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20 t Volume 02 t Issue 09 t August 2013 / RKDS Structure as iconography / Kochi-Muziris biennale bits of beauty everywhere / Joseph Grima engineering and tradition / Julian Worrall rebuilding communities / Khushboo Bharti a quest for cultural nostalgia / Heidi Specker m g road / Specker, Weski, Vyas, Niggemann city as dimension / Clare Arni space and possession / Dekho, Codesign amar in the making

India

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domus 20

August 2013

Editorial The investigation with forms and ideas of visuality continue in this issue too. We move into the street and urban spaces looking at the way they are animated and decorated, and what it means to document that. Jaipur belongs to a region with great visual traditions of paintings on walls, with the classic case of Shekhawati. In this city, the paintings on city surfaces seem to be an important 'quest for nostalgia' through government commissions, irrespective of which party forms the government. Forms of representation come under the scanner here as historical figures as well as prototypes of 'traditional' figures are painted and sculpted. Motifs seem to get classified as tribal or otherwise, and preferences emerge as to what kind of images should get drawn on which surfaces. All of this produces a graphic mélange of contemporary life and built form in the city, with images from a past that is imagined as ideal and beautiful. It is not a juxtaposition of images across historical periods, but an overlapping of the living city, spaces and architecture with images that construct an ideal past, a past that states and governments aspire to encourage within their populace. The rich photographic documentation with detailed annotations by Khushboo Bharti helps us to understand the landscape that is contemporary, that is struggling and the ways in which modern societies produce their pasts, along with governmental support and narrative structures — some borrowed, along with some imagined and re-imagined out of context.

In the same line of thought we engage with M G Road — a name, a road one finds in every Indian city. However, this M G Road is the one in Ahmedabad, where Heidi Specker, a photographer, from Leipzig, Germany is trying to understand the city through a photo-interpretation of the road with this name. She attempts to overlap the city she has imagined and tried to figure out with all the knowledge and information that she has collected even before coming to Ahmedabad, now with the road she walks down. Names like Corbusier, Mahatma Gandhi and the Sarabhais become her cues to dissect the road. There is a zooming in and out in her photo-documentation... from the façades of nondescript buildings to pieces of modern sculpture and the flow of fabrics, she develops a portfolio of collected images. Heidi Specker also brought along some of her students, who, along with students from the National Institute of Design (NID), worked on a photo-documentary of the city and its spaces, which essentially collects the city as a collage of elements and visual formations. The city which is a collection of parts in a way, and a series of

objects, visual experiences and constant discoveries, gets structured and understood through the series of images each student has put together. This collection becomes the beginning of a process to investigate and analyse what urbanity means and how cities achieve characteristics that are specific to them, yet the city extends and exists beyond these imagined and identified characteristics. These images also capture that which otherwise may appear chaotic, without any cogent and cohesive structure and visual frame; drawing our attention to corners and juxtapositions which we would miss as a frame belonging to a larger narrative, otherwise.

A third collection of street images comes from Clare Arni; at a cursory look these are images that vibrantly capture street-walls strongly painted with a variety of subjects and illustrations. However, what the frames here capture is the way these brightly painted walls engage the street and its users. With changing economic condition, the ever-growing nature of cities in India and again specifically Bengaluru which has drastically undergone changes socially as well as culturally... a study of this nature keeps in mind the way we perceive what is private and what is public, what is religious and cordoned off, or what is shared and available to many. As newer economic relationships have emerged, religious, ethnic and regionalist approaches to cities and their spaces have also grown. In this situation, what does a painted street mean? What does a painted street indicate, allow and harbour? One is reminded of the wall painting project in cities such as Mumbai, where groups of youngsters come together on Sunday mornings to paint an allocated spot on long walls along roads and in neighbourhoods — however, these often tend to be message boards, emphasising middleclass imaginations of what is good and what is bad, and promoting a sort of 'valid and acceptable street art'. While street art has always been spontaneous, and graffiti has meant claiming a street politically and opposing normative values imposed by institutional forms, the Wall Painting Project in fact introduces a form of institutional approach to even street art now! Against this, photos by Clare Arni show how streets can be taken-over by painted surfaces actually indicative of claims and conflicts.

Extending our interest in design and the aspect of visuality we engage with a book called Dekho, literally asking you to see... based on the premise of seeing, looking, and the many aspects of the visual world we design, represent and hence construct.

The book is a wonderful collection of interviews with many designers, discussing from typography to exhibitions, public information projects to design

education. This book is truly a first step towards comprehensively putting together a history of design in contemporary India. We bring to you a discussion on the making of this book and the idea behind it, as well as one of the interviews, that with Amardeep Behl, the designer of the exhibition at the Panjpani Gallery, Khalsa Museum, a building designed by Moshe Safdie, in Anandpur Sahib, Punjab. We believe these discussions on designing spatial narratives are something that will interest our readers.

In a manner of directly discussing architecture, we look at the Volvo-Eicher Headquarters in Gurgaon, Haryana designed by Delhi-based Romi Khosla Design Studio. And we also discuss how at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale artists engaged with the architecture and built spaces of the city — a condition that emerged out of the difficult situation within which this biennale took place.

Architectural elements, sites and built volumes with their form, location and constructional characteristics became the grounds for artistic enquiry and integration into the city of Kochi as well as the other concerns each artist was working with. This indicates to us the expanse that space and architecture offer in a cultural endeavour of this sorts as well as the unpredictable and elastic life and nature of buildings.

The Volvo-Eicher Headquarters sits in the mishmash of architectural constructions in Gurgaon, Haryana clearly defining a sense of its own identity which comes from its structural logic and posturing. Structure, in this case, literally generates the architectural ornament and iconography of the building. As the architects mention, the realisation of building with its various parts manufactured in different parts of the world is nothing unique or revolutionary today, however, for this to be successful within the current context of Gurgaon, is surely an achievement of sorts since various parts have been crafted with close interactions with small metal workers and many visits to the Delhi markets. Combining precise computer technologies with craft skills available in the vicinity has indeed indicated towards a system of architecture for the future. And finally, the visual logic of the built form emerges from the structure itself.

With these ideas, we bring to you once again an issue of Domus India that forever keeps expanding the scope and definition of architecture, spaces and design.

— KAIWAN MEHTA

7

In the beginning was the Word (cogito ergo credo) From the exhibition Das Bauhaus in Kalkutta (The Bauhaus in Calcutta)

— Georg Muche 1922 Rights: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin 8

The east German city of Dessau had recently organised an exhibition that was originally held in 1922 in Calcutta at the Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of the lndian Society of Oriental Art. This exhibition titled Das Bauhaus in Kalkutta (The Bauhaus in Calcutta) is a reconstruction of the same.

(Also see pages 25 and 26)

Young Woman, Part 4 of the book 10 Original Lithographs From the exhibition Das Bauhaus in Kalkutta (The Bauhaus in Calcutta)

— Johannes Itten 1919 Bauhaus Archive Berlin, VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, Photo: Markus Hawlik 12

Envelope to: Utopia. Documents of reality, Utopia Verlag From the exhibition Das Bauhaus in Kalkutta (The Bauhaus in Calcutta)

— Margit Tery-Adler Weimar, 1921 Rights: Judith Adler, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

10

domus 20

August 2013

Op–Ed

Op–Ed / Gyan Prakash

A text of urban conciousness The city is dead. Urban theorists tell us that the city no longer exists as a distinct, bounded entity. Urban sprawl and globalisation have turned cities into barely legible legal nodes in vast urbanised systems of communication, transnational flows of people, capital, commodities, images, and ideas. The world is now comprised of megacities with ever-extending reach and rapidly diminishing inner unity. Increasingly obsolete is the idea of the bounded city, defined by an internally coherent civic life, organised as a public space inhabited by rational citizens, and structured by clear relationships to the region, nation, and the wider w orld.

Mumbai is often described in similar terms. Newspaper and magazine commentaries, and literary and academic writings frequently portray the great city in ruins. Where once textile mills and docks had hummed to an industrial rhythm, there is now the cacophony of the post-industrial megapolis. In place of the clearly defined city of mills, dockworkers, employees, and trade unions, there is now the socially amorphous world of the megacity strung out tight between its rich and poor ends.

Civic services are bursting at the seams under the pressure exerted by explosive and unplanned growth. Nativist passions, communal riots, the nexus between corrupt politicians and greedy businessmen, have destroyed civic consciousness and wrecked the city as a coherent and cosmopolitan space. So when the Shiv Sena officially renamed Bombay as Mumbai in 1996, to many the re-christening seemed to formalize the transformation that had already occurred. The flood in 2005, when large parts of the city went under water, only darkened the sense of doom. The human bodies, animal carcasses, and garbage floating in the water appeared to expose the malaise set deep in the city’s body.

Etched in this portrait of death and ruin are the outlines of a remembered city. Its shape peers through the images of the creaking infrastructure, eroded institutions, and ethnic eruptions on the city’s cosmopolitan skin. Yes, the city had changed, but also identifiable in accounts of transformations wrought by post-industrial growth and globalisation is the idea of Mumbai as a specific place. The city’s residents experience their globally situated and connected environments as decidedly local lifeworlds, thick with particular experiences, practices, imaginations, and memories. In fact, the awareness of change has only sharpened Mumbai’s urban consciousness and produced a surfeit of interest in the city. Consider the recent proliferation in the number of novels, nonfiction works, and films about Mumbai. Architectural historians have retrieved records and photographs to produce portraits of the history of the Island City’s built environment. A renaissance of scholarly interest in Mumbai is clearly evident in the spurt of studies by historians, anthropologists, and urban researchers.

The enhanced focus on Mumbai not only reflects the growing importance of urbanisation, but also draws attention to the question of the modern city as a society.

The English translation and publication of Govind Narayan’s Mumbaiche Varnan as Govind Narayan’s Mumbai: An Urban Biography from 1863 should be seen in the light of this growing interest in the city. The first full account of Mumbai written in any language, Govind Narayan’s text is well known among students of the city’s history. It was composed before the ramparts of the Fort were torn down to accommodate the city’s growth. Yet, even at this early date, the text registers an urban consciousness. It describes Mumbai as an urban society, not as a subset of the nation or region. The Island City appears as a spectacle, a visual object to behold and appreciate. As Govind Narayan describes Mumbai’s sights and sounds, he suggests that we are witnessing the emergence of something new. He presents himself as an observer of this emergent reality, taking us on a guided tour of its wondrous social and cultural landscape.

Combining observation of daily life with accounts of the city’s built environment, institutions, and people, and interspersing

historical details with legends and myths, Govind Narayan writes excitedly of Mumbai as a dynamic city, as a marvellous metropolis of cultural and linguistic diversity. He depicts the cotton trade and cotton mills, describes the city’s religious patterns and festivals, provides a view of its drinking and gambling dens and criminal life, and paints pictures of its street life. These descriptions anticipate the representations that we now associate with Mumbai. Thus, he writes of the presence of a cosmopolitan array of religions, ethnicities, languages, classes, castes, and communities in the city. The Hindus, he says, consist of over a hundred castes, ‘with no end of differences and variations within these castes.’ Then, there are ‘other castes – the Parsi, Mussalman, Moghul, Yahudi, Israeli, Bohra, Khoja, Memon, Arab, Kandhari’. Also listed are the ‘hatted raced’, - the English, Portuguese, French, Greek, Dutch, Turkish, German, Armenian, and Chinese (p. 50).

Diverse and complex, Mumbai is also presented as a dynamic city of opportunities, a place that attracts people from all over in search of work and fortunes. Accounts of its famous Parsi merchants and traders serve as evidence of the chance for advancement and wealth that the city offers. So great are these opportunities that no one need go hungry. ‘In this City of Mumbai, the poor and the maimed, the lame and the crippled, the deaf and the dumb, the blind and the maimed, the good and the bad, the thief and the scavenger, the fool and the fraud, whoever one may be, is deprived of neither food nor clothing’ (p. 58). Obviously, this is not meant to describe an actual situation but to convey his image of the possibilities that Mumbai offered.

In fact, a striking feature of Govind Narayan’s text is its unalloyed enthusiasm for the city. As he moves from topic to topic, now describing its urban form and then sketching its social architecture, a strong undercurrent of admiration for the city runs through the text. He strongly appreciates the environment of the modern city that he identifies in the mint, the telegraphs, metalled roads, railways, docks, cotton mills, Town Hall, the courts and the police, and street life.

Recognising the formation of a new society in these spatial forms, he registers the development as a doubly colonial project. Thus, while expressing support for British efforts to develop and manage Mumbai, he also records its history as a colonial project, i.e., as an attempt to establish mastery over nature. He writes about the filling of breaches and the cutting down of trees as part of the city’s growth. We learn about the construction of docks and piers, and roadways and embankments as acts of human artifice to bend nature to culture. But these acts of progress were also acts of destruction. They involved, for example, the imposition of an abstract geographical grid over lands infused with religious and customary meanings. Govind Narayan’s recording of this process, however, also reveals that these acts of erasure were not complete. Consider, for example, his account of the construction of the Worli embankment. In describing the embankment’s erection, he recounts a legend according to which the project did not succeed until the engineer followed goddess Mahalaxmi’s instructions that he received in a dream.

She told him to retrieve her idol buried in the seabed and install it in a temple. Once this was done, the embankment project was successful (p. 74-75). Whether or not historically accurate, the legend undercuts the story of a relentless march to progress.

Gods and goddesses do not go away but return to haunt the site of their expulsion. As a record of Mumbai’s nineteenth century history, as a text of urban consciousness, Mumbaiche Varnan is superb. Its unavailability in English so far has meant that this fascinating indigenous account of Mumbai has remained inaccessible to readers without the knowledge of Marathi. We owe a debt of gratitude to Murali Ranganathan for translating this text and making it available to the wider readership that it so richly deserves.—

This text is a foreword from the book Govind Narayan’s Mumbai: An Urban Biography from 1863 edited and translated

by Murali Ranganathan

Gyan Prakash is the DaytonStockton Professor of History at Princeton University. His general field of research and teaching interests concerns urban modernity, the colonial genealogies of modernity, and problems of postcolonial thought and politics. He is also the author of Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City

by Princeton University Press, 2011

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domus 20

August 2013

Op–Ed

Op–Ed / Zara Audiello, Lorenza Baroncelli

Slavic rhapsody

Zara Audiello, curator, lives and works in Belgrade, where she has opened a gallery. In 2009 she co-founded Association 22:37, a critical and curatorial collective that operates between Milan, Barcelona, Berlin, Venice and Belgrade. She is also project manager for Art & Tours, an agency of artist walks and guided tours of contemporary art, architecture and culture in Berlin and Belgrade.

Lorenza Baroncelli, architect, researcher and curator, today she collaborates on several research projects regarding the relationship between landscape, new technologies and conflicts in Italy, Colombia and Serbia.

She worked with Giancarlo Mazzanti (Colombia) from 2011 to 2013 and with Stefano Boeri (Italy) since 2009

The Balkans today are a paradigm for the failure of Europe: the economic gap between countries of the north and countries of the south, the inability to predict the impact of the prolonged financial crisis on nations such as Greece, Spain and Italy, and the separatist pressures in states like The Netherlands, Finland and Austria, fuelling fears that the old continent may experience a history like that of the Balkans.

The term “balkanisation” is still largely interpreted negatively — as a synonym for small-scale wars and fierce, bloody divisions between multiethnic communities. There is a need instead to observe and utilise the potential underlying the centrifugal forces. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia, Belgrade has been experiencing a slow relaxation of urban planning laws, in marked contrast to the strongly centralised regulations in force during the Communist era. Today this process sees the coexistence of state and public buildings alongside private property without any clear legislation regulating the relationship between them. Despite the structural rigidity of the pre-existing urban fabric and the lack of regulations governing it, the city is demonstrating an unexpected capacity to accommodate and adapt to the needs of its citizens in this post-Communist period of transition.

So who is taking care of Belgrade’s transition?

The key players in this change are certainly not institutional figures (politicians, architects or urban planners). But neither are they the citizens, who in developing areas of the world such as South America, India and Africa are obliged to construct pieces of city with the means and technical knowledge at their disposal in order to satisfy their basic needs. What is occurring in Belgrade, on the other hand, is a gradual revolution guided by the dreams of an emerging middle class (professionals, small-scale entrepreneurs and figures from Serbian culture and subculture), who are creating specific interventions by bringing together technical knowledge and territorial networks to conceive and construct a new design for the city.

The first is the relationship between cultural production and urban spaces, a situation exemplified in the story of DJ Buca and the BIGZ Building. The BIGZ is one of the city’s most famous, and most gigantic, brutalist structures of the 1930s. The former headquarters of the National Printing Institution, it remained abandoned for many years. DJ Buca, an irrepressible dreamer and a star of Belgrade’s underground cultural life, introduced electro-trance music to the Balkans, took hallucinogens in air-raid shelters, and animated the demonstrations of 1992, which led to the fall of Slobodan Milošević. In 1995, along with two partners, he decided that renting a space inside the stillabandoned BIGZ would be a forward-thinking choice, and so he opened Klub Studio 69. Within a few months, following a series of psychedelic parties attended by thousands of people, the BIGZ began to host the city’s most important cultural production and social spaces — recording studios, ateliers and lounge bars — becoming the fulcrum of Belgrade’s underground cultural scene between 1990 and 2010.

Another story, this time about the regeneration of the city’s degraded areas, involves Maja Lalić, the Mikser Festival and the Savamala district. Springing up at the point where the Sava River flows into the Danube, Savamala was Belgrade’s 16

first urban centre. As one of the most important hubs for infrastructure and commerce in the Balkans, it has experienced periods of both affluence and decay, most recently during NATO’s embargo and bombardment of the city, when it was abandoned and became the city’s most dangerous area.

Today the neighbourhood is experiencing a gradual rebirth thanks to positive initiatives like Mikser Festival. The festival came into existence in 2000 — through the persevering efforts of Maja Lalić — as a creative space open to young artists, designers and architects. It has rapidly become the Balkans’ most important art and architecture event and has forged itself an outstanding reputation. But the Mikser Festival’s importance goes beyond its status as an international event.

Indeed, its significance also lies in its capacity to redesign the fortunes of Savamala, which has evolved from a decayed and unsafe area to become one of the city’s most fertile districts for creativity (with a consequent rise in property prices), successfully overcoming the lack of vision in politics and urban planning.

The third story regards the U10 collective and their gallery at 10 Kralja Milana. The breakup of Yugoslavia had major repercussions for the Serbian art world. While the cultural embargo limited its international influence, the country’s institutions only promoted work with strong nationalist leanings, thus marginalising artistic practices that failed to correspond to prescribed criteria. Contemporary art, once excluded from the mainstream, has now returned to the country and its streets and is being renewed by collective processes.

In November 2012, a few young artists — who were fresh out of art school and well aware of the difficulties of accessing the national and international art worlds — convinced a builder to loan them a large, empty, semi-concealed space on the ground floor of a residential building in the historic city centre. Today this gallery is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting in the city, not only due to the quality of the young artists’ work on show, but also because it undermines the complex economic dynamics of the art world.

These three stories are expressions of a hard, conflict-ridden and extreme city, but one that is, at the same time, alive and creative. In Belgrade melancholy and irony exist side by side.

As a city, it has not attempted to erase its own history, conflicts and suffering, but to build on them to create its own character, aesthetic and vision of the future.

It is a city made up of histories, passions, impulses, fears and those same emotions that the artistic disciplines (above all architecture and design) have, since rationalism, forgotten to catalyse and which we should perhaps begin to examine once again. This consideration may help to reveal not only new technical and artistic directions, or fresh urban planning strategies to apply to our cities, but also act as a tool to reassess the potential that a balkanisation process can unleash, as well as rethinking our identities as part of this incredible, and at times troubled, Europe.

— ZARA AUDIELLO (www.beoproject.org) LORENZA BARONCELLI @lorenzabaroncel

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domus 20

20

August 2013

Contents Editorial Op-ed Gyan Prakash

A text of urban consciousness Op-ed Zara Audiello, Lorenza Baroncelli

Slavic rhapsody

7 15

Street Diaries Heidi Specker

M G Road Street Diaries Heidi Specker, Thomas Weski, Daniel Niggemann, Pradyumna Vyas

City as dimension

25

Romi Khosla Design Studio, Suprio Bhattacharjee Cover The image is from the Panjpani Gallery, Khalsa Museum; the exhibition is designed by Amardeep Behl.

