Aesthetics of Democracy: Theo-politics of Architecture
fig.24 Narendra Modi with Ar. Bimal Patel (front) and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath in the Kashi Vishwanath Temple Precinct.
The site has been chosen, the context has been erased. On the 12th of March, 2019, Narendra Modi shared the design of the Kashi-Vishwanath Corridor precinct via his twitter handle71. For the design of the Kashi-corridor temple precinct, the firm Hasmukh C. Patel Architects (HCP) have been chosen under the design vision of their principal architect, Dr. Bimal Patel. Even though the proposal is a religious construct there are layers of politics embedded in its design. As Vale points out, ‘architecture is first and foremost a statement of an ideological program that concisely symbolizes the political power of the state which imposes a certain collective identity and not another.’72 When presenting the proposal, Dr. Bimal Patel surfaces the very visible pragmatic parameters of logistics and issues of security, encroachments and cleanliness (fig.25). But the inherent politics of place making cannot be subsumed under the neutral forces of function and program. It is critical to decode these architectural and urban gestures which authorize and stabilize forms of identity and place by shaping a representational world. Through the rigorous analysis of the aesthetics of its materiality, I intend to unmask the social ideology embedded in its structural genotypes. The cognitive mapping and appropriation of icons as an embodiment of communities probes a research into the spatial readings of formal vocabularies which surface the interplays between meanings and practices along with the performative aspects of symbolic signification. 71 72
Appropriating social media and mass culture to disseminate self-constructed images of the self. Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity (Routledge, 2014).
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