Writings
Papers, Reviews, Essays & Explorations 1. This abstract was selected to be presented at the Asian Planning Schools Association Congress in 2009 Where are Asian Cities Headed? The process of globalization as we know it today was kick started in the 1980’s and accelerated in the 1990’s with a large number of governments either opting to, or being coerced into adopting a free market economy, notable examples of which are the entire eastern bloc and India. This phase was marked by deregulation, opening up to FDI (Foreign Direct Investment), and participation of national economies in the global arena. A direct consequence of this process has been the partial unbundling or weakening of the nation as a single unified spatial unit. From this fragmented national identity, sub-national units, cities or regions, emerged to transcend their regional identities and become multinational (or even global) trade, finance and cultural centers, in the process morphing into what are known as global cities. Slowly the food crop is becoming a cash crop, the farmer a trader or merchant and the daily conversations between people a solipsistic thing of virtual networks and the like. Physicality is becoming more visual than spatial and we seem no longer to be part of what everyone seems to be part of (but in fact are not themselves). The hutong, golmok and roji seem like sentinels of the past, but to a more discerning mind they are in fact remnants of a fast disappearing era. This paper forces a re-look at the form of Asian cities. Not in the light of their duality as present in the juxtaposition of the traditional streets with the modern volumetric burgeoning. But a perspective of the growing characterlessness of Asian cities in the face of a juggernaut-like economy and tumultuous political changes. What comprises the modern and globalizing Asian city? Globalization has had its impact not just on the economy but on the mass psyche of the people it encompasses. Interaction is no more a physical or spatial entity when we are so closely and frequently encountered by the internet and other electronic media. Does this bring public spaces to a stand-still? And ultimately what is the role of memory in the visual aesthetic of urban planning? Density, loss of identity, multiculturalism, and massive urban sprawl come to a head here in the Asian city. Multi ethnic, constantly growing and mutating, the Asian city today celebrates the man-made over the natural making context and history insignificant in the process. The paper suggests that the future of Asian cities could lie in deconstructivism, not by mere aesthetic identities but as characterised by fatalistic nihilism. It is important to understand here that although deconstruction is alluding to the visual physicality of the urban space of the Asian city, it is nevertheless not defined by it. The Asian city has come to epitomize the Generic City of Rem Koolhaas. The inhabitant of the Asian city has come to generate a city through a process as tangible as perhaps, designing a table lamp. “It is conceived as the apotheosis of the tabula rasa: the razed plane as the basis for a genuinely new beginning.” – Rem Koolhaas
2. This article on Jaaga, a co-working space was published on it’s older website (no longer available). Jaaga The retreating monsoon’s rain is incessant, but a group of artists cheerfully rehearse on a smooth, dry second floor with slim partitions, flooded with light and rich with earth- scented air. The building, ‘Jaaga’, itself has only recently moved off its old site and settled down here, but its inhabitants are already busy feeding off and nourishing it in every possible sense of those acts. ‘Jaaga’ in the words of its founders Archana Prasad (an artistdesigner) and Freeman Murray (an entrepreneur-investor) is a ‘creative common ground’. With a core team and some volunteers, this quirky place came up within a month. ‘Jaaga’ means ‘space’ and that is the core of what it provides – a space for anyone to use for events pertaining to art, design, technology or socio-political values, free of cost, so long as the events are open to all. From film-screenings and conferences to writing workshops and poetry readings, Jaaga is a place teeming with ideas, exhibitions, discussions and most of all - experiences. Visiting artists, green activists, photographers, technicians have all brought to the space a token of experience that help in truly making it a ‘living building’ as the founders describe it. In creative endeavors with visiting artists, sound and light projects have been produced – an interactive feature that seeks to represent space or engage the audience by means of ones auditory and visual senses - the idea being to create a sentient building. Jaaga is a site for art installations and in more ways than one is an art installation itself. The building’s front façade is a vertical garden (a garden expert’s contribution). The site grows its own vegetables. They aim to have a circulatory system of rainwater harvesting and a metabolic system of worms to compost waste. Bright red and blue pallet-rack shelving constitute the low-cost framework of the building, creating a cluster of spaces that can be dissembled and rearranged to adapt to various functions, in a form that is minimal and sustainable at heart. Electronics and media labs, indispensable tools in making the living building a reality, are also contained. The place’s spirit is one of extended amenability. Thus in its vibrant, transparent entirety, Jaaga almost becomes a living, breathing, organism that is sentient and responsive in its own respect. The structure by periodically changing its site, moves through the city, is continuously varying to adapt to functions and as a system is open to all. In its multi-level spaces, simple yet flexible organization and light body, it is unique in how it insinuates into its surroundings and succeeds in being a habitat for a thriving community of creative concerns. It continually absorbs and runs a biotic process as it nurtures new talent and accommodates audiences. The hallmark of Jaaga’s singularity is its malleability and ability to be accessible to all in a simple yet effective technique. It is a community space that is always in the making, a space shaped by everyone. If democracy could be expressed as architecture, it would be Jaaga.
