Ek ruka hua Faisla

In a closed room, emerged a debate regarding capability to teach in a school of architecture in Bangalore. The dramatis personae included an eminent architect and design Chair, the principal,  the chief trustee, the Council of Architecture (COA) representative and supposedly respected academician, and a few others to add gravitas to the sombre settings.

Some snippets:

“…pardon my saying so, but this profile of this person indicates a rolling stone. Many job changes, two years at most in each job. How can one expect a commitment towards teaching?”

“…Maybe. But since I am a rolling stone, I have not gathered moss. There is an innate ability to relate various subjects with architecture, people and design in general. This wide angle view is necessary today. It is vital for a student to know that architecture does not begin and end with drawings”

 “This is all philosophical talk…I have given more than 20 years of my life to dedicated teaching, with commitment. The profession of architecture is now a specialized field. It is no longer the subject or craft of a time where an architect would design the door handles and the latches. In teaching architecture, one needs to be “focused” and “should get the class to focus” on the subject being taught at that moment. “If I am taking a class on Interior Design, I will talk only about Interior Design and not about urban design because it is not relevant. A student has to know what to specialize in…”

“I agree, yet disagree with what you say… Yes because a student has to know what is the relation of a subject/discipline with his /her role as an architect. No, because Architecture is now indeed so specialized, it is even more vital for an architect to know when and where to bring in a specialist and what to expect from them.  If we go by what you are saying, then we will have an architect who will design the building without cognizance of topography, accept the fact that its services will go haywire over the site. One day the sustainability consultant will come and show that the building is wrongly oriented and hence it will have huge energy impacts. The next day, the landscape architect will come and show that critical site features could have been sensitively woven into the design and trees need not have been cut. The third day, the structural engineer will come up and say that the bulk of the work will need expensive structural solutions because much of its going away from basic structural logic. And in the near future citizens will remark caustically about how one building can be so in-your-face and totally disrespectful of its context and surroundings. That is the architect who will emerge from compartmentalized education”.

“Show us your work”

“ These are projects I have worked on, in the offices I have worked in as you can see in the top right hand corner of every slide. They are not my projects since the copyright is with the respective offices. I have letters to show from the offices that I have worked on these projects. I am not claiming them as my projects. ”

“These are not your projects ?”.

“Then…what have YOU done? Show that.”

“I have completed these projects for these offices.”

 “I will sound pompous, but I have worked on these- Medical College, Superspeciality Hospital, Healthcare Township, Adaptive re-use of heritage estate, Masterplan for Urban revitalization of this precinct, Trauma Centre, Resort, temple, Slum Rehabilitation buildings…”

“OK…The projects are all about Conservation, Urban design, Landscaping, Low Cost housing etc. What is your strength in Architectural Design? You are not practising Architecture, so how can you say you can teach Architecture?”

“What can you teach?"

“I have taught services, Indian History, Construction, Basic design, Architectural design, Urban Design, Landscape Design, Theory of Design. Conducted study tours, workshops on large span structures and green buildings.”

“No…tell us ONE subject you can teach fully.”

“I realise I cannot teach. Thank you for your time, Gentlemen and Ladies”.

As Dylan sang...

How many years can some people exist, before they allowed to be free?

The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind.

But the questions remain...

Q1: Can Design exist without philosophy?

Q2: Is the education system  today capable of distinguishing between information and knowledge transfer?

 Q3: Is the architecture student of today so dumb that hand-holding becomes the essence of instruction? Or is it that the Faculty is playing it safe?

There is no answer. Or perhaps it is blowing in the wind.

Not Letting Go...

The inability to let go is characteristic of the typical Indian psyche. Stories abound in feudal India about generations fighting over what seems like crushed pride. Retrospective vision sometimes makes it appear as something banal, or something which could have been settled once and be done with, or better still…let go. But this is never so, whether it is feudal India or any of its modern avatars.

N. Srinivasan cannot let go of his powerful position as the man who makes Indian cricket a daily tamasha. The game, in India, has stripped itself of all residual honour and yet continues to grab its daily share of eyeballs. Indians viewers cannot let go of a much sullied game where victories are now largely pyrrhic.  People who can turn the game of cricket management around for the better are not letting go of their silences, offering what is at best, a lip-service about the Board doing the right thing and other such.

While the Congress cannot let go of the Gandhi family, LK Advani cannot let go of the fact that today his views (about how the BJP should function and project itself ) are now dated. The elderly statesman cannot let go the fact that nobody is listening to him from his own party. The BJP in its desperation to form a Government cannot let go of their poster child Narendra Modi. On a sobering note, secular India should not let go of the fact that his name is associated with communal violence and genocide, and such a person cannot represent the notion of “India” as enshrined in its Constitution.

Arnab Goswami, Rajedep Sardesai , Barkha Dutt and their ilk cannot let go their penchant to take issues to hair splitting ends and emerge none-the-wiser, while wasting programme band-width and ignoring matters which would truly inform and galvanize the Nation.

