Grid, Zone, and Field Studies
University of British Columbia | Chandigarh Research Studio Edited by Nicole Sylvia & Roy Cloutier
GRID | zone | field
projects BY Patrick Birch Mitchell Gray Tori Hamatani Pera Hardy Josh Potvin Felix Lavergne Blaire Schille Anna Thomas Caleb Westerby Trevor Whitten EDITors Nicole Sylvia & Roy Cloutier Adjunct Professors, University of British Columbia CHANDIGARH RESEARCH STUDIO, 2017 School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture University of British Columbia
CONTENTS
Preface 2 Nicole Sylvia & Roy Cloutier Landscapes of Rural-Urban Migration Josh Potvin
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WastE Ecologies 14 Anna Thomas TELL-TALES OF INCREMENTALITY Félix-Antoine Lalonde Lavergne
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Horn Please 32 Blaire Schille Chandigarh on Two Wheels 40 Mitchell Gray Being and Becoming 44 Caleb Westerby Daily Circulation 50 Tori Hamatani Regions, Roofscapes, and Rooms Trevor Whitten
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Masala Chai 64 Patrick Birch Class Mobility: Traveling by Indian Railway Pera Hardy
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Acknowledgements 78
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Preface — Nicole Sylvia & Roy Cloutier
Grid, Zone, and Field Studies is a collection of student work conducted as part of the Chandigarh Research Studio, a study-abroad program of the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Based in Chandigarh, India for fall semester 2017, the program consisted of three courses: a design studio, a history/theory seminar, and this course, a drawing-based field research course. The field-drawing course had three main components: a study of graphical precedents, a series of field walks, and a folio of drawings. In all three exercises, the focus shifted from architecture as traditionally understood toward a more open-ended examination of the everyday and its infrastructures—the (para-) architectural aspects of daily life. In this sense, the seeming order of architectural norms (be they embodied in objects or drawings) becomes a substrate of sorts for a wild proliferation of appropriations, adaptations, and transformations—a frame for the hybridity of the city. First, the students embarked on a study of a heterodox assor tment of graphical conventions— some from within architecture, most from without— used to convey space and narrative in ways that challenge architects’ established disciplinary understandings of what drawing can be and can do. These examples spanned many geographies and eras: from 16th-century Rajput miniature paintings to Ikea instructions, from capriccio and tableau to graphic novels, from figure-drawing croquis exercises to film storyboards, from anatomic diagrams to odd permutations of oblique projection. The second component was a series of Field Walks—loose, fluid, site-based drawing and documentation exercises, each concluded with a
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discussion of the sketches produced during the visit. These walks brought students out into the diverse landscapes of Chandigarh, its periphery, and its hinterland to study its many grids, zones, and fields—in each site, examining the quotidian aspects of everyday life (and all of the accoutrements it appropriates and spaces it constructs). These ranged from the dense, incrementallydeveloped urban fabric of Burail, an enclave engulfed by Chandigarh to the weathered austerity of the ruins of Mughal-era caravanserai, gardens, and monuments; from the chaotic bustle of the Sector 22 Shastri Market—a gridded mat-building housing hundreds of formal and informal shops—to the rhythms of agricultural life in villages in the nearby countryside of Punjab. The third component—documented in this book— asked students to create a folio of narrative drawings studying stories and patterns encountered in the course of the program. These drew upon observations and encounters both from the field walks and from daily life around Chandigarh—with each student following a thread; investigating it through the tripartite scalar and conceptual lenses of body, form, and territory; and producing at least one drawing for each lens. Drawing upon the first exercise, students were asked to consider and reconsider convention and notation, specifically examining how space and time can be distorted or layered within a drawing to communicate a richer and more diverse array of information. In doing so, the students developed not only their understandings but also a set of tools to facilitate an open-ended engagement with unfamiliar terrain— techniques and lenses by which we might open ourselves to the many narratives in a landscape. The drawn, physical artifacts produced from this process—only some of many possibilities—are shown in the pages that follow.
