Articles and Essays Niyati Thakkar
M.Arch. C.E.P.T. University B. Arch. Sir J.J. College of Architecture
Contents Dazed and Confused
article for PROBE, Faculty of Architecture Newsletter, CEPT University (Monsoon 2018)
I was raised by the Television
article for PROBE, Faculty of Architecture Newsletter, CEPT University (Monsoon 2018)
Monkey see Monkey do
article for DIORAMA: variegated frames of the housing landscape, Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University (Monsoon 2018)
Between borders and boundaries
PREFACE for a research project, CEPT University x Politechnico di Milano (Spring 2019)
A lesson for life
for Guru G. V. Ramani Natya Kala Foundation (May 2020)
Mixology in Milano
Sharing shared stories (April 2020)
Dazed and Confused article for PROBE, Faculty of Architecture Newsletter, CEPT University (Monsoon 2018)
7:00am, wake up to an alarm on the phone, I snooze. What a smart move. You snooze, you lose- to your phone. Check my WhatsApp messages, don’t open them, just go through them. Nothing urgent. Just a bunch of Good mornings from the distant ‘related-by-blood’s. Go back to sleep. Something urgent? Still, do the same. Doesn’t urgency too, like beauty, lie in the eye of the beholder? No seen, no scene. Moving on. Instagram. A face, a place, an unnecessary pace. Is this a race? Maybe it is and I’m still far behind. Click, edit, post. The finish line is nowhere in view. A mirage if you may. Is there a way out? I try to quit every now and then. Why am I still here? Masking the emptiness of a phone with no social media apps with a convenient “Oh it keeps me informed about the events around the city, and of course the whereabouts of my peers.” Peers? Who cares? How does it matter? Why can’t I just be Bhutan?
Anywho, scroll, scroll, scroll, through old friends, new acquaintances, and timeless foes, quirky startups and confused golden-agers, struggling artists and advertising actors, handed to me on a plate, what a delight. Could the world get any easier? Wait. Pause for respect. A NatGeo post. You know, cos it’s NatGeo. Wouldn’t pause for no Tom, Dick, and Harry. I need my stamp. But what do I see? “NatGeo’s latest tiger picture is not half as interesting (pretty) as the one last night.” No double tap for you, Sir. Moving on. The phone rings. It’s mum. The usual how’s college, how’s the food, how’s the city. You can’t handle the truth, mum. Or I can’t afford to tell it to you? Either way, out of bounds. “All good. I miss you too.” More on this in Article 2. Get out of bed, smother the silence with some comforting noise and the compulsory cup of chai. The phone is buzzing with happenings from around the world. We must keep ourselves informed, informed equals smart. Smart equals value. “Well, of course, I know who the richest man in China is, duh.” Yes! Plus one. “What do you think about the recent news on black money and demonetization?” Recent news? The silly app, why would you skip that bit of information? Minus one. Google ‘best-unbiased news apps India’. Another buzz, buzz, buzz, “Start your day with scrumptious pancakes.” Sounds tempting. But only if they’re scrumptious. What is the other kind you sell? Did you really think I’m that easy a buy? Try again later, buddy. Yet another buzz, buzz, buzz and 50% off on an Ola ride this morning. Seems like we’re cabbing it to college today. Eyes stuck to the screen, I catch up on the happenings of the 30mins since I last checked. “How boring.” Outside the window, my screen is replaced by a hoarding. But it pretty much says the same thing. Watch this show
or this movie, live here, drive this car. In the midst of this visual chaos “I’m going back to my phone. Also, that show was terrible, thanks.” Article 4 touches a parallel bank. Steer clear of eye contact till I reach the destination. Mission 1 accomplished. Now time to think out of the box. Cos that’s what every designer does, right? Make lemonade of lemons. “Bus sir, out of the box is the new mainstream.” “No, you silly, young, future competitor ‘I am not mainstream’ is the new mainstream.” What? What do I do with that? I gulp down a rising apprehension. Ok, time to zone out. “Hmm.” And I go back to my screen, my love and warmth. Is there really an alternative? My folks told me this is the only way forward, the only vision. ‘Cos honey, I was raised by the television. Read further in this trajectory, in Article 3. Moving on. Time to be in the limelight, my turn for an approval. I undress my thoughts and in the nakedness of my anxiety, I wait for you to check them for any malice and hand them back to me respectably. I shiver as your tear them apart, piece by piece. You say they’re disagreeable. Someone giggles. I drown. Why is respect so hard to confer? My hand twitches for the unreachable phone. There is no moving on, this moment lasts forever.