Corporate India is no different. While Infosys cannot let go of Narayana Murthy, Narayana Murthy cannot let go of Infosys. It doesn’t need a great business analyst to understand that he had never ‘let go’ in the first place, always operating as a ghost figure.

Self-effacing “giants” in academia cannot let go of their “sacrifice”. They cannot digest the bitter truth that in their so-and-so years of teaching, the standards of academia have been dipping. Every batch is a little less interested in the subject than its predecessor, the effort put in is that much less on work and the caliber that much more blunted. But colleges cannot let go the revenue brought in by admitting a new batch no matter what the current crop’s standard is.

Starved for triumph in almost every sector, India cannot let go a Sunita Williams, Kalpana Chawla and other “Indian –origin” achievers like them as citizens and achievers of their respective countries. They are neither products of the Indian system nor beneficiaries of the Indian State. We unashamedly claim them as “our own” while burying our ineptitude in catalyzing the emergence of great leaders and achievers.

Architects cannot let go their fixation with making each building to "stand out" and each building to be a landmark, at least till the next one comes along.  They cannot let go of  0.00 as their datum level. If quality of our inhabited spaces have to improve, Citizens cannot not let go of the fact that poor habitats are more often the result of poor architecture, generally devoid of emotive content, without a sense of connect.

Landscape Architects cannot let go of the sad reality that they have been offering lip-service all this while about being environmental vanguards or at least being environmentally conscious. Solutions to our country’s  ecological and environmental issues that should have been a part of the profession’s roles and responsibilities have been shouldered admirably by others. Landscape architects do not figure in important programmes such as mapping urban open spaces, protecting waterbodies, urban ecology and landscape conservation. Landscape architects in India cannot let go the fact that despite the success of a few, the profession at large is increasingly seen as a redundant yet exalted profession of garden-makers and open space beauticians, where garden contractors are given preference over a landscape architect, simply because the former can deliver what he/she speaks.

Simplicity

The power of the thought, the elegance of the concept, the simplicity in expression. So simple, it can arguably be termed boring. Perhaps it is being dismissed as such, which is a pity. Indian Cities are full of unassigned voids  awaiting a Paley Park-like catalyst.

At one level it is a pocket garden/ public space. At another level, it is -to me- the willingness to accept simple interventions that end up having a profound impact on the way we see cities, nature and people.

I have been looking at it for years, yet it beguiles me.

As Ghalib concluded, "...yun hota toh kya hota..."

A Place in the Shade

The name Borivali recalls the Zizyphus trees (Bor in Marathi) which were abundant till about ten years ago. Borivali is my hometown, specifically Mandapeshwar or Mt. Poinsur. The place contains varied marks of history.  The 65 million years old landscape with yielded itself in the 5^th Century CE to the chisel marks of the stone carver at Mandapeshwar- a Buddhist era outpost along the Dahisar river.  Perhaps then the Dahisar river flowed closer to the caves. It is said, till the late 1960s, crocodiles apparently resided along the river. Nearby, was an old bridge- perhaps late 17^th Century CE- a lifeline across a river prone to floods. A thousand years ago, monks, wayfarers and merchants camped at Mandapeshwar while negotiating the route between Kanheri and the port of Sopara (present day Nala Sopara). Later, so did the Portguese invaders who came here from Bassein (Vasai) in the mid-16^th century CE, followed by Jesuit priests in the mid-19^th century.  Over the years, Mandapeshwar became Montpazier and then Mt. Poinsur.  

In this setting, Jeevan Bima Nagar, a township built by the Life Insurance Corporation of India between 1974-78 sits on a small hillock. Its slopes gradually merge with the not-too far away mangroves, tidal flats and salt pans. The layout of the colony bears influences of distinct cultures on a now famous and respected architect. It has a Radburn-like Cul-de-sac arrangement which ends into a central green. Like the traditional Indian settlements, there is no boundary wall to the township. The houses and floor plans with cascading terraces and spilt windows visually connect the residents with the existing mango orchard amidst which the majority of buildings were nestled. Contact with nature through an aperture is a design leitmotif here.

While there is no attempt to acknowledge the larger ecology and history in the Masterplan, the architect seems have enjoyed siting buildings on the sloping land. The geometries of the hill and the layout plan gave ample opportunity to demonstrate this. It created interesting possibilities like pedestrian alleys between buildings, split level entrances and a sense of relative high and low elevations which could stimulate a child’s imagination. Dry pitched walls became forts of warring kings and “Chor Police” could be played throughout the colony without having to worry about the main road traffic.

There were no badminton courts or netted cricket pitches. The rain and sun dictated the games of the season. The road was the arena and there were a few mud pockets at places to create the slush so important for football and a beating from your mother. There was no lawn. We had sun-loving hardy grasses in the unassigned spaces between buildings which became small maidans. They also substituted as congregation spaces. There was a creative use of open space, because the intent of the space was not thrust upon its residents by being "landscaped".

