domus 36 January 2015
Volume 04 / Issue 03 R200
Author
Authors Aparna Andhare Art historian
Kaiwan Mehta
Imran Ali Khan Researcher
26
Contemporary museum for architecture in India
Ranjit Hoskote
The elusiveness of the transitive
28
Contemporary museum for architecture in India
Ranjit Hoskote Poet, cultural theorist and art critic
Nancy Adajania
34
New media overtures before new media practice in India
Robert D Stephens
38
Shadows and memory
Robert D Stephens Architect and photographer
Imran Ali Khan
46
Disturbing the petals
Contributors Ekta Idnany Suprio Bhattacharjee
Aparna Andhare
50
Suprio Bhattacharjee
52
Kaiwan Mehta
54
Collecting and history-telling
Arata Isozaki
56
Supra-intimate space “beyond architecture”
Ekta Idnany
60
Christopher Charles Benninger Architects
Projects The argument of form
Kaiwan Mehta
68
IMK Architects
Crucibles for thinking, and redrawing lives
82
Frank Gehry
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
94
Amancio Williams
The House over the brook, Mar del Plata
Talking Design
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
102
Rassegna Outdoor
107
Feedback Xavier Vendrell’s Chicago
Volume 04 / Issue 03 R200
Xavier Vendrell INDIA
Space of joy Talking Design
Daniel Tiozzo
January 2015
City of circles Talking Design
Photographers Brandon Biederman Hisaho Suzuki Iwan Baan Javier Rodriguez Leo Torri Marius Quintana Mary English Milan Rohrer Nancy Adajania Prakash Rao Rajesh Vora Ramprasad Naidu A Tadashi Okakura Xavier Vendrell
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
Title Editorial Steps into another framework altogether
036
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
036 January 2015
036 January 2015
Cover: Detail of the Fondation Louis Vuitton building in Paris by Frank Gehry. The 43 luminous columns alternated with yellow mosaic and mirrors below (not seen in the image) cast a gleam on the connecting bridge above.
ELEVATION B ELEVATION A
corridor
036
Design
Confetti
Nancy Adajania Cultural theorist, art critic and curator
INDIA
CONTENTS 25
corridor
January 2015
ELEVATION C
ELEVATION D
Elevations of the Symbiosis Knowledge Village campus buildings, in Lavale, Pune designed by Rahul Kadri of IMK Architects
C D
ELEVATION E
E
domus 36 January 2014
26 EDITORIAL
STEPS INTO ANOTHER FRAMEWORK ALTOGETHER One has made many notes in the past on the shape and life of architecture. As we enter a new year and everybody is excited about all that is new, planning new futures, shaping new visions, we think it is very necessary to review what we have said and what we have done. In the recent past, this is the third time the magazine is obsessively taking an account of what happened in the months and issues gone by; one has felt the constant need to generate an inventory, one that is by no ways final, but in a process of thinking through notes, recollections, reiterations, and simply taking some time to mull and ponder over some ideas, a few thoughts... — Architecture in many ways for many of us becomes the meaning-making process, making meaning of that which we refer to as life. The love for architecture cannot emerge from anything else but from the love of life. Life is then that abyss where charting paths, marking locations, building relationships becomes the way of carving sense out of this abyss; and architecture is my guide, my mode, my idea and my challenge, my tool-set and my system. Architecture is the tool-box which I use to sculpt life from the abyss of existence. DI_21 — Architecture, in many ways, becomes the playground for culture, life and society to play itself out. Its existence is much, and far beyond that of the architect, and so, in many ways, the architect is playing his role within the architecture as a field of living, rather than being the super-creator of that field. The architect is oscillating between the roles of a creator and a sustainer – creating the material shell and context, by actively engaging with the ocean of life as matter as well as context, and hence sustaining it. The architect essentially engages with what he is given by culture and society, but in his practice s/he also holds the key to turn the rules of the game at some time under certain conditions. Often the questions architects ask, or are pressured to answer, need to be thought through outside the direct production of architecture, but yet within the biography of buildings and material landscapes. The life of things and objects are journeys within histories and cultural atmospheres, and hence their existence is embedded in context, often even sustained by that – in which case the study of objects is incomplete without understanding the atmospheres that house them, and through which objects journey. But this also brings us to essentially realise that the study of architecture may not reside within the practice of architecture, nor are the tools of architecture adequate for the knowledge we need to produce about the life of architecture. In which case borrowings from experiences and researches in other fields may be necessary to study and understand, but having said this, the problem is how do we assimilate knowledge produced in different fields and formats into one conversation or a conversation purely on architecture? DI_27 — Those involved in the practice and field of architecture directly, as well as the others firstly need to understand how architecture is way beyond building and shaping buildings. Within the community of architects itself there are many ways of thinking about architecture – for some it is business, for others it’s about juggling sizes and looks, and for some it is art, philosophical engagement and a way of life!