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Field Walks Sketchbook reviews
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LANDSCAPES OF rural-urban migration — Josh Potvin
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‘Landscapes of Rural-Urban Migration’ traces an increasingly-common experience in India—one that many millions of people will repeat over the next three decades—that of a family migrating from a rural area to an urban area in search of a new life. In Chandigarh, the city’s population is expected to rise from 1.1 million people in 2011 to 2.5 million people by 2026. Many of incoming migrants will find themselves in slums at the periphery of the city, fighting to find a way to place their skills and lives within an unfamiliar and drasticallychanging urban environment. Based on a series of interviews and interactions, the following set of drawings traces one family’s narrative of migration to Chandigarh. For this family, the journey passes through four distinct stages: rural life in an agricultural village in Punjab, the first stage of the transition in an informal settlement in the periphery of Chandigarh, a second transitional stage upon the slum being cleared by the government and the family being rehoused in a ‘rehabilitation colony’, and a four th stage of their everyday life within the urban fabric and parks system of Chandigarh.
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WASTE Ecologies — Anna Thomas
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Actors of Waste This series of drawings focuses on an extremely common sight in India: when waste infrastructure is lacking and waste management is neglected, people often have little choice but to dump their garbage in public spaces. Specifically, the drawings study the systems—the natural and ar tifical ecologies—involved in piles of dumped waste, examining them from the actants involved in the processes. Who contributes waste and who takes it away? Animals such as cows, goats, pigs, dogs, birds and horses scavenge through the piles for food. Wastepickers—among the most marginalized people in India—comb through and find materials to be recycled and take the rest to be deposited at the landfill. Trash Trajectories These system-diagrams show the many different common trajectories for a single plastic bottle of Limca soda as it becomes waste. It is common for residents to burn their trash daily, to throw it in the street, to discard it in the trash before being recovered and recycled by another. The easiest option is often chosen; from there, its paths diverge based on a wide array of factors. Forms of Waste Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan, the Clean India Campaign, seeks to create increased awareness of littering through the use of signage and improved numbers of trash cans and other waste infrastructure. These drawings catalogue the many different forms of waste receptacles and waste related signage around Chandigarh, the ‘City Beautiful.’ In these, form ser ves functions it often tends not to—straying into representational, didactic, and even whimsical roles.
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TELL-TALES OF INCREMENTALITY — Félix-Antoine Lalonde Lavergne
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This series of drawings explores the constructive culture of incremental architecture in Sector 25, Chandigarh. Building—and in particular, incremental building, as it progesses over time—is an act of recombining a wide variety of forms of agency: between the mind and the environment, between materials themselves, but also between the body and the physical world. The first set of drawings explores the telltale material artifacts of the constructive culture of incrementality: exposed rebar sticking out of concrete slabs soon to become a balcony, piles of bricks flanking the streets, and half built second levels overlaid with metal sheets. Workers are constantly constructing the unfinished, laying bricks to form the uncompleted. The neighborhood is in constant mutation. The second set of drawings moves upward in scale to study the territories of the main materials used to build the neighborhood: bricks, concrete, steel bars, tiles, and more. From the brick kilns, the steel and cement plants, the marble quarries, the building blocks of the city are made outside of it. From their making to their use, the construction materials have journeyed through a wide territory to feed the city’s evolution. The last set of drawings relates more generally to construction and the peculiar and specific ways that the body is used to engage with the act of building.
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Horn Please — Blaire Schille
‘Horn Please’ examines the stor y behind one of the most striking par ts of the experience of Indian roadways: the extravagantly-decorated trucks that carr y much of India’s freight. Acting as a home for the ten long months each year that drivers are on the road, the architecture of the truck comes to fill a wide array of needs and desires—not only functional (eating, sleeping, driving, relaxing) but also representational, with the exuberantly-painted exteriors acting as a billboard for each driver’s personality, beliefs, family ties, hometown, and more. In this way, the trucks become a major source of pride. Drivers spend their hard-earned money decorating both the interior and exterior, covering them with slogans, precautionar y traffic messages, colourful paintings, attractive calligraphy, beautiful sceneries, pictures of gods, goddesses and Bollywood stars, and names of children and family members. The ar t can reflect the driver’s religion, ser ve to ward away bad omens, and even function as moving billboards, adver tising both the truck and the driver to potential customers as it snakes its way across the countr y.