One had to learn how to climb trees, how to hit a six that cleared the canopy of the Pangara tree and where that snake hole was, in that culvert. There were wells which became source of water in particularly dry summers (twice) and a silent testimony to the magic of groundwater. Every child had a version of how water came to be in the well. We weren’t yet exposed to the subject of Environmental science.

My grandfather used to take long walks along unpaved trails- a pagdandi.  He would reach out and break a sturdy twig, and the next day I would have my bow. The arrows came from the broomsticks. We aimed to hit our enemy but we also learned to duck and avoid injury. We learned to jump on and tackle where leaves were littered and the banyan roots hung. Today the idea of an unpaved walkway is unpardonable, a safety floor mandatory and a jungle gym necessary.

Somewhere down the line, our parents jobs started paying better. Scooters and cars clogged our cricket pitches. Parking lots overtook our maidans. Buildings acquired compound walls and the space between buildings became filthy backyards. The jaalis unfortunately got built-up, and the window shutters devolved into sliding windows which brought in heat. A naturally cool place, Jeevan Bima Nagar started using air conditioners as the surrounding greens outside the colony gave way to rapid urbanization.  

The Dahisar river too has witnessed a change in relation to the Mandapeshwar Caves.  Today it is about 800 metres further to the east, obscured by a burgeoning Shivaji Nagar Colony. My family's  domestic backbone-Parvati bai- was a construction worker from Satara, who helped build the colony 35 years ago. Today, many like her are indispensible to the families that live in Jeevan Bima Nagar and surrounding colonies. It is where the “other half” of our lives live. They keep their colony clean and wistfully remember when the river used to flood their homes. The landscape has bound different destinies together.

The Maratha-era bridge is now gone, and the tempestuous river lies channelized, till it abates as a tidal estuary and meets the mangroves. The river today has few traces of its bygone picturesque character and is highly polluted with industrial effluents, sewage and stormwater. In recent times it had narrowed down and silted up. After the 2005 Maharashtra floods, where more than a 100 people lost their lives, the local corporation undertook a de-silting and widening project to clean up the river and prevent future flooding. There are occasional stirrings regarding the beautification/ environmental improvement of the river. The caves spring to life on Shivaratri, when the precinct is cleaned and devotees throng to seek blessings. Otherwise, it alternates as a parking lot for autorickshaws and the occasional drunken brawls. There are few interested souls in the Shivaji Nagar slums and surrounding colonies who bother with its heritage status.  The Archeological survey‘s guardianship has prevented the misuse of the place. In the last few years, the salt pans have been claimed for resorts and slums proliferate as vote banks. All this is a clear nexus with the CRZ rules. The salt makers have gone into the pages of history like the monks. The caves thankfully haven’t vanished.

Recently  the 19-acre central green area- absolute wilderness- in the colony was in threat of acquisition by market forces.  Fringe open spaces continue to be lopped off and sold to builders. Nostalgia has prompted residents to re-organize street-side games and Sunday-events for children. The community is waking up to the beauty of having undefined and hence multipurpose open spaces. The mango trees still yield fruit, albeit lesser than before. No buildings or roads disturb them as they age gracefully. But the urge to break the compound walls and let children and pets wander is an idea whose time has gone.

All of this is proof that the way we now think of boundaries and segregations has changed and needs to be integrated as experiences rather than lifeless landuses.

It does not take a degree in Architecture to realize that my house and my colony weave the outdoor and Indoor seamlessly. I did not have to look far to understand phrases like borrowed view, indirect lighting, diffused sun,  vista, threshold, transition space. It does not need a course in climatology and History of Indian Architecture to know that the buildings were oriented to harness sea breeze and keep out the sun. The windows, by their design allowed an adult and a kid to see the outdoors, and kept the rain out. The jaali brought in diffused light that had bounced off a rough plastered white blank wall of the adjoining building. The step outside each door on each floor created an aangan-like place where the fishmonger, salt seller and the milkman would navigate between noisy kids and elderly neighbours. Sight sound and smell is an integral part of living here.

It tells us that perhaps we can blur the distinction between landscape and architecture- an imagination of Architecture as a non-sanitized, inclusive environment.

This project has been relegated to a footnote status in the large body of work by the architect-Charles Correa. For me, this is one of my best references when I look for the Place of Nature in the City of the Future.

(Illustrated talk presented at the ISOLA 2012 Conference- Bhopal under Panorama: The Place of Nature in Tomorrow's City")

The futility of knowing what a Building will be

"We know what our buildings are going to be", is right now the biggest statement that is floating all around wherever I go. There is a wide ocean of possibilities that lies between Knowing and Seeking Architecture. The seeking is the journey. The knowing, is just one pit-stop on the way.

Even then, what does it take to "know " what a building ought to be? Is it enough if it creates an enclosure, functionally organizes its indoor usage and carries notions of aesthetics which are as fickle as the client's mind? Is it enough to declare that the building is planned for "flexibility of use"? Or that it superficially alludes to a sense of Place?