This situation puts a certain kind of pressure on how one discusses architecture within a journalistic space like the magazine, which is also the crucial critical space. A magazine has to mirror the profession and field it represents on the one hand, but also has to challenge it harshly, critically, responsibly and creatively. To showcase the debates and dilemmas of the profession, the ideas and thoughts in the field and the struggles of producing buildings within the architectural field is what a good architectural magazine should be engaged in. Architecture, and its object – the building – exists within a plethora of practices and ideas; it is an aspect of historical and philosophical or ideological confluences as well as a result of building material and technological developments and availability of patronage, an economic environment, and so on... We begin engaging with architecture but it soon turns into an investigation of everyday life, the worlds of philosophy, history and politics that shape our individual and public lives. The journey is one that is intellectually investigating our roles as professionals, our responsibilities as creators of objects in a large and complex world, as well as our thinking as human beings occupying and using space as well as resources in a rich and challenging society. DI_23 — The act of ‘making’ things is one of the primary occupations of mankind and civilisation. Making things has been, in fact, the production of civilisation and the physical world of objects that human beings occupy, and make life within, and with. From underestimating ‘making’ as the most obvious thing someone can do, to raising it to the level of art and design, to treating it as a fine-tuning of skill in craft and artisanship, we have dealt with ‘making’ in many ways; yet not deciphered it enough. This is most apparent when one is trying to teach ‘making’ and figure out the process of education a ‘maker’ needs to go through. Skill can be taught, art can be discussed and critiqued, but how do these become the process of ‘making’? In India, the process often has another layer attached to it – making also falls into the discussion on caste, where a human being’s and community’s social status and scale of polluted-ness, decided by birth, is also associated with the task and work s/he can do, will do... The world of human beings and the world of objects is indeed a complex network of relationships, in many ways deciding the constellation we may refer to as society, or its politics and culture. From Jean Baudrillard and Arjun Appadurai, to Hannah Arendt and Richard Sennett, and from the actions of Gandhi to the debates of Ambedkar, much has been said about objects, their making, and their existence in human life and history, yet it is often in the everyday struggle to make new objects, and educating new generations of producers that the reality of ‘making things’ dawns upon one most sharply, and critically. Education itself has a much larger role in teaching the act and art, process and design of making – much beyond teaching the means and materials of it. Criticism then even steps into another framework altogether – the act and art, process and design of meaning-making, and the understanding of the cultural life of objects made and used. Education needs to understand and develop frameworks within which the maker
Kaiwan Mehta
understands not only her/his job, but the role and significance of his job as well as the consequences and contributions of the objects s/he makes in the social and political life of human environments. Journalism and criticism keep alive then the discussions between ‘making objects’ and ‘making meanings’. From the anvil and the workshop, to the laboratory and the museum, to the library and the writingtable, objects are being made all the time, meanings and the cultural life of ‘making’ is being constantly produced, and churned out, and manufactured. The ‘makers’ are often in different roles – the labourer, the technician, the artisan, the craftsman, the artist, the designer, the weaver, the electrician, the fashion designer, the architect, the critic, the poet, the taxi driver, the hawker … and it can go on. DI_29 — We … fail to understand the category of the ‘critic’ who is a producer of thoughts and ideas as much as an architect is. Writing is the mode and medium that produces architecture as much as the drawing, the sketch, and the stone and aluminum produce a building. That architecture is probably one of the most (physical-) process-intensive of all artistic and cultural productions, should hint towards the values and techniques of process – its nature, role and protocols. The building is an accretion of its process/es and the final object can be deceptive and not essentially account for its process of production. The buildingobject can cheat its process and produce an image for itself, and then stories are told to validate the image rather than the process of production. Production and construction in this conversation can no longer be the architectural and engineering act of putting walls and foundations, structure and