The premise of this exploration is that the separation between culture and nature only exists as an act of imagination. Nature is all encompassing including ourselves as an integral part. To separate man from nature or the ‘man-made’ from the ‘natural’ can only be an act of creating a rift. This rift is the place that is being explored here.
The separation between man and nature is constructed everyday through our acts, gestures, metaphors and institutional systems. Nature is thus made- taking on different forms and different meanings. This is an exploration of some of these constructs and the modes through which nature (or the natural) is thus constructed / imagined.
---
GORAI
There are stories to be told about the relationship of nature and architecture across the city. After all, isn't this the first real role of architecture- the first boundary drawn around the body against nature. It is this boundary that we explore if we circle what is the body of the city as it confronts nature on its edge. Once such frontier can be found in Gorai- a traditional fishing village on a beach is separated from the main island of the city by a narrow creek. Here we can find a veritable catalogue of different imaginations of the relationship between nature and civilization.
To get to Gorai you walk a long road reaching out from Borivili railway station towards a slimy black stone jetty. From here one catches a ferry across the creek. My school was on this road. As a schoolboy i remember the forbidden adventure of walking to the jetty after school and throwing stones at the slimy salamanders in the black mud with my friends. In the summer we used to hire bicycles for the day and set out on an adventure bicycling to the beach, carrying our bicycles on the ferries that carried daily commuters from the village to the city and holidayers and adventure seekers like us to the other side.
The road to the jetty form the city was pretty much deserted then except for a few developments. These included the Maharashtra Housing Board Colonies for low income groups on the right and the large open lands belonging to All India Radio. Towards the end of the road and closer to the jetty the sisters of the Mother Teresa Hospital had set up a home for destitute women and the Bus Stand. This was almost the last building until you got to the jetty with its tiny group of ramshackle shacks where you could buy a vada-pao or a cold drink. A tiny group of auto rickshaws and a few BEST buses carried passengers to Borivili Railway Station. These buses were infamous among us schoolboys for the fisherwomen that they carried. We lived in fear of them- their loud cantankerous voices, their smells and their tempers.
In later years the road that led to the ferry saw many new developments. Sites and Services schemes for the low income group emerged in a grid plan across the landscape. Rows and rows of toilets waiting for their homes making a new edge to the mangrove. I am certain some reclamation of land from the edge of the creek was inevitable. In the unending grid of this new housing colony, the creek was never acknowledged as a possible edge. Waterfront development was relegated to being an unresolved tangle of half made roads, compound walls and building mixed with shrub and mangrove. IN later years these toilets grew into a variety of homes, ranging from low rise single room tenements to multi storied towers. A planned suburb has emerged with playgrounds and schools like any other except for the foetid smell in the air- especially in the evenings. This emerges from an enormous garbage dump that rises on the edge of the mangroves to the north of the jetty. This dump, active until very recently, slowly and steadily pollutes the creek making the murky water even more filthy. Lately, with the growth in residential areas in the surrounding neighbourhoods there is a move to push this dump even further out of the city. The dump is now being closed using what are purported to be 'green' technologies, after a similar transformation of the dump in Malad. There, some green turf was slapped on the top of the three storied dump to make it look pretty from the windows of the mall and the glass buildings around it. This caused strange gases to be released into the air, causing the computers in the call centers to crash. In Gorai the closing of this garbage dump, it is hoped, will open land for future housing colonies with 'creek views'.
Thirty years back, across the creek, on the other side there was no settlement except for the fishing village on the beach. To go across the creek was to travel back in time by 50 years. Bullock carts and bicycles were the main form of transportation to go from the jetty to the village. On both sides of the road was low lying barren land dotted with a few mangroves that used to flood over at high tide.
It is on this land that, in the early nineties we saw the first signs of a new imagination for the area when seven multicoloured metal giraffe-like gates were built as the entrances to the development of two enormous amusement parks in Gorai- Esselworld and its partner Water Kingdom. Here weekend holidayers from the city cavort in pools and fountains and test their nerves on roller coasters. The more real the feeling of danger- the more the pleasure. every few years more and more rides are added to the site, each claiming a more thrilling adventure. Naturally, all the dangers are really simulations, allowing us a show of fortitude in the face of a paper devil. Over the years both of these amusement parks have become islands of pleasure on the edge of Mumbai They are host to many a wild party held on New Years night promising a space for unhampered abandonment with lights, fireworks and really loud music. As the popularity grew a new jetty was built specially for these to the south of the older one so that visitors didn't have to deal with the local community while getting to the parks. This local community, living in traditional houses in Gorai village is still involved in fishing and small time farming activities. some of these have started catering to the needs of the hordes of travelers that descend on the beach on holidays. Houses along the beach have been converted to weekend shacks that can be hired for the night or for the day. They cater to the groups of young men who can be seen playing cricket and football here; or speed racing along the relatively flat black beach. Other visitors to these shacks are young couples, married or unmarried, looking for a romantic getaway from their lives in the city. You can also hire these shacks for an all night party. The courtyards of these shacks are decked up in lights strung from palm tree to palm tree and music blares from speaker systems carried all the way from the city. Some nights even more illicit love can be found here (if you are looking) in the gay parties and raves that are advertised over the internet.