I was raised by the television article for PROBE, Faculty of Architecture Newsletter, CEPT University (Monsoon 2018) A recent interview about the loved-by-all-Indians-because-of-the-Netflix-adaptation book Sacred Games found author Vikram Chandra articulating an idea worth dwelling upon. He said ‘Read what gives you pleasure. Write about what disturbs you’. To me this is beautiful. This means a matter that really bothers someone resonates within me and gives me great pleasure. I think that pretty much sums up our existence. Taking the word of our latest fad’s author for it, at the cost of sounding extremely petty in the eyes of my fellow architects, and accepting wholeheartedly this pettiness that lies at the bottom of my being, I would like to use this important space, a space that deals with everyday issues via intellectual sounding rants, to rant about an issue that truly disturbs me- why do we not talk about The Simpsons enough? A show that has been around for longer than I have, The Simpsons is, or at least was up until it hit puberty, witty and smart, and maybe a little messed up. OK, quite
messed up. No, I do not still watch the show but I can guarantee that there are some really valuable everyday issues solving life lessons to be learned here. For example, the tagline of The Simpsons Movie that released in 2007 is “See our family. And feel better about yours.” That’s life lesson number one and it’s spot on- see any of the Simpsons in isolation and you will learn to appreciate the madness of your family with peace. More such examples from the movie itself give us life lesson number two “Doomsday is family time.”, number three ‘Not even Harvard Business school can teach you how to cope with failure’ and the most accurate lesson in today’s times “The Government is listening to everything”! The Simpsons are real (figuratively), as real as that one person we all know who does not listen to a word you speak or the one mother-ing you around, the one with the moral high ground or the one that makes their own rules for life (yes, Bart you can sometimes be a real brat), or even the one that does not speak much but when time comes stands to be the most rational. When people representing these clashing attributes agree to co-exist is when you have a family, or a rich social life. As Manu Joseph puts it “Maybe the secret to a very rich social life is to have low standards for friends”. This is the most important lesson one learns from The Simpsons- the ability to tolerate each and every one of these seemingly strange people, by habituation, or by lowering your standards. This is precisely why I believe The Simpsons need to be spoken about more often than they are. I sit in a dingy corner by a long, heavy door leading to a balcony on the ‘dark side’ of the Masters’ studio, under a family of spider, who has also been around longer than I have, thinking about the talks that have surrounded me over the past few days. The first thought that crosses my mind is the elections- both General Body and National, depending on whether I am conversing with a person experiencing quarter-life or mid-life crisis. There have
been dialogs of alliances and counter-alliances, money making and budgeting, power plays and so on and so forth, and I am not even getting into the complexities of the matters outside of campus. As much as I might romanticize complexities in design juries in reality I run away from them at the speed of The Flash. Referencing an episode from another important show society needs to talk about, I suggest maybe we should all just vote for what we really like. Following Troy and Abed from the show ‘Community’ who decided to vote for ‘South Park’ for Greendale College elections, I’d vote for Maggie Simpson, a born leader who has pretty much been the same age since she was born. Now that’s something to probe into. Because, perhaps Maria of ‘The Sound of Music’ was right and we should all make our own “Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens...” list to get us through these times, since the times they are a-changin’. Before I cross the line, that Maria defined, the line where joyous edges on annoying, I am going to take your leave, but you must certainly keep reading. Quoting The Simpsons Movie yet again “Coming up on your right, nothing.”
Monkey see monkey do article for DIORAMA: variegated frames of the housing landscape, Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University (Monsoon 2018) “Wandering from the parent bough, Little, trembling leaf, Whither goest thou? ‘From the beech, where I was born, By the north wind was I torn. Him I follow in his flight, Over mountain, over vale, From the forest to the plain, Up the hill, and down again. With him ever on the way: More than that, I cannot say. Where I go, must all things go, Gentle, simple, high and low: Leaves of laurel, leaves of rose; Whither, heaven only knows!’” - Count Giacomo Leopardi Alone but strong, unsure but faithful, we move in swift strides. Towards what’s new, towards what’s golden and above all, towards what they say is right. The story of Alibaug is the story of a way of life.
