle of the pure creation of the mind: contour modulation...
Early modernism, to a large extent, remained white or in shades of grey or at the most with some splashes of primary colours. The colours, when used, were almost always to set off the white. Architecture was regarded as form and space making, the coming together of forms to create space, and colour somehow did not fit in.
Architecture has always battled the perception of being regarded as merely visual. The optic is the most dominant of all our senses, and many perceptions we have of reality and truth are based largely on our visual sense (seeing is believing). That is also why, the visual is regarded as a more baser, a more immediate , and architects have often sought to overcome this bias, tried to involve our other senses. Often a successful piece of architecture is one that is multi-sensory, that evokes feelings in an individual that are not merely visual. Space is to be felt, not merely to be seen.
Thus, colour when used in architecture, seems to reinforce and acknowledge the merely visual within architecture, the surface treatment, and colour is almost equated with ornament. The modern society equated ornament with crime, most famously in Adolf Loos’ seminal book of essays, Ornament and Crime – ‘The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects.’ Ornament was regarded as a wasteful expenditure of human resource, in a society that equated time with money. In his book, Loos invests a culture of minimalism, with moral, economic and social superiority.
There is nothing like it in the architecture of all the world and all time...
It is the moment of utmost acuity when a man, moved by the noblest thoughts, crystallized them in a plastique of light and shadow...’
Le Corbusier, on the Parthenon, in ‘Vers Une Architecture’ ( Towards a new architecture)
Parthenon sculptures were colored blue, red and greenSaturday, February 25, 2006ATHENS - AFP
Its austere white is on every postcard, but the Athens Parthenon was originally daubed with red, blue and green, the Greek archaeologist supervising conservation work on the 2,400-year-old temple said on Friday.
“A recent cleaning operation by laser revealed traces of hematite [red], Egyptian blue and malachite-azurite [green-blue] on the sculptures of the western frieze,” senior archaeologist Evi Papakonstantinou-Zioti told the Agency France-Presse.While archaeologists had found traces of the first two colors elsewhere on the temple years ago, the malachite-azurite coloring was only revealed in the latest restoration process, Papakonstantinou-Zioti said.
Given the testimony of ancient writers, it is not unlikely that the Parthenon’s trademark columns were also colored, she added.
When I was at the AA, I had attended a couple of lectures that Mark Cousins gave on surface and ornament. In those, he brought out how the use of colour was looked upon with suspicion by the early modernists. Even when some modernists highlighted the high degree of refinement in Greek architecture, it was thought to be in monochromatic white marble, and all evidence that it was actually profusely painted was ignored. Greek architecture was thought of, as the achievement of perfection in proportion and form, manifested in pristine white marble, and revealed in a play of light and shadow in the bright Mediterranean sun.
It is the moment of utmost acuity when a man, moved by the noblest thoughts, crystallized them in a plastique of light and shadow...’
Le Corbusier, on the Parthenon, in ‘Vers Une Architecture’ ( Towards a new architecture)
Parthenon sculptures were colored blue, red and greenSaturday, February 25, 2006ATHENS - AFP
Its austere white is on every postcard, but the Athens Parthenon was originally daubed with red, blue and green, the Greek archaeologist supervising conservation work on the 2,400-year-old temple said on Friday.
“A recent cleaning operation by laser revealed traces of hematite [red], Egyptian blue and malachite-azurite [green-blue] on the sculptures of the western frieze,” senior archaeologist Evi Papakonstantinou-Zioti told the Agency France-Presse.While archaeologists had found traces of the first two colors elsewhere on the temple years ago, the malachite-azurite coloring was only revealed in the latest restoration process, Papakonstantinou-Zioti said.
Given the testimony of ancient writers, it is not unlikely that the Parthenon’s trademark columns were also colored, she added.
When I was at the AA, I had attended a couple of lectures that Mark Cousins gave on surface and ornament. In those, he brought out how the use of colour was looked upon with suspicion by the early modernists. Even when some modernists highlighted the high degree of refinement in Greek architecture, it was thought to be in monochromatic white marble, and all evidence that it was actually profusely painted was ignored. Greek architecture was thought of, as the achievement of perfection in proportion and form, manifested in pristine white marble, and revealed in a play of light and shadow in the bright Mediterranean sun.
It was almost in denial, that people acknowledged studies that showed traces of elaborate paint work over the Parthenon and other Greek architecture. Somehow, the appliqué of paint as decoration, and refinement in architecture did not go together.
Early modernism, to a large extent, remained white or in shades of grey or at the most with some splashes of primary colours. The colours, when used, were almost always to set off the white. Architecture was regarded as form and space making, the coming together of forms to create space, and colour somehow did not fit in.
Architecture has always battled the perception of being regarded as merely visual. The optic is the most dominant of all our senses, and many perceptions we have of reality and truth are based largely on our visual sense (seeing is believing). That is also why, the visual is regarded as a more baser, a more immediate , and architects have often sought to overcome this bias, tried to involve our other senses. Often a successful piece of architecture is one that is multi-sensory, that evokes feelings in an individual that are not merely visual. Space is to be felt, not merely to be seen.
The stepwells of gujurat, for example, involve a truly multisensory experience. The coolness of air as one descends, the touch of stone, the gradation of light and the gradual erosion of environmental noise as one goes lower into the ground.
Thus, colour when used in architecture, seems to reinforce and acknowledge the merely visual within architecture, the surface treatment, and colour is almost equated with ornament. The modern society equated ornament with crime, most famously in Adolf Loos’ seminal book of essays, Ornament and Crime – ‘The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects.’ Ornament was regarded as a wasteful expenditure of human resource, in a society that equated time with money. In his book, Loos invests a culture of minimalism, with moral, economic and social superiority.