The hand-painted mural in the miniature style depicts the culture and the day’s activities in Punjab through experiential narrations aided by a play of lights. This is from one of the many interviews in the book Dekho (2013), which is developed and produced by Delhi-based Codesign

Structure as iconography

28

Deepika Sorabjee

Bits of beauty everywhere

40

Space and possession Contemporary Museum for architecture in India curated by Kaiwan Mehta, text by Mohor Ray, Codesign

Dekho

48

90 96

Contemporary Museum for architecture in India Amardeep Behl, Codesign

Amar in the making

Joseph Grima

Engineering and tradition

84

16 Street Diaries Clare Arni, Abhimanyu Arni

Journal

82

98

Cold Case Luigi Spinelli

Julian Worrall

Rebuilding communities

56

Casa al Parco Rassegna

Filipe MagalhĂŁes, Ana Luisa Soares

The Metabolist routine Street Diaries Khushboo Bharti

A Quest for Cultural Nostalgia

64

Lighting

106 108

72

23

Founded in 1928 by Gio Ponti

20 t 7PMVNF 02 t *TTVF 09 t "VHVTU 2013

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Journal —

Dessau, DE; Kolkata, IN

1922 Calcutta Revisited The recently held exhibition titled Das Bauhas in Kalkutta (The Bauhaus in Calcutta) organised by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in the east German city of Dessau was a highly significant show that took us back to a time in history when the political and social climate in Europe and in Calcutta (now renamed Kolkata) was very different from what it is today Known for its unorthodox way of teaching and innovative training, Bauhaus was one of the first schools of design that, in its fourteen years of activity, was responsible for bringing radical and utopian thought in the field of art, design and architecture and was also the pioneer in uniting art with technology. Bauhaus was founded by

Walter Gropius in 1919 in Weimar, Germany and was a breakaway from the classical German culture and was responsible in bridging the gap between the artist and the artisan. While many would know the above mentioned facts but a lesser known fact is that the first ever Bauhaus exhibition outside Germany took place in Calcutta in 1922 with the initiative of Stella Kramrisch and Abanindranath Tagore. The 2013 show in Dessau organised by Bauhaus was an attempt at reconstructing the exhibition that was held in Calcutta in 1922, and was based on extensive research and original documents, newspapers, photos and films that were collected over the years. The exhibition in 1922 witnessed, probably for the first time, cultural cosmopolitanism

and dialogues between different cultures at such a geographic scale. The show included works by Bauhaus masters Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Johannes ltten, Lyonel Feininger and Auguste Macke alongside contemporary artists from Calcutta such as Gaganendranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy who were known for their experimental art in India. The common thread among all these artists was modernity through cubism and abstraction.

Stella Kramrisch, then a teacher of Indian and European Art at Santiniketan from 1921 to 1923 had requested Bauhaus to send artworks by Bauhaus members so as to present it alongside the Indian contemporary artists in a joint exhibition at the Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of the lndian Society 25

Journal

Previous page: painting class, Kala Bhavana; photographer unknown; Rabindra-Bhavan Archives, Santiniketan

↑ Image from Journal of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, 1981

↑ Lyonel Feininger, Mellingen, 1919 Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, VG BildKunst Bonn

of Oriental Art in Calcutta in 1922.

The exhibition was an interesting juncture in world history as Germany was recovering from the aftermath of the World War I and Calcutta was a British colony and was awakening to the idea of independence at that moment. While the Bauhaus movement worked towards reversing the split between art and production

by returning to the crafts as the foundation of all artistic activity, it also played an important part to trigger globalisation of art in its true sense by being part of the exhibition of 1922 in Calcutta.

Kalyani Majumdar Bauhaus Dessau www.bauhaus-dessau.de

Mumbai, IN

Experimentation of ideas through moving images This June it was a rare opportunity for all movie lovers to witness the screening of experimental cinema in their original format at a free retrospective of Indian cinema titled Hundred Years of Experimentation (19132013) at Films Division, Mumbai The three-day festival opened with the silent mythological film Raja Harishchandra produced

by Dadasaheb Phalke in 1913, and even though it falls under the purview of popular cinema, it was also a benchmark for experimentation as the first full-length motion picture in India.

The event was curated by filmmaker, scholar and anthropologist, Ashish Avikunthak and documentary filmmaker, Pankaj Rishi Kumar.

“The conceptual rubric traces its theoretical geneologyfrom Gandhi’s ‘experiments with truth’ rather than Western art historical lineage of experimental or avant-garde. Although these terms are temporally analogous to the 1920s and have an aesthetic origin, experimentation in Gandhi has a metaphysical, self-reflexive and ontological root,” notes the curatorial concept. The films were divided thematically into experiments with gods, 26

state, school, documentary, short film, gallery and animation. The three-day event was in many ways an anthology of experimentation in Indian cinema from the very first movie by Phalke to the movies made in the post-colonial independent India of the 1960s and 70s where these films generated a dialogue with Indian history, tradition, culture and religion. In the 90s video art and installations became part of the art space, and artists started to converse with the audience through moving images. This retrospective attempted to reflect on the cinematic experience and cinematic thought as it took us through a trajectory that described the changing thought process and socio-political scenario that existed at the time when these films were made. This intervention also triggered a conversation that needs to be continued in order to understand the real meaning of ‘experimentation in cinema’ in India as this term is loosely used by popular media. Kalyani Majumdar Films Division www.filmsdivision.org

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Montréal, CA

Archaeology of the Digital A disheartening observation: most of what we think we know about the use of computers by architects during the personal computing revolution of the late 80s and early 90s is hearsay, mostly based on misconceptions. Part of the problem has to do with evidence. If we trace the genealogy of “the digital” from the many familiar techniques in use today, an explosion of computational practices in this pivotal decade appears, but the details of how computers were used — who clicked which button when — remain elusive. Archaeology of the Digital, the exhibition by Greg Lynn, is the first to start unearthing evidence and begin putting together a nuanced account of the complex ecosystem that spawned the digital architecture we see all around us today. Matthew Allen until 13.10.2013 Canadian Centre for Architecture www.cca.qc.ca photo © CCA, Montréal

Athens, GR

Mexico City, MX

System of Objects Arquine Since its inception, the aim of The System of Objects has been to show Dakis Joannou’s approach to art collecting. He is collaborating with architect Andreas Angelidakis, who is presenting Joannou’s world in an uncommon and non-conventional way. Inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s seminal 1968 book The System of

Objects, Angelidakis takes a look at the collections Joannou has put together over years of passionate dedication and gives them new life by arranging them in the space of the Deste Foundation.. until 30.11.2013 Deste Foundation www.deste.gr

The discussions revolving around various perspectives on the theme of space at the 14th Arquine Conference were very enriching.

"Space as infrastructure", the concept presented by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto from Atelier Bow-Wow was one of

the most interesting, for suggesting that action in a space is not only an intervention, but also a tool for constructing various forms of @clora interaction. Clora Romo www.arquine.com/en/congreso

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Structure as iconography

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Gurgaon, IN

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Gurgaon

This spread: built in the tropical climate of India, given the present water and energy crisis, the design of the Volvo-Eicher Headquarters building explores possible ways forward for modern architecture, employing a balanced mix of traditional and global technologies

Something big has been moved into the placeless glitz of Gurgaon. It has less shine and is more obsidian. And instead of the impenetrable easy-off-the-shelf countenance we have a seemingly ceaseless flutter delicately hung. This is less of an insular fish tank and more of a Stevenson Screen.

Seemingly paying homage to automotive containers in which automobile manufacturers would earlier transport their unfinished products in an SKD (semi-knocked down) condition, the building’s undeniably powerful structural iconography can lend itself to amusing metaphors. As if a giant port crane has plonked this open container neatly onto a flatbed trailer. Oh, where’s the towing truck?

This building, the Volvo-Eicher Headquarters, is one of the newest additions to Gurgaon’s fervently growing assortment of buildings. What sets this one apart, at first glance of course, is its sheer stance and expressiveness of structure, that catapults a comparatively modest building (it only has 6 storeys) to the foreground of the urban mish-mash it is a part of.

A study in how construction technology can show a path to how we build in the future, the entire building was componentised and effectively ‘built’ off-site with techniques employed that attempt at a balanced approach between the precision engineered edifices of the erstwhile ‘High-Tech’ genre that we were enthralled by during the latter part of the 20th century, as well as the ‘loose-fit’ approach that is necessary for building 29

Structure as iconography

Gurgaon, IN

within a largely ‘informal’ and non-mechanised construction sector within the country. The country still has a persistent craft tradition, as pointed out in previous articles on the works of Kamath Design Studios, Studio Amita Vikrant and Vir Mueller. And the greatest challenge of any work of architecture within this milieu that chooses to employ sophisticated techniques and engineering (whether in its design or in its actual execution) is to achieve the tenuous balance between ‘what-one-would-like-to-do’ and ‘what-really-can-be-done’.

In this case perhaps, there were lesser doubts on the part of the client to support a building that is well, pre-engineered, but not off-the-shelf. Also the very setting of the project (in a dense urban setting where there would be considerably lesser challenges in terms of ‘sophisticated’ construction) pointed towards a balance that could be struck. Heavy engineering and fabrication came courtesy of modern steel factories in Bidar, Karnataka — the place where the famed metal crafting techniques of ‘Bidriware’ have their origins. Local metal craftsmen were made a part of the project too — in the process of assembly as well as the finer details. The façade was fabricated in Mumbai. In many ways, the project’s execution could point towards how, in the future, ‘reconciliation’ between the ‘local’ and the ‘not-so-local’ can be struck. Also the persistent metaphor here is that of how the automotive industry works 30

This page: the client welcomed the building’s unusual design that resonates with the cultural and climatic reality of Gurgaon, while justifying the functionality of the spaces within

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August 2013

This page: the architectural design approach is that of an exposed-steel span-free engineered building

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too, wherein a majority of components are manufactured off-site.

Typologically, the building prescribes to the generic within a relatively modest footprint — and understandably so, as it tries to maximise the envelope volume. This may also have been a prerogative from the point of view of LEED certification. The broad two-storey base houses lobbies, shared staff facilities as well as open-plan exhibition and user-experience spaces, while the set-back four-storey block houses typical open-plan office spaces. An uppermost ‘penthouse’ offers workspaces for senior management with the option of a charming screened terrace garden that would also house the mechanical and services equipment.

On a site that is oriented roughly in the South-East-to-NorthWest axis, the building tries to maximise its exposure to north light for the workspaces by positioning the bulk of its services on the longer South-West façade, which also forms a considerable heat-sink to the blazing afternoon sun. Roughly configuring an open ‘T’ within the rectilinear typical floor plan, the services maximise efficiency in terms of the floorplate arrangement, allowing for large column-free office spaces. While the delicate all-encompassing ‘wrap’ of kite-like fluttering armatures over the generic glass-and-terracottaspandrel-panel box makes for an enticing visual proposition, one wonders whether there could have been some scope of 32

August 2013

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The spiral staircase during the construction stage

The trajectory of this building has been quite different from other similar structures because of the construction methodology employed; various aspects of this building have been crafted with close interactions with local metal workers

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View of the spiral staircase within the building

Image indicating the scale of the joinery and the different components coming together 33

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VOLVO – EICHER HEADQUARTER Design Romi Khosla Design Studios, New Delhi Principal Architects Romi Khosla, Martand Khosla Design Team Chandu V. Arsikere, Ram Pandarathil Nair, Sanjoli Tuteja

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FACT BOX Structural Consultant Frischmann Prabhu MEP & LEED Consultant Spectral Design Services Client Eicher Goodearth Pvt. Ltd. Location Gurgaon, Haryana

Project Area 9,972 m2 Project Phase 2010 - 2012

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Glazed curtain wall comprising of 24 mm insulated (HS) glass unit Terra-cotta cladding comprising of ms (HDG-75 microns) brackets, metal shims welded to steel structure along with vertical aluminium box sections (anodised 25 microns) bolted to the MS brackets Raised floor comprising of steel cementitious infill on 500 x 500 x 30 mm thick interchangeable steel panels overlaid with 5 mm thick carpet tiles 80 mm + 80 mm thick Zinc galvanised steel shallow composite floor decking 39 mm thick checkered aluminium walkway on 150 x 75 mm twin galvanised steel brackets supporting vertical flanges of virendal truss supporting louvres 42.4 mm diameter MS railing Perforated aluminium louvres attached to the vertical bracings 150 x 75 x 12 mm thick vertical flanges of virendal truss supporting louvres

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This spread: the solar faรงade louvres have been hand fixed to pre-determined positions for modulation determined by complex calculations for each faรงade

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August 2013

defining the orientations and exposures differently, with say, more glass area on the northern aspects, considering the relatively dense metal scrim and the oblique angles at which sunlight may brush past those façades.

Without doubt, the building's unforgettable iconographic signature is its oversized, super-scaled braced box, with the bowstring strut seemingly forming the axis along which the rib-like vierendeel beams supporting the perforated aluminium screens twist or rather ‘warp’, seemingly (and metaphorically, yes) bent by the Gurgaon heat. Its sheer ponderous nature and firm stance makes it a brawny companion to the gossamerlike wispiness of the sunscreen. At first glance the immediate contrast may strike one as odd — more so as one never really gets a grasp of how the braced box ‘sits’ on the ground (it’s lower frame seems to have gone ‘missing’) while the sunscreen manages to define a specific geometry. The broadened base here is perhaps a typological monster — what if we could have seen the two braced cubes float free off the transverse staircase core, seemingly levitating themselves in a cheerful, frolicking seesaw over the not-so-fancy neighbours, with the base discreetly tucked in?

The other significant and welcome aspect of the architecture is how it eschews a sense of visual ‘refinement’ in favour of a tectonic language that is ‘rough-at-the-edges’ — discarding the overwrought corporate imagery of a ‘desired slickness’.

Details and junctions are not meant to be covered up under the sheen of a supposed designer attire, but are rather exposed and displayed unassumingly for contemplation and inspection. This furthers the building’s core conceptual driver as an exercise in ‘making’. Reused wood from packaging material from the truck manufacturer’s factories reinforces this ‘rawness’ on the exterior pergola that wraps the two-storey base, as well as in the furniture that has been custom-designed.

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View of the louvres as seen from within the building 37

Structure as iconography

↑ For the interiors, all packaging material of all the Volvo trucks that arrived in India were saved up and used to construct nearly 80 per cent of the interior woodwork

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Gurgaon, IN

August 2013

The building boasts of significant environmental strategies too — such as the reduced water usage, a lower running energy bill due to significant sun-shading in addtion to greater ingress of natural light, as well as the significant usage of recycled materials — as described earlier. Of course the paradox is how the carbon footprint can be minimised in constructions like this, where components need to be manufactured and shipped in from distant places. This is a challenge that the global construction industry has been facing for quite some time now.

With a few simple but dramatic gestures, this office building becomes a celebratory assertment of the possibilities of construction and the integration of precision engineering and local craftsmanship.

— SUPRIO BHATTACHARJEE Architect

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View of the building within its backdrop, during different times of the day, and at night

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Text

Deepika Sorabjee

August 2013

Historically, Venice is the oldest biennale city, the first biennale was held here in 1895. Subsequently, over the next century, as biennales have spread around the world, (almost virally in the last decade, to keep up with that internet concept), the predeliction for the majority to be held in or near a port city, must be noted. Havana, Istanbul, Sydney, Shanghai, Sharjah – biennales of “resistance” perhaps, but they don’t resist in following a time-tested tradition in siting. Art was never a commodity in the past as it is oft decried now, but the increase in its movement has to be one of the defining factors of the history of art in the 20th century. Never before, has contemporary art, been so contemporarily viewed, by a public, miles away

from where it was produced, not just virtually, but exhibited around the world. And so it is, that India’s first biennale, the Kochi-Muziris biennale, comes to a port, Fort Kochi. A site that trade has touched down upon, through conquistadors and moors, on Roman ships and humble dhows; now, shipments arrived, not to be traded in the traditional sense, but in a broader one in keeping with the idea of conceptual art: ideas pollinated from afar pervaded the ever receiving Malayali mind.

In choosing Fort Kochi, co-founders and artists themselves, Riyas Komu and Bose Krishnamachari could not have sited it better. With crumbling shipyards and abandoned warehouses, a multi ethnic literate local community, high end boutique hotels and affordable homestays, past history and a live creation of new – in a few walkable square kilometres, albeit in sapping heat, it was a biennale that had the element of discovering artworks in decay that hinted of past splendor – memories evoked in architectural spaces that once were bustling; and now bustled with life once more. Cash strapped for funds after the promised amounts from the government were withheld following protests, nothing was done to spruce up most of the spaces; some so raw they must have stopped an artist’s heartbeat. In the ensuing chaos at the start, these spaces saw artists push the envelope beyond urban space crunching limitations.

Architecture, in recent times, being represented more and more via images finds itself part of a visual world, the spatial aspect has been appropriated increasingly by historians,

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Installation by L N Tallur titled Veni, Vidi, Vici

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Kochi, IN

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Bits of beauty everywhere

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Srinivasa Prasad's memory nest high up in the coconut palms titled Erase was accessed by a gunny sack stacked walkway

geographers, sociologists and theorists rather than architects themselves. If architecture is more than functional space, what better way to explore it emotively, historically, socially and aesthetically, than for contemporary art to appropriate this functional yet beautiful dereliction at Fort Kochi, and through ploughing of its history, and explorative use of space bring back the volume of architecture, in so many tactile ways?

The main venue, Aspinwall House, is a sprawling complex of warehouses and offices of the erstwhile J P Morgan Company, arranged around a central space, with one edge of the quadrilateral compound bordering the sea. Overlooking the port terminal, it was a beacon to incoming biennale visitors, who chose to reach the island by the water route – artist Robert Montgomery’s verse, neon lit the lapping port waters against its low walls. The road entrance led one into a spacious central clearing, that supported artworks on the ground and ones strung from trees, (artist Srinivasa Prasad’s memory nest high up in the coconut palms was accessed by a gunny sack stacked walkway; narrow, it went high enough to give the agoraphobics the jitters) and acted as the de facto central square of the biennale – like the congregating centrality of a piazza in an Italian town – everyone checked in to plan the day’s 42

wander. And a wander it was. With all the works not up on the opening day, there was much back and forth in the initial weeks checking to see progress; by the biennale’s end in March though, it was all in place.

While Aspinwall was left in its ruinous state for artists to intervene, Pepper House, further down the road, a compact warehouse for a pepper trading company, was spruced up for the biennale. White washed and a café within, it was interesting to see the view from the entrance – in an unimpaired built to function plan, the entrance went past old offices, across the now manicured courtyard’s lawn, straight through another arched gateway to the sea-front dock – economy of function purposefully built for the pepper to enter from land, once graded and priced was loaded onto ships at the sea end.

But it was the creaking, collapsing Moidu’s House (Heritage Plaza) that was the jewel that glittered in the cobwebs and perhaps termite-ridden dust.

Offered by its owner just two months before the biennale was to open, cash strapped as they were, there was nothing the foundation could do to it – it added to the excitement of discovering Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto’s sinuous, droops of cloth filled with spices in an attic reached by the brave through a trapdoor, or sitting on unsure

wooden floors mesmerised by Australian artist Angela Mesiti’s video, the music resounding in the capacious darkness.

There were sites scattered around Fort Kochi where individual artists exhibited. Artist and teacher Nandakumar drew attention to the abandoned Mattancherry Palace gardens and temple by installing his artworks in that neglected space; Zasha Colah and Sumesh Thakur Singh, curators at Clark House, used a house in Jew town appropriately called Mandalay Hall for a presentation of Burmese art; Rose Street bungalow on Princess Street, had Jannis Kounellis install bentwood chairs arranged in circles around a pile of cinnamon sticks – one imagined, mothers sitting, mourning lost sons, as in a novel from South America. It wasn’t the only time the biennale transported one, in an instant, elsewhere.

In a room below at street level, videos by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei protest videos brought you sharply into contemporary times, mood shifting in a biennale achieved simply.

— In staging a biennale in a setting where there are no institutional spaces, using found spaces became the overarching plan – a practical one too; tight economics and remnant colonial architecture made these sites at Fort Kochi

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↑ Artist Robert Montgomery has created a poem about exile in light on the sea-facing façade of Aspinwall House titled Fado music in reverse

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Alex Mathew's work titled Untitled

evocative beyond erstwhile usages and histories, as patinas were left untouched and debris strewn, worked around. It drew attention to current economics and cultural practices – the architecture was then not just about the spaces but about time itself; of time lapsed and proleptic prophecies. The curatorial brief was succinct and pithy – the site was the canvas the artists were to draw upon; the history of the site may have informed most but the unprecedented availability of thousands of square feet of space in cloister-like settings, and the sitings of these along an active seafront the views and light thereof, played a principal factor in most works.