facades together, but it is the construction of architecture, the production of its (architecture’s) sense and idea, in the process of building, renovating and conserving architecture. As much as this production continues in the life of architecture, the life of a building which begins once the first user enters it and starts making every space and detail of the building his/her own, or maybe rejects it. The celebrated icon is architecture, as much as the rotting wall and abused building is architecture. Every user, and abuser, of a building produces architecture, as much as the architect and contractor, engineer and mason are producing it. The architect strives to keep authorship of the process, manoeuver it, shape it, direct it, but alas the shape of architecture does not allow him/her to be the sole producer, s/he tries to be the sole interpreter but again alas the user and the critic do not let him/her do that either! DI_26
CONFETTI
— We close this inventory here, for now, but open a new year with some clear ideas and intentions. This issue, we begin a new mini-project within the pages of the magazine – What we talk, when we talk about design – and we continue with From the past, but only more significant now… while we look at three very important projects in the sphere of education and architecture, with all examples making crucial statements on how they understand the role of architectural form in India’s contemporary landscape. km
Tanmoy Samanta, Random Birds, 2013. Set of 11. Watercolour on handmade paper, 6x10 inches each
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52 CONFETTI
domus 36 January 2015
CONFETTI 53
TALKING DESIGN
SPACE OF JOY What we talk about, when we talk about design... Under the misplaced guise of ‘freedom’ there is often a consensus that when something ‘new’ can be created, why should one look back – an idea that is a well-documented Modernist and 20th Century folly Suprio Bhattacharjee
Below: glimpses of the author’s library. Left: the fertile landscape the Bengal region
What we talk about, when we talk about design... (a clear reference to Haruki Murakami) was a sentence we sent across to designers, writers, and thinkers on the subject of design... asking them for a spontaneous response, from everyday work, or from one’s own studio, or memory and experiences... issues we would talk about, examples we would cite, as we sat across a table with friends and colleagues, and chatted over some good tea or coffee...
Circa 2009. I am sitting in front of the Director of an aspiring school. I wasn’t sure why I was being called in for a one-to-one – but not long into the conversation it becomes apparent. I was being preached. “So, we should teach them new concepts in architectural design and architecture theory – new concepts such as” – there was this slight pause as his eyes fell upon me to announce loftily, “layering.” I felt like this was going to be one of those revelatory earth-shattering moments, but hey, no. I looked at his terse smile in disbelief. Vivid images of Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Canoviano and the epochic restoration of the Castelvecchio Museum floated; no, rushed past. Wait, I thought, ‘layering’ as a ‘conscious’ design strategy within recent times is, well, at least half a century old – at least in the Western canon. And as a deeply ingrained aspect of culture, one needs to just examine Japanese spatial practices that date from, well, as Google humorously states in one of its prompts, ‘the beginning of time’. But this wasn’t a joke and I wasn’t erasing my browsing history. Rather, it seemed that somewhere, some other mis-readings of history needed to be erased. I thought to play Good Samaritan and offer a little resetting of facts. Ummmm. Not welcome. So I stepped out of the room and began to wonder, where does one begin? Of course, one needs a re-reading of history – and not only in the Humanities class – but even in our design studios and our practices. Now this is of course a contentious territory. Under the mis-placed guise of ‘freedom’ there is often a consensus that when something ‘new’ can be created, why should one look back – but this has already been a well-documented Modernist and 20th Century folly. Perhaps we have learned from the past. Or not. Well, (if one chooses to point out) is this really new? – in most cases one is met with diffidence. A favourite example is the ‘Modern House syndrome’. How often have we been washed with images of Villa Savoye, the Farnsworth House, and Johnson’s Glass House, as these ‘iconic Modernist’ houses – and their ‘radical’ nature. But were they ‘really that radical’? Let us ask this question again. And then observe how rarely we remember Oscar Niemeyer’s Canoas House, Aalto’s Villa Mairea, Bo Bardi’s own ‘Glass House’, Kazuo Shinohara’s Kugayama House or Sep