When I went to the AA for the DRL program in ’99, I immediately felt out of place in my clothing, although my wardrobe had always been very conservative when it came to colour. It took me one and a half terms to come to terms with the western architects dress code – black.
Everything at the AA is almost monochromatic, the way people dress, as well as the white bare walls of 36 Bedford square that become backdrops for countless exhibitions. Colour, when used for walls, is always transient and part of exhibition displays. The furniture, including the cafe/ bar counter ( as well as the other equally important counter - the library counter) is also black. In this sea of black and grey tones, any colour sticks out. It took me a good four months to adjust to the new code, and it did not go unnoticed. Once, when i walked into the bar, four months into the course, Brett Steele commented to Patrick Schumacher – ‘ Hey, He’s one of us now!’.
It took me eight months to come out of the black fixation once I was back in India, But still after 6 years or so, the after taste lingers. In India, where the climate doesn’t allow the total embrace of black, and the overall landscape is too populated with people in bright colours that celebrate the bright sunshine, the intellectuals among architects defined their own dress code during the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. A whole dress code of Fabindiasque Khadi and cotton wear, with earthy colours defined the progressive Indian architect as someone, who is inspired by a left leaning world view, and who dresses like he designs – climatologically attuned to the harsh climate, in an eco- friendly way embracing natural materials, colour and textures, and embracing technologies that were indigenous and capable of generating employment at the grass-roots.
Back at the AA, I found it amazing to find Brett in his Hugo Boss, or Patrick (Schumacher) wearing his flamboyant fur coats and body hugging black tees. It was a revelation to someone who was brought up on a diet of the Kanades in their Khadis. The Henry Ford model T dress code (any colour as long as its black) was everywhere.
Among the few architects who dressed colourfully and lectured at the AA, was Louise Hutton of Sauerbruch Hutton, and these are one of the most sophisticated architects when it comes to the use of colour (www.sauerbruchhutton.de). Colour for Sauerbruch and Hutton is an important aspect of their architecture. Another was Will Alsop.
Bernard Tschumi lectured at the AA while I was there, and I couldn’t get into the main hall for the lecture as it was too crowded. I, along with some friends, watched him speak from the bar, where a screen had been put up. Bernard Tschumi wore black, but with one of the brightest of red scarves (Parc la Villete Red) which I have seen. The colour of the scarf dominated the whole screen, much in the same way the red dominates in many Tschumi buildings.
So, why do architects wear black? There is also a new book by this name - Why do architects wear black? By Cordula Rau.
( An industry manager who left his white-blue, silver-shimmering world of car bodywork and dove into the pitch-black, mysterious world of architecture for the first time during a competition asked me one day: “Ms Rau, why do architects actually wear black?” Although I was wearing black and I am an architect I didn’t have a spontaneous answer, so I responded: “Ask the other architects!” That was in 2001, and it is why this small book came to be. I have asked the question at an international level and whenever it seems appropriate ever since. The sometimes amusing and other times programmatic or hair-splitting answers I have received over the last seven years are listed chronologically in this little black volume. Read, and please, don’t ask me why architects wear black! – Cordula Rau, 22. 02. 2008 )
Andrew Benjamin, during one of his crit sessions with us, while conducting a workshop, commented that architects wear black, because they do not want to commit to any specific colour, they are in denial about colour. They therefore dress in tonal shades. That is why they design in white and grey and wear black.
( An industry manager who left his white-blue, silver-shimmering world of car bodywork and dove into the pitch-black, mysterious world of architecture for the first time during a competition asked me one day: “Ms Rau, why do architects actually wear black?” Although I was wearing black and I am an architect I didn’t have a spontaneous answer, so I responded: “Ask the other architects!” That was in 2001, and it is why this small book came to be. I have asked the question at an international level and whenever it seems appropriate ever since. The sometimes amusing and other times programmatic or hair-splitting answers I have received over the last seven years are listed chronologically in this little black volume. Read, and please, don’t ask me why architects wear black! – Cordula Rau, 22. 02. 2008 )
Andrew Benjamin, during one of his crit sessions with us, while conducting a workshop, commented that architects wear black, because they do not want to commit to any specific colour, they are in denial about colour. They therefore dress in tonal shades. That is why they design in white and grey and wear black.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Altourism
While I am in the process of salvaging past writings, I may as well post this project that I wanted a to do nearly 5 years back. I got too busy doing 'real' projects, and never got around to re-visiting what I had written.
The text is still from five years ago, and it is still in a draft copy version. The brief trails off in the ends and needs closure. There may yet be a good project that may emerge out of all this, and if any one sees any potential, please let me know how we can take it forward...
Altourism
Tourism has become one of the most influential stimuli for urban and economic growth. As societies get more and more interconnected, the touristic gaze proliferates, seeking and exoticising difference in a world of blurring differences and global cultures. Tourism, in fact, is as much a globalising factor as it is a reaction to a global mono-culture. In these times of blurring boundaries and identities, the transnational tourist trots the world in search of difference and in a way contributing to the erasure of this very difference.
Countries such as India, and most parts of Asia are increasingly engaging with tourism as a factor influencing societal and cultural metamorphosis. Whereas, tourism in countries such as India is generated by their geographies, architectural and cultural heritage, and exoticised lifestyles, the same factors are destabilised by the forces of tourism.
The project is an exploration in the way tourism can become a trigger for urban, ecological and socio economic renewal in developing countries. Rejecting the utopian notion that total isolation of native communities can exist, or is even desirable in this dynamic global world, the study seeks to define a typology for touristic growth that is also linked to the sustenance of host communities.