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CHANDIGARH ON TWO WHEELS — Mitchell Gray
As India’s economy grows, so does its middle class—and among the top priorities of this emerging class is a more effective means of transportation than by foot or bicycle. Many of these people turn to the small motorcycles produced domestically by Hero Honda or Royal Enfield. Their uses are far-ranging: from carrying entire families to bringing crops to market, there is a wily utility expressed through the work of these machines. The legality of some of these uses is unclear, as is the enforcement of many traffic laws in India. In 2015, helmets became mandator y. An unlicensed business sprang up overnight selling cheap helmets at the road side. These are unrated and unlikely to make much difference in the event of a crash. They may be better than nothing, but many choose to openly flaunt their rejection of the law by riding with the wind in their hair. Similarly, the place for a motorcycle on increasingly congested roads is a precarious one. Some cut corners or avoid the dangers of the road by riding on bicycle paths. While cars and buses weave past one another, motorcycles fill the spaces between. This is especially true in Chandigarh, the modernist vision of a car-friendly city, now groaning under the weight of automobile congestion and a rigid urban layout.
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BEING AND BECOMING — Caleb Westerby
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Perched precariously on a mountain’s ridge in nor thern India is the small suburb of McLeod Ganj. Here you will not find white picket fences enclosing meticulously manicured lawns; no SUVs will come close to fitting along the narrow, steep, winding roads leading to a yellow- and pink-painted concrete structure. This is the seat of the Tibetian Governmentin-exile. This is Tsuglag Khang, temple of the 14th Dalai Lama for the Tibetians refugees. These people hail from perhaps one of the most vast and empty places on ear th. Even today, nomads roam the Tibetian plateau with humble herds of horses and yak. Here 11,000 Tibetan émigrés reside in an area the size of two football fields. The streets are unusually quiet, yet bustling with identically clad monks offering a sincere smile, a raise of the palm, and nothing more. Here, sounds take on a new life. From the valley below you can hear the motion of the ar terial road passing by. From the next mountaintop over resound the gleeful screams of paragliders jumping out into thin air. Echoing off the mountains are bhangra beats from a radio station’s loudspeaker in the next town over. All around you: just footsteps. At one of the many meditation centres, the day is busy with ritualized nothings. A gong breaks the silence marking morning, meditation, meals, meditation, tea, meditation and night.
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daily circulation newspapers in chandigarh — Tori Hamatani
Today, information is consumed at an unprecedented rate. Global news sits comfortably next to the local as we are connected via headlines to the rest of the world. Yet too often, the physical, material practices of information remain overlooked—the infrastructure of information upon which the system depends. A lot can be learned about a place by their newspaper. In some ways, the news is a preview into the daily lives of the people. From adver tisements to current events to celebrity gossip, information is distributed not only to inform, liberate, and enable its citizens but also simply for enter tainment. As of recently, print circulation has been overshadowed by online news sources. India is an outlier to this, with print numbers remaining steady. Although print sources are arguably more resource intensive, there is something revealing and generative about their tangibility. This is not to be mistaken with a preciousness of newspapers as objects themselves, as often, their second life is close to scrap. Yet even in this second life, they can take on new meanings, generate odd juxtapositions, fill new roles: they retain a function as cultural and physical ar tifacts. The Tribune is one of the top circulated publications in Chandigarh, followed by the Hindustan Times and the Times of India. These news distributors promise to deliver current information objectively and accurately to the general public. Every day, these three papers reach 220,000 readers (and they are not the only publishers in Chandigarh). Information is collected, composed, edited, printed and circulated rapidly and frequently. This fast-paced process never stops churning.
