staying away from home – sale / meeting / movie

my house has been overrun with clothes and women trying them on.. as it does every year at around this time when my aunt has her annual clearance sale of salwar kameez, tops and skirts that she designs for various clothing stores in the country. she has over the years developed a select clientele who are informed by telephone and descend as soon as they can to pick up stuff that might vanish later. this means that the house is open for all until 11.30 at night from 6 in the morning. the entire house is turned upside down to accommodate for this wild shopping spree. usha maushi, madhavi mami, suhas mami, aaji and mom (sometimes sonal) are the sales women making suggestions and recommendations. its quite an event, but there is no place to sit in the house and dad and me either fin our little corners somewhere on the edges of the tumult or find lots of things to do outside the house.

and there have been things to do outside. on friday we put up an exhibition of work of all five years of design with the help of the first years. this was for a meeting that we had yesterday with the academic council. it seems that some architects (read kk) seem to have complained about the quality of building resolvers that the school is sending out into practice. the other problem seemed to be that they said it was becoming too heavy on the humanities and not concentrating on architectural issues. the discussion yesterday just made things even more odd as new dimensions to this divide were excavated when we realized that some of the visiting faculty have also been talking about things in much the same way outside the school. saying essentially that the internal faculty make them too humanities oriented. i was confused by the understanding of the academic space as imagined by these people- and even more by the conception of architecture as a discipline. how can one imagine form and space outside the realm of aesthetics, meaning and society? does it happen in a pure space of emptiness? where does language (the highly debated word) emerge from? isn’t that what we are supposed to teach? instead we seem to be heading towards a place which justifies empty form making without any enquiry because the market demands it. “consumers and draftsmen” but in another form.

kaushik, i think put it best yesterday when i asked him what the problem was. he said.. for a certain way of thinking if it is related to things you can measure, count the number of trees on and know the kind of soil that exists then it is architecture. what is not, is anything that asks the question who exists as the person you are building for.

it was interesting as the very presence of the academic space as a place for new ideas that can transform architectural production (desperately in need of a change) was being attacked for challenging some of the basic assumptions of a self satisfied and smug market driven system of production. the weapons were many- the main one being the academic space does not ‘practice’. however, when challenged by placing clear examples of the contrary, the next astra: too much time on analysis and not enough on synthesis. as if there is a separation that is so clearly defined. architecture is after all an art form and not a resultant of three formulas arranged sequentially in a time table. the need for time management is understood but should not be the only determinant. and then the next weapon.. of.. it went on and on.. until i really did not really know what the point of the exercise really was. but i did figure out one thing. at some level, our conception of architectural thought seems to threaten another way of seeing more settled and conventional. this can only be a good thing considering the level of architectural thinking and production in the country.

after the meeting i spent a longtime in college talking and reminiscing with namrata, tapan and mayuri in the stilts. love affairs, the value of poetry, the reason to have a blog for me and other unrelated topics. thought we’d go for a film, and though i wanted to see ‘zindagii rocks’ as well, decided to go see ‘7 islands and metro’ at fame malad. namrata and me met lubaina and ubaid none of whom had seen the film and just about managed to make it into the theater while the beginning titles were on.