Historically, tourism is perceived to operate in two ways. In the first instance it monumentalizes, eternalizes and objectifies cities by the touristic gaze, seeking to fossilize places and cultures in time and space. In this way, Cities and cultures are reduced to being a simulacrum of their former selves.
In the second, tourism as a social and economic force totally reconfigures the existing space, leading to a perceived loss of local cultures and overuse of natural resources. In the first instance, touristic activities are well organized and often state planned or sanctioned, whereas in the second they are often organic and ad-hoc.
In both the cases, tourism is often viewed as a de-stabilizing factor, an external force irrevocably altering the ‘natural’ course of progression. The host community is always positioned as the ‘other’, needing to be protected from the contamination with outsiders, needing to exist in a stasis.
A touristic experience in India and such places is perceived in two distinct ways. On the one hand, there is the experience of the local villages and settlements, where one becomes a part of the place but has to contend with the aesthetic squalor of rampant development. And on the other, the pristine plastic beauty of acres of gated resort spaces, where the (erstwhile) charm of the place and people is simulated.
Economically too, these two developments work in distinct ways. The local economy is a major beneficiary of the touristic euros in Ad-hoc urbanism, which requires small parcels of land and smaller investments, allowing for a greater participation by the local dweller and thus strengthening the local economy. Bigger concerted developments are often built by large corporations, benefiting from tourism subsidies and tax holidays offered by the state.
This research is an attempt to reconcile these two oppositional modes of development. Through an exploration into other models for urban/ touristic development, which are participative and concerted, organic as well as planned, a typology is envisaged which utilizes the potential of tourism to socio-economically empower local communities, while at the same time offering a variegated and participative experience for the tourist. This will also allow communities the access to cater to high end tourism, a market currently cornered by bigger developments.
The thesis of the project is to combine inherent patterns of touristic growth with successful models of community based development (such as the co-operative movement in banking and dairy sectors in most of south Asia). The project has a multi fold dimension, in that, it seeks to strengthen democracy at the grass root community level, calls for a symbiotic relationship between the tourist, the local and the place leading to a sustainable growth, and seeks to invest the economic future of the community with the environmental health of the place.
Through its intervention on an existing urban/ rural scenario in Goa, India, the project will design the framework that allows for sustainable touristic activity to unfold. This framework will range from the political (where it defines the state-community relationship, the public private partnership etc.) to the urban (where it identifies and defines patterns of urban and touristic growth for a particular scenario).
Site
Situated on the western coast of India, and with a touristic reputation that stretches the last five decades, Goa becomes an ideal laboratory for new models of touristic growth in India.
Tourism which contributes for most of Goa’s GDP also contributes for most of its deterioration. Erstwhile villages are transformed into hubs of uncontrolled activity, totally eradicating lifestyles and places that survived millennia. What 500 years of colonialism could not do is being done by tourism in 50 years or less.
The coastline of Goa is dotted with isolated fishing communities that are being engulfed by a parasitic cancerous tourism and these become the site for an intervention. The project involves focusing on one or two such urban situations and developing specific strategies to develop these into sustainable tourist villages.
Typology
The tourist village, while working as a single entity is a cellular structure of semi-independent public and private facilities. In a Deleuzean way, the tourist village is simultaneously singular and multiple. While it is fashioned along the lines of age-old indigenous governance systems of villages like the panchayat or communidade, the village typology operates in a rizhommatic fashion of alliances and agglomerations, and reflects the way contemporary organisations operate.
The typology allows for individual entrepreneurship of the inhabitants, while simultaneously containing it within a framework of overall growth. Whereas certain facilities such as boarding and lodge, Restaurants, boutiques etc could be franchised by individual inhabitants with local licensing fees, facilities such as Basketball courts, swimming pools, water based sports infrastructure and health clubs could be put up by the community on common land, and could also be used by the local populance. A viable sports and recreational infrastructure could be thus available at the grass-roots level.
A coherent development would also give the ecomomic means and incentive for communities to develop eco friendly public sanitation. In this way, a community could add on to its public infrastructure while at the same time economically benefiting from it. Funding could thus be generated for the preservation of architectural heritage, such as churches, old mansions etc, which form an integral part of these settlements.
For the tourist, the tourist village would offer a much-authenticated experience with a more authentic variegated architecture and layering of time and space, than the monster resorts designed by monster architectural firms.
Research
The project addresses issues at two levels, the generic and the specific. At the level of the generic it formulates a model broad enough to be global ( scalable and replicable) and simultaneously, by working on a particular site, it tests the model at the specific level.
The project seamlessly has to blend urban architectural issues with ecolocical and even socio economic issues, and in order for a successful model to emerge, a research in all these factors becomes imperative.
Project
A team of architects/ student-architects will work on different strategies of developing Agonda, a fishing hamlet in South Goa. Being located in South Goa, and close to the popular beach at Palolem, Agonda is slowly waking up to the pressures of tourism. It is only recently, that villages in South Goa have the touristic gaze turned on them, primarily due to the over saturation of the Northern beaches.
Agonda becomes an ideal laboratory because tourism has still not over whelmed the place, but the process has just begun. An intervention in agonda also has great potential for being actually realised...
The text is still from five years ago, and it is still in a draft copy version. The brief trails off in the ends and needs closure. There may yet be a good project that may emerge out of all this, and if any one sees any potential, please let me know how we can take it forward...
Altourism
Tourism has become one of the most influential stimuli for urban and economic growth. As societies get more and more interconnected, the touristic gaze proliferates, seeking and exoticising difference in a world of blurring differences and global cultures. Tourism, in fact, is as much a globalising factor as it is a reaction to a global mono-culture. In these times of blurring boundaries and identities, the transnational tourist trots the world in search of difference and in a way contributing to the erasure of this very difference.