The design of a building cannot be just driven by the knowledge/ one's command of climatology/daylighting/floor use efficiency/ quick buildability although these are very valid parameters for a building to exist. Nor can its parts be "assigned" to various consultants from allied fields to make the building work.

If Louis Kahn's "Ask the brick what it wants to be" is any yardstick, then it takes more than just bricks and mortar to know what a building ought to be. 

The idea of declaring that one knows what the building should be /will be is like saying that we breathe with our nose. Though factually correct, the breath through the nose is the basis for engaging with Prana - vital Life.  This happens regardless of whose nose it is, or where the air is coming from. Likewise, the act of making a building has to engage the designer and the user's senses. It can only get better if it manages to communicate some poetics of Space and engages with the land on which it sits.

This is that vital Life- Prana- necessary for creating a distinction between a Building (a mere shell which panders to function aesthetics and climate) and Architecture.

There is no other way. 

Preferring Feel over Feeling is symptomatic of the various forms of disconnect we see around us, paradoxically enabled by technological connectivity. It has percolated into design of spaces, and is becoming responsible for further catalyzing the disconnect.

The sooner this is grasped...the better. Only then will we see the renaissance of Architecture with Soul. 

Babumoshaai!!!!!!!!!

"Babumoshaai!!!"  Probably the most popular one-word dialogue ever uttered in Indian Cinema, with a great visual recall.

Its voice... Rajesh Khanna, the first Superstar of Hindi Cinema, and arguably Indian Cinema.

Rajesh Khanna is not the sort of actor, in my opinion, to have a great recall value, especially when one is not from either of the generations, ones  which idolised him and ones which continued the wake. But a quick survey of his repertoire given in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajesh_Khanna is enough evidence of what he has tried to do as an actor and the euphoria he generated as a superstar. The critical comparison with Kamal Hassan for the same role is even more remarkable (Ref: Sivappu Rojakkal/Red Rose).

What pains even a non-fan of Kaka, as he is fondly called and parodied, is the current ad for Havell Fans. We see a very old Kaka, nattily dressed recalling the days of yore where true Superstardom was defined by the adoration of the fans. A beautiful montage of flashbacks  forms the backdrop for this giant of a Thespian, now old, feeble and perhaps standing on his own legs with the determinism that characterizes true human beings.

 "Mujhse mere fans koi nahi cheen sakta" he summarizes, and the camera pans out to see an auditorium of "fans"...the revolving kind. It looks clever and cheeky at first, and then the disgust sinks in. 

What was the director thinking? What was Havell as a company thinking? Commodification of persona is not new to Indian television. But this plumbs to new low. A new threshold of "Sick".

Why did you do an ad like this Kaka? Is it the pain of watching your greatest rival and successor to the mantle of "Superstar" hawk everything from cultural tourism to chawanprash in every third ad that comes on TV? Is it because someone with a personal agenda massaged your Capricornian ego and said you could do it too, and you gave in? 

Advertisements need to be made in good taste, especially when the person endorsing the product is a little more accomplished than most others around. Else its becomes a pathetic commercialization. Perhaps one of the slickest ad's ever made in India for is BPL TV by Rakesh Omprakash Mehra more than a decade ago and featuring Amitabh Bachchan- your greatest rival and successor. But then, it has been consistently downhill since then for him. Another good set of ad's in the last two years have been by Abhinay Deo, featuring his father Ramesh Deo. Thankfully, he is extremely choosy.

The triangle of Amitabh Bachchan, Ramesh Deo and Rajesh Khanna gave us Anand. In the movie, your candle went out in a blaze that it is one of Indian Cinema's greatest endings ever.

Please remember this Kaka when you say "Theek Hai Re..." to the next advertisement that comes your way. But then, it is your choice, as it is your life and you are its best judge.

I say all this even though I am not a great fan by the yardsticks of fan-dom that you have created..

The ones that started the Quest

How often can we remember the exact moment when life takes a huge turn for us? The closest that I can recollect are the moments spent in seeing the landscape around the site after taking this picture. While William Kent is supposed  to have "leap'd across the fence and saw all nature to be a landskip", my first epiphany came through a camera viewfinder while doing scale models of to-be-built tensile structures; a subject which I had only theoretically and appreciatively  explored till then . 

The model is of a design for a classroom module using tensile membranes for an "ecofriendly" school. The plan is a simple 9 point membrane with a central peak supported on a suspended strut. The membrane design mirrors on two sides of a "built" unit.

Sadly for me and thankfully for the site, the project involving some big names, did not see the light of the day. But it reinforced some directions in two fresh architecture graduates' lives . The other graduate is Aalok D.

On Gardens as Sculpture

Isamu Noguchi On Gardens as Sculpture

"I like to think of gardens as sculpturing of space: a beginning, and a groping to another level of sculptural experience and use: a total sculpture space experience beyond individual sculptures. A man may enter such a space: it is in scale with him; it is real. An empty space has no visual dimension or significance. Scale and meaning enter when some thoughtful object or line is introduced. This is why sculptures, or rather sculptural objects, create space. Their function is illusionist. The size and shape of each element is entirely relative to all the others and the given space. What may be incomplete as sculptural entities are of significance to the whole.