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Burail: Regions, Roofscapes, and rooms — Trevor Whitten
Sitting and sketching on a narrow street in the historic neighborhood of Burail, motorcycles and pedestrians squeeze past me as merely another obstacle impeding upon their commute. A small group of children approach us, excited by the oppor tunity to show us where they live. Through a small door that appears to be a storefront, we walk a shor t passage and find ourselves in a slender cour tyard. A sliver of light finds its way down the narrow opening between the abutting buildings. Once again the children urge us to follow, this time up a slanted staircase at the back of the courtyard. At the top of the stairs is a long corridor, lined with single rooms with one window each. Peering in as we pass by, residents seem busy carrying out their daily chores. The end of the corridor brings us back to the streetfront, this time one storey above the entrance. We take another staircase which is seemingly tacked on to the building’s façade. This stair leads us up and out of the depths of the city and over its sea of rooftops. Like saplings weaving their way towards the sun from a forest floor, each building seems to grow from some organic process, finding the best shape that will bring it to this surface, each protruding a bit differently into the vastness of the blue sky. As if the city was tucked beneath the ground, each rooftop is used as if there was never a building on its site. The children lead us back to the cour tyard, now on the top level: we have arrived at their home. The small room acts as a kitchen, living room, and bedroom. We are told this is the home of six people. We take a seat on the bed, and they invite us to stay for tea.
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Masala chai — Patrick Birch
As the world’s largest consumer and second largest producer, the ubiquity of tea in Indian culture is clear. Initially introduced through British production in the 1830’s, tea has today become an integral par t of life in India. The most popular form of tea in India is masala chai: sweet, milky tea spiced with cardamom and cinnamon. From home to the street, from temple to the train, rarely does one find themselves unable to find a cup. The ritual of drinking chai transcends boundaries, while also providing social structure to ever yday interactions. These drawings document different anecdotes in the tea production and consumption process: from the Himalayas to the home, from street vendors to tea-pickers.
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class mobility traveling by indian railway — Pera Hardy
The Indian railway system is a massive, complex organization that is an essential par t of the country’s interconnectivity. Trains travel between almost every location imaginable in the country, departing and arriving at all hours of the day and night. Train stations are bustling, intense experiences with multiple platforms, trains that stretch beyond what the eye can see, vocal food vendors, and people and dogs alike sharing sleeping space on the platforms while waiting out delays. The experience of train travel in India varies greatly based on one’s position in society. The cost of a single ticket can range from 10 to 1,400 rupees (roughly $0.20 - $28.00) for a trip on the exact same train. The huge extremes in ticket classes reflect a similar disparity in Indian culture; while allowing all members of society to travel as needed, they also reinforce the conditions of a class-based society. The quality, comfor t, and travel experience are represented in these drawings through the ways people occupy space based on their economic standing in the train-class hierarchy. Similarly, the experience of India itself is mediated by the lens (in this case, the train car and type of window) through which it is viewed. Sharing a wooden seat with a family of eight and crowding around a small, glass-less window with bars creates a different perception of the landscapes of India than relaxing in an air-conditioned, private carriage. Both experiences exist simultaneously alongside one another in the social condenser-andstratifier that is the Indian railway system.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the numerous people who suppor ted and guided us in our explorations within Chandigarh and beyond. First among these is the Mehar Baba Charitable Trust, which assisted us in our visits to Bassi Pathana, Fategarh Sahib, and Sirhind—in par ticular, Thakur Meije and Hema Panesar, who were gracious and knowledgeable hosts. Likewise, our gratitude goes out to Rishika Bora and Hargobind Singh, students at the Chandigarh College of Architecture, who accompanied us on a number of our excursions, providing interesting information and often acting as translators and facilitators. More generally, we are extremely grateful to the many generous people we encountered in our travels around Chandigarh: the kind gentleman in Sector 22 who insisted we join him for masala chai; the crowd of bemused people outside PGI Hospital who gathered around us to become spontaneous guest-reviewers on one of our sketchbook discussions; the family that hosted two of our group for pakoras and chai in Burail; the gaggle of curious kids who seemed to appear as if by magic every time any of us sat down to draw; the enthusiastic farmer who showed us how to make it to the top of the ruined tombs outside Dera Mir Miran village; the generous families in Sector 25 who showed us around the settlements and shared their hopes and aspirations with us; and many, many more as well. It is your stories that gave us ways in to better understanding this fascinating place. We are very for tunate to have been so graciously-met everywhere we went—which was deeply humbling, especially for outsiders embarking on the task of incrementally building our understandings of a place to which we are visitors. 78