Countries such as India, and most parts of Asia are increasingly engaging with tourism as a factor influencing societal and cultural metamorphosis. Whereas, tourism in countries such as India is generated by their geographies, architectural and cultural heritage, and exoticised lifestyles, the same factors are destabilised by the forces of tourism.
The project is an exploration in the way tourism can become a trigger for urban, ecological and socio economic renewal in developing countries. Rejecting the utopian notion that total isolation of native communities can exist, or is even desirable in this dynamic global world, the study seeks to define a typology for touristic growth that is also linked to the sustenance of host communities.
Historically, tourism is perceived to operate in two ways. In the first instance it monumentalizes, eternalizes and objectifies cities by the touristic gaze, seeking to fossilize places and cultures in time and space. In this way, Cities and cultures are reduced to being a simulacrum of their former selves.
In the second, tourism as a social and economic force totally reconfigures the existing space, leading to a perceived loss of local cultures and overuse of natural resources. In the first instance, touristic activities are well organized and often state planned or sanctioned, whereas in the second they are often organic and ad-hoc.
In both the cases, tourism is often viewed as a de-stabilizing factor, an external force irrevocably altering the ‘natural’ course of progression. The host community is always positioned as the ‘other’, needing to be protected from the contamination with outsiders, needing to exist in a stasis.
A touristic experience in India and such places is perceived in two distinct ways. On the one hand, there is the experience of the local villages and settlements, where one becomes a part of the place but has to contend with the aesthetic squalor of rampant development. And on the other, the pristine plastic beauty of acres of gated resort spaces, where the (erstwhile) charm of the place and people is simulated.
Economically too, these two developments work in distinct ways. The local economy is a major beneficiary of the touristic euros in Ad-hoc urbanism, which requires small parcels of land and smaller investments, allowing for a greater participation by the local dweller and thus strengthening the local economy. Bigger concerted developments are often built by large corporations, benefiting from tourism subsidies and tax holidays offered by the state.
This research is an attempt to reconcile these two oppositional modes of development. Through an exploration into other models for urban/ touristic development, which are participative and concerted, organic as well as planned, a typology is envisaged which utilizes the potential of tourism to socio-economically empower local communities, while at the same time offering a variegated and participative experience for the tourist. This will also allow communities the access to cater to high end tourism, a market currently cornered by bigger developments.
The thesis of the project is to combine inherent patterns of touristic growth with successful models of community based development (such as the co-operative movement in banking and dairy sectors in most of south Asia). The project has a multi fold dimension, in that, it seeks to strengthen democracy at the grass root community level, calls for a symbiotic relationship between the tourist, the local and the place leading to a sustainable growth, and seeks to invest the economic future of the community with the environmental health of the place.
Through its intervention on an existing urban/ rural scenario in Goa, India, the project will design the framework that allows for sustainable touristic activity to unfold. This framework will range from the political (where it defines the state-community relationship, the public private partnership etc.) to the urban (where it identifies and defines patterns of urban and touristic growth for a particular scenario).
Site
Situated on the western coast of India, and with a touristic reputation that stretches the last five decades, Goa becomes an ideal laboratory for new models of touristic growth in India.
Tourism which contributes for most of Goa’s GDP also contributes for most of its deterioration. Erstwhile villages are transformed into hubs of uncontrolled activity, totally eradicating lifestyles and places that survived millennia. What 500 years of colonialism could not do is being done by tourism in 50 years or less.
The coastline of Goa is dotted with isolated fishing communities that are being engulfed by a parasitic cancerous tourism and these become the site for an intervention. The project involves focusing on one or two such urban situations and developing specific strategies to develop these into sustainable tourist villages.
Typology
The tourist village, while working as a single entity is a cellular structure of semi-independent public and private facilities. In a Deleuzean way, the tourist village is simultaneously singular and multiple. While it is fashioned along the lines of age-old indigenous governance systems of villages like the panchayat or communidade, the village typology operates in a rizhommatic fashion of alliances and agglomerations, and reflects the way contemporary organisations operate.
The typology allows for individual entrepreneurship of the inhabitants, while simultaneously containing it within a framework of overall growth. Whereas certain facilities such as boarding and lodge, Restaurants, boutiques etc could be franchised by individual inhabitants with local licensing fees, facilities such as Basketball courts, swimming pools, water based sports infrastructure and health clubs could be put up by the community on common land, and could also be used by the local populance. A viable sports and recreational infrastructure could be thus available at the grass-roots level.
A coherent development would also give the ecomomic means and incentive for communities to develop eco friendly public sanitation. In this way, a community could add on to its public infrastructure while at the same time economically benefiting from it. Funding could thus be generated for the preservation of architectural heritage, such as churches, old mansions etc, which form an integral part of these settlements.
For the tourist, the tourist village would offer a much-authenticated experience with a more authentic variegated architecture and layering of time and space, than the monster resorts designed by monster architectural firms.
Research
The project addresses issues at two levels, the generic and the specific. At the level of the generic it formulates a model broad enough to be global ( scalable and replicable) and simultaneously, by working on a particular site, it tests the model at the specific level.
The project seamlessly has to blend urban architectural issues with ecolocical and even socio economic issues, and in order for a successful model to emerge, a research in all these factors becomes imperative.
Project
A team of architects/ student-architects will work on different strategies of developing Agonda, a fishing hamlet in South Goa. Being located in South Goa, and close to the popular beach at Palolem, Agonda is slowly waking up to the pressures of tourism. It is only recently, that villages in South Goa have the touristic gaze turned on them, primarily due to the over saturation of the Northern beaches.
Agonda becomes an ideal laboratory because tourism has still not over whelmed the place, but the process has just begun. An intervention in agonda also has great potential for being actually realised...