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3. This abstract was a semifinalist in the Berkeley Prize Essay Competition in 2011. Berkeley Prize 2011 semifinalist “You must be able to enter a church and feel that you are at the centre of the world. I believe that this idea of the sacred corresponds to a primordial need of man.” – Mario Botta. Bangalore was a city that once held its many gardens and trees in sacred hold. Bangalore’s now redoubtable sobriquet of ‘Garden City’ is dying a silent death with the advent of globalization and with it the death of the space of the individual. The space I have illustrated does not have a name, a clear formal use or even an identity. While not being the garden that Bangalore typified, it exists to me as a paragon of an individual’s place. It lies in the midst of my residential layout Sadanandanagar, like a quiet manifestation of the Brahmasthana (the central void that ancient Indian building texts prescribe for harmony) ensconced by a water tank, a coconut tree, a now defunct bus stop, the local watchman’s house and a dairy parlour. No one seems sure what it was originally intended for but there exists a sort of unspoken respect for the area that is visible when you note that: there is no garbage dumped here, the occasionally parked vehicle takes care to gently back out onto the road before moving away and not through the site and yet the land is regularly treaded on keeping it the grass-free ground that it is. It is not the green fenced park that BDA punctuates every layout with, it has an edge that interacts and invites. There is no skyline to look only the sky. It is empty and yet safe, it looks up and yet looks within. Sadanandanagar itself ensconced within immovable Defence land on one side and railway line on the other has so far succeeded in keeping away from the and thereby preserves a modicum of sanity. The CDP is fast dissolving into a tragic farce it is. It used to be a desolate layout with very few houses. It is a world where commercial forces have not yet laid their touch, where the common man still has his say. Where wideeyed residences have not yet been converted into introverted glass-façade-toting offices and footpaths are not run over by two-wheelers and hawkers and are still safe. It is important to understand what it is not in order to see what it is; for it is in the experience of this duality do I perceive the sacred that I speak of. Bangalore’s much vaunted Metro has one its primary stations located near Sadanandanagar. In the light of this development and more, I intend to enunciate in my essay how this place can preserve its sanctimony through careful edge treatments and if required adaptive reuse of the existing residences. 4. This was written as a studio assignment in preparation for a studio on urban design Review: Typographic Intelligence by Mark Wigley Mark Wigley discusses how our environment today presents such a wide array of choices that it has forced architects to expand their profession from building to something beyond. The amount of architectural writing published, printed, copied and circulated does come to quite a staggering quantity. The author describes the lengths to which architects will go to sell their creations. From project descriptions and philosophical elaborations to lettering styles and presentation techniques, it does, after all, boil down to marketing. The process of putting across a design work becomes a process in itself. It seems that architects ultimately sit down to work on a matchmaking of
sorts of what they say and what they create, and it is this job that dominates most offices. Wigley acknowledges that “every architect must be a skilled typographer, a professional” but it’s the almost-brute force of contrivance over creation that he notes with mild asperity - “The words rarely move discreetly around the images. It’s more a tango than a waltz.” What he’s attempting to express is that global flows are stronger today than ever before and problems of information are to do with processing them rather than obtaining them, so much so that, at some point in time the processing took precedence over the information itself. The readiness with which methods and techniques are available have made the situation bewilderingly complex and the need to make sense of it all results in the parallel process of stitching together a sort of framework for the design to be carried in. Therefore the context has come to be this – a contemporary city, a situation where technological advances and the free market have made the plethora of choices inevitable. And this context has come to be so bewildering that the way we think changes. Since building does not seem to be the architect’s predominant activity (having established the apparent obsession with graphic design, writing, computer aided gimmicks and what-not, which are actually the author’s metaphors for the various elements of environs and our manner of perceiving them), what then, is the predominant activity’s structure? What is the architecture of the architect’s thinking? Or, how has this digitized and highly informed world influenced the way we think? How is our manner of responding bound to change in this setting? The crux of the situation, thereby, eventually lies in the architecture of the architect’s thinking. Bringing up the rudiments of the functioning of the human intelligence, it’s a question Wigley engages you with, with some interesting wordplay (reminiscent of those he spoke about!) - “If the core of the architect’s intelligence operates through layouts, what is the architecture of our layouts today?” Perhaps Mark Wigley himself finally got on the bandwagon. 