Popular inscriptions of Alibaug find recurrent descriptions of the town such as “The Great escape”, with a “rustic charm”, for “getting back to nature” (Reddy, 2017), “the weekend retreat of the well-heeled” (Singhal, 2018), “a sleepy hamlet” (Hiranandani, 2018), “every Mumbaikar’s escapist paradise - always just a ferry ride away… whenever a long weekend is in sight” (Homegrown, 2017). What is strikingly common between all of them is that they are all evidently distant interpretations, from the perspective of outsiders, regular visitors or their marketing personnel. Assuming the prescribed visitor’s gaze, one lands at Mandwa Jetty, the modest gateway to Alibaug, following a 50-minute ferry ride from the celebrated Gateway of India at the southern tip of Mumbai. This coastal town to the south of the city, readily greets the wide-eyed city folk with an option of a quick experience, a trailer, which summarizes the otherwise 3-hour long movie that the town is, in the form of boutique shops, cafes and restaurants. By-passing this performance, generously positioned for the ‘corporate party outside the city’, one enters the suburbs of Alibaug. Here, located on generous plots of land, are a succession of bungalows owned by elites from the mainland. The proximity of the lucid town from the city allows the city folk to religiously exercise their bipolar lifestyles, two days a week, by retiring to their lavish second homes. A mirror image of Mumbai city, the town has been conquered by the city folk along the northern tip. Locating themselves in the north-south direction, yet again, they have occupied every piece of available land by the beach. This is followed by the capturing of hills, to claim elevation for a distant view of the beach, and subsequently the inhabiting of large farmlands. The ‘weekend home’ bungalow typology reveals itself as one continues on the journey, but only in glimpses, hiding behind high fort-like walls. Designed by the who’s who of the architecture fraternity in the city, and
around, the weekend homes bask in their mini-environments that the city folk comes to live in, breaking away from the constructed pace of their concrete jungle homes. As an Economic Times article perceptively remarks, each one of these houses frames a slice of nature and upgrades it with a slick coat of luxury. The design of these bungalows is a representation of the aspirations of the well-traveled client and the intentions of the skilled architect. The client under consideration, rightfully, demands a certain ‘feel’ and ‘feature’ for the family abode, one unaffordable in his city matchbox, say an English façade with a Moroccan tone. Simultaneously, the architect makes the most of the freedom earned by such a project, and a hefty budget to explore his own artistic inclinations. Sometimes these align and sometimes they don’t. With the recent move towards sustainable and organic living, an increasing number of both owners and designers share a common intention idolizing nature as another source of inspiration. What one also notices during the passage through the town, sprinkled in between these new age fortresses, are another type of houses, humbler and more lived. Generally smaller in scale and visually less protected, this category represents the local’s houses. Like the second homes of the regular visitors, this primary household typology also manifests its own set of aspirations. But, unlike the former, the latter is not a result of travel. The latter does not even have the artistic support of the city architect. This story is about the latter. The local’s home in question is relatively small, comparable in scale to only the caretaker’s quarters on the urban elite’s plot. It is cramped, colorful and lively, like a collage made from Nitco tiles and metal roofing sheets. An unaffordable stone cladding is replaced by the not so close stone-like tiling. If the neighbor has a yellow painted exterior wall, the façade of our protagonist is blue. Complete with floral patterned window grills and bay windows, the house is fully air-conditioned. The
brown tinted glass on these windows, like sunglasses for hungover eyes, protects the dwelling from external inspections by passersby. The house owner is happy. He has successfully achieved the image he desired to convey, trumping not only his neighbors but also allowing him to reference a commonality with the city folk. His architect has allowed him to fulfill his budget dream. Charles Correa elaborates such client and architect dreams in the essay ‘The Mythic Image’ from ‘A Place in the Shade’: “For just about every architect has a Grab Bag of images (hanging over his shoulder, unknowingly, draws during the process of designing… These images act like powerful elixirs, transforming the dross of everyday construction into something far more vivid and exciting.” (Correa, 2010) The city folk’s Grab Bag is filled with images from across the globe, sometimes through experience and sometimes through Pinterest. The architect, as an agent, directs and defines these images. Furthermore, he overlays them with images from his own Grab Bag and materializes the point of confluence of the two in the form of a bungalow, typically adding a layer of selective localness in terms of scale and materiality. The project is then executed by a city contractor, working in collaboration with a henchman based out of the town, a mistri with his team of locals responsible for erecting the building delivered to them on paper. The completed house substantiates the dream of the city client. However, in doing so, unconscious of contributing to another loop of exchange of imagery, the completed house also simultaneously transmogrifies into an image representing the outside. This image, admired in awe, is comfortably tucked into the Grab Bag of the local client. Hopeful and enthusiastic, the local client then approaches the esteemed mistri, the contractor who has just
