home / housing / house. - edge of desire. dodiya . zarina . kbs new house . east of eden

C-8

it is strange how a variety of things sometimes come together to form patterns in my head. today, it must be the fact that i finally finished reading ‘east of eden’ that themes revolving around the home, history and memory seem to be forming weird constellations in my head that i finding very difficult to articulate. to add to this yesterdays trip to town and the lectures in college also are connecting in weird unsuspected ways.

it all started off in the morning yesterday when as usual my mother was taking her time coming down to the car for our morning ride to work together. instead of, as i always end up doing, reversing the car and listening to my music, i took a walk down the lane and turned to see the building in which i grew up. c-8, flat 5, lovely villa, lic colony- on the first floor of a terraced building with an open to sky space overlooking the trees. it had been a long time since i actually looked at the building, newly painted and gleaming compared to the ones right besides. i thought about charles correa and the act of imagining a life that led to this formation. i thought about how he has influenced the way i act- my relationship to others, and to nature. i thought about power. and then the fourth year design project juries that i was to be a part of an hour later.

the project is in dharavi where work and living form a seamless fabric; where one cannot be separated from the other; where everyday life is of a variety that needs to lead into new and inventive house and community form. unfortunately in a housing project even if we manage to create these, we forget the home as a space enmeshed in the networks of memory and desire.

so caught up are we in the pragmatic we forget the poetic. and when marsha presented for the theory of design class later in the day heideggers meditations on the connections of the fourfold - earth, sky, mortals and divinities - the difference between the two was apparent. architecture is subsumed by the passions of the body and becomes the medium through which the everyday is made marvelous, where it becomes the receptacle for the virtues and the vices of peoples lives. the house is made into a home.

atul dodiya

in the evening there were more connections that revealed themselves. we were gallery hopping when we came across atul dodiyas new exhibition at the museum art gallery where he pays tongue in cheek tribute to the visual language and the women of his own past. using laminated sheets he paints images that reference his parents relationship, the images of television and mass culture that he lives with, and the artists that have influenced his work. the laminated were of the type i remember from growing up at home, the cheap, easy to maintain type that the middle classes prefer, and the juxtapositions strange and ironic. sometimes, i thought, maybe too ironic. a little mtv, perhaps? but no.. for just before that we were at the huge ‘edge of desire’ exhibition at the national gallery of modern art, and there mtv style uber cool exploitation of pop iconography was irritating and reeked of upper class snootiness. but this exploitation was rampant throughout the exhibition. i liked a lot of the work though. nalini, neelima, ghulam sheikh, dodiya, kgs. but i digress into desire when what i wanted to talk about was memory – which might be another kind of desire.

kaushiks work at edge of desire

zarina hashmi

at the bodhi art gallery there were some beautiful prints on display. zarina hashmi was born in aligarh and seems to have spent her life in different homes and cities all over the world. the etchings seemed to be memories of these spaces she has lived in and left behind. it was like walking into an archive of her past. the drawings varied between impressionistic sketches of the light within a room, or the patterns that might have been tile patterns, to beautifully drawn technical drawings of the houses or the cities themselves. somewhere the abstract space of the drawing met the lived and remembered experiences of her past. they were extraordinarily beautiful. maybe the fourth year students need to take a look at them to give their projects more body.

finally last night we were at kuntals new house where rajes new interior is on the verge of being lived in. “to be looked at, and to be looked through” is what kuntal told me the house was about. this was the first look i had of the white walls, the precisely imagined details in wood, the parchment paneled sliding doors, the pieces of art that are to become the place where meha is going to grow up and mukul is going to sleep in his overnight jaunts in town.

kuntals new house

which brings me back to ‘east of eden’ that i finished reading today morning through a haze of tears that i could not keep from falling. it is the scale of the story that got to me; the landscape of many lifetimes that revolve around two families and their homes. the ranches where a living is eked out of the land and the city homes where neighbourhood love and rivalry begin below the branches of backyard trees. and it got to the romantic in me about how architecture can be so integral to the lives of people, how it can shape their lives and how it soaks these stories into itself in the form of traces, scars, additions.

but then again, i remembered what ateya and me were talking about about the samant wada and how to map it. we thought we saw in it a novel of enormous proportions where a family’s history became representative of the history of a village. where in the bricks and stone of the house there lay a mammoth tale that we had in our romantic narrative made larger than life. when the story was finally unraveled it lay in tatters in front of us, because it could never match up to our expectations; and more realistically we were forced to realize that sometimes brick is really , you know, just brick..