designing for the future
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Critical Practice: Matter of Intimacy This essay is in response to the 361 Degree Conference theme “designing for the future
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ny conversation concerning the future involves the notion of change, and the idea newness. A change for the better through the next new thing, or the next big idea. This is expected. Yet what constitutes the new? Anticipated newness relies on formal (or abstract) identification by casting it against what is it is not, i.e., the familiar and what we are habituated with. The familiar in this scenario is either viewed as an anchor, weighing down or holding back the steady progress facilitated by the new. Or, it is assumed as an authenticity embodied in the ordinary, absent or eroded in the face of newness which must somehow be reclaimed, regained or restored.
Shubhra describes her work as borne out of conditions that “keep you on your toes; ever vigilant, always looking for that foothold to anchor oneself. There is not much choice, but plenty of opportunities.” With a design intensive practice based out of the United States and India, she is inspired by the exciting shift in the dialogue between architecture and its context, in which the architect’s methods and approaches are being consistently re-evaluated. She also ascribes to an expanded definition of sustainability that moves beyond experimentation with new materials and technologies to include such concepts as social and economic stewardship. Using design as a tool, these undertakings not only offer pragmatic solutions to known needs, but also aim to be relevant for the communities and building cultures within which she works. Shubhra is a visiting professor of Architecture at the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT), Ahmedabad (India) and the Denver and Boulder campuses of the University of Colorado. She has taught at her graduate alma-mater Cornell University. She lectures where invited, and has been a visiting critic at universities in the United States, continental Europe, India and China. Indian Architect & Builder - December 2018
In this dichotomy, both the new and the familiar most often remain unexamined. While we assume that endless possibilities for architecture and design lie in the pursuit of the new, creation of novel things is not the only creativity. The sensibility that allows one to discover the unknown in the familiar is equally creative. As Friedrich Nietzsche has stated, “What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to, is the most difficult to ‘know’ — that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as ‘outside us’” 1. Critical practice involves the imaginative examination of what we take for granted; an examination that must deal with the specificities of context and how to make it relevant to the design process. There is an intimacy here in such an engagement with the familiar, to seek out what has been forgotten or invisibilised through everyday routines of habitation, and revealing, albeit momentarily, an enduring habitus of the body and built environment. Intimacy is not just a matter of engaging emotions, but engaging the intelligence of the body to engage with the environments one inhabits. The body reveals the existence of the architect, and the experiences she brings to a project. Constituting the body as material, connects the architect’s own identity as a person with the identity of architecture she practices as a discipline. This approach is simultaneously investigative and vocational. It is borne out of the urge to model with what one has at hand, operating with the restriction that the architectural sensibility must emerge from the instincts of the body in place. The interest is in how the built environment wraps itself around the body, and vice versa; and through that how design sensibilities are cultivated. A cultivation of the intuitive senses of the body that is a disciplined practice, a pedagogy. Play, as one of the tools employed, is used to activate the
body, and insert it into the methodology of working with the bodyin-place and senses. Play is a stimulus to experiencing the built environment, and not an abstract observed strategy 2. Operating thus, from a position embedded within context, play is an active manifestation of curiosity 3, of which Michel Foucault observes, “[curiosity]…it evokes ‘concern’; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervour to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential.” 4 The design process then, recast as a form of play, is based on a willingness to engage with the inherent habits, conventions or limitations that invariably constrain the architectural project, and ask what rituals and opportunities are available for them to become the generators of the design proposition in order to find a project’s own reality. The historic reality of the present, which includes the projection onto the future; and the physical reality of the exact place, within which a project is placed and simultaneously what this place shares with the wider landscapes and conventions. While art is rooted self-expression, design is engendered by a sense of empathy among human beings in our common values and spirituality 5; it’s essence lies in the process of discovering a problem shared by many people, and trying to solve it. In reframing the discourse on the future away from a preoccupation with newness, there is a sustained allusion here: that the work of architecture be returned to the stuff of life. Of making, and of the sense of things. Of meetings, junctions and relationships that bind us.
1. Nietzsche, Fredrick. The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman. New York Vintage Books (1974). I have been working on the notion of play as a tool with Dr. Gauri Raje, who is an anthropologist and storyteller and Mare 2. Trevathan, an actor, theatre maker and educator through workshops in the US and India since 2015. These observations are a result of our collaborations. Lewis, Tsurumaki, Lewis. Opportunistic Architecture. Princeton Architectural Press (2008). 3. Foucault, Michel. The Masked Philosopher. 4. Rabinow, Paul. Michael Foucault Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The New Press, New York (1994). 5. Hara, Kenya. Designing Design. Lars Muller Publishers (2007) Indian Architect & Builder - December 2018