Urban Parks - the brief
A couple of years back, I had the opportunity to write a brief for the ANDC trophy ( The Annual NASA Design Competition). The brief involved issues that have gained in relevance, these past few years:
The brief
Society of the hybrid
Contemporary lifestyles create a society of hybridities, of convergence. Mobile phones are no longer just phones, but cameras/ mp3 players/ personal organizers bundled into one. We see hybridities in all aspects of our schizoid post-modern lifestyles – the gadgets we use, our cultural and sexual identities, the way business and pleasure get blurred (so as to even prompt the finance ministry to have a fringe benefit tax!), and increasingly, even the spaces we inhabit are hyper functional.
Architecture has engaged with hybridity in one way or another for the past century. Whereas modern architecture of the early twentieth century tried to simplify modern society by techniques of stratification and separation (the factory from the house, the pedestrian from the automobile, the figure from the ground…), the last few decades have celebrated the impure - the hybrid, whether formally as in post modern architecture of the sixties and the deconstruction of the eighties, or programmatically as in the last two decades or so.
Contemporary works such as those of Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, Ben van Berkel etc. irrigate territories with potentialities of new and schizoid programs. The word ‘typology’, a modernist creation, is no longer a stable construct. Typologies are destabilized, deconstructed and mutated to form new possibilities of inhabiting space and unfolding contemporary life.
The Seattle Library anticipates new ways of archiving information, and also becomes a lounge for the entire city; the Prada store in New York gets converted into a place for concerts every once in a while; and any atrium in a shopping mall constantly reconfigures to accommodate functions ranging from VJ hunts to Polio drives.
Just Park
In this world where even the typology of the house is in a state of flux (the loft, the SoHo…), we invite you to re-think a typology, which has largely resisted architectural innovation – the car park.
The ubiquitous feature of any urban agglomeration, the car park (whether as a multistoried mega structure or just asphalted ground) has remained fairly mono functional in the way it is conceived.
“Parking” as an architectural function is always relegated to the back in the designers mind, a boring space which no building or urban space can do without, but in itself lacks any feature. The architecture of parking is increasingly an architecture of statistics ( habitable space /X m2 of office space/ housing space etc. = no of parking bays…) to the point that parking spaces in their blandness stand in contrast to other public spaces within a building.
Urbanistically, in the west, the car park has become a site for exploration only in the last decade or so. In one of the more famous projects, Rem Koolhaas uses the car park in Yokohama city to unfold a range of time based programs on a largely inert parking space. Many other architects such as the dutch studio, NL architects, generate a complex web of programmes intertwined with a multi storied parking for the city of Amsterdam. But these explorations still remain very few compared to architectural thought in other urban spaces.
If the twentieth century was defined by new ways of mobility, the twenty first is about the infrastructures and the redundancies that mobility generates. Spaces such as railway stations, airports, traffic interchanges etc. coexist with and sometimes even replace traditional notions of urban space such as courts and streets.
Rethinking the mundane
We invite you to rethink the typology of parking precisely because it is so boring. The site for architectural innovation is not only in generating new and unimagined forms, but also in rethinking inherited notions of functions and generating unimagined mixity of program. Creativity lies in the skill to generate the interesting out of the mundane.
In India the issue of parking has started pitching our everyday life. Nearly all cities in India are compensating the lack of urban planning by thinking of ad hoc solutions for parking and traffic management. In cities all across India, we see streets being taken over by the automobile, and when that is insufficient, ugly multistoried car parks mushroom with scant regard for context. It is imperative that such junk spaces of our society become sites for architectural creativity.
Another aspect, which bears exploration in the design, is the architectonic quality of a space designed primarily for the automobile. When an automobile is intended to infiltrate architectural (and therefore primarily human) space, it generates its own logic of turning radii, column free access etc, which conflict with traditional ways of generating space.
Architecture then has to resolve this tension between the needs of the automobile and the inhabitants. For an early example, one has to look at the ground floor plan of Villa Savoye to understand how the path of the car reconfigures the access to the first floor and the primary grid of the plan.
In this brief, innovation lies at two levels. The basic monofunctional typology of the car park is to be metamorphed into a space which reflects todays schizoid and simultaneous lifestyles, and secondly, drastically rethinking the architectonic quality of a space which primarily caters not to man but to the machine.
Scale
The project should accommodate parking for approximately 500 cars and also have parallel programs introduced to hybridise the typology of monofuntional parking. The project could take the form of a multistoried intervention or an underground solution or even combine both, but should not be confined only to the ground plane.
The programs which are inserted in addition to parking could be accommodated within the space generated by the parking or could be accommodated in highly specialized spaces which in themselves are mono functional (for e.g., a street market could be introduced within the space of the parking itself, whereas a cinema theater would require a dedicated space…)
The hybrid programs introduced should sufficiently destabilize the notion of the car park as we know it, but at the same time should not consume more than 10% of the parking capacity generated by the project during the peak hours. In this way the programs should be symbiotic rather than parasitic.
Site
The site could be located in any urban agglomeration, which justifies the amount of parking space generated. (This could be the down town commercial hub of a metropolis or even the congested by lanes of a small temple town).
A part of the design lies also in choosing an interesting urban situation and mining the context for programmatic mixity.
Careful analysis of the site through different techniques such as photographic and image based, diagrammatic, statistical, and even through computer animations modeling time and other parameters, should support the selection and subsequent design of the site.
Name
The design should be such that simplistic terms such as “Car Park” should no longer be able to describe the design. A part of the design also lies in synthesizing a name that adequately describes the project.