Such sculpture is eliminative, it is neither this nor that but a thing in space that affects of consciousness --a node in the void -- without content related to or derived from anything exterior to its purpose -- in effect subliminal. These sculptures form what I call a garden, for want of a better name.

Its viewing is polydirectional. Its awareness is in depth. With the participation of mobile man all points are central. Without a fixed point of perspective all views are equal, continuous motion with continuous change. The imagination transforms this into a dimension of the infinite."

http:// www. noguchi.org/intextall.html#gardens

The above text is excerpted from Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor's World (New York and Evanston: Harper  Row, 1968)

Designing Museums

In Architectural Schools,  Museums are a very popular Thesis topic. Much of the time, it is a topic which is not given its due introspection. The work of Daniel Libeskind is often copied/ cited/ fleetingly engaged with as  a case study. Chancing upon a Daniel Libeskind article for The New Statesman on the occasion of the opening of the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, gives one the sort of "peering into the architect's mind".

(Note: Emphasis added)
 
" Architecture is a communicative art. All too often, however, architecture is seen as mute. Buildings are understood as disposable consumer items whose sole fate is to disappear with their use. In our day, the only distinction people make between architecture and building is that buildings are utilitarian and architecture is a monument belonging in a cemetery. I am determined to get away from this over simplified view of architecture’s tradition; to overcome the dichotomy of extremes. The alternative between the so-called neutral boxes and the decadence of expensive facades is untenable. When I began to work on the competition for the Imperial War Museum North, I was deeply challenged by the notion of creating a place which was at once intimate and civic. A place in which the story of the significance, sacrifice, tragedy and destiny of conflict can come alive.

What could inform a museum of conflict and of war? Clearly, this is not a museum of peace but a museum of the permanent struggle to attain it. As I thought about the content of the Imperial War Museum, my mind was occupied by a number of images: Churchill speaking of conflict as one of the dimensions of world stability, Goya’s painting of Saturn eating his own children, victories of Allied forces over tyrrany, my own memory of breaking the glass on Stalin’s portrait when I was in the third grade during the Polish uprising of 1956 and the unimaginable hole where the World Trade Center used to stand. Every person living today has been consciously or unconsciously affected by conflict. Recalling the incomprehensible amount of blood poring through the victorious pages of the Iliad, along with Homer’s premonition that, ultimately, fatality dooms winners is sobering. This dimension of war - ever present in conflict yet never wholly visible in space - should be made manifest in the experience of the Museum.

My aim was to create a building, not only intelligently programmed for the events which were to take place in it, but one which emotionally moved the soul of the visitor toward a sometimes unexpected realization. Conflict is not simply a story with a happy or unhappy ending, but an ongoing momentum which structures one’s understanding of the future in relation to the past.

In order to touch the passions of the visitor, and structure a building that is boldly put together, I designed a building that is emblematic of the earth shattered by conflict. As the visitor moves through this splintered globe with its fragmented curvatures, there is a feeling of vulnerability. Normally, there is a detachment of the visitor from the exhibitions, but here there is a fusion of the instability of space with the permanent time of reflection. To create a continuity of experience across the discontinuity of interpretation was my aim. The space of the building produces an oscillation between the artifice of the exhibition and the materiality which it contains. Each visitor is sensitized by the topos, just as footsteps and the eye become guides treading through a history that dawns only in retrospect. The realignment of geometries toward the narrative of programs, physically articulates the ambiguous tensions which mirrors the attempt to construct and reconstruct an illusive world order.

The startling and stark subject matter of the Museum is addressed not only by the exhibitions, but by an emotive and visceral relationship to the building. The interplay between known proportion and the unknown disproportion, between an anticipated roof and an unanticipated wall eliminates the space in which Medusa’s face shows itself. The danger of being turned into stone by simply becoming a voyeur, gives way to the unique spatiality of the exhibition. The architectural topography of the building allows gravity to act on the body and on the consciousness of the visitor in order to vitalize one’s awareness. The experience of architecture together with exhibition is choreographed through a series of precise and discrete movements, each of which is connected to the unfolding adventure.

It is important to realize that a Museum which is to depict the ongoing implication of past conflicts into present day fears must still be a place that has dignity, elegance and magnetism -– qualities offering the visitor unique sensations, ones not to be confused with negativity or simulation. A Museum whose shards penetrate the psyche, also creates a potential for wholeness which every conflict promises by withholding it.