5. This was my concept essay for design project on K R Market ‘Ancient Regime’ Eagles circle peremptorily and rest with quiet dignity on the parabolas of K R Market’s quirky rooftops. From the flyover, the building’s quietude at its highest reaches stands out like a long dead sentinel against the chaotic backdrop of Chamarajpet. I only have to tilt my gaze downwards to meet the surge of humanity crawling with an unceasing rhythm to the beat of the market’s pulses. When I say rhythm, I actually mean it. Customers march on with an aura of decadent familiarity with the place, with their favourite grocers, to the sounds of the clanging weighing balances. Similar groceries group together in the simplistic tradition of competing for better bargains. We stop at the strawberries place. Thirty a box. Twenty-five, perhaps. Even twenty if we can make our case. And I smile with unhidden wonder at the ridiculously low prices. Life is most alive at ground level in K R Market. It is almost as if there is some indiscernible vertigo among the people. The building with the quirky roofs houses little sparrows and pigeons in its four courts; so far-removed is it inside from the madding crowd on the outside. It grows quieter with the ascension, farther from everybody. Innumerable shops selling practically everything from rat-traps and aluminum tins to cheap bangles
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and tawdry trinkets sit in tragic rejection within the massive structure. Far from the madding crowd and hence cut off, it seems, from any life itself. For all the action is beneath the blazing sun. The almost defunct upper storeys float grumpily in the face of the defiance of customs. Driving into K R market is a curious experience. The market seems like a self-sustaining self-contained pocket of buying, selling and the intermittent unloading. Running away from the market on one hand is the slightly more sophisticated S J P road that touches the imposing Town Hall at its other end. And on the other hand is the flyover that sweeps over with only a cursory glance at the market. What is this old market doing in the midst of such perceptibly more noteworthy destinations? With its ugly shops, cheap goods, narrow streets, incorrigible vehicular movement and the unpleasant smells you want to pick K R market up by the scruff of its unhygienic neck and fling it into some far-off corner of Bangalore. But as you try to pull it up you begin to notice the various strings attached. The ugly shops are not just shops; they have a family, perhaps two or more, residing in its upper storeys. Try to pull it off and you will notice the innumerable BMTC buses that rise in unison unwilling to go elsewhere except dear old K R Market. You will be attempting to displace the hundreds of families who run their daily existence on the market’s cheap goods. And the strawberries! The strawberries will morph into their expensive counterparts from Indiranagar. All good things, they say, must come to an end. Will City Market? The city’s borders are blurring and with the affluent growing in size, centre-town may no longer be ‘the’ place. I look up at the cocksure face of the market building trying in vain to hide its futility and then around at the active beehive of the city’s lower classes. Bangalore burgeons with unbridled rapidity. But the proletariat is here to stay. This essay was written in response to the studio directors’ call for problematizing K R Market Unasked After I learnt to appreciate the volume of the market building, I realize how big the site area is.
inertia. A space that has a moment of inertia. A market + a station =? A market + higher FAR=? A market + higher FAR + station=? What do we design (not how do we design) such that so and so conditions are met? What are the conditions? Moment of inertia. Its polarity. People trouble. Obeying FARs, by-laws. Integrating the station. I guess this could be a task in creating a task. NOTE: FAR - floor area ratio A sample of my creative, conceptual writing Slush I began to feel alive on the thirteenth mile. I felt my muscles pumping, pushing back the ground through several yards in every few bound. I ran in an unceasing rhythm, unconscious of time and space. There was no end in sight, only a blurred perspective of a boulevard. Blood pumped like a vital beast in my ears and the cold... the cold froze my nose and made me sharply aware of the burning within. My lungs were on fire, my heart a furnace. Years of sloth and age tore away, burnt by the friction leaving a trail of fetid grey. I ran, I ran. Unrelenting - unceasing - locked in the inertia of a viable madness burgeoning in the endless taverns behind my forehead. I ran. It was an irreversible mechanism. There was no looking back, there was no looking even. I ran like a blind panther live on the scent of a hare. Muscle, blood and bone moved with calculated economy, cutting through volumes of cold oxygen-rich air carving a path through the invisible woods that closed insiduously behind me. I ran. Cheeks stung from the cold, but they burnt too. Like my lungs. I was an ice-block on fire. I was alive. ... I am sprawled on the sofa staring vacantly into the window. My chin lies locked on my chest in adamant immobility and my head is currently the only vertical entity of me. Such romance really tires me. Who needs a run?
The people of any place shape it. And the more homogeneous they are, the stronger is the clarity in their identity - not that it makes things any simpler – but this establishes that the people here are an important consideration. What could come up at market? (The BDA says higher FARs and the Metro rail for sure) Maybe the higher FARs could become higher and higher till it looks like something of Corbusier’s ideal city. Incredibly tall buildings, so tall they almost float leaving ground space free. I do not see merely a market at the place. I envisage a space that is ‘multi-purpose’ (in a manner of speaking). Where the people decide what happens. And when they execute that decision, they must find the place invisibly morphing into what they wanted. Something like the Room of Requirements (from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). An urban public space that does not stop people in their tracks, but seeks to keep mobility alive. I like to call it moment of
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