Seminar 2015: Individual essay
Date: 17-11-2015
Architecture and the Millennium Cities? Architecture through time has been a constant facilitator of the needs and wants of human beings. It has continuously absorbed and responded to the change and evolution of all the elements of the human race. It has affected and has been affected by various aspects of the lives residing within it, be it economics, politics, religion, culture, region, gender etc. knitting a complex web around values, ethics and attitudes. We can witness architecture holding the simplest and the most complex ends of life together surrounding us at all times. It is the physical relation with life. You cannot think of it primarily as either a message or a symbol, but as an envelope and background for life which goes on in and around it, a sensitive container for the rhythm of footsteps on the floor, for concentration of work, for the silence of sleep. It is a container of emotions, experiences and memories blending the tangibles and intangibles of life together. [CITATION zum05 \l 1033 ] Something so close to one’s actuality is ought to play a vital role in their existence and what more important can be to someone, than their identity. But does this container of life reflect the identity of the contained and if it does, does it do it naturally or is it forced? In the fast developing cities like Delhi, the thirst of being called “developed” is quickly succeeding over its need to hold on to its identity, the game of imitation seems to be the quickest way to join the club. Now if ethics and values of the city change, architecture, following its instinct of “absorbing and responding”, changes accordingly. But if we analyse the situation more closely we will realise that there is some glitch in this process of architecture moulding according to the society, where in most of the developed nations it might still be true, in developing nations like India the architecture and infrastructure is modernising much faster than the society and culture [CITATION rah15 \l 1033 ]. This is creating a lag between the two. The container no more reflects the contained, instead holds an identity provided, rather forced upon through external forces. A very good example to explain this would be the large scale MNCs set up in the country today, the face of the developing India, designed on the basis of western standards to keep a global approach are nothing more than forced identities containing lives within, which have yet not fully adapted to these shells provided to them. What occupants probably remember most is the meaning, sense and emotion that an environment helped provide. These feelings alter the perception of the occupants as well as affect the decisions they make in a space further enriching their memories [ CITATION Kar10 \l 1033 ]. But this lag between the changing architecture and the society is cornering 1
Seminar 2015: Individual essay
Date: 17-11-2015
architecture and depriving it of its abilities to connect to the people, leaving it open only to the ocular-centric realm [ CITATION jpa13 \l 1033 ]. The spaces though remain but are unable to transform into places. What is going wrong here is that we are ignoring the fact that every new work of architecture intervenes in a specific historical situation. It is essential to the quality of the intervention that the new building should embrace qualities which can enter into a meaningful dialogue with the existing situation. For it the intervention is to find its place, it must make us experience what already exists in a new light. We through a stone into the water. Sand swirls up and settles again. The stir was necessary. The stone has found its place. But the pond is no longer the same[ CITATION zum05 \l 1033 ].
It is the architect’s responsibility to set the ethics, values and attitude of the design in accordance with that of the user’s in order to bridge the gap between the two and then stimulate the experiencer. We as architects need to realise that to influence our users through our designs we need to be influenced by them first. As said by Alain De Botton in his book The Architecture of Happiness: the secret art of furnishing your life, “an ugly room can coagulate any loose suspicions as to the incompleteness of life, while a sun-lit one set with honey-coloured limestone tiles can lend support to whatever is most hopeful within us. Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places- and on the convection that it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.”[ CITATION Ala07 \l 1033 ]
Works Cited Botton, A. D., 2007. Architecture of Happiness. s.l.:s.n. Frank, K. A., 2010. Design through Dialogue. s.l.:s.n. Mahrotra, R., 2015. new delhi, spa, s.n. pallasmaa, j., 2013. eyes of the skin. s.l.:s.n. Zumthor, P., 2005. thinking architecture. s.l.:s.n.
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Seminar 2015: Individual essay
Date: 17-11-2015
S. Shabeeb Raza Bilgrami A/2016/2009 IX semester B. Arch Section- B
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