The building’s completion depends upon the visitors’ participation and interest, be it in having a cup of coffee, buying a book, perusing the landscape, viewing the panorama of the city or being engaged in the time line of history. These programmatic activities are given three-dimensional depth, not in neutral containers, but in functional and emblematic spaces, each of which has a density, materiality, temperature, acoustical quality, atmosphere and gravity which are not fully accessible to the abstraction of words, but rather to concretely embodied experience. Whatever that experience might be for each individual, the Museum has the simplicity in construction and the complexity in architecture that parallels the simplicity of news images and the complexity of modern warfare.

An architecture which is strong yet open, precise yet subtle, serious yet fun is a contribution to public discourse. I hope that this building will enable the Imperial War Museum North to accomplish its mission of inspiring, involving and educating its audiences."

Daniel Libeskind

Kurosawa- Rashomon

"Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings-the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people that they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave-even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. this film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego.You say that you cannot understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it."


Kurosawa Akira on the script of Rashomon.

Kurosawa - Notes

"When I begin to consider a film project, i always have in mind the number of ideas that feel as if they would be the sort of thing I'd like to film. From among these one will suddenly germinate and begin to sprout; this will be the one I grasp and develop. I have never taken on a project offered to me by a producer or a production company. My films emerge from my own desire to say a particular thing at at particular time.the root of any film project for me is this inner need to express something."

Kurosawa Akira- Notes on Filmmaking (1975). Trans. Audie E. Bock.

what is "Landscape"

Two questions linger.

One- why do Indian architects, environmentalists and landscape architects share a tenuous relationship, especially about meanings of the term “landscape”? And secondly, why does the term “landscaping” find fervent recurrence (alongwith a dismissive air) in professional and academic exchanges especially when it comes to ‘dealing’ with the land ?

In this regard, Ann Whiston Spirn’s essay ‘The Language of Landscape’ throws some insights about etymological roots and the fragmented perception of what is “landscape”. Reproduced below are some extracts, from the much debated essay. (Italics in original. Parentheses added.)

“...'Landscape’ associates people and place. Danish landskab, German landschaft, Dutch landschap and Old English landscipe combine to roots. ‘land’ means both a place and the people lving there. Skabe and schaffen mean ‘to shape’; suffixes –skab and –schaft as in the English ‘-ship’ also mean association, partnership. Though no longer used in ordinary speech, the Dutch schappen conveys a magisterial sense of shaping, as in the biblical Creation. Still strong in Scandinavian and German languages, these original meanings have all but disappeared in English. Webster’s Dictionary defines landscape as static. “ a picture representing a section of natural, inland scenery, as of a prairie, woodland, mountains...an expanse of natural scenery seen by the eye in one view”; the Oxford English Dictionary traces the word to a Dutch painting term -landskip. But landscape is not a mere visible surface, static composition or passive backdrop to human theatre; therefore dictionaries must be revised and older meanings revived. The words environment and place commonly used to replace landscape in twentieth century English are inadequate substitutes, for they refer to locale or surroundings and omit people. In midcentury, the declining use of landscape was in part a reaction to the Nazis’ adoption of “blood and soil”, a linking of native landscape and racial identity. Environment and Place seem more neutral, but they are abstract, disembodied, sacrificing meaning, concealing tensions and conflicts, ignoring the assumptions landscape reveals...”

“The language of landscape, humans have always known (sic), but now use piecemeal, with much forgotten. People still read paths and create them, identify boundaries and define territory, delight in a flowering tree comparing it to a lover, but most people read landscape shallowly or narrowly and tell it stupidly or inadequately. Oblivious to dialogue and storyline, they misread or miss meaning entirely, blind to connections among intimately related phenomena, oblivious to poetry, then fail to act or act wrongly. The consequences are comical, dumb, dire, tragic ...”

“...Ironically, the professionals who specialize in reading certain parts of the landscape more deeply than other parts and shaping them more powerfully, often fail to understand landscape as a continuous whole. Once, those who transformed landscape were generalists: naturalist, humanist, artist, engineer, even priest, all combined. Now pieces of landscape are shaped by those whose narrowness of knowledge, experience, values and concerns leads them to read and tell only fragments of the story. To an ecologist, landscape is a habitat, but not construction or metaphor. To a lawyer, landscape may be property to regulate, to a developer- a commodity to exploit, to an architect- a site to build on, to a planner- a zone for recreation or residence or commerce or transportation or “nature preservation”. As in the story of the blind men who each touch a different part of the elephant-trunk or tusk or tail alone- then arrive at a false description of the whole animal, so (does) each discipline and each interest groups reads and tells landscape through its own tunnel vision of perception, value, tool and action. And as each shouts its own fragment the landscapes of cities, suburbs and regions are severed, become impoverished, dysfunctional. It is even fashionable now to design buildings, gardens and cities deliberately as dislocated and unconnected fragments to emphasize the erosion of common ground, a misanthropic view of cultural differences...”

“...to see landscape as mere scenery gives precedence to appearance at the expense of habitability and risks trivializing landscape as decoration- landscaping- concealing the significance of senses other that sight and of parts hidden from view, the deep context underlying the surface. To call some landscapes natural and others artificial or cultural misses the truth that landscapes are never wholly one or the other.”