Destuffing Matrix 2012, by CAMP (a Mumbaibased collaborative studio, organised by Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran) is a video work that addresses the sudden joint appearance of a “new container terminal, facing the waterfront, sharing their most visible parts.” Ports breathe, relentlessly, like human lungs of a city’s trade, through the inspiration and expiration of goods in and out of the city, a city survives, lives. The artist statement goes on to explore these boxes within boxes, “boxes resist images, but also offer an invitation to the curious.”

From early recce visits to the site, Shaina Anand found it “clear that Fort Kochi’s large spaces 43

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(Aspinwall and Pepper House, but also all the other waterfront properties between Fort Kochi and Matancherry, including disused piers etc) offered amazing, often dilapidated spaces for installing large-scale art work. Their lure was now quite different from the original function of these spaces as warehouses and godowns.” CAMP responded to what they saw as a contradiction between the theme of the biennale (the antiquity of the trade route, the mythical Muziris, and an early, eclectic form of globalisation), and “what looked back at you” as one looked out of any seafacing window from the Fort Kochi venues – “the first thing to stare back at you was the yearold Valarpardam International Container Trade Terminal, operated by Dubai Ports World (and surrounded by Vypeen, Ernakulam, Willingdon Island and Fort Kochi, and hence the cynosure of the entire city, its rather visible new symbol

of global trade.) A corner room of Pepper House became the venue where this dialogue between the view from the window and the venue could take place. “Abutting us, was the customs office, with the customs boat docked, and in front of us container ships would wait to be loaded and unloaded,” Anand points out.

Indeed, the view from these windows at biennale venues competed with the art works themselves.

Cranes lift and deposit these multicoloured containers from ships, “but what’s in them?

Where is the spill of goods and the longshoremen on the harbour? Where are the warehouses? The action of stuffing and unstuffing a container which now happens in the hinterland, in special customs areas or SEZs, became the point of focus for our new work, Destuffing Matrix for KMB 2012” explains Anand, continuing a series of works CAMP has done on port cities – Sharjah,

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Liverpool, Beirut and now Kochi. The video is as mesmerising as the real life incessant activity – in a grid like frame, nine channels are shown simultaneously, 4 rows of 3 screens each stacked one on the other show cotton yarn, scrap metal, coffee, polyurethane footwear, coconut fibre etc being loaded and unloaded continuously, port calls being yelled in languages that reflect a thriving port history, past and present.

Artists used the remnants of a recent past as well – at Aspinwall House, Nalini Malani used an office space with the remnants of wall posters as a screen the video work In Search of Vanished Blood was projected on; Valsan Kolleri using existing cement shelving recycled organic material into objects, an eerie haunting presence was created in the detritus of a life he fashioned. Beyond the works, in absentia, the viewer was left wondering over the demise of more than what the artists

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proposed – that of hasty, incomplete departures of recent occupants from these intimate rooms.

For some, the backdrop was an exciting trigger to contemporise the space – light and airy for large photographic displays, or dark and capacious to screen videos in cinema scale widths, as did Amar Kanwar and Ranbir Kaleka.

In a long room spanning the breadth of the building at Aspinwall House, white tiled torso high walls separated the space into cubicles in the former Aspinwall laboratory. No longer housing white-coated lab workers, experimentation of a different kind was afoot. Artist Atul Dodiya chose the former laboratory space for a work that displayed 231 photographic portraits of people who he has encountered in the course of his makings and travels as an artist.

Initially Dodiya had a completely different work in mind. But on a site visit, the laboratory appealed

to him, – “no other artist was willing to accept that space” – and he thought that a photography installation would work well. Certainly the space allowed for a variation in displaying the pictures – on the walls and on the cubicle separator ledges, the light coming in through the windows bounced off the white tiled interior even as the windows provided a shifting view of boats against Dodiya’s stills of people. The ledges provided an eye level view of the photographs, the cubicles forced people to meander, as if at an art show vernissage and the museum quality glass Dodiya used, allowed for no reflection despite the light; a certain immediacy was the advantage he created out of a difficult space. “I had a clear notion of where a few images would go, these were the starting points of the install. As I unpacked the photographs the cubicular nature of the space naturally formed groupings, as in the mother-daughter enclosure, or

where one image triggered a memory of another – the install created its own narrative,” says Dodiya. As the viewers came in, not all of Dodiya’s personal collection of people who informed his world were recognisable to them, yet inadvertently he noticed them position family members by the few they did recognise, such as artist M.F.Husain, as they clicked a memory to take away, much like the studio portrait at a village mela. Here instead of the Taj Mahal or Shah Rukh Khan as backdrop, an old, popular tradition was insidiously contemporarised in a biennale space.

The larger spaces at Aspinwall afforded artists to think expansively even as they turned to the history of the buildings. Some referred to the structure of the buildings (L N Tallur), others to ancient archaeological sites (Vivan Sundaram, Sudarshan Shetty), in doing so the building blocks were reflected on and more ambitiously

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A video work at the CAMP space at the biennale

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Bits of beauty everywhere

landscapes brought in. These created mise-enscènes not seen in the box-like gallery spaces of the metropolises, they harked more to film sets, indeed some artists created sets (Sundaram) for their ensuing video works. Artists like Sudarshan Shetty and Amanullah Mojadidi (who marked plans of an imaginary unearthed house in uncovered earth), took to digging underground – like archaeologists at Muziris, the hyphenated second name of the biennale, they drew on the past, using contemporary artisanship in executing their concept of architectural space.

Mumbai artist Sudarshan Shetty visited Muziris, the site reputed to be the ancient port Mucheri at Pattanam, 30 km north of Kochi, where archaeological digs have uncovered traces of trade with the Roman empire. The flooding of Muziris led to the creation of modern day Kochi’s deep harbour. Reflecting on the idea of archaeology, “which relies on evidence to arrive at the interpretation of facts”, Shetty wanted to take this idea of interpretation further. Manufacturing objects outside and then placing them in pits dug to simulate an archaeological find – “as if it belonged there” – Shetty wanted to “play the role of an artist as an eccentric mediator between fact and fiction.” Away from the main compound of 46

Aspinwall House in a separate area that housed a printing press, the remnants of the building became his connect to his Muziris visit. In his work I Know Nothing of the End comprising of ‘Cenotaph’ (hand carved in wood) ‘Water’ (a small fountain in the centre of the cenotaph) and ‘Rangoli’ (using coloured powder poured on a photograph of a pot breaking), he plays with the idea of authenticity, what’s new, what’s old, what’s past, what’s present, of impermanence and the reassembling and remaking of objects involved in erasure: “its disappearance being a condition of its making, which perhaps can be read as the guiding principle of my work.”

Artist Vivan Sundaram evoked Muziris by recreating a ruin in a ruined shed. Here was space that allowed him to use the terracotta shards gleaned from the Muziris site, in Black Gold, to refashion his version of the mythical city. Re enacting the flooding, he filled it with water and filmed the draining. Adjacent to his work in the same space, Subodh Gupta used the soaring height of the warehouse to crank up his installation – a boat then cascaded with belongings down from the roof to floor. These were gestures the artists could take because the spaces allowed soaring imaginations to soar, spreading dreams to occupy

This page: an installation

by Sudarshan Shetty titled I know nothing of the end he plays with the idea of authenticity, of impermanence and the reassembling and remaking of objects involved in erasure

heights unabashedly. Sheela Gowda and Cristoph Storz’s Stopover, a spill of 170 granite rice grinding stones, from warehouse interior to deck to sea, was one of the most evocative pieces in the biennale – the history of the abandoned rice grinders needn’t have been known, the visual was a compelling use of site. These were multifarious landscapes within spaces, impossible to have been conceived but for the site itself.

In the seafront warehouse, L N Tallur brought in the material literally into his work. “During my site visit, I saw J.P. Morgan stamped Mangalore terracotta tiles on the roof, (in Mangalore, there is a Morgan gate even today). The Basel Mission tile factory that made terracotta roof tiles in Mangalore was taken over by the English after the war and was renamed the Commonwealth Tiles factory. The J P Morgan tile factory site in Mangalore which started around the same time is abandoned now and in the same state as Aspinwall House,” says Tallur. “I wanted to reflect the ceiling on the ground using new Mangalore tiles, and that is how the work was triggered.” Using the tiles in an inversion of the roof in an installation Veni, vidi, vici, tiny hatha yoga postured figures people it – Tallur ties up the ethnological figures made in colonial times, as

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in the then Victoria and Albert museum displays in Bombay / Mumbai, with the multi-racial terracotta tile manufacturers, and captures the multilayered history of the current biennale site and practices of time past.

Along the promenade outside the Cochin Club, Sanchayan Ghosh used an existing beach marina to house his sound piece that showed the crossover of foreign words into the local language, the different tongues of history voiced out in evolutionary transition, even as big and small boats sailed by as a reminder of voices still crisscrossing oceans.

— “There’s perfume burning in the air Bits of beauty everywhere, Shrapnel flying, soldiers hit the dirt.”

Madeleine Peyroux/’Blue Alert’ Peyroux may not have been singing the blues about the Kochi Muziris Biennale but there was spice perfume and shrapnel on opening night, blue oceans called out despite government refusals to release funds. Art lovers hit dirt literally – the grand old ladies of Cochin shook the dust off derelict skirts; salted, wasted docksides were retreaded and timbred floorboards refashioned stories – bits of beauty hung in the humid Fort Kochi air, blew everywhere.

— DEEPIKA SORABJEE Writer

I,II,III L N Tallur ties up the ethnological figures made in colonial times and captures the multilayered history of the current biennale site using new Mangalore tiles IV Mattancherry warehouse work by UBIK titled Past Present Past V Kochi Tower by Rigo 23

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Engineering and tradition A foray into the office of Junya Ishigami in Tokyo reveals new aspects of his design philosophy, intent on creating architectural experiences poised between engineering challenges and simple gestures

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Design

Text

Photos

junya.ishigami +associates

Joseph Grima

Yasushi Ichikawa, junya.ishigami +associates Bewildering and beautiful Walk into Junya Ishigami’s new office in the Roppongi neighbourhood of Tokyo, and the first thing you’ll notice between the model-laden desks and workstations is a large, gaping hole in the concrete floor slab. I peer down into the basement: a sea of models from past projects are haphazardly piled in stacks as far as the eye can see. Ishigami’s collaborators (relatively few, considering the office’s prodigious model output) seem to have become so accustomed to the abnormality of a gaping void in the office floor as to no longer notice it, and seem mildly baffled by my surprise. Like all exceptionally true visionaries, Ishigami operates by creating a powerful reality-distortion field, and the hole in the floor is perhaps the least exceptional thing his collaborators must learn to metabolise. Each project is an opportunity to question the basic assumptions of every aspect of architectural practice: from engineering to furniture and from climate control to circulation, Ishigami envisions a condition or an experience, then stretches architecture to the limits of impossibility to realise it. Much as with the James Turrell’s Skyspace installations, in which extraordinary lengths are taken to isolate the simplest of experiences — the act of observing the sky change colour — for Ishigami the experience is the architecture, and the envelope is simply a device that triggers the experience. As a result, there is an utter indifference to the effort required to produce this experience: Ishigami’s architecture runs the spectrum from near-impossible engineering challenges to simple gestures of displacement.

The distinction between three projects currently underway in the office provides a clear demonstration of this contrast.

On the same campus of the Kanagawa Institute of Technology where in 2008 Ishigami completed the workshop building (see Domus 913, 2008) that first brought him worldwide recognition for its open plan interrupted only by the slenderest of columns, an even more ambitious endeavour is in the making. Like the partition-free workshop building, it confounds all existing labels for university-building typologies. Ishigami calls it a “cafeteria combined with a semi-outdoor multipurpose space”, and the awkwardness of this rather inelegant description only serves, when one is confronted by the model, to underscore just how extreme the project’s ambition is. On the one hand, the building is the simplest of gestures: a single room, and one with a rather low ceiling at that — 2.3 metres, low enough to be able to raise an arm and brush your hand against it. On the other, it is one of the most phenomenal engineering challenges to have ever faced a university cafeteria, because this room is the size of a football pitch, and not a single column supports the roof throughout the entire span. This roof is a single, thin (nine-millimetre) sheet of tensioned steel, perforated by unsealed rectangular openings that allow light and elements to enter the space, creating a semi-enclosed garden. Above, a thin layer of soil transforms the roof itself into a landscape of grass and vegetation. It is simultaneously megastructural and intimate, effortless as a gesture and bewildering in its scale, and like Ishigami’s previous works it has a deeply human dimension: as the steel roof plate expands and contracts with changes in temperature, the ceiling

Photo Yasushi Ichikawa

Project for a residential centre for the elderly. The study models highlight an exercise in working on variations of traditional housing typologies 49

Junya Ishigami / A studio visit

Tokyo, JP

Photo junya.ishigami+associates

↓ For the new complex of homes for senior citizens affected by dementia, Junya Ishigami opted to salvage and renovate structures of old houses slated for demolition, located in various parts of Japan. The method adopted, known as Hikiya, entails the removal of the entire building frame without any disassembly. The structure is then transported by a flatbed truck

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height varies by as much as 80 centimetres, as though the building were alive and breathing.

Commissioned to design a home for elderly patients suffering from dementia, Ishigami again side-stepped the conventional route towards building-making. The brief specified the need for an architectural environment that the residents would easily be able to recognise, facilitating the process of identifying their own residence through the unique characteristics of each space. The proposed strategy employs a technique known in Japanese as Hikiya, or moving a house from one location to another without disassembling its structure: in place of a single building, the centre is composed of a multitude of wooden houses collected from villages throughout Japan. In fact, it’s very much like a small village compressed onto the site of a single building: the individual elements fit neatly into one architectural structure

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Photo junya.ishigami+associates

Photos Yasushi Ichikawa

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thanks to the tatami mat grid that governs most traditional Japanese domestic architecture. Each unit possesses a distinctive character defined by the building frame’s proportions, which vary depending on the location and time period, as well as the technique of the carpenters who built the house and the way it was inhabited. A unique, recognisable identity is embedded in this wooden skeletal framework and its original roof, but the complex is given a unitary identity by “abstracting” the vernacular architecture through the substitution of the cladding with metal and glass. “The objective,” according to Ishigami, “is to create a new type of hybrid space that could not have been conceived either by contemporary architecture or classical architecture alone.” It’s a deeply empathetic architectural solution that hybridises architecture and urbanism into a space which is new yet culturally familiar to its residents.

In Ishigami’s studio, work progressing on the models of homes for the elderly. The structures vary according to their original geographic location and the technique used by the carpenters who made them. Each has its own characteristics, which are exploited to aid the future inhabitants’ sense of orientation Above right: the site in Akita Prefecture where the parts of the salvaged dwellings were gathered prior to their refurbishment to create new homes

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Junya Ishigami / A studio visit

Tokyo, JP

↓ The cafeteria roof consists of a single nine-mm-thick sheet of steel with numerous perforations. There are no supporting columns to interrupt the interior space. A thin layer of soil on the roof allows vegetation to grow, thereby restricting the temperature of the steel beneath it. The range of temperatures nonetheless causes the building’s interior height to vary between 2.10 and 2.90 m

↓ Project for the cafeteria on the campus of the Kanagawa Institute of Technology.

The pavilion is developed horizontally on a single floor, with a surface of about 110 x 70 m, and covered by a thin steel roof that floats at a height of approximately 2.3 m Photos Yasushi Ichikawa

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Photos Yasushi Ichikawa

UNIVERSITY CAFETERIA

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Grass field Cafeteria Kitchen Kiosk Entrance

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CREDITS Design Architects junya.ishigami+associates Structural Engineering Konishi Structural Engineers

General Contractors Kajima Corporation, Takasago Thermal Engineering Co., Ltd.

Site Area 129,335.04 m2

Completion Spring 2014

Building Area 6,210 m2

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Junya Ishigami / A studio visit

Tokyo, JP

The house designed for a young couple demonstrates that for Ishigami “the act of making architecture has the same value as the act of creating a landscape”

Much of Ishigami’s work is permeated by this deep empathy for the humdrum exercise of living everyday life. In a suburb of Tokyo (“a landscape comprised of a repetition of nothing but ready-built houses that continue endlessly”), the office recently completed a residence for a young couple that injects a microcosm of nature into the deeply artificial environment of the city. One could describe it as an exercise in the act of not creating an architectural image: unlike most other examples of recent domestic architecture in Japan, the exterior is understated to the point of anonymity, almost perfectly camouflaged into its mundane and rather harsh urban surroundings. On the interior, however, the act of making architecture is subsumed by the desire to create a landscape — a point that is driven home clearly by the exposed soil in the corner of the living room, from which a small forest of trees springs into the double-height space. Looking out onto the street, one realises that the interior space of this residence somehow feels more like an outdoor space than the regular, strictly aligned cityscape outside.

What sets Ishigami apart from others of his generation is the simplicity of the gestures through which his architecture is produced, irrespective of the complexity required to execute them. His architecture is uncompromising but deeply human, driven by the desire to transform simple gestures of everyday life into architectural experiences, and to turn the everyday into something bewildering but beautiful. Perhaps the hole in the floor of his office is a quiet reminder of how threatening architecture can be, and how easy it is to be swallowed by it. —JG

SENIOR CITIZENS’ HOUSING

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CREDITS Design Architects junya.ishigami+associates Structural Engineering Jun Sato Structural Engineers Co., Ltd. Photos junya.ishigami+associates

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Facilities Engineering ES Associates Consulting Engineers

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HOUSE WITH PLANTS

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Lower terrace Garden Kitchen Washing machine Refrigerator Dining table Bookshelf Bathroom

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CREDITS Design Architects junya.ishigami+associates

Horticulture Design Equipe Espace

Site Area 115.44 m2

Design Phase 01/2010—01/2011

Structural Engineering Jun Sato Structural Engineers Co., Ltd.

Textile Coordination Yoko Ando Design

Total Floor Area 69.22 m2

Construction Phase 02/2011—06/2012

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Rebuilding communities

While the reconstruction in Japan proceeds at a slow pace, a group of architects has created a series of public buildings working directly with local communities, erecting kindergardens, community spaces and play centres near temporary housing zones. Although modest in size, these projects are profoundly appreciated by their users thanks to their spirit of sharing

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Julian Worrall Photos

Edmund Sumner

Two years later

↑ A destroyed municipal building in the town of Minamisanriku, Myagi Prefecture, which has now become an impromptu memorial

Disasters fade from memory. This fact is at once their tragedy and their blessing. It is an inevitable truth that the living must bury the dead, and occupy the places where the dead once lived.

The survivors cannot but remember their dead and fear the power that took them away. But in order to go on living, they must in some important sense forget these things too. In this way, disasters starkly reveal a fundamental truth of life itself, compressing and amplifying the gentle rustle of generational renewal into a terrible roar of destruction.

These meditations are prompted by my encounter with a survivor of the tsunami, an irrepressible middle-aged Japanese

woman named Mikiko Sugawara. We meet in front of a wood stove, in a quirky building overlooking a desolate plain of concrete foundations, roads leading nowhere and weeds. This is all that is left of Sugawara’s hometown, Rikuzentakata, once home to over 23,000 people. The building is the built realisation of one of the “Home-for-All” community centres in temporary housing zones that Toyo Ito has pioneered with a band of friends (the KISYN group, made up of Kengo Kuma, Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, Riken Yamamoto and Hiroshi Naito) and protégés since the disaster.

The Rikuzentakata Home-for-All was the outcome of a collaboration between Ito and the younger architects Kumiko Inui, Sou Fujimoto and Akihisa Hirata. Models documenting 57

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Rebuilding communities

The Home-for-All, which Toyo Ito, Kumiko Inui, Sou Fujimoto and Akihisa Hirata recently completed at Rikuzentakata, a town in Iwate Prefecture. The vertical structure was built with cedar trunks stripped of their bark. They were selected from trees uprooted by the tsunami in a nearby nature reserve, the TakataMatsubara forest

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reconstruction planning is a highly political game involving local communities and landowners, all levels of government, engineers and planning experts, and private companies large and small jostling for a slice of the reconstruction pie. Even after a plan has been settled upon, numerous obstacles—logistical, administrative, economic and political—must be cleared before a community can proceed with confidence down its own path to recovery. Formerly productive lands may be rendered unusable by subsidence or seawater, as in the case of Kesennuma. A plan to relocate a town to higher ground out of future harm’s way may be stymied by the lack of available land or the resistance of key private landowners, as in the case of Babanakayama.

