ReFresh CEPT: notes on play as a tool in exploring CEPT’s built environment.

ReFresh CEPT Notes on play as a tool in exploring CEPT’s built environment

By Shubhra Raje, with contributions from Mare Trevathan Ahmedabad, June 2019

fig 1 Location- CEPT Campus | Light Shaft, Admin Block

“The city of memory is empty, because for imagination it is easier to conjure architecture rather than human beings” ~ Joseph Brodsky

Conceived by architect Shubhra Raje and theatre-maker Mare Trevathan to work with and within the CEPT University Campus, the ReFresh workshop seeks to reveal the pleasures and possibilities of the built environment of the campus otherwise hidden due to habitual use on the one hand, and deeply entrenched architectural paradigms, on the other. The participants included students from across the various faculties of study on campus, universities within India as well as one participant from Australia in the field of social work.

Rather than conventional tools used to measure, analyze and determine value in architecture, the participants inhabited the campus through play in ways that emphasized an active, performative experience of space instead of a literate reading of it. Here play is not a frivolous act, but an active manifestation of curiosity1, operating from a position embedded within the context. To play, or to put something in play, requires action and commitment in seeking a goal through transformation and change. It is neither removed from life, nor a diversion, but a consistent inquiry into the possibilities and potentials of architecture to question and to have an effect.

“Play is a critique ... of conventions, of obligations, of the idea of efficiency, of instrumetality of action and space…and in all these ways, a critique through which we develop new social practices”2.

In other words, though play, people experiment with rules, roles and meanings; one can be totally responsible to the rules of play, but irreverently careless of prevalent paradigms, at least for the duration of play. In the context of CEPT, an iconic campus associated with an equally iconic pedagogy, play offers a distinct mode of engagement with built forms characterized by this sense of an ephemeral groundedness, a liminality.

The workshop, simultaneously investigative and vocational, works with what one has at hand, operating with the restriction that the inhabitation must emerge from the instincts of the body in place. We are interested in how the built environment wraps itself around the body, and vice versa; and through that how design sensibilities and collective patrimonies are cultivated. A cultivation of the intuitive senses of the body that is a disciplined practice.

1.“Curiosity… The word, however, pleases me. To me it suggests something altogether different: 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 fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential”.

Michel Foucault, The Masked Philosopher Rabinow, Paul. Michael Foucault Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The New Press, New York (1994).

2.Stevens, Quentin. The Ludic City: exploring the potential of public spaces. Routledge, London (2007).

Play, as a tool employed, is used to activate the body, and insert it into the methodology of working with the body-in-place and senses; it is a stimulus to experiencing the built environment, and not an abstract observed strategy. To this extent, play evokes an ephemeral quality — that the experiences of the built environment have a temporary quality stimulated by its inhabitation. This process of encountering and recording becomes relevant to the extent that context is a dense weave of interdependencies, and in its comprehension we are always striving to find a language that can bring more and more of the complexity to light. We, however, argue that this maybe an impossible task since complexity can only be revealed through partially bringing it into light. The transient nature of play may well be suited to this task, allowing the player (the participant, and in the context of our workshop, the audience as well) a glimpse into more enduring structures and processes of design.

This necessarily requires a shift in intention from a solution focused nature of research, documentation or indeed knowing; focusing on meetings, junctions and relationships instead of ubiquity. Our effort has been to create a method for what has been long accepted as valid sensorial observations and narratives of moments of cultural experience, to be translated into being part of the language of documentation instead of being relegated to the realm of the esoteric. For it is in the conscious immersion into such a space that a dialogic understanding can begin to emerge of a collective culture of a place, and a sense of being in this world, partly shaped by it, partly at odds with it. ****

The workshop: In order to maintain the necessary rigor and discipline to inhabitation, we recast the process of play along the lines of site-specific devised theatre. The exercises themselves subverted communication and representation via spoken, written or visual language in favor of physical and sensorial “listening� through bodywork, borrowing from a myriad of influences ranging from post-modern dance as well as the theater of Anne Bogart, Tadashi Suzuki, Ruth Zaporah and others. And in devising short in-situ performances over the course of the workshop, the architecture of the campus became a creative partner and an instrument of investigation, rather than the more traditional setting or a backdrop for the story or narrative.