Temporal fields
Adequate analysis of the existing context should be carried out to establish temporal uses of the site and the surroundings. Teams have to be creative and sensitive in designing the temporal aspect of the program. The project should be programmed in a manner such that it acts passively during peak hours (it absorbs parking congestion contributing very less to the existing demand) and is active as an urban stimulator during other times. New innovative ways of choreographing space through time is anticipated as a part of the design.
Architectonics.
Just as the design anticipates new and exciting ways of imagining the mundane, the architectonic / structural solution also should be liberated from traditional notions of structure and space. New juxtapositions in functions should result in new ways or at least hybrid ways of generating space.
Design
The design should address the issues stated above, and go further in anticipating issues, which may not even be a part of this brief. The design should be as multivalent in its approach as the brief imagines the space of an hybridized parking lot to be.
The scope of the design, in spite of being architectural, ranges from the interior to the urban.
The brief
Society of the hybrid
Contemporary lifestyles create a society of hybridities, of convergence. Mobile phones are no longer just phones, but cameras/ mp3 players/ personal organizers bundled into one. We see hybridities in all aspects of our schizoid post-modern lifestyles – the gadgets we use, our cultural and sexual identities, the way business and pleasure get blurred (so as to even prompt the finance ministry to have a fringe benefit tax!), and increasingly, even the spaces we inhabit are hyper functional.
Architecture has engaged with hybridity in one way or another for the past century. Whereas modern architecture of the early twentieth century tried to simplify modern society by techniques of stratification and separation (the factory from the house, the pedestrian from the automobile, the figure from the ground…), the last few decades have celebrated the impure - the hybrid, whether formally as in post modern architecture of the sixties and the deconstruction of the eighties, or programmatically as in the last two decades or so.
Contemporary works such as those of Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, Ben van Berkel etc. irrigate territories with potentialities of new and schizoid programs. The word ‘typology’, a modernist creation, is no longer a stable construct. Typologies are destabilized, deconstructed and mutated to form new possibilities of inhabiting space and unfolding contemporary life.
The Seattle Library anticipates new ways of archiving information, and also becomes a lounge for the entire city; the Prada store in New York gets converted into a place for concerts every once in a while; and any atrium in a shopping mall constantly reconfigures to accommodate functions ranging from VJ hunts to Polio drives.
Just Park
In this world where even the typology of the house is in a state of flux (the loft, the SoHo…), we invite you to re-think a typology, which has largely resisted architectural innovation – the car park.
The ubiquitous feature of any urban agglomeration, the car park (whether as a multistoried mega structure or just asphalted ground) has remained fairly mono functional in the way it is conceived.
“Parking” as an architectural function is always relegated to the back in the designers mind, a boring space which no building or urban space can do without, but in itself lacks any feature. The architecture of parking is increasingly an architecture of statistics ( habitable space /X m2 of office space/ housing space etc. = no of parking bays…) to the point that parking spaces in their blandness stand in contrast to other public spaces within a building.
Urbanistically, in the west, the car park has become a site for exploration only in the last decade or so. In one of the more famous projects, Rem Koolhaas uses the car park in Yokohama city to unfold a range of time based programs on a largely inert parking space. Many other architects such as the dutch studio, NL architects, generate a complex web of programmes intertwined with a multi storied parking for the city of Amsterdam. But these explorations still remain very few compared to architectural thought in other urban spaces.
If the twentieth century was defined by new ways of mobility, the twenty first is about the infrastructures and the redundancies that mobility generates. Spaces such as railway stations, airports, traffic interchanges etc. coexist with and sometimes even replace traditional notions of urban space such as courts and streets.
Rethinking the mundane
We invite you to rethink the typology of parking precisely because it is so boring. The site for architectural innovation is not only in generating new and unimagined forms, but also in rethinking inherited notions of functions and generating unimagined mixity of program. Creativity lies in the skill to generate the interesting out of the mundane.
In India the issue of parking has started pitching our everyday life. Nearly all cities in India are compensating the lack of urban planning by thinking of ad hoc solutions for parking and traffic management. In cities all across India, we see streets being taken over by the automobile, and when that is insufficient, ugly multistoried car parks mushroom with scant regard for context. It is imperative that such junk spaces of our society become sites for architectural creativity.
Another aspect, which bears exploration in the design, is the architectonic quality of a space designed primarily for the automobile. When an automobile is intended to infiltrate architectural (and therefore primarily human) space, it generates its own logic of turning radii, column free access etc, which conflict with traditional ways of generating space.
Architecture then has to resolve this tension between the needs of the automobile and the inhabitants. For an early example, one has to look at the ground floor plan of Villa Savoye to understand how the path of the car reconfigures the access to the first floor and the primary grid of the plan.
In this brief, innovation lies at two levels. The basic monofunctional typology of the car park is to be metamorphed into a space which reflects todays schizoid and simultaneous lifestyles, and secondly, drastically rethinking the architectonic quality of a space which primarily caters not to man but to the machine.
Scale
The project should accommodate parking for approximately 500 cars and also have parallel programs introduced to hybridise the typology of monofuntional parking. The project could take the form of a multistoried intervention or an underground solution or even combine both, but should not be confined only to the ground plane.
The programs which are inserted in addition to parking could be accommodated within the space generated by the parking or could be accommodated in highly specialized spaces which in themselves are mono functional (for e.g., a street market could be introduced within the space of the parking itself, whereas a cinema theater would require a dedicated space…)
The hybrid programs introduced should sufficiently destabilize the notion of the car park as we know it, but at the same time should not consume more than 10% of the parking capacity generated by the project during the peak hours. In this way the programs should be symbiotic rather than parasitic.
Site
The site could be located in any urban agglomeration, which justifies the amount of parking space generated. (This could be the down town commercial hub of a metropolis or even the congested by lanes of a small temple town).