The plan itself may require massively time-consuming preparatory work, such as at Onagawa, which aims to raise its ground level by 17 metres using transported earth, an enormous undertaking requiring at least 5 years. In Japan, a country where land ownership is widespread and fragmented, private land rights are protected and consensus is highly valued, reconstruction is slow work. It’s just as well, as Shigeru Ban told me with a wry smile, that “Japanese people are the most patient people in the world”.

In this contested arena, independent design architects are very much the little fish, largely overlooked and even actively discouraged by the bureaucratic mechanisms of reconstruction planning. Their contributions are volunteer efforts in most cases, bypassing the official processes to work directly with local communities, aiming to bring shelter, solace and a modicum of comfort to those suffering the greatest need. A non-profit organisation called Archi+Aid has taken on a key role in assisting this process. Based at Tohoku University in Sendai, Archi+Aid aims to facilitate the interaction of independent architects with both the disaster-affected communities and the government apparatus, linking knowledge of local conditions, administrative procedures and a network of architectural expertise. One initiative that Archi+Aid is advancing is the “Core House” project designed by Atelier Bow-Wow, a cheap,

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the project’s design process were exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012, along with photographs showing the scale of the devastation by Rikuzentakata native Naoya Hatakeyama. The project was widely applauded and picked up a Golden Lion for Best National Participation, a verdict that has since been reinforced by the recent award of the Pritzker Prize to Ito. But here, looking over Rikuzentakata’s landscape of loss, reflecting on the enormity of what happened and the enormousness of the reconstruction task ahead, the glamour of Venice seems a long way away.

It has been over two years since the great tsunami of 3.11 savaged Japan’s northern Pacific coastline. For those not directly affected, the event has faded from view, even as it continues to cast long shadows over the national psyche.

Fears of a belligerent North Korea and an assertive China now outweigh anxieties of natural disaster and nuclear radiation.

The challenge of reconstruction has become one among others. The country has tacked right, the markets have rallied, and the fragrance of sakura blossoms fill the spring air. Life, irrepressibly, goes on.

Yet what is striking when touring the devastated areas is just how slowly the reconstruction appears to be proceeding.

The force of the tsunami literally wiped off the map many of the fishing and port towns that once nestled in the inlets of Tohoku’s convoluted ria coastline—places like Onagawa, Otsuchi, Minamisanriku, and Sugawara’s own Rikuzentakata.

Today, over two years later, these towns are still silent wastelands pockmarked with stagnant pools, grimly presided over by a few hulking shells of shattered buildings. Beyond the tidy mountains of cleared rubble, restored trunk roads and the serried ranks of temporary housing ranged on higher ground, there is little sign of the 19 trillion yen (approximately 150 billion euros) earmarked by the national government for reconstruction up to 2015.

The apparent stasis belies the intense process of jockeying and negotiation proceeding behind the scenes. The business of

Asahi kindergarten in Minamisanriku by Tezuka architects

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↑ The town of Rikuzentakata, which in 2010 had a population of about 23,000, was literally wiped off the map by the tsunami of 11 March 2011, as can be seen from one of the terraces of the Home-for-All, a building that has assumed the difficult role of a social centre for a community that lost around 80% of its homes

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The Asahi Kindergarten, designed by Takaharu and Yui Tezuka of Tezuka Architects, was built to replace the nursery school that was completely destroyed by the tsunami at Minamisanriku, in Miyagi Prefecture. The project, which was funded by UNICEF’s Japan Committee, was constructed with Japanese red cedar trees that were killed by the sea water. The trees have sacred importance, having been planted in 1611 following the tsunami of that same year, exactly four centuries before that of 2011

↑ Every component of the building has been constructed in wood, without the use of metal joints. The load-bearing elements therefore have a massive appearance. The architects used traditional woodworking techniques, “because these ancient crafts have allowed Japanese architecture to survive for more than 1,300 years”

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The Home-for-All built by Riken Yamamoto for the town of Kamaishi, in Iwate Prefecture. The building is situated next to a temporary residential complex also designed by Yamamoto, together with students from the Yokohama Graduate School of Architecture. At night, the structure lights up like a lantern, and functions as a meeting point for the inhabitants of the adjacent refugee camp

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make her survival count. She threw herself into the recovery, becoming the local community leader. As her story turned to the creation of the Home-for-All, her eyes began to sparkle with enthusiasm. The ghosts of the dead seemed to melt away as she talked. The architecture of the project, in its jaunty optimism and unpretentious, open-hearted forms, seemed to be the perfect vehicle for her remarkable energy and personality.

Then it dawned on me that this was no accident. For Ito, the disaster posed fundamental questions regarding the purpose of architecture. With this small project he had deliberately engineered the process to transcend the individual egos of the architects, while bringing the local community in as equal partners in the design process. Sugawara was therefore as responsible as the architects were for its form and character.

As we talked, the space she presided over welcomed neighbours, workers, casual observers and curious outsiders, clambering up the external stairs to take in the view, or joining us in front of the stove for a chat. All were welcomed as I was—somehow real conversations between strangers were possible here. This, it seemed to me, was what a public space should be: both an intimate kernel for an emergent community as well as an open place for encounters with outsiders.

In these small but significant projects, the reconstruction process is bringing architects and local communities together in ways that are transformative for both sides. Local communities experience the sense of possibility that an external creative perspective can offer. Meanwhile, architects are finding out how contested, messy and yet deeply rewarding reconstructing communities can be.

— @julianworrall JULIAN WORRALL Associate Professor at the Waseda University, Tokyo

Designed by Toyo Ito with Maki Onishi of the practice o+h (Maki Onishi and Yuki Hyakuda), the Children’s Home-for-All is a play centre built on a temporary housing estate in Higashimatsushima, Miyagi Prefecture

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single-room wooden house with plumbing that can be self-built from prefabricated components, and which is flexible enough to be combined and expanded as communities regain their economic footing. The Core House aims to provide a method for communities to rebuild housing in a bottom-up way, rather than relying on standardised offerings of public housing provided top-down by government.

Going directly to local communities means that the architects enjoy more liberty, but it also means that they generally don’t get access to public reconstruction funds, and many such projects are precariously financed by private donations or charity organisations. Yet, despite being of modest scale and limited reach, these projects have frequently been more successful and appreciated by their users than official responses, challenging bureaucratic imperatives of impartiality and neutrality with the architect’s eye for individual distinctiveness and local community character. In the case of the Home-for-All project, six different schemes have been completed so far, each of distinctive design including ones by Riken Yamamoto and SANAA. Others are currently underway. Particularly charming is the Children’s Home-for-All, the product of a collaboration by Ito with another of his young protégés, Maki Onishi. With privately sponsored and funded projects such as the Home-for-All initiative gaining both local support and international acclaim, such efforts are changing the conception of the architect’s role and possibilities in conditions of post-disaster reconstruction.

On that day at the Home-for-All in Rikuzentakata, I asked Sugawara about her experience of the disaster and the period since. I saw her eyes flicker as she composed herself, as she must have done to countless others, before recounting her story.

It was a tale of incomprehensible violence, terrible loss and arbitrary survival. Yet despite losing half her family and all her possessions, there was an improbable but unmistakable note of joyful defiance. She had been spared, and now she had to

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Inaugurated last January, the Children’s Home-for-All provides the refugee camp with a cheerful landmark.

It is highly recognisable to children with its three roofs shaped as a cupola, a pyramid and a spire

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The Metabolist routine Japanese Metabolism was more than just an architectural movement: it was a lifestyle. Two young Portuguese architects, who currently reside in Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, report on their daily 21st-century life in one of the 20th century’s most iconic buildings

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Text & photos

Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares

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22 DECEMBER 2012 Sometimes you get lucky We first went to visit Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower as architects (and tourists). We got lost on our way there and ended up arriving late in the evening. The initial impact was strange: it was as if we were looking at an old friend that we had known for a long time, an interesting feeling when you first visit a building you thought you knew everything about. Only one capsule had the light on. “Curious,” we thought. We entered the lobby, but the doorman quickly saw us out. “No visit! No picture!” were the only two phrases we could understand.

By chance, while we were being ushered back out onto the street, a Japanese man in his late 50s was arriving and, in nearly perfect English, he started asking us questions: “What fascinates so many people about this building? What brings you here?”

We were caught off guard by those questions and replied truthfully. “We’re architects. We’ve just moved to Tokyo and we tremendously admire this building. We’d like to live here.” Kenzosan laughed, gave us his business card and said: “Maybe I can help.” Thanks to this encounter, a few days later we would be living in the Nakagin Tower. Indeed, Kenzo-san had his office in one of the capsules and a friend of his had another available for rent.

We met his friend, who subsequently became our landlord, and he was delighted to find someone as enthusiastic about the building as he was. When he was young he had dreamed of living there, read everything about the building and the Metabolists, and had ended up buying his own capsule, where he lived for several years before moving to the suburbs upon his marriage.

He was really happy that someone still believed in the building and wanted to live there. On the day we moved in, the capsule owner greeted us with the key and said something we will not forget anytime soon: “You are very likely the last people to live the Metabolism.”

Opposite page: Metabolism had very few opportunities to translate its principles into built projects, and the Nakagin Capsule Tower, built between 1970 and 1972 by Kisho Kurokawa in Tokyo’s Shimbashi district, is certainly the most famous example. The building’s two concrete towers, standing 11 and 13 storeys high, are connected to one another and have a stair and elevator shaft at the centre of each.

They house a total of 140 prefabricated capsules, each of which is independent from its neighbour, being attached as a projection from the central load-bearing frame This page: the windows were originally fitted with a fanshaped brise-soleil, of which only a central pivot remains; view of an interior with the table folded away

27 DECEMBER 2012 Living the Metabolist dream Every time we meet an architect and our address comes up we get the same reaction. “What’s it like to live in the capsule?” is the first question. Then we get some sceptical remarks about the available floor area, followed by curiosity regarding the rent. While our courage is praised (not more than our luck), we always give the same answer: “It’s different from what we were used to.”

Inside, the space doesn’t seem that small. And, honestly, it doesn’t even seem so relevant in our daily lives. The capsule perfectly fulfils its modern function of a “machine for living” and, as a couple, which theoretically makes the experience 65

Nakagin Capsule Tower

↑ The netting that was placed over the building’s facade after an earthquake last December

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even more extreme, we can live normally. We are happy here.

We prefer to live in a smaller space in central Tokyo than in a big house in the suburbs. Our routine is to leave home in the morning and return at night to rest. We feel like normal, happy examples of the “contemporary nomad” whom Kurokawa wrote about. Nevertheless, it still feels like we are living somewhere in between a hotel and a scientific experiment.

The window is large and circular; it seems huge in such a space.

Our room faces west, overlooking the surrounding buildings and the Shimbashi crossing, which at night is filled with lights.

The frame is fixed, to avoid accidents, yet this precludes natural ventilation in the room. In the ’70s, all the windows had a round fan system that controlled the amount of light coming in, but today only the metal support in the middle of the window remains. As a result, and despite the fact that we put up a blue curtain, every day at 6am light invades the capsule.

At first, sleeping was a problem, but now we are used to it.

All the surfaces are in contact with the outside and the insulation is not particularly good. The result is simple: the capsule is sweltering in the summer and freezing during winter. There is an enormous ventilation system integrated into the original design of the capsule. The wheel button allows three options: “fan”, “low” and “high”, but the air temperature cannot be controlled since it is set by the general system of the entire building. The air ducts are damaged in many places and some residents speak of possible contaminations. Even though we use an electric heater and the capsule is warm when we go to bed, all the heat quickly dissipates overnight.

When we take off our jackets or get changed, we have to store everything right away. The space is limited, but ergonomics is all-encompassing. A 35-centimetre-deep closet covers the entire south wall and serves as the storage system for the capsule, simultaneously featuring a sideboard, a dining table, a wardrobe and a set of shelves to store other objects. There isn’t much space for coat hangers, but the table is large and folds away, disappearing when not required. It is relatively low, like a sink,

but its latch is impressive: while the table is folded down in the horizontal position, the mechanism is collected in a cavity and becomes coplanar with the table, so your elbows don’t hit against it. The capsule encloses similar small details everywhere — in a very simple and almost imperceptible way, Kurokawa made living in such a space easier. As time passes, we get the feeling that maybe we don’t need more space than what we have now.

The TV is not the original, although it is the same size. The radio doesn’t work and the only functioning buttons on the “control panel” are the ones that switch on the two sources of light in the room: a large central lamp and a small, individual reading light.

The fridge is small and tight, like a minibar, but very useful. The freezer is not sealed and thus becomes the cooling unit. We were lucky that it works, because placing a standard refrigerator in that space would have been a nightmare.

As it was designed for the man of the future, whose very busy life would leave no time for cooking, the capsule does not include any appliances, so we were forced to buy a small kettle and a portable electric stove. Sometimes we cook but it isn’t easy, especially if we’re both at home. After some experimentation, however, the process got smoother. We realised the bathroom extractor fan is so powerful that it can ventilate food smells from the entire room, and the table can be used simultaneously as a kitchen work surface and dining table. The secret is organisation (as with almost everything we do in the capsule). When we’ve finished cooking, we do the dishes in the bathroom sink and have to put them away immediately. During the night, we only hear the old refrigerator running. If we feel like eating something before going to bed, or if we’re just not in the mood to cook, we always have the convenience store on the entrance floor, which is open 24/7.

The bed was a major problem. We couldn’t find a bed or mattress to fit the capsule, and we needed space to store our suitcases. Since we were having problems, and had access to the University of Tokyo’s carpentry workshop, we bought some materials and built our own bed, tailored to our needs. With a little DIY philosophy we

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The majority of units are in a bad state of repair, and few are still used as dwellings.

Each added element, such as the air-conditioning units, has been installed without respect for the original design

Ana Luisa Soares in her living unit. The capsule’s internal measurements are reduced to the bare minimum (2.3 x 3.8 x 2.1 m)

↑ The wheel button of the ventilation system; and the control panel of the elevator

achieved a good result, and even added a few more boxes for storage on the bed’s accessible side. On top of the structure we placed an air mattress, which fits perfectly.

The bathroom is particularly well organised. The walls are made of a washable plastic, turning the WC into a capsule within the capsule. In a visit to some of the abandoned units, the advanced state of disrepair of the remaining elements compared to the sanitary divisions was plainly visible. Since this is an interior space with no windows to the outside, the door has a round frosted glass window, which brings natural light into the bathroom. Despite the space’s minute proportions, there is a bathtub instead of a shower, something very typical in

Japanese culture. The toilet, sink and tub are a single plastic piece that functions as a whole and organises the space. Soap dispensers, a lamp, a towel holder and some small shelves are subtly placed on the walls to avoid the need for a cabinet. There is an electric plug next to the sink, protected from water by a metal screw cap. To flush the toilet we press a button.

We rarely see any of our neighbours, and despite having lived here for a few months, we’ve never come across anyone in the elevator. There is no noise in the other capsules and sometimes we have the impression that no one else lives in the building.

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Nakagin Capsule Tower

Tokyo, JP

7 JANUARY 2013 Current condition Every time we leave our capsule and look up at the ninth-floor balcony, while waiting for the elevator, we remember the earthquake of late last December, when Tokyo shook and the tower rocked violently. The building is not prepared to withstand strong earthquakes, but after 40 years these events are seen as normal.

We come from a country where there is no seismic activity, and for us it was scary to see the capsules colliding into each other.

We dashed down the concrete staircase, which seemed safer, and on the way we saw some neighbours acting as if nothing were happening. In Japan, an earthquake is somehow part of daily routine. A couple of days later the building was covered with a net, as a “precautionary measure” and “only for a few days”, so as to prevent anything from falling onto the sidewalk. Maybe we’re wrong, but something tells us that the net is here to stay.

Although it is known as “Nakagin Tower”, the building is actually composed of two attached towers. Each has an elevator core with a staircase going up in a spiral. On every landing there are two or three doors, but in reality there are many “landings” that don’t correspond to regular floors. There are 78 units in tower A and 62 in tower B. The numbering system is simple: we live in capsule B807 — tower B, 8th floor, door number 7.

Signs of previous residents are present all around the capsules and corridors. In our capsule, the most evident marks are the strange wallpaper, a carpet covering some degraded spots in the original flooring, and the air-conditioning unit that had to pierce through a wall in order to be installed. At Kenzo-san’s office, nothing original remains except for the bathroom, and the entire space is filled with revivalist furniture; a neighbour two doors down has created a warehouse and lined the interior with metal shelves. Most capsules are generally used for functions other than living.

The interior spaces gradually get larger towards the staircase, which is suitable for storing bicycles, boxes, shoes, garbage, etc.

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There is no hot water in the capsules. In order to wash ourselves with hot water, we could either install a water heater by ourselves, or use the shower on the common entrance floor. Like most residents, we chose to use the common shower facing the street. Every day we have to schedule our shower time, which isn’t difficult since there are so few of us. Due to the deterioration of the plumbing, new pipes were installed a few years ago, but the job was done carelessly and the doors of the capsules were cut so that the pipes could pass through. Indeed, everywhere around the building it is clear that the structure was never respected whenever some kind of repair was necessary. All solutions are patches.

There are perhaps ten to fifteen people living here, and most of the capsules have been abandoned. Some are “sealed” with plastic, while others don’t even have locks so you can enter and see the advanced state of dilapidation: walls are crumbling, shelves are broken, and garbage, mould and moisture are everywhere. From the emergency stairs, outside, you can see damaged roofs and holes all over. The ground and office floors work normally and are well maintained, but the capsules are slowly disintegrating.

The doorman leaves at midnight and only comes back at around 6AM. The door stays unlocked all night. Tokyo is so safe that the building only needs protection from the hordes of tourists.

Until he got used to us, the doorman would always run up to the elevator telling us we could not enter. We had to show our contract several times to prove that we were not tourists.

Someone is invariably standing at the door every day when we leave. Dozens of tourists — predominantly architects — stand on the other side of the street taking pictures. Most of them try to get in, like we did months ago. Usually we are approached when someone notices that we are leaving the tower. In the beginning we were happy when this happened, and we would even show our capsule, but as time passed this became so frequent that we now comprehend the doorman’s brusque reaction to us the first night we came here.

↑ The bathroom is a plastic monobloc set in a corner next to the front door. The capsules were conceived to be replaced every 25 years

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This page, clockwise: Kenzosan in his capsule B702; Filipe and Ana Luisa on the emergency stairs; the corridor along which the capsules are distributed; the entrance lobby to the tower; the residents’ letterboxes

Photo Joseph Grima

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Nakagin Capsule Tower

Tokyo, JP

17 JANUARY 2013 Past/present/future We often speak with Kenzo-san, who tells us that some of the remaining inhabitants talk of demolition as if it were imminent, even mentioning specific dates.

Every day we hear new rumours and conflicting information. Nevertheless, a few days ago we met a young Japanese man who had bought five capsules and was restoring them by himself in his spare time. Despite so many abandoned and decaying units, somebody still believes in the building’s future. Contrasting approaches by the building’s diverse inhabitants outline an uncertain future.

The demolition almost went ahead in 2007.

Plans were approved and some owners were completely in favour of it, but a public petition with the support of the Japan Institute of Architects (JIA) saved the building at that time.

Faced with this situation, Kurokawa proposed an obvious solution: “Why not replace the old 70

capsules with new ones? That was the idea all along.” However, the idea fell through. Six years have passed since then and the doubts regarding the building’s future remain.

At over 40 years since its completion back in 1972, the tower that was a modern icon is now seen by some as obsolete, and even a bad idea.

Nevertheless, maybe the update suggested by Kurokawa could revive the idea that sustained the building’s conception to begin with.

The idea of demolition and renewal was an integral part of the Metabolist ideology, so it’s somewhat ironic that there’s all this controversy surrounding the tower’s demolition, updating and current state of decay.