The first part of everyday was spent with exercises where participants learnt to make the ordinary unknown, starting with everyday objects, progressively scaling up to elements of architecture and then to assemblies and situations. The intention of the exercises was to take something familiar, like a pen, or a chair, railing, bench etc. and subject it to a manner of perceiving that challenges our understanding of it, and at times thrills us with its reality.

In addition, the exercises were designed to increase awareness of, and responsiveness to, people and surroundings; to decrease the dependency on sight; and to identify and disrupt habits of physicality and perception. In the latter part of most days, participants worked in groups of 3 to 5 to devise very short performances within various sites of their choosing on campus that expressed their examinations of the sites. Daily journals were maintained by the participants as tools for reflection, and as a means to connect their daily experiences in the workshop with the design process in their regular coursework.

The workshop culminated in an hour-long evening of six site-specific performances within the campus (fig 16), followed by a talk-back discussion between the audience and the participants. The audience experience, which moved from location to location, was also one of constituting and reconstituting (re-membering) the narrative and the architecture, as each audience member moved between stories and locations.

Workshop Components Bodywork Bodywork explores and develops physical

expressiveness,

I

which

is important in the preparedness for and

creative

process,

performance.

presence Participants

learn to use their bodies lyrically, metaphorically and expansively to explore how movement, rather than a script, can be used for storytelling. fig 2

“

I really love the idea of working as body in space, without narrative...

“

responding to cues. The idea of ‘full body listening.

Amy Williamson

Building Ensembles Building

Ensembles

and

II

collaborating as teams, participants open themselves up to the creative impulses of others. This helps to open up participants to their context and see the world through another’s eyes, rather than being locked into an idea borne of an individual’s will. fig 4

“

Without looking at anyone directly, we had to jump together and turn our directions together. It was easy at first when Mare was initiating the jump, but became harder and harder when the jump was initiated [randomly] by someone else in the group. It is easier when our mind

“

knows who to follow.

Anagha Nabar

Workshop Components

III

Spatial Interactions Spatial

Interactions

with

the

built environment expand on a conventional

understanding

of

spaces by altering our associations with them. A loosening is achieved as participants play with the physical (rather

than

characteristics

representational) of

objects

and

through

the

assemblies. fig 3

“

Once we started to explore, rather than discuss, it opened a gateway and

“

ideas started to flood in.

Krutika Sharma

IV

Building content Building

Content

connection between the architecture and body movements; themes, characters, relationships and even story emerges.

fig 5

“

“

The architecture acts as a guide for movement.

Aishwarya Padmanabhan

fig 6

CEPT Campus | Site plan mapping frequency of usage of space across campus, for the workshop performances Larger circles denote greater used spaces | Smaller circles denote least used spaces

Playful conditions and the nature of tolerance: The investigations began around the central Shrenikbhai Plaza and in the buildings that provided for its enclosure - the School of Architecture building (1966), the School of Planning & the administration extension (1970), the Lilavati Lalbhai library (2015), the additions at the boundary with the Hutheesing & Kanoria facilities and, the canteen (2017).

Through the means of play, the architecture was subjected to all manners of inhabitation.

Many of these are unconsidered while designing, and (therefore?) actively discouraged when these designed environments are put to use. The architecture of the campus was tinkered with and tugged at to explore how things worked or test limits of its performance; surfaces and components were scraped, stroked, banged and slid upon to generate sounds and sense textures; parts of the architecture were climbed upon and crawled under to shift points of view. In short, participants began an engagement beyond appearances, playing with(in) the buildings and exploring them. And claiming, albeit momentarily, not only the right to play, but the right to unsanctioned pleasure and discovery. Such experiments underplay detached cultural and historical narratives in favor of individual journeys, shifting the frame of reference and cultivating an instinct for inquiry.

“People do not play because it is easy…they want challenges”3 .