completed the elite house across. The best the client can afford, the mistri is considered a local genius, the interpreter of our client’s dreams. He is presented with the client’s set of hand-picked images, to be deciphered into a tangible residence. Depending on the budget, plot size and existing built form, the mistri steps into the shoes of an architect and takes imperative design decisions. With drawings only in the form of memory, the new architect initiates the construction of a local dream home. The only rigid requirement of the client is in terms of number of rooms that the family will need. The extent of modernization adopted varies from a simple addition of marble facade to a G+2 RCC and brick house, complete with steel railings and French windows, and fully air-conditioned homes, dependent only on the budget offered. Notably, the Grab Bag is not limited to just a few architectural images. It is so encompassing that everyday life of the locals is lived in the images contained in it, slowly and unconsciously creeping into and evolving their lifestyle. An increasing number of local vehicle ownership is as much an evidence to the transforming social lifestyle as is the appearance of ‘Red Chili’ and ‘Anand Chinese’ restaurants catering to the imagined demands of the visitors. The visitors in question here are not only the house owning urban elites but also the second tier, AirBnB tapping city folk, also being supplied with affordable options for a stay by locals. An engulfing moment of ‘Animal Farm’-like transformation is seen when the caretakers of the holiday homes and the mistri architects, both fully aware of the whereabouts of the city dweller, gather at a bungalow owned by a city dweller who is away and celebrate in the style of the outsider. Owing to the bipolarity of the life of the urban elite the locals also practice dual lives. While the complexities and ironies of the passing on of images in this relationship are barely discussed, there is, at the moment, a hope to reflect on reality, foresee
a future and direct the existing pattern. Concurrently, optimistic construction giants from the mainland look forward to a different future. They see the town as an opportunity, predicting a real estate extension of Mumbai city’s residential area to the dreamy coastal town of Alibaug, courtesy the multiple proposed connectors by road and water. The extension is a grand idea to, once again, support the overcrowded southern tip of the city. And so it goes.
References Correa, C. (2010). A Place in the Shade The New Landscape and Other Essays. Mumbai: Penguin Books India. Hiranandani, D. N. (2018, May 17). Accomodation Times. Retrieved from https://accommodationtimes. com/alibaug-to-emerge-as-economic-hub-acrossmumbai-harbour/ Homegrown. (2017, March 14). Retrieved from https://homegrown.co.in/article/25647/10-unreal-alibaug-homes-wed-like-to-break-into-this-weekend Reddy, S. (2017, December 29). The Economic Times. Retrieved from https://economictimes.indiatimes. com/magazines/panache/mumbais-very-own-hamptons-come-holidays-gautam-singhania-rashesh-shahescape-to-alibaug/articleshow/62290834.cms Singhal, M. (2018, October 7). Financial Express. Retrieved from https://www.financialexpress.com/ india-news/alibaug-to-be-mumbais-hampton-hugeinfrastructure-projects-lined-up-that-will-change-it-alot/1340227/ ‘And so it goes’ The term refers to the usage in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, where it “is used whenever there is a mention of death. At times used tragically, at other times absurdly, this phrase, repeated more than 100 times, comes to represent the randomness of death — how death can come to anyone at any time — and to convey a sense of fatalism during wartime.” https:// www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/books/review/andso-it-goes.html Image Source: www.bookings.com
Between borders and boundaries PREFACE for a research project, CEPT University x Politechnico di Milano (Spring 2019)
This academic thesis has been prepared over the span of 4 months, from March to June 2019 and is based in the city of Milan. Contemplation for an apt thesis topic, however, goes way back, to October 2018, when the first draft of the proposal was prepared for the selection process of the exchange semester between my home University, CEPT, and Politecnico di Milano. The research has metamorphosed considerably since then, however constantly carrying the natal emotion at its core. A reflection of a cognizant anxiety, the proposal drafted in October 2018 was structured around a deemed irony of the profession. On one hand ingeniously aiming at helping, bettering and rejuvenating society, eradicating it of all its flaws in the effort to attain a sort of utopia, the discipline builds a conscious army of well-intending individuals. On the other hand, however, a society obsessed with growth designs the field in which the discipline is planted, rendering it incapable of deciding the structure of the field itself, playing only an assigned part in the narrative directed by global schemes.