Tokyo has changed a lot since the ’70s. At first the tower stood alone, but over time it found itself surrounded by tall buildings. Facing it, a once busy highway is now closed, with no cars crossing it any longer. During the ’90s several

skyscrapers were built across the street, blocking the sunlight that arrived from the south. The convenience store is not the same.

The city has lost its love for the Nakagin Capsule Tower and intends to demolish it in order to profit from the sale of the valuable square metres in this area, which lies at the edge of the fashionable Ginza district.

The most tangible materialisation of Metabolism has become part of the scenery. Now rotting, it has become disposable.

— FILIPE MAGALHÃES, ANA LUISA SOARES Architects, www.falaatelier.com

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This spread: the two peaks of the towers house the systems and water tanks; the Shimbashi district seen from the second-floor platform. This area lies next to Ginza and has a high market value — a factor that in 2007 prompted the owners to consider the possible demolition of the Nakagin Capsule Tower. Kurokawa, backed by the Japanese Institute of Architects (JIA), proposed substituting the worn-out capsules; some of the portholes are shielded by a lateral curved panel

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STREET DIARIES

A Quest for Cultural Nostalgia A critical examination of art patronage and policy by state government and its effect on contemporary and traditional art production, aesthetics and choice for art location; this research study, based on art in public spaces within Jaipur, presents an important perspective

In her article “art without heart”, Manjula Padmanabhan explains the role of the artist and the authorities in forming a collective aesthetics through public art, an aesthetic which not only reflects the general trend in art but also the political will behind the patronage provided to these works . To a certain extent this becomes clear while travelling around Jaipur; although public commissions for art were acutely sporadic in the earlier times, more recently a surge is visible in installation of art at public spaces since the last 10-12 years, showcasing the themes inspired from the cultural and political plethora of Jaipur.

Over the years the murals paintings are reduced to a pastiche of past glory with works that have either started to deteriorate with neglect or new works have replaced earlier murals. On the other hand, the sculptures in the public space too are witness to modified aesthetics. With a new government in power after every five years, these public space commissions have thus become critical record of a larger political and cultural discourse which is important to decipher to enable an understanding of the changes in policy making which in turn effect art production, its placement and aesthetics.

Mural paintings One of the essential aspects of public art in Jaipur is the apparent importance given to the continuation of tradition in art production. Historically Jaipur was established by Sawai Jai 72

Text & Photos

Khushboo Bharti

Singh on 18th October 1727 and over the years many rulers came to the throne of Jaipur and added to the cultural and political growth of Jaipur, but the name that is important in the course of increasing and adding to the aesthetic value of Jaipur by directly contributing to the city structures was that of maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II (1835-1880). It was in his reign that all the buildings facing the main bazaars were painted pink with floral motifs in white, thus giving the city the famous name of pink city. This is one of the most prevalent myths about Jaipur. It is true that Sawai Ram Singh II developed the city in interesting ways — it also includes an experiment in 1868 that involved painting every street with a different coloured wash. As soon as this was recognised as a hideous mistake in 1870, the pink wash was restored; the other version of the myth is that the city was painted pink to celebrate the visit of the Prince of Wales in 1876.

This too is a confusion based on the regular practice of giving the major public buildings a fresh coat of colour wash before the visits of distinguished people: the late 19th century reports of the state's building department record this being done on a number of occasions when Jaipur was visited by the viceroys or similar dignitaries.

Today, planning regulation ensures the maintenance of the pink façades but leaves it to individuals to determine the precise shade; many have opted for a pastel shade of pink far removed from the original terracotta or geru which was sustained in Ram

↑ Amar Jawan Jyoti Conceived by architect and city planner Anoop Bartaria, the Amar Jawan Jyoti brings together political aspirations and the heritage of Jaipur. The work, ZKLOH LQÐXHQFHG IURP WKH Amar Jawan Jyoti in Delhi, also integrates elements from iconic structures of Jaipur such as Jantar Mantar and Statue Circle Chattri.

This symbolic structure, dedicated to the martyrs of war, is placed on the road that leads to Vidhan Sabha of Jaipur.

August 2013

Singh’s time, but now only patches of it survive on parts of the city walls. Geru imitates the colour of the region’s sandstone also used most notably in the Mughal imperial cities of Delhi, Agra and Fatehpur Sikri. Given that a part of Sawai Jai Singh’s intention was to establish his capital in Jaipur as an alternative power base to Mughal authority, it is not surprising that aspects of the design reflect this ambition. Thus, along with the karkhana (workshop) tradition — influenced by the Mughal system of department-wise division of the imperial household — the colour wash imitating the geru colour completes this illusion of proximity with Mughal courts. Traditionally, only the main entry gates to the city were painted with floral motifs along with the walls surrounding the old city with background of geru overlaid with white floral motifs. Although this tradition is continued till today, its manifestation is limited to the overhead bridges, under bridges and other boundary walls around, besides major connecting roads in Jaipur, within the old city and the newer, developed areas which are being painted in shades of geru and decorated with white floral motifs or simple lines.

The 60s saw another addition to this tradition. The postindependence craft revival within Jaipur initiated the process of re-establishing karkhanas where miniature paintings were produced on industrial scale, but these were private-owned institutions run by artists trained under the Bengal revivalist school tradition. The government, on the other hand, gave a major responsibility of reviving the craft of blue pottery to Kripal Singh Shekhavat. Along with this was granted a commission to paint murals on the interior walls of the railway station.

Following his own style of revivalist painting, he conceived the mural panel with figurative narrative themes showcasing the culture of Rajasthan.

In the successive years to come, public space art commissions were only granted for sculpture but this changed in the decade of 1990 with the completion of Jawahar Kala Kendra (JKK). When Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh built Jaipur he was moved by two seemingly conflicting sets of ideas and images. On the one hand there was the oldest theory of the Navagraha Mandala — the mandalas of the nine planets, which scholars believe was the origin of the city plan of Jaipur, with one of the planets moved to the opposite corner in order to avoid an existing hill — and on the other was Jai Singh’s interest in astronomy, and a profound belief in the theory of science and progress which culminated in the form of Jantar Mantar — the astronomical instruments constructed to measure, with the greatest possible accuracy, the movement of sun and stars across the skies. And it is this dual concept that was followed in the formation and conception of Jawahar Kala Kendra by architect Charles Correa in 1990 which was constructed taking influence from the Jaipur city plan. JKK is a metaphor for these theories: a contemporary building based on an ancient notion of the cosmos, the very same Navgraha Mandala, with one of the squares moved aside, so as to provide a point of entry and to recall the gesture that creates and revives the original plan for Jaipur and a visual directory for cosmology.

The external walls of the building are clad in red Agra sandstone topped by a coping of beige Dholpur stone — the same materials used for the Jantar Mantar observatory and in keeping with the tradition established by the maharaja Jai Singh of painting the city with the geru wash to imitate the Mughal architecture of Red Fort or the Fatehpur Sikri since the same stone used in JKK is used at Fatehpur Sikri and Red Fort. Throughout Jawahar Kala Kendra, the traditional symbols of planets are visible, recalling the surfaces and symbols or astronomical instruments at the Jantar Mantar observatory. Another element that represents the inspiration from the Jantar Mantar is the use of mural paintings on the interior spaces of the structure to depict cosmology. These works partially also reflect inspiration from Jain cosmology and are painted by the traditional miniature painters, suggesting the continuation of the miniature painting tradition of Jaipur in the large scale mural format. Jawahar Kala Kendra was the first incidence after a prolonged gap where a public space such as JKK — being promoted as the arts and cultural centre of Jaipur — utilised the miniature paintings style as large scale mural panels.

Far above: View of the Tonk Phatak Over Bridge, depicting a panel with engraving inspired from tribal motifs.

Above: View of the Ajmer Overbridge ↑

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The police memorial and the road leading to the Narain Singh Circle bus stand

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A Quest for Cultural Nostalgia

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This page: Ajmer Overbridge $MPHU 2YHUEULGJH ZDV RQH RI WKH HLJKW EULGJHV SDLQWHG GXULQJ WKH Ă?UVW SKDVH RI EHDXWLĂ?FDWLRQ XQGHU WKH %-3 JRYHUQPHQW 7KH ZRUN ZDV FRPPLVVLRQHG WR senior artist Sumahendra, who took inspiration from the style of Kishangarh and Shekhawati paintings and incorporated the lively themes inspired from narratives of historical personalities, sports of Jaipur, heritage structures DURXQG WKH VWDWH DV ZHOO DV Ă?RUD DQG IDXQD The bridge was not selected to be repainted during the second phase of EHDXWLĂ?FDWLRQ XQGHU WKH &RQJUHVV JRYHUQPHQW ,W ZDV HYHQWXDOO\ SXOOHG GRZQ in 2013, due to construction of the metro track in Jaipur, with no reminisce of the artworks preserved in the process.

Since this bridge has vertical and horizontal space, the murals too have iconic depictions of folk performers.

The space on this bridge is laced with lively depiction of various animals such as elephants, deer, horses etc.

Opposite page: Bhaskar Overbridge 7KLV EULGJH ZDV DOVR SDLQWHG WZLFH WKH Ă?UVW WLPH E\ WKH 8GDLSXU EDVHG DUWLVW Suresh Sharma. Although an abstract painter, Suresh Sharma depicted paintings in a style that he had evolved during his graduation studies, therefore meeting with the requirement of government directive of painting Ă?JXUDWLYH ZRUNV WKRXJK QRW LQ D WUDGLWLRQDO VW\OH 7KH VHFRQG WLPH LW ZDV FRPPLVVLRQHG WR -DLSXU EDVHG WUDGLWLRQDO PLQLDWXUH artist Ramu Ramdeva, who again did not follow the government directives of depicting the past and heritage of the state, and resorted to his vision for IXWXUH RI WKH FLW\ DORQJ ZLWK SDLQWLQJV VXFK DV WKH %DQL 7KDQL Ă?JXUH ZRUNLQJ on a laptop and mobile.

Thus this bridge provides an example where the artists have moderated their vision and style to accommodate the government's insistence on traditional Ă?JXUDWLYH HOHPHQWV 7KH %KDVNDU 2YHUEULGJHV H[SHULHQFHV WKH OHDVW WUDIĂ?F LQ -DLSXU ZKLFK LV one of the reasons why the works survive in a fairly good condition, without being under the constant threat of getting permanent spitting marks by pedestrians.

The images also depict various festivals of Rajasthan, although a few works are more detailed than others since the time that was allotted to this artist ZDV QRW VXIĂ?FLHQW WR DFKLHYH FRQVLVWHQF\ LQ WKH LPDJHV 74

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With the coming up of the decade of 2000, and under the BJP government tenure as ruling party, the paintings got a new lease of life with the completion of various over bridges and walls connecting major centres of the city. The government, for the first time, commissioned a multitude of contemporary artists from Rajasthan, but mainly from Jaipur, to paint these bridges.

The selection of the artists saw an assortment of modern artists and traditional miniature painters. The directive given by the authority to the artists mentioned themes which include, for example, festivals, folk instruments, traditional motifs, etc.

This directive by the government on the themes and topics meant that few artists who work in abstract and semi-abstract styles had to undermine the style and incorporate figurative art. Thus the style of these artists is not visible; what is visible, however, is a subject and figure-oriented work which compiles with the already popular figurative arts be it in contemporary arts seen in the art galleries or the miniature paintings seen in the traditional karkhanas.

Sculptures If the above mentioned paragraphs portray the traditions in mural painting, the tradition of sculpture-making has also garnered a regular patronage for centuries. The evidence of this is the fact that the traditional sculptors or murtikar (idol makers) still live and work in the Murti Mohalla within the Khajane Wallon ka Rasta in the western part of the walled city.

These traditional artisans continue to produce idols of gods and academic naturalistic-styled portrait sculptures of famous personalities. And a continuation of this tradition is manifested in the art adorning the public spaces of Jaipur.

At this juncture, it becomes vital to understand the two distinctive categories of sculptural production in Jaipur that are installed at several important public places.

In the first category are included the colossal works adorning the cityscape which serve as communicating symbols for the society. These public creations can be put in the category of commemorative sculptures for their socio-political significance as memorials blending the elements of academic naturalism prevalent in sculpture tradition with contemporary practice, without any visibility of ostentatious feel: the life-size police memorial at Jawahar lal Nehru Marg, the Tagore image at Ravindra Manch, portraits of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Mahatma Jyotibaa Phoole, and along with these are the sculptures of Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh, and Maharaja Sawai Man Singh.

The second category incorporates sculptural tableau which revolves around the themes of festivals and culture of Jaipur incorporating academic-style figurative sculptures garbed in traditional attires and engaged in activities reflecting the myriad festivities. Highly ostentatious in their approach, with emphasis on details, these sculptures mark a stark differentiation from the portrait sculptures explained earlier.

However, in both these categories of sculpture production the concern is not just to create an object of beauty, rather to let the entire structure of the sculpture to communicate in a direct visual manner and not necessarily be an intellectual activity for the onlooker.

An exception to these two categories of portraiture or the tableau sculpture is the Amar Jawan Jyoti dedicated to the martyrs of war, designed as a symbolic representation of not just the military service but as a commemoration again to the two iconic and landmark symbols of Jaipur — the statue circle and the Jantar Mantar — along with the inspiration taken from the Amar Jawan Jyoti of Delhi. This may suggest the government’s intention to establish Jaipur as a cultural base confronting the proximity to and central authority of Delhi; it is not surprising that aspects of the design reflect this ambition of the BJP government, an act of power display which Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh too usurped with the formation of Jaipur as his capital and an alternate political power base to the Mughal empire.

The second example can be seen in the form of installation created at the central park. This 12-piece abstract installation, 75

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This page: Gair Dance Tableau Sculpture Amongst the group sculpture installations commissioned in Jaipur since the 2005, the Gair Dance group installation is the most ambitious in terms of the scale of individual images.

Conceptualised by architect and city planner Anoop Bartaria, DQG H[HFXWHG E\ -DLSXU EDVHG DUWLVW 5DMHVK %KDQGDUL WKH ODUJHU WKDQ OLIH VL]H WDEOHDX GHSLFWV D NLQJ DQG D TXHHQ acknowledging the performance of Gair dancers and singers.

The placement of this panel is equally important as the Gair is a royal dance done during royal ceremonies, thus the panel is placed on an island in front of the Rajmahal Palace FRPSRXQG HQ URXWH WR WKH %-3 KHDG TXDUWHUV The works are placed on very low pedestals rather than the high pedestals usually visible in public installation in Jaipur to increase visibility from far. The conceivers of this work increased the scale of the individual sculptures to thus make the work visible from a distance.

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This page: Gangaur Procession Tableau Sculpture This grou p of sculptures, conceived by architect and city planner Anoop Bartaria and sculptor Rajesh bhandari, is placed on the island in front of the Rambagh Palace, Jaipur, while the road leads to Moti Doongri Fort and Ganesh Mandir, both patronised by the royal family of Jaipur. The tableau sculpture thus is one more example where the location of the images marks an association with the theme of sculpture and royal family; Gangaur Festival procession being a royal event, this group sculpture is thus the longest tableau to be found in Jaipur.

7KH LPDJH GHSLFWV WKH *DQJDXU LGRO RQ D SDODQTXLQ ZLWK WKH ,,30 EXLOGLQJ YLVLEOH LQ WKH EDFNJURXQG 7KLV EXLOGLQJ WRR ZDV RQH RI WKH Ă?UVW SRVW PRGHUQ architectures in Jaipur created by Anoop Bartaria.

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A Quest for Cultural Nostalgia

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Gurjar Ki Thadi Underpass $UWLVW 6DPDQGHU 6LQJK .KDQJDURW FUHDWHG ZRUNV LQ D FKDUDFWHULVWLF OLQH oriented composition for this location. The subject matter again depicts the royal procession which the artist had created earlier too on the Kathputlinagar wall. Along with these, the heritage architectures within the old city is also highlighted in the compositions.

Different views of the underpass carry depictions of procession themes and heritage buildings.

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JP Underpass Mrinalini Kumawat is the only artist along with Samander Singh Khangarot to SDLQW DW PXOWLSOH SODFHV -3 8QGHUSDVV LV WKH VHFRQG ORFDWLRQ WKDW 0ULQDOLQL Kumawat was commissioned to paint. Apart from the standard theme of royal and village life, the artist has incorporated elements which include lively depictions of monkeys, deer, cows and peacocks.

The space under the staircase has niches which are painted in decorative ÐRUDO PRWLIV DQG KXPDQ ÏJXUHV 7KH VSDFH DERYH LV XVHG WR GLVSOD\ EDQQHUV and other advertisements.

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This page: Jawahar Kala Kendra The façade of JKK that leads to the DXGLWRULXP LV �DQNHG E\ WZR VFXOSWXUHV depicting a male and female kathputli. :KLOH LQWHUYLHZLQJ VFXOSWRU 8VKD 5DQL Hooja, it was revealed that initially she was asked to make these scupltures in metal but the commission did not get formalise and later, the same concept was given to a local artisan who made the present scuplyures and also painted them.

The images also depict the various paintings on the front walls of the art gallery in JKK. Originally, the wall behind the craft museum at JKK was painted with an iconic image of Krishna in the form of govind deva ji (the popular form of Krishna in Jaipur).

Artist Ghanshyam Nimbark discussed the particular work with Charles Correa and it was decided to paint the image with minimum elements and decorated in black, white and red so that the colours retain brilliance for a longer duration under the sunrays.

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A Quest for Cultural Nostalgia

Jaipur, IN

donated to the city by French artist Christian Lapie, was made in collaboration with various private organisations of Jaipur, is again a tribute to the Jantar Mantar as well as the city of Jaipur, inspired by the theme of astronomy and astrology, thus giving tribute to the vision of Sawai Jai Singh for the city of Jaipur.

Yet these two works are vital and the most recent examples of public space art which diverge from the main stream practice of public space art by utilising symbolism and showcasing the amalgamation of traditional and culturally signiďŹ cant symbols from the past.

Another distinction can also be made in the manner of studying the timeline dividing the art works done under the tenure of the Congress government as opposed to the works commissioned under the BJP government.

Under the tenure of the Congress party, public art commissions were mainly about the commemorative sculptures displaying portraits of political personalities and important congress leaders or social reformists. On the other hand, under BJP leadership the public space commissions mainly dealt with large groups of sculptures which reect the festivals of Jaipur, the portrait sculpture of the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh, the Amar Jawan Jyoti, and along with these, the mural paintings on and under the bridges or roadside walls depicting the cultural plethora.

Thus, where the commissions under the Congress reect an importance attached to past leaders, the BJP gives signiďŹ cance to the cultural symbols from the past and the present. Although with the Congress back as ruling party in the state, the kind of public commissions for art it would propose is yet to be witnessed.

This page: Bais Godam Underpass 2QH RI WKH Ă?UVW ORFDWLRQV LQ -DLSXU WR EH SDLQWHG WKH %DLV *RGDP 8QGHUSDVV ZDV commissioned to miniature artist Samandar 6LQJK .KDQJDURW ZKR FUHDWHG Ă?RUDO PRWLIV with a white and pink colour combination on the middle divider wall, while one sidewall KDV FDOHQGDU DUW LQVSLUHG SDLQWLQJ GHSLFWLQJ the desert theme of Rajasthan.

The other sidewall of the underpass remains LQFRPSOHWH VLQFH WKH DUWLVW DQG RIĂ?FLDOV could not agree to similar terms within the contract.

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Location for the art works JLN Marg — a road connecting two extremes of Jaipur, north and south, the city palace and the airport — a straight broad route with the university, colleges, cultural centres and government offices running along its either side: it is at this road that the placement of the ďŹ rst government-sponsored public sculptures began with commemorative sculptures such as the Gandhi statue, and the police memorial. The placement of these sculptures is such that they face the Gad Ganesh temple in the north of the city which has always been a sacred element in the planning of the city of Jaipur during Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh’s time and it was during his reign that the construction of the city palace was done facing the north, directly towards the Gad Ganesh temple. This is not the ďŹ rst incidence of sculptures placed in line with Gad Ganesh and city palace in the north; before this, the portrait sculpture of Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh at the statue circle (erected during the time of Maharaja Sawai Man Singh) too was placed facing the north and more recently the portrait of Maharaja Man Singh are made facing the sacred temple of Gad Ganesh and the city palace. Thus the city palace, the Elbert Hall, the portraits of the maharajas and the JLN Marg, all face the sacred form of architecture, the Gad Ganesh.