It became apparent through the course of the workshop that aesthetic or functional criteria alone are not adequate or relevant for play to “take hold”. Cues predicated by specificities of the place begin to matter. Such an intimacy emphasizes an encounter with the environment at the small scale in different spatial relationships to the body. It involves becoming aware of the slope of the ground, of when concrete becomes tinny or steel sounds pleasant, the shaky edge of a shadow, the damp spreading across a floor, the smell wafting into a corridor; of discovering the physical characteristics of the settings not with one’s eyes, but up close with the body, in what James Gibson called “environmental affordances”4 . These are the beginnings of familiarity in that they need our presence. In allowing for an intimacy, pleasure and play challenge the current tendency towards architecture that prizes itself or its sense of detail too seriously; an architecture too precious, and arguably hostile, to be engaged with or weathered by people or the environment. The aesthetic or technical criteria are the ones, it seems, with which we evoke architecture instead of imagining them as resonant settings for situations of lived life.

3.Stevens, Quentin. The Ludic City: exploring the potential of public spaces. Routledge, London (2007).

4.Affordance as a precondition to activity, depending on intentions and capabilities of the participant in the present. Gibson, James. An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Boston, 1979.

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fig 7a

Performance location Audience location

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fig 8a

fig 8b

Performance location Audience location

fig 7b

fig 7c One of the most interesting periods of the workshop involved working with sound, and producing sound for the site-specific work using the architecture that we were situated in. In a wholly unexpected way, we began to study the world of the detail. We realized that trying to generate sounds from things around us meant becoming conscious of the meeting of things, and the nature of finishes; a the most obvious being a body or an object meeting another, thus revealing the sonic properties of materials, shapes and finishes.The more curious was the world of the animate detail and the ease with which a detail functions or is maintained; a flimsy assembly rattled, an ungreased hinge squeaked, a metal stair reverberated, a latchless window banged, and so on. Moving parts produce sound, and in order to investigate the kind of sound produced, an awareness of how the detail worked needed to be cultivated. And for students of design and construction, an entirely different motivation emerged to investigate how something is made.

fig 8c

fig 8d The “north lights� (northern skylights at studios across faculty buildings on campus) providing shadowless light to factory floors and studios alike are transformed into a framing technology - reminding us of the pleasures of the horizontal window when freed from the burdens of a bearing wall (a Corbusian legacy adapted first in the 1966 school of architecture building, and continued as a language and daylighting strategy in later buildings). With the window as the primary interface between the building and its context, the explorations also illuminate an aspect of the school of architecture that is often forgotten in the dominant narratives of the campus - the terrace as a space of respite, recreation and retreat in the evenings, especially, in the context of Ahmedabad.

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fig 9a

fig 9b

Performance location Audience location

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fig 10a

fig 10b

Performance location Audience location

fig 9c

fig 9d A shadow cast on the floor becomes a (shifting) threshold between two worlds, drawing attention to it beyond its aesthetics: as a marker of a change in conditions and a junction where differences meet. Shadows not only mark the transition between inside and outside. They also bear witness to the shifts from cool to warm, dark from bright, shelter from exposure. There were a few explorations with the condition of the shadow, and in each exploration which lasted a day or more, participants realized the unreliability of the shadow - it tended to move, fade or disappear altogether, its behaviour tied to the sun, lighting and the architectural section. This in itself is fairly obvious, but in the context of the workshop, the participants were able to reflect upon the aestheticized world of architecture and photography, where shadows have become concrete and tend to get fixed through an image.

fig 10d

fig 10c

In strategically restricting the audience to a front-on vantage point and limiting play to the thickness of the railing, the flatness of the architecture of the canteen, and the importance of the architectural elevation therein, is exaggerated. A similar investigation of surfaces involved the exterior of the Lilavati Library (Fig.15). These were in stark contrast with another set of explorations involving the balconies of the promenade between the schools of architecture and planning, where play and site-specific work resulted in extending the depth northwards, towards the north lawns, hinting at the irrelevance of the architectural elevation in this case (Fig.17)