Ann Whiston Spirn.

Extract from The Language of Landscape (1998),Yale University Press.

Utopia

Utopian cities have always been man's dream. I am glad that many people out there share the dream, though I personally prefer living in an Inclusive City rather than a Utopian one. I find the idea (as advertised in newsprint) of “Utopia+ City+ structure+ neighbourhood +module+ away from the city yet approachable" very self contradictory. My reasons and fears as to why this may lead to myopic or even a dystopic caricature of the term utopia in terms of design responses are as follows.

1- The idea of Utopia: In mythology and history, Utopia has always been a space/ concept which has a high degree of resonance with physical, spiritual and natural elements. These elements occurred in such a mystical combination that mankind found it/ finds it nearly impossible to mimic the same BALANCE that these places acquired over time, much like a patina on bronze. As a word, BALANCE has been neglected in the design of our spaces, atleast in recent times. I feel the inclusion of this word will make a difference to the approach to the topic. BALANCE will dictate "how much"...and this "how much" will be a question between man and land, building and nature, today and tomorrow etc. This is perhaps the reason why architecture like Paolo Soleri's earth displacing ideas of architecture and ecology (Arcology) or Peter Cook and Archigram's Floating City have never taken off, while Ancient Greek Society or Rama’s mythical rule in India is referred to as Utopian.

2. The progression and the boundary: Contrary to the typological module repeated endlessly across a site or landscape and thereby generating a pithy organic urban form, the City-neighbourhood-structure-module as a vital understanding (large to small) allows itself to be better regulated since there is a Masterplan that governs how development can be organic at the smallest level and yet bind with a overall idea. The trick of blurring boundaries using natural units rather than buildings can perhaps be the crux in preserving regional / urban identities( e.g. Auroville- where a form of utopian-cosmic ideals has influenced even the smallest of buildings and revived neglected land by allowing forests to be regenerated first before architecture and therefore the city settings come into operation while acting as 'boundaries'). And yet, such ideas face problems such as lack of committed focus, funding, corruption of ideals over time; factors which cannot be predicted or over-anticipated. How does one prevent the larger idea from being corrupted ?

3- Architecture and urbanity as modules: As an addendum to the above point, whether ideological or physical, the notion of modularity and replication tends to disrespect sites, places and even cultures. An example of this module-based approach is the Metabolist architecture of the '70's perhaps epitomised by Kenzo Tange's work. In such approaches, nothing remains of the "original" land. You would agree that under its skin, Metabolist architecture aspired to utopia. The “Blobtecture” of today is no different, thanks to surface distending softwares.

4- The segregated city: The Corbusian city (famously generated by his theory of the Une Ville Contemporaine, or the city of a million inhabitants), mechanically segregates the city, an idea that Rob Krier has famously decried in his City Vs Anti City diagram (ref. Spiro Kostof, The City Assembled). Rob Krier's observation that the ideal city is a mix, an organic growth generated by needs, stands in direct contrast to the Corbusian model of the Architect-Planner telling the city what it will be. While the medieval city allowed civic spaces, congregation, and leisure to be ingrained, the modern city assigns "zones" for it, under the pretext of organization. Cars calibrate distances. and road widths.

5- The Place Vs The Palimpsest: Memorable architecture and a memorable city are both characterized by change, where the city and the building acquires a patina over time and its vibe is what is generated by its users. The present imagery of all our new towns and cities is that of a fixed unchanging composition. The idea of negating the existing city fabric and allowing Development to go and establish the idea of Utopia someplace else, also advocates the notion that the city as existing cannot be improved or be made more inclusive, and that going someplace else by leapfrogging existing constraints is the solution, rather than turning those constraints into potentials.A city like Bombay with an Urbanization history dating back to 9th Century BC and prior is being dreamt of as a new Shanghai. Why cannot Bombay be Bombay and thereby its ethos dictate its city form, culture and therefore housing as one example of its many parts (my apologies for the pun on Amos Rapaport). Why should a city in the Western ghats be a copy of a European town in spirit as well as form and not something indigenous in root yet aspirational in expression? While most of the ongoing and proposed developments touting themselves as Utopia do not point out such formative thoughts, I feel it can be a vital cue to leading design solutions into the realm of Utopia.

5- The Tactile City: I am at a personal loss to understand whether a Utopian City can be sustained purely on tactile terms such as lush lawns, state-of-the-art finishes and the like. Ironically, the hi-gloss renderings appear colder rather than having warmth considering the amount of glazing and steel that goes into the building elevations. What about the intangible (like the need for solitude...where does one go find solitude in a city? Is a lush lawn or a golf course then the only expression?). I feel by using such tactility as a qualifier, there is a worrisome encouragement of a design process which will overdose on computer wizardry to create lighting conditions and ethereal settings like a beautiful Gurudutt film but miss out on its soul . The soulful Geeta Dutt rendition Waqt ne kiya kya haseen sitam (Kagaz ke Phool) seems eerily prophetic when transposed in meaning and situation).