With the expansion of the city over the years, it became pertinent that other roads be utilised too. What we see, thus, are two divergent public space engagements by two political parties BJP and the Congress. In the previous component of sculpture, I have already explained the two differing subject matters but it is not just the subject matter, it’s the location of the public space art commissions too that differs.

Most of the sculptures commissioned by the Congress are positioned in front of prominent government building, whereas the works commissioned under the BJP government are located on sites that are close to buildings that were made by the maharajas and are now heritage properties, or they are positioned on major tourist routes. — KHUSHBOO BHARTI Art historian and academic at IICD, Jaipur

This project was recently exhibited at the Artisans Art Gallery in Mumbai.

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This page: The Peacock Garden One of the most expensive projects commissioned for public space in jaipur, the space was designed by architect Anoop Bartaria. Artist Samader Singh Khangarot was commissioned and a traditional metal caster was employed to make the peacock sculptures around the garden.

Well appreciated by the citizens of Jaipur, WKH VSDFH ZDV LQLWLDOO\ Ă?OOHG ZLWK PDQ\ sculptures of peacocks which became less over the years due to theft.

The space under the Malviya Nagar bridge forms a part of the Peacock Garden, thus

the artist Samander Singh Khangarot was directed to paint peacock motifs and characteristically at this space too the artist has utilised pink and white colour scheme.

The space was designed for visitors to relax and appreciate the aesthetics, thus benches were laid around the park; although the popularity of this place has languished over the years.

The image shows one of the only peacocks in the garden in dancing posture with open feathers, while another shows a closeup of the space with a peacock on the fountain.

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M G Road Juxtaposing the historical with the urban, photographer Heidi Specker captures the essence of one of the most commonly used street names across the country — MG Road, in Ahmedabad — as a reflection of the country itself

Text & Photos

Heidi Specker

The invitation from the Goethe Institute/Max Mueller Bhavan for participating in the Germany Year of India, 2012 caught me by surprise, about one year before my actual trip to India. I was to be in Ahmedabad for four weeks — a city that I did not know and a culture that was alien to me.

Long before my departure, my mind was already in Ahmedabad. My ideas and imaginations oscillated back and forth between the past and the future.

There were questions: What was Ahmedabad?

What is the history of this city? How has its history registered into its architecture, in the cityscape?

Who had shaped it? Where would this history be visible and will I find these places? Will they be like I had imagined them to be? What am I still not thinking about? What will surprise me? And finally, how can I get a legible, visual context?

Artistic work? Will four weeks be enough for that purpose?

I had already made an important decisions before my departure, due to the shortage of time — I wanted to make Mahatma Gandhi, the Sarabhai family and Le Corbusier my protagonists. The plan was to photographically link the development of the textile metropolis of Ahmedabad — the so-called Manchester of India — to these people.

The content-related important prerequisite for this idea was that these three subjects share some similarity; they represent modernisation, for striving for positive change and for progress. At the same time, Gandhi, the Sarabhai family and Le Corbusier differ in their influence and dealings.

As the leader of the Indian independence movement, Gandhi propagated non-violent resistance and civil disobedience. He settled upon Ahmedabad as the location of his ashram.

The Sarabhai family, who owe their wealth to the textile industry, displayed their interest towards contemporary artists by extending invitations to their residence in Ahmedabad; Robert Rauschenberg had been to their residence in 1973 and collected materials, bought fabrics on his journeys in the area. John Baldessari was invited in 1990. At the same time, the Sarabhais committed themselves to tradition

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and established the Calico Museum of Textiles in 1949, where the world-renowned collection of Indian fabrics and textiles spanned five centuries.

In keeping with the same spirit, to unite tradition and modernity, Le Corbusier began to build four houses at once in Ahmedabad — private houses such as Villa de Madame Manorama Sarabhai and the Shodhan House, as well as the Ahmedabad Textile Mill Owners’ Association House (ATMA House) and the city museum, the Sanskar Kendra, as public houses. His architecture creates a radical notion of space with traditional handicrafts.

The picture folder MG Road, with 27 photographs, places historical locations next to urban daily situations, traditional handicraft next to the fragmentary. There is no place in India which does not have a street by the name of MG Road, thus, it is not only Ahmedabad that is reflected in my work. This is not the aim of my activity; it only refers to the formulation of the typical and the universal.

—

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City as dimension A collaboration between photography students of The Visual Academy of Art in Leipzig, Germany and the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, explores the question of looking at cities and the quest to comprehend the familiar, as well as the unfamilar. The shape and form of urban spaces, streetscapes, and urban objects becomes the subject of visual investigation into the nature of cities Text

Parikrama

Heidi Specker Thomas Weski

Pradyumna Vyas Daniel Niggemann

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Photo by Antje Guenther

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The history of this project dates back to 2010. We were approached by Mr Heiko Sievers, Director of the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi, who expressed an interest in initiating a collaboration between German and Indian academies of photography. This was to be a part of the Year of Germany in India — Germany and India 2011-2012: Infinite Opportunities — organised to celebrate 60 years of diplomatic relations between Germany and India. The Visual Academy of Arts in Leipzig, where both of us teach, welcomed his proposal. As the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad is an art and design institution of enormous repute and one of the few in India where photography is taught, we readily agreed to partner with them and to collaborate with the NID’s Department of Photography. We also decided that StadtRäume — CitySpaces, the theme of the Year of Germany, would be the general focus of our project, which would address the issue of rapid urbanisation and its effects in Ahmedabad. The project was realised with great support from the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai, in particular, the support of its director Dr Marla Stukenberg and the programme coordinator Jayashree Joshi, and the support of Dr Deepak John Mathew, the coordinator of the NID Photography Design Department and our principal counterpart at NID. If one looks at the city as dimension, its sheer size becomes the scale and theme, and can be understood instinctively in spatial terms. Initially, a city was defined by its area — large city: sprawl, small city: manageable. Then the space developed: congested areas with very high houses on a small space or a collection of very small houses on a large expanse. In the coordinate system of a metropolis, everything is possible. To make the issue more complex, there is also the scale of 1 and 0. 1 which stands for infinitely many people. We speak of mega cities with a population of millions, where the millions are as yet in double digits. The 0, on the other hand, stands for few, infinitely few people. These are the shrinking cities that maintain their volume while remaining vacant, but are shrinking in size as their populations decline. Photography has explored the development of cities from the very start. The medium itself has also developed rapidly and kept pace with the urbanisation of the landscape and the cities.

More than a year before setting out for Ahmedabad, we started preparing our photography class at the Academy in Leipzig for the project; over the course of two semesters, the students collected as much information as possible about the city and its history. We screened topically relevant documentaries and feature films to sensitise the students to possible issues and motifs, and we discussed Indian photography and visual arts. We also invited photography students from other German universities who had already been involved in similar projects in India.

But we primarily studied photographic projects that dealt with the documentation of cities in different cultures, as we wanted to broaden our approach to and research on StadtRäume — CitySpaces.

The research work proved to be extremely difficult.

In contrast to Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata, cities for which there is a plethora of images and a wide range of artwork, Ahmedabad is virtually a blind

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spot. This was certainly one of the reasons why the Goethe-Institut suggested that we base the project here. Contemporary images were just about impossible to ďŹ nd and the ones that were available were mainly of the gigantic Sabarmati Riverfront Project, a large urban planning project on an almost-utopian scale. As though it is the done thing, the animations and renderings produced and available on the net depict something visionary, something that seems to have only little relevance for the present ground realities.

Nevertheless, a look beneath the surface reveals

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the explosiveness of the mega project in terms of its design and environmental impact, as well as the impotence of traditional technological vision and research, which seem to be quite removed from reality.

After one semester, we selected 12 students for our project. Most of them had never been to India. In the second semester, these students were asked to draft a concept for their respective projects as precisely as possible. Under the guidance of Heidi Specker, the group eventually travelled to Ahmedabad in August 2012 for a four-week

residency. They stayed at the NID guesthouse on the new NID campus which proved to be perfect, as they were able to interact with Indian students on a daily basis. Immediately after their arrival, the students began implementing their individual photo projects. It had been agreed that the students would work exclusively with digital formats so that that the work in progress could be regularly presented, discussed and critiqued.

These sessions were organised jointly with Deepak Mathew’s class, where the students were also working on the CitySpaces theme. Halfway

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Photos by Akash Anand

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through the residency, the German and Indian students together started to select images for their exhibition in the NID gallery in Ahmedabad. We settled on Parikrama as the title of the exhibition.

Digital photography and mega cities are central elements in our world today; their future dimensions are completely open. What both phenomena have in common is the incredible speed at which they are changing and adopting a new role. It is virtually impossible to come up with an appropriate depiction or deďŹ nition of a metropolis, as it tends to be an embodiment of its development potential or of the imagined potential, rather than the here and now. The present is thus more trend than fact. In this project, the trend deďŹ ned the space where the students met and attempted to grasp and depict it in their work.

We noticed that the German students were quicker to post their photographs on Facebook with the message ‘Here I am!’ than to ask and discuss the question: ‘Where exactly am I?’ with their Indian colleagues in the workshop. In this context it is interesting to note that Parikrama in Sanskrit means ‘the path around something’ or to move around a central core. Both mega cities as well as digital photography seem to have lost their ‘core’. Hence the focus of the project was on re-deďŹ ning the core of the city and its dimension through digital photography. This dimension is reected in a vast and diverse range of works. The students and their works in a metropolitan area go around smaller places while being encircled by the theme.

The Indian and German students were moving within a shared city / time / space, in a dimension, so to speak, that would not have been possible without collaborating within the framework of the project. Their work is less about a concrete representation and more about subjectively founded concepts of urbanity that respond to the ďŹ ction of the mega city with a personal view, add perspectives, and highlight the space in everyday life that lies between a black spot and a bright future.

The exhibition opened on 7 September 2012. The photographic works of 12 German and eight Indian students were on display, each with a speciďŹ c approach and interpretation of CitySpaces in Ahmedabad. In February 2013, Parikrama was shown at the Goethe-Institut Mumbai in a reduced and different form. It was curated by Daniel Niggemann, one of the participants of the residency. — HEIDI SPECKER, THOMAS WESKI Professors, Academy for Visual Arts, Leipzig, Germany

This page: photos by Thomas Krueger

Heidi Specker is an artist and a professor for Photography. Thomas Weski is a photography curator and a professor for Cultures of the Curatorial. Both teach at the Academy for Visual Arts in Leipzig, Germany. The authors would like to express their heartfelt thanks to all who contributed to the implementation and success of this unique project. A special thanks goes WR WKH VWXGHQWV RI WKH 9LVXDO $FDGHP\ RI $UWV LQ /HLS]LJ DQG WKH 1DWLRQDO ,QVWLWXWH RI 'HVLJQ LQ Ahmedabad. They also acknowledge the contribution of translator Ritu Khanna, and 'U 'HHSDN -RKQ 0DWKHZ &RRUGLQDWRU 3KRWRJUDSK\ 'HVLJQ 1,' 87

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Photos by Annegret Schlegel

Photos by Ajit Bhadoriya

ȓ šm| mf( ( | Lf ƀ(LyªL=ǽ ( I ( |L($ m ready ourselves for India and the metropolis of Ahmedabad with its five and a half millionstrong populace. Of our group of 12 students, only two had any experience at all of the Indian subcontinent. Most of them had never been to Asia before. Even if almost no one exactly found what they had defined in Germany, most of them have been able to work on the questions framed at home. This could not have been possible without the exchange with the students of NID. In the daily workshops, we mutually presented our work and discussed our project ideas for those under the title CitySpaces standing invitation.

Thus, the Indian students provided us concrete help by helping us find the correct locations for our images; but their opinion was a lot more important. Stereotypes were exposed and questions on the relevance of themes and artistic 88

approach from the German and Indian point of view were discussed.

Influenced mostly by a journalistic account of India, we tried to approach the city without resorting to this familiar pictorial canon. What are the specific visual characteristics of this city? How are its structures laid out? The form and aesthetics, the function and organisation of a contemporary Indian industrial city were deemed worth of investigation. We tried to gain insight as much in the historical city centre as in the modern temples of consumption that are the shopping malls, whose construction as well as closure seem inflationary. We also looked at road traffic, the interaction of people and the transportation of goods.

How the billboard-interventions define the perception of the urban space and how they accentuate the architectural symbols became

the subject of our inquiry. Similarly, the renovation and redesign of the construction project of Ahmedabad and the landscaping of the promenade over 10km on both sides of the river, the Sabarmati Riverfront Project came to illustrate for us the change the mega city Ahmedabad is undergoing. We suspect this echoes the overall current urban development of India.

It was outstanding to meet people at a distance of about 6000 kms, who work on the same thing despite displaying large cultural differences at first glance; and that there was a friendly exchange — which continues.

— DANIEL NIGGEMANN Participant of the workshop

ȓ Ƈ Lmf _ űf L ( m2 œ( L=f ( _L I($ Lf 1961 and has been a centre for design education, practice, and research since then. NID is the leading design school in India that bases its ideology on balancing traditions and modernity in the context of design solutions. NID has several student exchange programmes with institutes from various nations; this encourages exposure to the best of international trends. These programmes are conceived in such a way that they bridge cultures and nationalities through design understanding.

Parikrama was one such international exchange programme that happened between the Photography Design Department at NID Gandhinagar and the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig. Photography students from Leipzig, along with their mentor Heidi Specker were hosted by the Photography Design Department at NID. Deepak John Matthew (Coordinator, Photography Design, NID) and Heidi Specker mentored the students for a month in various aspects of photography.

Students from both the countries were meant to work on one theme — the city of Ahmedabad, which is a 600-year-old city with several complexities; it also offers many contexts to work with. This is a city on the verge of becoming a metropolitan city. The complex structure of east and west Ahmedabad shows the divide between the old and the new. The students could take up any aspect of the city and work on the same.

This was a challenging task for students from both countries. Students worked with aspects of constructions, water, old traditional structures such as chabutaras (bird feeders), chaos, textiles and fabrics, environment, street fashion, and the inside world of the city. Each came up with an interesting corpus of work at the end of the workshop.

Apart from doing considerable amount of work, students exchanged ideas and communicated them at various levels. Regular review sessions exposed students to the works of each other, and constructive feedback. With this, the workshop also accommodated many photo-books and review sessions to gain a larger perspective in history and various genres of photography.

The experience of living together enriched each student’s experience of other cultures and customs.

At the end of the workshop, students from both institutes put a show at the Design Gallery at NID Ahmedabad; this show was called Parikrama.

The show gave very interesting perspectives on the city of Ahmedabad. Later, the same show travelled to Mumbai at the Max Mueller Bhavan gallery, along with an exhibition show by Heidi Specker called M G Road.

Parikrama has paved the road for long-lasting relationships between the two institutes and countries. It was indeed a matter of delight when NID, by way of conducting ‘Parikrama’, was invited to be a part Year of Germany in India for celebrating 60 years of the India-Germany relationship. Relations between different cultures can be fostered through art and by art.

— PRADYUMNA VYAS Director, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad

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Photos by Franziska Schurig

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Space and Possession A documentation of the uniquely “Indian” modernity that is responsive yet upholds a sense of affinity for history and tradition that is taking over the streets of Bengaluru, poses a pertinent question — that of ownership of spaces — public, private or shared

Text

Abhimanyu Arni Photos

Clare Arni

↑ Vibrant artworks form the backdrop of everyday life in Bengaluru

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↑ Shrines painted on walls complement the religiocultural aspect of daily life, without excluding groups that do not share the same sentiments

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As India undergoes a demographic shift from the rural to the urban, old ideas of urban space will need to be changed to accommodate the unique interaction between the forces of privatisation, led by India's increasing level of integration with the global economy, and the older forms of social arrangement and demarcation. This does not mean that the streets of Bengaluru are witnessing a siege of the immemorial by the modern, but are rather seeing a dynamic and responsive expression of a particular modernity that is being produced by uniquely Indian circumstances.

For global economic integration to take place, private property rights and paid-for spaces are necessarily becoming emphasised.

Yet, this has not triumphed in becoming the only way that we think about space; nor has it led to a wholesale tragedy for its general users. Equally, so-called "modern" views of space, the municipal mindset that emphasises civic beautification, monumentality or transport efficiency must encounter ideas of space that hold it to be sacred, ritualistic or communal.

Public space can also be contested and shared by various communities that may not necessarily associate or interdine.

History and climate mean that expressions of religious belief are

not restricted to closed, or formally allocated spaces: an exterior wall or outdoor shrine means that the shared space may be sacred to a particular community, without a formal recognition of that fact nor the means to exclude other groups — the very meaning of shared space.

Since Nehru, it has been a cliché to describe India as a palimpsest of different histories, cultures, languages, processes etc. However, it is true that the Indian urban space is such an interaction of multiple imagined geographies that overlap, complement, contradict, embellish or destroy each other — the sacred, the commercial, the municipal, the private, the social, the communal etc. The crudeness of formal property demarcations and privatepublic boundaries belies the vast complexity of meanings that swirl around a roadside or maidan; for instance, is a tree on one of Bengaluru’s urban village streets the property of that village, or the Corporation, or the whole population? Or does it belong to the adjoining property? Or all? Which claim eventually endures, though, is part of the great game of modern urban politics.

— ABHIMANYU ARNI Writer 91

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This spread: While images of prominent personalities, movies and other abstract ideas adorn the sidewalls, the streetscape serves as a public space for almost every imaginable activity

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This spread: The streets — the quintessential “shared, public space” within an urban setting — become the hub of all activity, be it religious, social or pertaining to entertainment

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&ODUH $UQL LV D %HQJDOXUX EDVHG SKRWRJUDSKHU DQG KHU ZRUN encompasses architecture, travel, social documentary and cultural heritage. She has been published by leading British book publishers such as Phaidon and Thames and Hudson, as well as magazines.

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Accounts of seeing Dekho, a book of interviews and design ideas, presents a narrative history of design in modern India. It begins with the question of 'identity' and discusses in detail the aspect of work and visuality in design practice Text

Codesign Kaiwan Mehta Identity being closely linked to culture, is a complicated matter in a country as profusely diverse as India. Across the country, in addition to natural and geographical diversity, manmade rituals of language, celebration, food and apparel alter every few hundred kilometers — making it complex to chalk out a pan-Indian sensibility in design. As a design studio working with local and international brands for a predominantly Indian audience, we often face comments like “This does not look Indian”, or references to clichés as “This is Indian”, “This works for India”.

Despite the emergence of multiple forums for showcase of design in India, there is little knowledge of the behind-the-scenes stories of designing in and for India. Dialogue only around a few finished examples of design, precludes knowledge-sharing about experiences, alternative viewpoints, failures and revelations that inspire. For students and young practicing designers, there is little access to the real-life experiences of designers in India.

To understand the fine connections between tradition, culture, modernisation and design, and to inspire a truly ‘Indian’ way of design, it is imperative that we nurture and create repositories of knowledge. This body of knowledge should provide room for introspection, for reflection. It should provoke new questions.

Most of all, it needs to be real — honest and bold from the experiences of practitioners in India.

Dekho is an anthology of inspirational conversations with designers in India, probing their stories for cues to the development of design in India and highlighting approaches that are unique to designing for India. In 2007, Dekho began as an idea, fueled by constant conversations within the studio about the lack of Indian heroes for young design students. For the next few months, working through an intimate network of contacts within the community, we traveled — meeting and recording conversations with designers, whose thoughts and work struck a chord with our quest to understand the unique context of Indian design. The selective addition of international voices for the publication came about with the desire to present stories that contained relevant cues for contemporary design development in India. The experience of the raw content that we gathered, was overwhelming in parts. With the first prototype of Dekho as a publication in our hands, we paused to consciously think about our role as curators and creators. In the next 3 years, there was a great surge of activity in design forums and platforms in India, yet most of these continued to be showcase-based, and lacking the voice of the designer. This was also in part due to the lack of writers with a good understanding of design, and the absence of connections between design and the world/issues at large.

After an extended break, the effort behind Dekho was revived with greater clarity. People, places and stories were revisited — for stories within their stories, for contexts that had changed in the interim, and for new people who had inspired us. The conversations were re-captured to focus on issues and ideas that 96

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are pertinent to the maturing of design in India, ranging from inclusive approaches to developmental communication, revival of dying Indian scripts, to the future of design education and the building of an iconic Indian brand by design entrepreneurs.