The ‘disillusionment of the profession’ that ensued, a mental state that a professor at CEPT University asserted every architect goes through at some point, led to the composing of the first draft of my proposal, titled “From intentions to reflections: addressing politics of architecture, from rhetoric to reality.” The following is an extract from the first proposal. “This study is an attempt to locate public architecture in a global environment that is increasingly directed towards a singular extrinsic goal, economic growth. It aims at elaborating examples of public projects by analysing them from two distinct ends, grouped as Rhetoric and Reality. While Rhetoric broadly represents the intentions of such a project, Reality embodies the interpretation of the said project by various users. Politics acts as a base to understanding both the ends. Such a holistic study would help bridge the gap between them, allowing one to reflect on the role of architectural practice in the current context.” With a vague understanding of the western “current context”, selectively absorbed from books and news articles off the internet, I arrived in the city of Milan during what I like to call the ‘grayscale days’. This assigned title was owed largely to the natural lack of saturation in the city’s colour palette as well as the fashionable overuse of blacks and greys in clothing choices of the city folk. The first experience of the city was vastly different from the hot and humid climate zone of my home-city Bombay and the hot and dry weather of Ahmedabad, where my home University is located. Although acting on the impending thesis did not start at this very moment of arrival and acclimatization, another very important process was initiated here. Learning how the city of Milan behaves in a public space was the equivalent of relearning the idea of being social. Fortunately, Milan is a good teacher.
The many prescribed images of the city eased me into the storm of public activities designed for the newcomer, the outsider and the youth. The sheer density of the prescribed consumption allowed for comfortable blending in. Transitioning from the wide-eyed tourist to a temporary resident, my patterns of indulgence in the city altered on familiarization. The temporariness conveniently allowed for an occasional oscillation back into the tourist mode as and when desired, while I selectively aligned myself to the patterns of everyday life. Milan is accustomed to this sort of in-betweenness driven by large flows of movement in and out of its hold, following variant timelines. A beautiful example of this is the gathering called by the National Alpine Association in the city in May 2019, bringing over 1,00,000 individuals to for a single weekend. While the increase in density was visibly noticeable, made easier of course by the spirits and uniforms of the members of the foundation, the city took the swelling population in its stride. Events like the gathering seem to be a common occurrence in the city. From the confetti soaked Carnivale to Milan’s famous Design Week and Arch Week, the many city marathons to the cultural festivals, Milan is eternally ready to rise to the event, to evolve into a new form and to accept the change as a challenge. And so, it transforms spatially, for festivals and weekly markets, for rainy days and the hot sun, for aperitivos and for lunch breaks. And in line with the transforming city, the weather changes in backdrop, from the grayscale days, like a black and white movie reel, to exhaustingly long days of coloured motion pictures. Ironically, the form of the city is also under constant transformation. Lidia Manzo in her paper ‘On people in Changing Neighbourhoods’ calls Milan a paradigm for a “transition zone” experienced as a mixing of population due to an on-going
gentrification process. Not restricting itself to the bounds of the phenomenon, as broad as it might be, Milan continually changes, reinventing new images while also constantly accepting with regard an older connotation. And thus, the city works as a multi-faceted entity, reshaping and rebuilding itself in its stride. The University lessons at Politecnico di Milano aided in developing an understanding of this process. While living in the city reshaped and rescaled the direction of the study, the thesis that follows continued to broadly locate itself within the original framework, attempting to theorise on public space in the neo-liberal context while developing an understanding and trying in all honestly to do justice to the Milanese way of being public.
A lesson for life
for Guru G. V. Ramani Natya Kala Foundation (May 2020) I have cold feet, adorned with the blessed salangai, as I nervously Pushpanjali on to the stage. I slowly turn my shifty glance, cloaked under attami, towards my dance family. And just like that, I leave the stares piercing through blinding lights of the air-conditioned auditorium and feel the warm Sunday morning breeze of Yoga Niketan. This is home. Here, miss teaches us to dance first for ourselves and then for the audience, to eat first for the heart and then for the stomach, to speak first for the conversation and then for the information. This is home. Here, we learn to accept ourselves in our everyday banalities. Here, miss tells us ‘you don’t choose characters, characters choose you’. And just like that my dance family holds my hand as I kummi my way from being a teenage Lakshmana to a young adult of a Tara. So when the eyes and the lights are back on and I dance through life, the smiles of my family keep me warm. Because this is home and we carry it wherever we go.
Mixology in Milano Sharing shared stories (April 2020)
“I live by the mountains and work in the city”, said the young mixologist-owner of an old-looking, not-too-expensive restaurant on the edge between a Milanese old town and a regeneration project in this ambidextrous city of Milan. “I can’t afford to live in this part of the city, it’s too expensive. It would probably cost the same as living in a decent hotel every day. And if I have to choose between the suburb and the mountains, the mountains it is! With the fast trains it’s only an hour away.” Some cities allow you to mix it up.
niyati.sthakkar@gmail.com