To end, "...maybe it is not so much that it is The Game that is short, maybe it is that the field that one is playing on, is just too damn big!" (Triple H, WWE Athlete)

mp3 hain na!

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“Why are you buying music CD’s when you can download the same stuff from the net for free?” is a question that is much asked of those of us who buy music off the shelf.

Yes, music these days is available on the net; quite a lot of it and most of it is free. In fact on the web, the same song has easily accessible multiple renditions by the same artist and/ or the same song sung by many artistes. I love listening to how different people sing the same song. “Ain’t no Sunshine (when she’s gone)” by Bill Withers (Just as I Am, 1971) is one such song. Covers by artistes such as Michael Jackson (as the 12 year old lead singer of the Jackson 5), Lenny Kravitz, Issac Hayes, The Temptations, Ziggy Marley are some of the covers in my collection. Likewise, I have discovered six renditions of “Black” by Pearl Jam- one of my favorites and possibly my vote for the greatest Pearl Jam number along with “Alive”, (Ten, 1991). The six renditions span the original, live versions, acoustic versions and one which is totally crowd-chanted. And yes it has been the net which has allowed me these discoveries.

But all this still comes a close second to actually buying a CD, unsealing its plastic, opening the sleeve booklet, smelling the paper and only then popping the CD in the player/ computer, while reading what is written in the sleeve booklet (lyrics, thank you’s , who-dunnit’s et al). This has been a ritual since the era of the now-redundant Audio Cassette, and I know people who did this with the Vinyl LP records. I wonder how this can happen with an mp3 collection. The question is not “does it have to happen so?” (since it cannot, unless it is a CD of mp3’s), rather “why doesn’t it happen so?”. Perhaps it is nostalgia.

Some CD’s purchased today triggered waves of nostalgia of what had been debated as ‘pop vs rock’, ‘hip’, ‘cool’, ‘classic’, ’tuned-in’ and were nevertheless definitely educative because they were discovered in the years gone by, along with friends with whom there is no contact today despite online social networking; Needless to say, the waves have been absent whilst hearing the same numbers in the mp3 format.

1– Madonna: The Immaculate Collection (1990)- Madonna, before she became the Diva, had an excellent voice to make one’s feet tap. La Isla Bonita is my first ever Madonna song (“ Just like I’d never gone I knew the song..”). Like a Prayer is perhaps the best use of mixed metaphor equating prayer and love in a sinfully imaginative manner; the song is one of the reasons for my love of the English language.

2- Metallica: The Black Album (1991)- Metallica, to me is synonymous with Vikas, T-shirt painting with Metallica skulls and script, swooping down on Rolling Stone magazine from the raddi-walas from Colaba to Vile Parle and subscribing to Rock Street Journal (RSJ). All this while in school before the 10^th Std!

And then there is Nothing Else Matters. Really…nothing else matters. Prophetic enough for me.

3- In Time: The Best of REM (2003)- has some firsthand insight into the band’s thoughts on songs like What’s the Frequency Kenneth (Kedyboy, I hope you are reading this in Amrikka), Man on the Moon, and Everybody Hurts (“ This song doesn’t really belong to us anymore; it belongs to everybody who has ever gotten any solace from it”- Peter Buck).

4- Red Hot Chili Peppers: Greatest hits (2003). One of those groups which has a Philosopher for its Bass Guitarist. In the cover sleeve booklet we have Michael “Flea” Balzary going “Hello, I should preface this writing by letting you know that I know nothing about anything…” , “If there were four different poles on the earth, we would all be from an opposite one” (about the co-members) and later on “…Firstly, we are nothing but insignificant specks of s@#t, pawns in a cosmic spiritual realm where our universe is nothing but a dot of crusty sm#@%a; and secondly, we work…when we could be gallivanting around spending our dough, we sit in a room and think about b flats and c sharps and tempos and grooves and textures and laying back and pushing and new ways of harmonizing with each other” (about achieving success). And there is Under the Bridge, which is perhaps one of those awesome songs that describe many things, the City being one.

5- On an Island: David Gilmour (2006). Whenever there is David Gilmour, it is necessary to speak of his alter-ego Roger Waters. Roger Waters came out with Amused to Death after he decided to separate from Pink Floyd, leaving David Gilmour to (arguably) carry on the mantle of the ‘Pink Floyd sound and Music’. The whole (Pink Floyd) resurrects as a sum of its Parts (Waters, Gilmour) and that is my catalyst for discovering music by these guys. It has happened with Velvet Revolver (Guns n Roses minus Axl Rose plus Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots). Needless to say, in all cases except Coverdale-Page (Whitesnake/ Deep Purple + Led Zeppelin), the sum of parts have never added up, but they have revealed much about why these people have been a part of some of the greatest Rock music on Earth.

By simply opening the cover of a CD, there is all this and much much more. And the waves begin all over again each time. It is like opening a penned down diary.

mp3’s…?