The conversational format of Dekho, stems from the latent richness that is at the core of conversations, as opposed to a commentary or report. Conversations have the innate quality to break boundaries, meander through seemingly unrelated territories and converge at points of relevance, and most importantly, open up ideas for interpretation. While editing and creating formats for the stories, we have been conscious of retaining quirks of the spoken word — which may not always conform to norms of written language — but are expressive and laden with the speaker’s intent.

Book design in India has been largely relegated to two extremes — academic and textual, or showcase-based, ‘coffee-table’ publications. Dekho explores possibilities in print design — driven by individual stories. Design for Dekho is a rich visual narrative that creates an experience of the unique context of each person, their work and their ideology. The book is designed to not just be read from start-to-finish; but with multiple layers of image and

text, it is meant to be experienced anew, with each new story and each new page.

Dekho means “To See” in Hindi.

At the outset, it is a simple word, as is the intention behind the project — to build context for design in India not by imposing a set of characteristics or rules, but simply sharing real, personal experiences of designing for/in India.

On deeper scrutiny, ‘See’ can mean a dozen different acts of recognition — Discern, spot, notice, catch sight of, glimpse, make out, pick out, spy, distinguish, detect, perceive, watch, look at, view, inspect, view, look round, tour, survey, examine, scrutinize, understand, grasp, comprehend, follow, take in, realize, appreciate, recognize, work out, get the drift of, find out, discover, learn, ascertain, determine, establish.

That, is what we hope the experience of Dekho will achieve for the reader—multiple take-aways and interpretations, making for a diverse and richer view of design in India.

— MOHOR RAY Editor, Dekho; Director, Codesign Brand Consultants Pvt Ltd

(This text is the introduction to the book Dekho)

Reading Dekho—The book Dekho is indeed a unique and valuable compilation of notes, memories, processes and shared histories. It is valuable as it documents, practically for the first time in India, design as a practice and profession, a process and investigation in the modern and contemporary scenarios. Not that design has not been documented before, but the former productions have been coffee-table books that glamourise design rather than elaborate its process; they have played on the visual richness of designed forms, the lure of their photography, the exuberant colours that objects in India use, and at times tried to locate them in a historical progression or continuity, but history here has meant only chronology.

The book Dekho seems to emerge from two interesting starting points — a conceptual frame, that of 'identity' and second, the pressure in practice to address history as process and investigation. The question of 'identity' has been primary in the worlds of art, architecture and design through the second part of the nineteenth century and all of the twentieth; postindependence the issue has taken curious colours, and emerged in conversations on its design, practice and teaching, in different ways. Artists have explored it through abstractions, narrative imagery, while also extending tantric imagery in modern abstract art, and so on. Architecture addresses the question on the one hand by going to symbology and image-based references, while technology was also extended into interpreting form and material as 'modern-Indian'. Institutions like the National Institute of Design or Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology, both in Ahmedabad, generated a whole approach to teaching design around the question of Indian identity. An attempt to document this history is not only brave, but a muchneeded exercise for sure.

Further, what is very necessary to note is how for Codesign, the design firm that initiated and executed this project, and produced the book, felt the need for this project through questions within their practice. The relationship between practice and its history is very important, and the demands of that relationship give this book the form it has adopted. Interviews as a form of investigation and documentation have played a very important part in documenting histories of work in fields such as art and design in the recent decades. Simple and pointed questions have encouraged stories of great value that are also very detailed. In these stories emerges a history, not one that is institutional or controlled by a historian's voice and argument, but the history which is a landscape of ideas, promises, disappointments and

struggles. The meandering narratives are also ripe locations for investigating the journeys design training, studio practices, job commissions, pedagogic attempts travelled. We bring to you here the introductory notes of the authors as well as one of the interviews from the book, as a way of further reinforcing the attempts of this book in recording, investigating and debating design practice in modern India.

Dekho which means 'to see' in Hindi is an interesting title. The authors see it as a celebration and engagement with many aspects of 'seeing', vis-à-vis design, and they list them out.

However, it maybe interesting to note that maybe 'design' as a category of acts and actions, is something that emerges only in the 19th century. Arindam Dutta's masterpiece Bureaucracy of Beauty outlines some of these issues. Well, then in this case one could also debate the primacy of 'visuality' vis-à-vis design — how much of design is about 'seeing'? Is it also a moment of modernity that premises design on the aspect of visuality, sight and vision? In what ways, and in which aspects of the occupied and experienced world, does visuality play a role, and how? What has sight discovered for us, shaped for us, and so also, restricted for us? As we can start to think of these questions, the demand that resides in the word 'Dekho' — a call to look, and hence think, closely, carefully and with responsibility and method/meaning is also interesting, and surely the need of the hour!

— KAIWAN MEHTA Architect and critic

This spread: images showing the different layout designs in the book

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Amar in the making

MAKI AR A R THE MAR KING 164_Amar In The Making

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Invterview with

Amardeep Behl

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AMAR IN THE MAKING

For over fifteen years now, Amardeep Behl has been orchestrating immersive spatial experiences in his search for a modern Indian idiom in storytelling. Moving beyond the labels of an exhibition/ museum designer, Amar has brought poignant and fresh perspectives through his responses to spaces and volumes— critical developments in the practice of narrative-based spatial design in India.

His body of experiences so far is akin to a rich Indian tapestry—layered with colour, warmth and meaning.

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by

Codesign

For over fifteen years now, Amardeep Behl has been orchestrating immersive spatial experiences in his search for a modern Indian idiom in storytelling.

Moving beyond the labels of an exhibition / museum designer, Amar has brought poignant and fresh perspectives through his responses to spaces and volumes-critical developments in the practice of narrative-based spatial design in India. His body of experiences so far is akin to a rich Indian tapestry — layered with colour, warmth and meaning Codesign—Your romance with design began as a student at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. What led you to explore design beyond the institutional confines of the classroom?

Amardeep Behl—I joined the National Institute of Design (NID) in 1978 and fell in love with the campus. I thought — if there is a paradise, it is here, it is here. When they called us for the orientation session and told us we are adults, I thought — this is it!

At the same time, I was also interested in architecture. I had already been in CEPT (Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology) for a month. I had seen the application form for NID and I thought taking a design school’s entrance examination would help in preparation for the examination for CEPT. I received the NID offer letter after I joined CEPT, and this created great confusion. I had topped the CEPT entrance with five others. When asked, the unanimous advice of my peers was not to make the shift. Architecture was hardcore, design was considered too flowery. But, the more I visited NID, the more I was fascinated by its multidisciplinary activity. There was 16mm cinema. There was cell animation and graphics.

Industrial design was big. Before I moved school, I went and spoke to everyone concerned about the decision. The conclusion was, one, architecture is architecture, and two, the decision was mine alone.

I joined NID. I had gone there to study film, concerned about the film scene in India. I wanted to make nice short films. After two semesters I thought I would do graphic design. Then I also toyed with the idea of doing product design — you know how men are into materials and machines.

Foundation was great fun. Laurie Baker visited the campus a few times — he showed us his work and gave talks. He started coming for a course on experimental architecture and this was to have exhibition design as a programme under it.

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We joined the programme under Dashrath Patel.

By the third year, courses were going downhill and we wanted to learn so much more. We even created a new exhibition design structure and were very earnest when we sent a letter to Dashrath explaining that we needed more inputs in lighting, structures, etc. Two days later he came and asked us in all seriousness if we wanted to leave. We told him we loved the discipline and we just wanted better inputs. He assured us that things would be sorted out. But nothing really changed. Rajan Khosa — a friend who was drawn to film — thought of joining FTII (Film and Television Institute of India) and I — still attached to architecture — wondered if I should go back to CEPT. We couldn’t make up our minds and decided to get our inputs ourselves.

At the time, Gajanan Upadhyaya was designing a house for the NID Executive Director. I asked him if we could work on the project and he agreed. We told Pathan from the photography department that we wanted to learn studio photography; he welcomed us aboard. Then we went to Moorthy, a film-maker who was a part of the film department, and told him how passionately we wanted to work with film. He was happy with our interest and invited us to develop a script with him for a feature-length film based on a press article. Before we knew it we were buried in work. We started working frantically and it was great fun. We got quite close to Moorthy, who used to try and get us lots of freelance work. One such project was to document a Kafila (procession) of a religious guru in Mathura. With about four thousand feet of film, a 16mm camera and two Super 8 cameras which could record for about thirty seconds and three still II

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camera kits, we moved into one truck and two cars.

We went to the coordinator of exhibition design department at the time, and told him of our plan to study with experts in different subjects like sociology, philosophy, though not about the project with Moorthy. We told him that we needed to take a semester off, and we were willing to take a year drop so that we could join the next batch. But the administration wouldn’t have us ‘walking in and out as we pleased, like it was our house.’ We cooked up a story about how we were going to learn film and do some training.

We went off for the project with Moorthy and it was great fun. After about three months, we returned to NID, only to realise that we had been expelled from the institute. The faculty was divided on the issue. Our parents came down to the institute and explained to the director that absence without permission could not amount to expulsion and that the institute could be taken to court. And that the most they could do was to penalise us for the year. We were given a year drop, which was exactly what we wanted.

In the meantime, Rajan decided that he wanted to study film, and went on to apply to FTII. He never returned. I decided to carry on doing design.

I came back to NID. By then I was in no batch because the courses kept changing. I did my own thing. It was quite nice.

My final graduation project was a corporate exhibition. I worked for Hindustan Thompson Associates, which has now become J Walter Thompson. They had an exhibition design cell; I knew them from my internship days and they

made sure I returned for my final graduation project. We did a large exhibition at Pragati Maidan in 1984 for the State Trading Corporation. The exhibition won the first prize.

When I finished my graduation project, Rajan was working on his diploma film at FTII (Film and Television Institute of India). Since I had helped write the script and knew well what he was doing, I went there to art direct the film. I stayed at FTII for a few months, designing and building sets for his film in the studios there. It was great fun. After design at NID, FTII presented itself in great contrast as a dark place. In these three intense months I worked and dreamt of travelling.

When I graduated from NID, I never thought I would set up a design studio. I had major dreams. The plan was to trek and walk around the mountains, start from the Northeast and end at Ladakh. I thought vernacular architecture was its best in the mountains, their architecture was very important to them. They make just enough for themselves, because of difficult building conditions. I thought I would take a year travelling this stretch. But that was not to be.

When I was in FTII, I received a letter from Ajoy, a senior from NID Exhibition Design. He had been offered a job from USIS (United States Information Service), with a salary of R 4000, which was a hell of a lot of money then. Ajoy asked me to come back and start a design office with him, otherwise he would take up the job. I thought about this for some time… two–three days of intense thinking. And I left to get hooked up and I’m still into it.

Earlier, just before graduation, Ajoy and I had started working together. We had a big project from

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Mahindra and my experience at HTA had put me in touch with vendors, allowing us to do this project from design to execution. Unfortunately the project head at Mahindra fell seriously ill. The project had to be cancelled just when we were purchasing materials. So they gave us a rejection fee of about thirty thousand in a time when four thousand rupees was a huge amount of money. I came back to Delhi and started Oriole Design with the money.

In 1986 I took up a duplex apartment, where I would stay on top and run the studio below. We started with a few small projects then soon got bigger ones.

Cd—The Gandhi Exhibition was the first big project you undertook. As a relatively young design practice, what was the experience like?

AB—In the days when Gorbachev was restructuring society and the Red Army was very much around, we did the Gandhi Exhibition. The Soviet Union was still a closed country when the Festival of India travelled to four cities there.

The Gandhi Exhibition was part of the festival and travelled to six Soviet cities. The festival was first inaugurated in Moscow, and then it went to Volgograd where the Russian army had defeated the Germans in World War I. Then it was taken to Siberia to a city called Novosibirsk in January, where there was six feet of snow and the ground was devoid of vegetation.

We were taking a half-naked man to the Soviet Union. And he was a vegetarian. Those are two things you cannot do there — roam half naked and get greens to eat — it’s just packed with snow.

I thought we were headed for disaster because people would just not relate. But the response we got was amazing. That made it special.

The exhibition was quite large, especially in Moscow. This allowed us to use different materials that reflected Gandhi’s life. He was born in a concrete and lentil household — so plaster wears off walls and exposes bricks. Then he goes to South Africa where he is asked to leave the first-class compartment of a train, and the harshness of the situation is reflected in metal. Then he starts practicing Satyagraha at Tolstoy Farms and leads protests against the apartheid. The material here changed to corrugated metal. When he got it all together in Ahmedabad, in the Sabarmati Ashram, it was all done in wood. In his prime he lived in a beautiful mud hut in Sevagram. When he was assassinated in Birla house, he was in the garden.

There was a stone wall in that garden — we used stone to describe final moments in his life — his achievements immortalised in stone.

The basic elements of the exhibition were taken there by us and the layout of the space changed from city to city. The Soviets provided us with carpenters and logistics. India was the only country, outside the Iron Curtain that they had relations with. We were half capitalist, but we were friends to the Soviet. We were treated with great love and affection. We had asked for a number of carpenters and trucks over fax earlier. Dates had been fixed for these arrangements. We landed there to find that it was quite like India; there were no trucks and the carpenters had not arrived. Ninetytwo of our crates were waiting at Moscow airport — some large and some tiny. We were waiting on site with no materials. When some transportation was finally mobilised, they brought crate 28 and crate 90, and they gave us four carpenters instead of twelve. There was utter chaos.

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All the trucks in the Soviet Union were busy complying to their operational procedure where all food stuff would arrive at Moscow and then get redistributed throughout the country. The trucks were deployed in distributing fresh fruit. Two days before the exhibition, a hundred and fifty soldiers from the Red Army walked in asking if we needed any help. And before long, they were at it and everything was going up. Since we were only two or three designers in a thousand square metres of exhibition space, something was bound to go wrong with unsupervised construction. While the inauguration lamp was being lit, there were still carpenters working on the roof of the Sevagram hut — they had to hide for the duration of the ceremony.

From Novosibirsk the exhibition travelled to Irkutsk, a town deep in the Siberian forest. We went there in spring, by a propeller-driven plane which flew us over the Tiber. Our President, R Venkataraman, was travelling to Ulaanbaatar with a stopover in Irkutsk, making it convenient for him to inaugurate the exhibition there. Suddenly the exhibition was going to be very important. The Russians would also send senior dignitaries for an exhibition inaugurated by the Indian President.

Again, as before, we were waiting and there was no team, and some trucks were missing; they could not give us carpenters either.

One morning an armoured truck arrived. Two Siberian guards stepped out with Kalashnikovs and opened the truck. Out came ten prisoners marching and one of the guards said “here’s your team.” By the end of it we were all friends — the guns and tunics lay discarded and soldiers, prisoners and IV

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designers worked as one. The armoured van left in friendlier air.

The Russians were very serious about their exhibitions — owing to a surfeit in cinema, exhibitions became a part of Soviet entertainment.

One carpenter from our team in Moscow spent all night in a queue on the street to see an exhibition to which people were being allowed to enter in batches. A town across the river near Irkutsk liked the Gandhi Exhibition so much that they made it a permanent structure in their town. It was a nice feeling — we had reached the hearts of people.

Cd—The Khalsa Heritage Memorial Complex has been ten years in the making. Tell us about the journey and what it means to you.

AB The importance of the Khalsa Museum project to me is at multiple levels. One, it is one of the few genuinely narrative museums. It is a storytelling museum. The typical museum is an artefact-based museum. You have collections, you have artefacts, you display them. And this is purely a narrative museum, which has no artefacts. The scale of the museum is tremendous. To do a museum of that scale, with no artefact and no collections, is by itself a very big, unique sort of experience. Second, it was a community-based project — it is a project on the Sikh community and the Punjabis. It wasn’t just a national-level museum or a state-level museum.

It was dealing with the story of a community and of a culture. And third, it was a project where the client actually wanted an experiential, world class museum, and they left us pretty much to ourselves to find an answer, find a solution, which was world class and unique.

The project went through various phases. When the project started at NID, I was a core team member. During the second phase, I became the main member, working with NID. Design Habit was asked to work on the project in its third phase, so the museum that has come up is the result of what we did as Design Habit, over three and a half, four years.

In its first phase with NID, the museum was imagined to be a technological museum, where use of technology was the big thing. In the second one, we continued from where NID had stopped work, but were told that there was not as much money to spend on technology. Also, there were questions about whether they would be able to maintain the technology in Anandpur Sahib. It was decided that we find a solution that wasn’t so high-tech, but retained the impact. So, the third phase started with this premise. It was three iterations of design, only the research was carried on as the consistent element.

What is unique about the museum is also the spaces. It was designed by Moshe Safdie, and the spaces are immense. Normally, in a museum, you have a large footprint, and the height of the gallery is proportionate. Here, the spaces are very different — the galleries are tiny, we have huge heights, sloping walls, sloping roofs and a small footprint.

Moshe had already designed the building before we started designing the museum. We had to meet the spaces head-on, blend them, so that it would seem they were designed in consonance.

What we have finally made, is an experiential narrative museum. We have used technology, but we have used it correctly. Technology that can be

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maintained. We have made the museum by hand; It is a handmade museum. It is largely installation based. There is a lot of craft — hand-painted murals, metals, textile, just about every material one can think of. It is very rich in colour, in texture, in use of materials, to the extent where you wonder how so much colour and material can be put together cohesively in a space. The story is spiritual. It is about the ten Gurus. At one level, it beats rationale that how can so much colour and so much material be used for a Guru period space, but what we have achieved is a very quiet, well-balanced, introspective — almost spiritual — space.

The journey has been very rewarding. The nicest thing is that the people of Punjab are responding to it extremely beautifully, they resonate with it. We are getting four thousand people a day — and to have that many visitors is very big, for museums.

From the intellectual to the NRI, to the man from the street, the trader, the farmer, the student — they all seem to be responding to it very well.

The main visitor is the man of the soil. Here we have audio guides, we have installations, we have fine textile work, painted work, miniature painting styles, metaphorical installations in beaten metal and glass — but the nice thing is that all kinds of visitors seem to be responding well to the stories. It gives me a great joy.

I was always afraid, while designing, of people turning away and saying it is too elitist.

One did a lot of thinking, spent many years trying to understand the Gurus as deeply as one could, understand the philosophy of the Gurus as deeply as one could. One tried to understand the time period in which the Gurus lived. One tried to see the art of the time period. For instance, to create fifteenth century Punjab, we studied the Jain miniatures. As we moved to the sixteenth century, we saw the art change. We saw how people represented trees or costumes in those days. We based our imagery on these. In Sikhism, there is the contemporary calendar art representation, then there is the very old representation in the JanamSakhis and the folk representation. There is nothing in between. We have analysed the calendar art kind of style, which was started by this famous artist called Sobha Singh for the Gurus. Then we saw the earlier representations, the Mughal style, and we amalgamated all this.

I think what this museum has done is create a representational art for Sikhism in modern times.

It is the result of a lot of churning with the material and it hasn’t been easy. It is like the culmination of a long journey.

When we started the project, we were also enthusiastic about finding the modern voice in our design. This is the dilemma we — all designers, especially designers today — face. What is our modernity? As a museum on Sikhism and Punjab, the questions are — what is the modern visual language for Sikhism, and how do you establish concepts of this nature. What is our modern aesthetic, our Indian language? What are our elements, our colours? And when you work with space, it is all of that. The Japanese have found some answers — they have actually compartmentalised it very well — their tradition and modernity. We haven’t. The Khalsa Museum is trying to really find the Indian language, and in a very contemporary way. We have had miniature artists do hoardingstyle paintings. We have taken traditional craft styles and created a contemporary language with it.

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It took a long time to complete work, because, for one, working with the government is very difficult.

This project is a unique project, it is a handmade project, very difficult to make, very difficult to specify and draw — not a regular tender-based project, but had to be implemented through the regular tender process.

Cd—For more than twenty years now, you have worked with many young designers. What do you expect from a fresh design graduate in terms of their approach to work and outlook in life?

AB—I expect a fresh graduate to be hungry.