Ruf’s Kanzlerbungalow. Or for that matter, Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre. And then there’s this fetish for the ‘innovative’ and the ‘new’ and the fastidious labelling of these so-called ‘new’ ideas, irrespective of their place in the history of spatial disciplines. I remember reading something more than a decade ago (the late 1990s? – I forget the reference) where the author, reflecting on the state of architecture in the last decade of the century, surmises that if everyone’s innovating, then well, no one’s innovating. This thought has remained with me for a while. What the author perhaps was really trying to point out, I can now infer, is that there can be no ‘self-conscious’ innovation. That comes from the space of the ‘ego’ and not the ‘spirit’ – and hence is a mere manifestation of a ‘desire’ to ‘create’ – all of which are ‘assertions’ of the self – a conflicted world-view where the self is still greater than the rest. That is perhaps the polar opposite of the space of humility from which the most radical thoughts and actions emerge – as such history bears witness to the most paradigmatic manifestations of thought that are so ‘effortless’ on the part of the individual – that they are representative of the act of the ‘subconscious’ perhaps – so ingrained in their actors, that it seems to be the most natural thing to do. There is seldom a realisation that for something truly original to happen, one would need to perhaps re-constitute one’s self from, well, within. Which means a significant and deep re-constitution of one’s relationship to one’s surroundings, their interaction with the self, and thus a re-positioning of the self with respect to those surroundings. Immersion. Dissolution. Subsumption. Not submission. Submission is an outcome of hierarchy. Immersion is nonhierarchical. I constantly am reminded of the quest of ‘Oku’ within Japanese spatial practices – that imperceptible and indefinable (but deeply experiential and perceptual) atmospheric state within spatial constructs where the self is at ease, ‘free’ in the most intense sense of the word, at harmony, at a state of non-conflict with all, an inner realm where there is a synchronicity with the ‘one’ as we may call it perhaps (now this is my inference) – the ‘advaita’. It is this deep search for a spatial condition (and not formalisation – let
us underline and note) that perhaps makes for a building culture so distinct. I think of Tagore’s idea of ‘Anando’ – a deep state of ‘joy’ – not ‘joy’ in the sense of ‘pleasure’ or ‘happiness’ – but the state of ‘joy’ where one is no longer in conflict, one is free of reactionary traits, the self is ‘at one’ with the surroundings – at ease, withdrawing, there, not there – supremely immersed and embedded – accepting, porous, immense, magnanimous, yet intimate. I think I can relate this to the experience one has of the landscape of that region – Bengal – the fertile plains at the mouth of the Ganges – the immense flatness and the gift of sempervirence – that on a dewy morning can simply wash clean all of last night’s harrowing dreams. I felt this during my visit to my beloved Harishchandrapur – this village of my maternal ancestry – that’s tucked away in the north-west region of West Bengal’s political boundary where the neck threatens to snap off the head – close to Jharkhand, and not so far from its sister, Bangladesh.
Incidentally, as I write this, I am also engaging in a workshop at a Mumbai school where the students are being asked to deal with the idea of ‘modernity’. This is interesting – for if – at its very core – ‘modernity’ can be surmised as a perception of the self or the sense-of-self, contexted by a sense-of-place, can we evolve a sense of ourselves today that breaches the most contentious aspects of our selves – our shorn sense of heritage, politics and culture – and connects us with that which is infinite – a ‘physical’ manifestation of which is perhaps the land we tread upon, Gaia as the ancients have been calling it, or ‘Ecology’ – the ‘scientific’ existence of which we have belatedly realised only half a century or so ago. Today the Prince of Wales talks about it (ironically) as do repeated conferences on that topic. We have invented labels for it that clothe old knowledge with a superficial fabric of ‘sustainability’ and ‘green’. But in all of this throwing around of jargon, are we really re-constituting our own selves, and
thus our world-view – or are we merely trading one word for another? Modern man in his rush for technological appropriation has forgotten the timeless nature of native knowledge – regardless of the East/West binary. But yes, there is a growing existence of those agents of the luminescence that revel in this newfound joy of knowing and connect – perhaps most recently if one looks at (for the sake of an immediate example) these two exceptionally luminous works by ‘young’ practitioners – the Plasencia Congress Centre by SelgasCano in the West, and the Kanagawa Workshop in the East – two works that accept the produce of a generalised ‘modernity’ as a given, but root its sense-of-being immutably to a sense-of-time-andplace, what Christian Norberg-Schulz had once termed as a quest for the Genius Loci – a new Phenomenology of Place. So there is of course the light – all we need is to really ‘look around us’ . . . . quoting Tagore, “......Aanondodhaara Bohitsche Bhuboney.......”