A part of the design lies also in choosing an interesting urban situation and mining the context for programmatic mixity.
Careful analysis of the site through different techniques such as photographic and image based, diagrammatic, statistical, and even through computer animations modeling time and other parameters, should support the selection and subsequent design of the site.
Name
The design should be such that simplistic terms such as “Car Park” should no longer be able to describe the design. A part of the design also lies in synthesizing a name that adequately describes the project.
Temporal fields
Adequate analysis of the existing context should be carried out to establish temporal uses of the site and the surroundings. Teams have to be creative and sensitive in designing the temporal aspect of the program. The project should be programmed in a manner such that it acts passively during peak hours (it absorbs parking congestion contributing very less to the existing demand) and is active as an urban stimulator during other times. New innovative ways of choreographing space through time is anticipated as a part of the design.
Architectonics.
Just as the design anticipates new and exciting ways of imagining the mundane, the architectonic / structural solution also should be liberated from traditional notions of structure and space. New juxtapositions in functions should result in new ways or at least hybrid ways of generating space.
Design
The design should address the issues stated above, and go further in anticipating issues, which may not even be a part of this brief. The design should be as multivalent in its approach as the brief imagines the space of an hybridized parking lot to be.
The scope of the design, in spite of being architectural, ranges from the interior to the urban.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
parking
Parking spaces bring out the worst paranoias in us. Repetitive spaces, rectilinear grids for machines that always function on turning radii...
In movies and TV serials, Parking spaces are spaces where the murderer or the rapist lurks, the site of inhuman horrors, in a space designed for the automobile.
but none of the movies or TV serials I have seen, bring the point across in such a forceful manner.
This is Seinfeld on modern parking...
Saturday, February 14, 2009
architecture that blazed
"We are fed up with seeing Palladio and other historical masks, because we do not want to exclude everything in architecture that makes us uneasy.
We want architecture that has more to offer. Architecture that bleeds, exhausts, that turns and even breaks, as far as I am concerned.
Architecture that glows, that stabs, that tears and rips when stretched. Architecture must be precipitous, fiery, smooth, hard, angular, brutal, round, tender, colourful, obscene, randy, dreamy, en-nearing, distancing, wet, dry and heart-stopping. Dead or alive.
If it is cold, then cold as a block of ice. If it is hot, then as hot as a tongue of flame.
Architecture must burn."
--Coop Himmelblau, 1980.
In his essay, 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction', published in 1935/ 36, Walter Benjamin draws an analogy between film and architecture. He contends that both architecture and film are art that are viewed by the collectivity, through a mode of distraction. While watching a film, generally one does not contemplate the finer nuances of the various arts and techne that are employed in the production. Arts such as direction, editing and many times even acting is relegated to the background, as the narrative assumes a dominant role. Similarly, for Benjamin, as the flaneur moves about the city, consuming it, architecture is a backdrop against which life is played out. Even as one goes through one's daily life, and moves through Train stations, airports, public and private spaces, the architecture is consumed in an almost absent-minded, distracted mode. This, according to Benjamin, is in stark contrast to how one would view a painting, or a sculpture. Here, there is an active engagement with the work of art.
The famous 1980 manifesto of Coop Himmelblau can be seen as a reaction to this resignation of having to deal with architecture as an art often being consumed distractedly.
Architecture, more prominently since the '80's, has constantly tried to address this issue. Bernard Tschumi, during this same time, called for an architecture that was the equivalent of rock music, a spatial sensibility that tested the thin line between order and chaos, between noise and music.
There is a reason why rock music is not played in elevators and hotel lobbies - it cannot be consumed distractedly, it demands an active engagement. Similarly, an architecture that burns, that makes one un-easy, that makes one feel claustrophobic or even dizzy, refuses to be consumed absent mindedly, it seeks an active engagement.
Two buildings literally burned down in the recent past. Villa NM by Un studio and TVCC by OMA. Both were buildings that blazed, that defied being viewed distractedly. In their being burned down, they posed more difficult questions than they could by being built. They brought forth the notion of emphemerality of built space.
OMA's work, for instance, embraces emphemerality, as a necessary metropolitan condition. It conceives of buildings that are adaptive to change all around and also within, but even OMA coundnt have conceived of such a drastic overhaul to its CCTV/ TVCC scheme
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Protrusion
Saw this the other day pinned in builders office. Its the madan mohan fort in madhya Pradesh, india.
The space that was left over
The deshpande center opened, the other day on the 6th of february, 2009. Among the best feedbacks for the project was from Gururaj 'Desh' Deshpande, who commisioned the project. He said to me, that the best part of the project was the space underneath - the space left over.
In a way, the project is about that, the left over space. Highly programmed, sometimes monofunctional spaces such as the auditorium, training halls etc, are configured around an unprogrammed core, an unbuilt space that constantly adapts to multiple uses. It serves as a spill over for the desh cafe, or could be pre function area or even an exhibition space. the list is endless.
The initial presentations was very much about the formation of this sectional core space, and I am happy that they like it...
Some images of the project could be viewed at :
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Sequestered Simulacra
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none.The simulacrum is true.
-Jean Baudrillard
Xintiandi is yet another simulacrum in the city of simulacra that is Shanghai. Shanghai itself is an attempt to create the ultimate simulation- the notion of the free city, a democratic metropolis. Everything, the pudong area , the bund, are carefully crafted and managed simulations based on the greatest of cities as we know them.
Xintiandi, or the french quarter, was a derelict colonial part of the old Shanghai. The shikumen houses and their alleyways were carefully restored and converted into the vibrant shopping and recreation district that it is today, by a single architectural firm ( Wood +Zapata) commisioned by a single developer. It was so successful, that the architectural firm has become synonymous with the project in China, and is inundated with projects to 'xintiandi' entire city districts. 'To Xintiandi' is now a verb in china.