Intimacy, is an attitude to building, and is not merely a sensorial or spatial attribute. It is a keen knowledge of the building culture and methods of a place. Informed thus by the prcesses of construction, it allows the integrity of its own construction to be revealed and challenge notions of a more finished look installed not to age. It allows for the built to let time reflect in things and of how far we can stretch the sense of it still being made, in a continuous present. Intimacy informs a tolerance to multiple histories, celebrating difference and dismantling ubiquity. It is an attitude which recognizes that monumentality lies not in the scale, grandeur or pristineness of the artefact (building) but in the ability to perceive the passage of time, and to feel the age in things; a recognition that raises questions for our belief in the architectural icon, its expected purity; the trajectories of its conservation and how to give depth to the reading of the work. **** At the scale of the detail, our explorations involved the transformation of elements and assemblies either through an immediate use or through more formal associations. Although associative transformations (Fig 11-13, a-series) provided an element of momentary recognition, surprise or delight, it was in finding an alternate use (Fig 11-13, b-series) that participants could understand architectural conditions holding within them the capacity to be multivalent - bringing a convivial complicity between functions officially programmed and ones that were not (Fig 11-13). A complicity that engages us in the search for a greater economy of means, and yet acknowledge the rigours of use in their construction. The goal of such an attitude is to intensify and expand the impact of a limited set of operations, asking less to be more through the interweaving of functional activity and material conditions.The attitude to multivalence is in stark contrast to the more specialized assemblies we currently favour to address a particular set of functions efficiently (fig.14, 15). Such assemblies are easily identifiable as design features, where everything outside their scope becomes someone or something else’s problem.

fig 11a

fig 11b

With a change in the audience viewpoint, a

Measure drawing through the body, registering

characteristic inherent in a staircase, a new narrative

the width of the entrance bridge at the school of

emerges. Participants bring forth their inner Escher

architecture building, and the sturdiness of a concrete

while working with the staircase of the school of

railing.

architecture building.

fig 12a

fig 12b

The vertical tongue-and-groove joints of the wood The ease of the pivot door swing and the design of the paneling at the studio doors of the school of architecture door handles allow the doors functioning as a pair of building evoke a cheese grater.

gymnastic rings.

fig 13a

fig 13b

The simple lines of the balcony railing transformed into The balcony railing as exercise equipment (not a stretched rope through the enactment of a tug-of- recommended for the faint of heart) war game.

fig 14a

fig 14b

fig 15a

fig 15b

fig 14c

fig 14d

fig 15c

fig fig15d 4a

Whereas technocratic approaches to notions of flexibility, resilience or sustainability (fig 14, 15) prize commodity over context, creating a detachment between the meanings and rituals of use and the built environment, multivalence is a different manner of framing expertise: it comes through one’s keen understanding of the context within which one is working, and through questioning which technology and products constitute relevance in a particular situation or geography. It is an approach that enables the capacity to improvise, and begins to define our ideas around efficiency and endurance. The building itself, through its attitude to use, creates the controls the user needs. In short, dealing effectively with context necessitates an inventiveness about living patterns using different conditions of the built form, about activity beyond “function�; and this cycle of activity, played out day after day, reinforces patterns of living that generates the meaning of use, and the culture of the place. ****

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P1 A1

P5

P6

A5

A6

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A4

A2 P2

A3 P3

fig 16 CEPT Campus | Site plan, showing the locations of the final performances

Perfomance locations

Audience locations

Audience movement path

Reversing the gaze of the iconic “street view� at CEPT, which is captured at the point of entrance to the campus from the north gate.

How you enter has become a dominant narrative in the way we construct the architectural promenade. Instead, here the students work fig 17 from within, exploring connections and thresholds from inside out and acknowledging departures.

fig 18 Toying with the edge between the Hutheesingh Visual Arts Centre and CEPT where once soft thresholds have since hardened.

Play also shares common ground with architectural conditions of the threshold, the border and the boundary. In its practice of playing, and its temporality, it occupies liminal spaces .