There must be a great desire to learn. I don’t think you learn design in your education. I don’t think you learn design in ďŹ ve years of practice. I think design is a lifelong thing. There are no easy answers to it. I think it is important that we all should be hungry, we should be wanting to learn more. We 104

should be a little uncomfortable — design doesn’t happen when you are too comfortable. That restlessness of wanting to ďŹ nd the right resonance to whatever you are doing has to be there. There has to be a huge amount of anxiety to be able to do better than what we are doing. It is not about being able to do better than someone else, one has to exceed oneself. Your work is not your shadow, your work is your journey, so it has to be more than what you are. You have to be able to put more than what you know in your work, so that the work makes you step up. You can’t work by thinking of looking at other design solutions, it has to come out of you only, but it has to exceed you. There are those times, when there is a swelling in the heart, when your chest expands, and you feel you have come to something and you can’t describe it very well. But you know it is very good. That is what design has to do to us. It has to make us see ourselves better. Then

that work will always be unique and it will always stand out. It will always have something, it will always have an energy. Because you have put that energy in it, it will give something back to you. It is not the money and all that. It will give you back right there. So, the deal is good, you have already received from it. —

Codesign conducted the above interview with Amardeep Behl; all text and images are extracted from the feature of the same title in the book Dekho (2013). The book is an anthology RI LQVSLUDWLRQDO FRQYHUVDWLRQV ZLWK GHVLJQHUV LQ ,QGLD developed and produced by Codesign.

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VII

I

Images showing opening spread of the interview as designed in Dekho

II

The Panjpani Gallery, Khalsa Museum. The gallery depicts the culture of Punjab — the land of five rivers, reminiscing the passing of time and the day's activities aided by a clever play of lights

III & V

This page: Images showing the layout design of the interview in Dekho

IV

A wall painting from Gandhi: An Indian Revolution travelled to the (then) USSR in 1984 and has since been housed in Irkutsk near the picturesque lake Baikal, Siberia

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Miniature style painting showing daily activities of the people in the region of Punjab

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Visitors at the Panjpani Gallery

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Milan, IT

from

Cold Case 62 years later

domus 263 11/1951

CASA AL PARCO edited by Luigi Spinelli

Gardella’s roof Designed by Ignazio Gardella between 1947 and 1948 at Piazza Castello 29, the Tognella condominium was recently in the news when the Milanese woke up to find the building wrapped in scaffolding, whose unusual height raised suspicions about what was going on inside. Architecture websites were alive with inferences and justifications, a petition was presented by specialist magazines, and the Order of Architects opened an investigation. Readers can gain a fuller insight into these events at http://casaalparco.blogspot.com, but the controversy essentially revolves around the granting of a “permission to build a penthouse for 106

use as servants’ accommodation”, an addition not envisaged in the original project, as shown in a photo by the architect’s son Jacopo. Now a modest cap has appeared resting on the raised and sharply projecting horizontal plane with which the architect had concluded his building. While waiting to see what will materialise from beneath the scaffolding and from the surprises of city council practices, we believe a useful contribution to the debate can be made by Gio Ponti’s interpretation (in Domus in 1951) of what is meant by a roof in Ignazio Gardella’s architecture. “This building by Gardella stands out for a number of aspects that have been subject to much consideration by modern

architects. For instance, Gardella resolved the roof by separating it from the built volume, which is the best answer to a necessary difficulty, because there has to be an eave (in buildings that are not excessively tall and not clad with incorruptible materials). It is indispensable and we are grateful to Gardella for this example. This idea of a separate eave, of a roof ‘beyond the architecture’, or the roof as a ‘halo’, enables the building’s volumes to be coherently finished as such. However, in order to ensure dimensional consistency between the building and its roof, Gardella lets the roof back into the architecture. As a result, the volumes are made lighter and indeed seem to disappear (this house is more a

play of diaphragms, of walls, than a walled solid), by showing the walls and roof side by side, and cutting a vertical sequence of windows through them. Thus the architect brings about a subtle, light and elegant vertical modulation that blends perfectly with the light (as is proper) horizontal covering of the roof (so to speak, but no longer so).” With this publication Ponti had understood the characteristics and significance of the “park house”, even before Gardella repeated this architectural idea two years later with his houses for Borsalino employees in Alessandria, which in turn inspired the roof of the house in Barcelona for José Coderch’s Instituto Social de la Marina. —LS

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Some pages from the article “Villa a Milano”, published in Domus 263, November 1951, pp. 28-33. Left and top left: the Casa Tognella condominium today. Photos

by Orsina Simona Pierini

August 2013

The Casa Tognella condominium has four basic characteristics: the clarity of its plan; the dialogue between its facade structure and its interior partitions; the roof detached from the staggered volumes; and the elegance of its details and finishings. Today one can note an emptying out of its interiors and their fragmentation into different real-estate units on each floor, the replacement of its window frames, and the erection of a raised level. “Architecture is precision in the proportional play of its component parts,” wrote Gio Ponti, providing us today with a critical comparison against which to measure the substance of the building’s new “halo”, the profile of its window frames, or the complicated routes described by its new plans, constrained by the position of the staircase. Finally, there is the rooftop addition.

Indeed, the construction that now emerges so glaringly seems to sit awkwardly on top of an architecture with which it bears no relationship.

It ignores the tripartite plan, in which the original volume was totally encompassed between the two internal bearing walls. Nor does the new construction consider the choices of material and construction that endorsed the architectural languages of its two fronts — walled and trilithic.

Many modernist houses have been readapted in the course of time and have come down to us in an already woefully altered state, having lost that proper connection between types of plan and material culture recognised today as the essence of modernist culture. That fate had not struck this park house, until recently miraculously frozen in time. —Orsina Simona Pierini Milan Polytechnic

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Rassegna

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Lights and materials The revolution in light sources, now much in evidence, has over the recent years brought about some extensive change in terms of design approaches to luminaries and light fittings of all kinds and in every category. A new-found freedom of expression given by light sources that are increasingly miniaturised and increasingly powerful has led to the design and production of lamps that are both original and innovative, especially when it comes to their outer casing. As such, the world of industrial design has nurtured the conception of an exciting new chapter in the

Glass

Fabric

Metal

Precious metals and crystals

The material most readily associated with the notion of light never ceases to amaze with its infinite declinations and design interpretations. Young Canadian designer Omer Arbel has studied Carlo Scarpa and traditional Murano glassworking techniques in the making of multicoloured balls that are each different from the other (series 57, Bocci). Artist-designer Arik Levy, meanwhile, has come up with an airy and mobile sculpture that plays on the transparency of glass and the perception of colours (Jar RGB for Lasvit).

A traditional screen for light, fabric is one of the most reworked families of materials in contemporary (lighting) design. Young Swedish designers Form Us With Love, for example, have used industrial felt in a similar way to metal in the creation of an unusual modular “diffuser” (Hood, for Ateljé Lyktan). Also surprising in terms of functionality is the large suspended light Silenzio, designed by Monica Armani for Luceplan: the circular crown serves not only a decorative purpose but also provides effective sound insulation.

The lightness and flexibility of LEDs is easily associated with the same characteristics found in steel and aluminium. This physical affinity has been put to use in the Elle T1 wall lights (by Jannis Ellenberger for Prandina) and the Alya hanging light (by Gabriele Rosa for Nemo Cassina).

The Fluida table light (by Studio Natural for Martinelli Luce), meanwhile, exploits the weight and magnetic quality of the metal base as a dynamic device that enables it to take on endless configurations.

Often cast out from the world of more noble design, luxury can also become part of a stimulating design brief. The diffusion of precious metals presented in a number of recent exhibition events has been accompanied by uncertain and partial reinterpretations of painterly and pre-modern decoration. There is no shortage of exceptions, however, and one of them is the large Argent lamp (by Dodo Arslan for Terzani) that exploits the particular way that polished silver reflects light.

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TERZANI

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eternal history of combining light and matter.

Many traditional materials such as glass and fabric have been addressed in a new way or have seen the addition of new functions and expressions, while some decidedly unusual materials like wood and stone have been added to the extensive range of lamps available. If all this effort has not been in vain, within these strange objects that combine light and matter one can perhaps perceive the glow of another energy — a brighter and more powerful energy than light itself: the energy we call design. @GuidoMusante —Guido Musante

Plastic

Wood and stone

Technical

Others (bits and pieces)

Slender and flexible, LED strips invite experimentation into form, movement and the plastic nature of the body of the lamp. Archetto (by Theo Sogni for Antonangeli), for example, is a fun lamp for outdoor use, conceived as a simple silicone “tube” whose shape can be altered as desired. Designer-architect Nigel Coates, meanwhile, has taken inspiration from the shapes of singlecell organisms to reveal the intimate natural DNA of plastic materials (the Crocco lamp, for Slamp).

Used widely in furniture production and the building industry, “natural” materials like wood or stone are rarely applied to the design of light fittings.

The rare exceptions often contain germs of innovation and original forms. Confirmation of this can be seen in the heavy stone ziggurat-like shade of Spiralitosa (by Raffaello Galiotto for Marmi Serafini), or in the light wooden pattern that features in Stick, designed by French designer Matali Crasset for Fabbian.

This category does not embrace a single material but the way that all materials are applied in the sector known as technical and architectural illumination. The light fittings that belong to this group are generically characterised by the way the aesthetic aspects of the materials are neutralised in favour of the perceptible quality of the light. Despite being invisible, the materials in this context play a key role in determining the effectiveness of the impact of these lamps in space.

Borges showed that every good classification must have the category “others” (“et cetera”). Otherwise our notional catalogue would not be able to include a lamp made of water (Dama, Trecinquezeroluce) or full of crushed glass, like Shaker. This latter example (by ADA Design for Leucos) presents itself as a fusion not only of original materials but also of perceptive suggestions, iconographic references and surreal connections— which Borges himself probably would have appreciated.

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Form Us With Love

Jordi Vilardell

A hanging lamp shaped like a hood that can be used to add a distinctive touch to open-planned and neutral communal areas and workspaces. It has a modular structure in three pieces WKDW DUH XVHG WR FRQĂ?JXUH WKH GHVLUHG VROXWLRQ 7KH LQGLYLGXDO sheets of pressed industrial felt that make up each modular element can be added together to achieve a lamp of the required dimensions.

An outdoor lamp that can also be used as a seat. Its design is based on the contrast between the light emitted and the shadows projected by the structure of the lamp into the space DURXQG LW 7KH OLJKW VRXUFH LV VXVSHQGHG DW D Ă?[HG GLVWDQFH from the ground and directed downwards, held by a structure in steel rod that, as well as acting as a support, has a decorative form, reminiscent of a cactus plant.

Chromakey presents desk lamps made out the headlight of a 5R\DO (QĂ?HOG ELNH &KURPDNH\ EULQJV WRJHWKHU ZRUNV RI ERWK well established designers and of the younger promising ones.

7KH XQLTXHQHVV RI WKH EUDQG LV LWV ZLOOLQJQHVV WR EH FKLF \HW VXEWOH DQG WR EH DFFHVVLEOH \HW H[FOXVLYH 7KH VWRUH LV D comfortable space that is splashed with white washed walls, letting the products stand out with their varied colours, VKDSHV DQG VL]HV 7KH SURGXFW UDQJH DYDLODEOH DW WKH VWRUH includes designer clocks, desk lamps, laptop sleeves and personal organisers amongst many others. Apart from lamps the store houses some of the most contemporary pieces which blend style with a unique component such as, an Intriguing chair modelled by renowned designer Fenny G is exclusively available in India at Chromakey and a centre table designed using the refurbished scraps of a refrigerator.

ATELJĂ&#x2030; LYKTAN

www.atelje-lyktan.com

R HOUSE

R House offer a wide range of lighting solutions ranging from chandeliers, table lamps, floor lamps, ceiling lights, outdoor lights and more.

Good lighting enhances the mood and desirability of a space. It contributes greatly to peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s VHQVH RI ZHOO EHLQJ 7KH OLJKWLQJ Ă?[WXUHV SURYLGH DQ DHVWKHWLF DSSHDO WR \RXU KRPH 7KHVH OLJKWLQJ VROXWLRQV blend into traditional and contemporary dĂŠcor beautifully so WKDW HDFK SLHFH LV PXFK PRUH WKDQ D ZD\ WR OLJKW D URRP 7KH (OHJDQW 7DEOH /DPS LV PDGH RI Ă?EUH ZLWK KDQGFUDIWHG GHVLJQ on it and the shade covered with silk fabric is a great way to mix up style of lighting in your home and add warmth to any space.

R HOUSE

VIBIA

www.vibia.com

LIVING IN STYLE Living in Style founded in 1995 is one of the premiere sellers of GÂ&#x;FRU SURGXFWV IRU KRPH DQG RIĂ?FH 7KH VWRUH RIIHUV D YDVW VHOHFWLRQ RI DFFHVVRULHV OLJKWV DQG OXPLQDULHV IURP WKH Ă?QHVW brands from around the world. With both contemporary and classical designs Living in Style provides ample options for KRPH RIĂ?FH DQG SXEOLF VSDFHV

www.rhouse.in

OKAPI LED GE Lighting A range of exterior light fittings, Okapi LED is available in 20, 30 and 44W versions and is designed to have a 50,000-hour life, the equivalent of 12 years of use with an average of 4,000 hours per year. Okapi LED FDQ EH Ă?[HG LQ WKUHH ZD\V side and post-top mounting designed for street lighting, and a decorative mounting option that is ideal for street furnishing in pedestrian areas, parks and gardens.

GE COMPANY

www.gelighting.com

LIVING IN STYLE

www.livinginstyle.co.in

CHROMAKEY www.chromakeydesigns.com

SCHĂ&#x153;CO SchĂźco is a worldwide premium supplier of aluminium windows, doors and façade system. SchĂźco in India is working with chosen ORFDO SDUWQHU FRPSDQLHV WR FRPELQH WKHVH VSHFLĂ?F UHTXLUHPHQWV IRU HQHUJ\ HIĂ?FLHQF\ DQG RSWLPXP LQGRRU FOLPDWH FRQVLVWHQWO\ with the highest design requirements, without compromising RQ UHOLDELOLW\ 7KLV PHDQV WKDW 6FKÂąFR 7URS7HFÂľ SURYLGHV \RX with system solutions for sustainable, aesthetic architecture from a single source. Slender face widths, for example on window SURĂ?OHV VHW QHZ GHVLJQ VWDQGDUGV ZKLOH NHHSLQJ DEUHDVW RI Germany quality standards.

SCHĂ&#x153;CO

www.schueco.com

111

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Lighting

PHILIPS HUE

ANCHOR BY PANASONIC

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PHILIPS HUE

ANCHOR / PANASONIC

www.meethue.com

www.anchor-world.com

LUTRON

VINAY SWITCHES

Energi TriPak

Nightinglow

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ENERGI TRIPAK

NIGHTINGLOW

112

www.lutron.com

www.vinayswitches.com

domus 20

August 2013

LIGHTBOX /LJKWER[ RIĂ?FLDOO\ UHSUHVHQWV (XURSHDQ OLJKWLQJ EUDQGV OLNH Occhio, Bocci, Moooi, Vibia, Foscarini, Diesel, Flos, Verpan, /=) &DWHOODQL 6PLWK %UDQG YDQ (JPRQG DPRQJ RWKHUV 7KH\ deal in hi-end architectural and decorative lights, for indoor and outdoor spaces, providing a complete solution for the SURMHFW 7KH SULPDU\ IRFXV RI /LJKWER[ LV WR VXSSRUW WKH GHVLJQ GLUHFWLRQ RI WKH DUFKLWHFWV LQWHULRU SURIHVVLRQDOV /LJKWER[ advises from the design stage to installation, on signature OLJKWLQJ FRQFHSW IRU VSDFHV UDQJLQJ IURP OX[XU\ UHVLGHQFHV WR ODUJH SURMHFWV DQG WKXV SURYLGH H[FOXVLYH GHVLJQ FRQVXOWDQF\ LQ KRZ WKH SURGXFWV PD\ EH XVHG LQ D XQLTXH ZD\ /LJKWER[ LV a platform for innovative, functional, beautiful forms that WRXFK RQHĂ&#x160;V OLIH WKURXJK D FUHDWLYH ODQJXDJH 7KH FROOHFWLRQ attempts to cover various spaces in the house and blends DFURVV GLIIHUHQW SDODWHV

MAGPPIE

PHILIPS

Coat Hanger Lamp

Lumiware

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Driven by innovation, Philips is Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leading lighting company and the pioneer in home decorative lighting and has always demonstrated how great lighting transforms WKH KRPH DQG Ă?OOV WKH DWPRVSKHUH ZLWK ZDUPWK DQG FRPIRUW 3KLOLSV EURDG UDQJH RI HQHUJ\ HIĂ?FLHQW GHFRUDWLYH lights can help you create the perfect atmosphere at your home with a powerful impact on the energy savings and LV FRVW HIIHFWLYH From table lamps and recessed light, to decorative and accent light a variety of Philips light bulbs can be used in PRVW Ă?[WXUHV WR PDNH \RXU KRPH PRUH EHDXWLIXO DQG HQHUJ\ HIĂ?FLHQW The home decorative lighting portfolio is not restricted RQO\ WR WKH FRQYHQWLRQDO ODPSV DQG OLJKWV 3KLOLSV KDV DOVR WR LWV FUHGLW UHYROXWLRQDU\ OLJKW DFFHVVRULHV OLNH WKH Lumiware range that includes LED coasters, wine coolers, IUXLW SODWWHUV DQG YDVHV

PHILIPS LIGHTBOX

www.lightbox.co.in

MAGPPIE

THE GREAT EASTERN HOME

CAPPELLINI

7KH *UHDW (DVWHUQ +RPH KDV LQWURGXFHG LWV FODVVLF (XURSHDQ style chandeliers and this collection is a perfect blend of FODVVLFDO DQG DUWLVWLF GÂ&#x;FRU IRU WKH KRPH VSDFH &ODVVLFDO GÂ&#x;FRU VW\OHV UHZRUNHG E\ FRQWHPSRUDU\ GHVLJQHUV JLYH D FXWWLQJ HGJH feel to it that adds a sense of panache and eclecticism that goes ZRQGHUIXOO\ ZLWK XS PDUNHW VW\OLVK KRPHV 7KHVH &KDQGHOLHUV DUH PDGH LQ EUDVV ZLWK JROG ZDVK DQG FRORXUHG JODVV

Lace Metal Lamp

THE GREAT EASTERN HOME

CAPPELLINI

www.greateasternstore.com

www.cappellini.it

www.magppieindia.com

http://www.philips.co.in

Fuwl got the idea of a Lace Metal lamp from a Swedish metal ZRUNLQJ IDFWRU\ FDOOHG +Â&#x161;Ă?D %UXN RQH RI 6ZHGHQĂ&#x160;V ROGHVW FRPSDQLHV HVWDEOLVKHG LQ 7KH\ KDG MXVW FRPH XS ZLWK D QHZ technique of manufacturing steel mesh with gradient sized KROHV 7KLV VWUXFN DV YHU\ SRHWLF UHVHPEOLQJ WH[WLOH RU ODFH DQG LPPHGLDWHO\ IHOW WKH GHVLUH WR PDNH D ODPS ZLWK WKLV PDWHULDO since it has great characteristics as a lampshade as small holes that cover the light source, gradually get bigger to diffuse the OLJKW LQ D EHDXWLIXO ZD\ 7KH UHVXOW LV D ODPS PDGH RXW RI PHWDO WKDW KDV D ORRN RI OLJKWQHVV and fragility, a very nice contrast: the gradient holes add to this IHHOLQJ GLIIXVLQJ WKH OLJKW LQ DQ DWPRVSKHULF ZD\ $QRWKHU JRRG thing about the production of the lamp is that no waste mateULDOV DUH SURGXFHG 7KH FRORXUV SUHVHQWHG DUH EODFN DQG ZKLWH PDWW ODFTXHUHG

113

Armstrong World Industries (India) Pvt. Ltd. Boomerang, A-Wing, Unit No. 304, Chandivali Farm Road Andheri (E), Mumbai - 400 072. Tel: 022-3048 0800, Fax: 022-2491 3604 e-mail : helpdeskindia@armstrong.com Branches: Ahmedabad Chennai Indore Pune

: : : :

Representatives: Bhubaneswar : Guwahati : Nashik : : Vizag

09376133127 044-42175303 073899 42297 09373323149

Bengaluru Gurgaon Kolkata

: 080-26576367 : 0124-2385671 : 033-24014755

Chandigarh Hyderabad Lucknow

: 072-2633680 : 040-32009868 : 0522-2201143

09937042387 09678069393 09325995556 09346783496

Cochin Jaipur Ludhiana

: 09633009209 : 08769217000 : 09316919120

Coimbatore Nagpur Surat

: 08754457957 : 09325995527 : 09325676005

RNI NUMBER MAHENG/2012/45937 Regd No. MH/ MR/ WEST/ 305/ 2013-2015

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