Xintiandi is an image of multiplicity, a multiplicity of spaces, of temporalities and histories, yet everything about it is singular. It is a public space, carefully designed to mimic the organic form of European cityscapes, recreated in the heart of the orient.
In a world where public space is highly mediated and controlled, and consumed on a large scale, it increasingly becomes a simulacrum, referring to a reality that never was. An entire spatial history and heritage is fabricated by singular architectural gestures.
As urban lifestyles are homogenised, public spaces in countries like China or India become caricatures of Western city squares and streets, or even American Malls.
But surprisingly, even this appropriation of western concepts of space and place happens differently in Totallitarian China and Independent India.
Ironically, In Communist China, where a freedom of indiscriminate consumption seeks to compenseate for a lack of freedom for democratic expression, the distinction between the city and the simulacrum is blurred. In a free country like India, these spaces tend to be more controlled, more distinct from the city with its lack of order and a plethora of democratic expressions in the form of protests and riots.
The UB City Mall in Bangalore, abruptly demarcates a highly sanitised zone within which it re-creates, among other things, a Venetian Pallazo, a urbane food court and an amphitheater. A sequestered Island of metropolitan urbanity in the land of the free...
The Police state and the moral policing state seem to generate two very different types of contemporary urban space
In China, these spaces seek to become the city, sometimes successfully, the city becomes a simulacrum, whereas in India, these spaces are escapes from the city, physically distinct from their surroundings. Thus, an unlikely but influential architectural parameter for the design of public spaces is the repressive nature of state power, or the lack of it.
The totalitarian regime in china stifles any protests and dissent, and allows for an incongruously democratic public space to proliferate in the sea of economic and social inequalities that it actually is. Here, on the other hand, the transparency of the democracy doesnt allow for such purely visual blurs and the harsh reality of the divided social space is brought home by a fragmented physical reality. Urban space in our country will become blurred only as a more inclusive growth takes place and that is a more viable though difficult model in the long run than the cheap chinese import version.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
urban warfare, the striated and the smooth
Recently, I saw Jacques Tati's french comedy, Mon Oncle, a film about the post war Paris of the '50's. The film, contrasts the old parts of Paris with the new modern reconstructed parts, ,subverting and parodying the perceived dichotomy of modern architecture versus the traditional city. It uses some of the same arguments that modern architects used against the traditional city, but very subtly subverts them.
The modern city is distinct from the old quarters, by its rational use of space planning, efficient traffic management and uncluttered aesthetic. The people living here are timebound and purpose driven, as against the more idyllic lifestyles of the citizenry of the old city.
Tati's Paris is a city divided neatly between the modern and the traditional-
New rational modern architecture with the old collaged accretions of the past
The smooth automobile roads with the pedestrian city squares
The automobile with the horse cart
The straight line with the meandering curve
The modern purpose driven, time bound man with the Flaneur
Only young children and street dogs, to a certain extent, seem to seamlessly negotiate this divide. This contrast between the two types of space has continued since the last century.
Tati's lyrical and comic critique could be seen as an extension of the post-modern debate of the late '50's and '60's. it ties in with works such as Colin Rowe's Collage city or Venturi's Complexity and contradictions in architecture.
The same dichotomy, but with opposite effect, was used by the early modernists to justify a homogenised modern architecture. Tati's two Paris' could be also seen as the striated and the smooth spaces of Deleuze
This dichotomy of spaces plays out in strange ways in the contemporary ways. In the recent Mumbai terror attacks, it took 60 hours, nearly twice the time it took for the Oberoi trident or the Taj's new wing, for the heritage wing to be sanitised, and brought under control.
The newer hotels, with their gridded rational plans, their repetitive cellular structures were easier to be cordoned and re-claimed from the terrorists. The heritage wing, on the other hand, was easier to be subverted by the terrorists. The alleyways with multiple accesses and staircases, made the Taj a difficult space for the security forces, and an easier target for the terrorists. These were the same spaces, that set the Mumbai Taj distinct from other more modern and equipped hotels.
Urban warfare, revealed the dichotomy of spaces in a far more brutal and tragic way than Tati's films, or debates for or against modern architecture could ever have. As security concerns override considerations of quality of space and may sometimes become a major consideration while designing space, the choice of spatiality will increasingly be governed by their resistance to subversion by terrorists and even rioters. The balance may tip in favour of a gridded striated spatiality, as against a smooth space full of connectivity and possibilities, a new paranoid secure space.
Paranoid space will be a space that can easily be controlled, that limits points of entrance and exit. Paranoid space relies on repetition to eliminate surprise, and is a space of constant surveillance. If the panopticon, exemplified Foucault's societies of control, the new paranoid spaces of hotels, airports, train stations, museums etc. will exemplify our societies of antipower, where a possibility exists that a miniscule group of people could hold an entire city to hostage, by subverting the openess and freedom of public spaces
Lets hope this one is for real...
Its taken a great effort to connect with the writer within me and get around to initiate a blog that thinks 'space'. So, after many false starts ( there are still some blogs started by me, with no content, that are still floating around out there like space debris), here goes...
Lets hope 2009 sees another line of production from all of us at thirdspace. Since a long time, I have been feeling that our studio may be too involved in producing space, and not thinking enough about spatiality.
This will be a forum for us at thirdspace to articulate our concerns, a parallel space that mirrors thirdspace.
Lets hope 2009 sees another line of production from all of us at thirdspace. Since a long time, I have been feeling that our studio may be too involved in producing space, and not thinking enough about spatiality.
This will be a forum for us at thirdspace to articulate our concerns, a parallel space that mirrors thirdspace.
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