The inbetween. Games are always played within or between, with the potential of altering what is within and without. Players move into play and step out of play to close play. In its potential to transcend, or subvert, to cross boundaries, play reveals the possible, but also what already stands as a structure or context, yielding an archaeology of architectural and urban conditions.

Play makes us aware of those hidden areas that conventional tools do not yield because they measure the measurable so far in architecture and studies of the built environment.

In exploring the campus thus, beyond the iconic (structures, landscape features or vistas), For further elaboration on the conditions of play, see Steven, Quentin. The Ludic City: exploring the potential of public spaces. Routledge, London (2007).

fig 19a

fig 19b

fig 19c

The circumstantial within a larger order gets acknowledged through the inhabitation of a less celebrated connection fig 19d

to

the

northlawns,

spatially and through narrative (of a schoolyard during recess)

spaces and connections less celebrated become relevant to the explorations, with the nature of enclosures and boundaries materially revealed (fig.17-20). Play is sensed as an equalizer that momentarily removes the campus’s calibrated divisions, creating ephemeral common grounds that provide participants ways of

lingering within a space beyond

immediate use; a form of dwelling, of being held-in-place that reclaims one’s sense of belonging in it, however momentary. Such physical memories are critical to building a sense of collective inheritance.

Memory work has long taken note of the role of the body in re-membering, and its flexibility in modulating the contours of memories over time. Creation of memories and memory work necessarily demands the ability to distantiate without disengaging - of capturing and storing textures and layers of events and conditions that allows these to be brought into context as conditions enable them. We look at this subjectivity and fluidity of memory work as a strength. Approaching memory work in this manner may allow complexities to emerge in context, rather than attempting to freeze their fluidities in the so far accepted modes of documentation. We look at play as a way of opening a possibility to finding new languages of expression of complexity in time, space and materiality. ****

fig 20 Activating the terraces, and developing a critique of the [landscape] design of the plaza as an exercise primarily in done through the architectural plan

a short note on patrimony and its recording: With the specific case of CEPT, does the careful, yet discrete, preservation of individual buildings (or landscape features) within a context contradict its world-view that imbues tolerance and necessitates looking at the built environment as a continuum; and does such a compartmentalized approach in fact create conditions where dealing with the complexities of context becomes some other discipline’s problem? When the heritage in question is a campus of design, planning and technology for the built environment, the questions concerning its conservation become more desperate, urgent and poignant because any trajectory determined is also materially articulating values in the education of an architect, and the practice of architecture.

Our workshop is a method of recording that emphasizes architectural inheritance beyond buildings, and their relative categories of importance. It also resists freezing lived practices into well-set cultural narratives. Instead, through creating opportunities of delight and discovery within what is already familiar, it cultivates a sense of patrimony, and gives importance to acts of inhabitation and design that acknowledge the time in things, so that we can follow the genesis of the structures and how they change as things are rubbed out and drawn over while the traces of the earlier versions of their histories continue to be clear.

ReFresh CEPT Conceived and conducted by Shubhra Raje & Mare Trevathan Workshop for SWS, Winter 2018, CEPT Campus Participants: Abhishek Durani

Eva Thomas

Rick Adhikary

Agrima Manglik

Gajjar Naman Mayank

Roma Patadia

Aishwarya Padmanabhan Kairav Trivedi

Rutuja Manoj Kulkarni

Amy - Williamson

Kinjal Ilesh Parikh

Shambhavi Kumari

Arushi Gopal

Nabar Anagha Arun Asha

Sharma Krutika Mani

Avinash Bhatt Vrutti Nileshbhai

Oghani Samarth Jitendrakumar Siddhi Agarwal Pendharkar Kshitija Kishor Anjali Somya H Agarwal

Bina Jayesh Udeshi

Pooja Sharma

Sprya Sharma

Brijain Mistry

Pulkit Sudan

Surpuriya Pratiksha Sanjay

Teaching Assistant: Srushti Shah Photography and Videography: Aanshi Ghoel & Mugdha Pargunde Report Compilation: Srushti Shah & Shubhra Raje

Š2019 Shubhra Raje