Another new development in the Gorai area, right besides Esselworld is the enormous pagoda of the Vipassana sect that works as a latter day monastery. Meditation and prayer sessions are organised here that sometimes include 10 days where you speak to absolutely no one. The huge Buddhist pagoda is fashioned on a Burmese model has a 90 meter internal diameter and is built without using any mortar. To be covered in gold it is the centre piece of a complex of meditation halls, hostels and other facilities for the temple. The gardens within this haven are a stark contrast to the rugged landscape outside its boundaries. here lawns and flowering shrubs tame the wild natural landscape to make it suitable for placating the troubled minds of the disciples. Today the spire of this hall towers over the landscape of Gorai and foretells of many more transformations that are on their way.
The amusement parks and the golden pagoda are premonitions of a future Special Economic Zone for recreation and tourism being planned in the area. Policies are being created that will allow private developers to amalgamate lands and give many incentives to transform this area into a pleasure garden for the city of Mumbai. Naturally this garden has little use for the older communities that currently live off this land, except as small time help in the servicing of these mega-complexes. local villagers whose see their traditional way of life being threatened by have begun an agitation to protest this development.
Gorai serves as a microcosm within which we can see the different ways in which we imagine and intervene in nature. Sometimes Nature is a commodity to be sold, other times it is a resource, for some others it is an emptiness where we can dump the unwanted, for others a getaway from the ravages of the city. Each of these is in conflict with another. to be able to resolve these conflicts these imaginations need to be understood and placed against one another with regards to who and what desire they represent. What follows is an attempt to unpack some of these desires through a few themes that exist in the ways in which we construct nature and the natural as material and metaphor in our everyday lives.
---
| In myth nature is where we all come from. And for that reason it is always a 'she'. Woman is nature / nature is woman. Mothers / wives / girlfriends - shoulders to cry on, placating our troubled selves from the ravages of civilization- caring for us, keeping us safe in softness that curls around us. This is nature as solace. The home is a symbol of retreat and is at the same time the kingdom of women. The home is a return to the maternal womb. In traditional societies where women are kept protected removed from the gaze of men and the world, its only in enclosed courtyards that women are allowed to run free. These protected spaces are filled with a tamed nature- flowering plant, fountains- for children to frolic in this garden of delight. After all, this safety is an essential feature of the ideal home - a place where children can play in safety until the inevitable growth of a boy outwards from this gynocracy to the real world of men waiting outside. Meanwhile the girl child continues to tend the garden. --- If nature here provides an escape from difficulty in the embrace of a mother, another version of the same comfort can be found if we travel all the way out of these courtyards, past the bustling markets of the inner city, past the tracts of extended suburban anonymity that exist at the fringe of the city until we come to the undefined, unresolved edges where nature becomes a commodity in a market of retreats. Here lie weekend homes and getaway hotels. A trip to Alibaug across the harbour from Mumbai or to Arnala to the north of the city will suffice to see both examples. The weekend homes designed by many a designer architect attempt to recreate a pastoral peace harking back to a pre-industrial past, complete with sloping roofs, front garden, back garden and valley views. These are called 'farmhouses' where farming is the last thing on anyone's mind- and if it is- it is a return to a life removed from where they are today. These homes allow the bourgeoisie to entertain itself in the pretence of living off the land precisely because it does not have to. It is an escape into a fantasy from a purer, more 'real' past. Here the image of the 'agrarian' is sold as a commodity on the market. Can an echo be found in the rhetoric that accompanies the creation and the sustenance of the idyllic city of Auroville near Pondicherry? Here a group of neo-traditionalists from all over the world espousing a return to roots under the shadow of a golden ball blessed by a holy mother, work with local labour to create a new-age regression into a pure past. As for the architecture of the farm houses - a home in a garden is the dream project for so many architects to create, in built form, the ideal illustration of their ideologies. this is a phenomenon seen right from early modernism to later experiments in sustainable homes. One is reminded of the Villa Savoye as one relationship with nature and Falling Water as another. In each case the relationship is articulated very differently. While one detaches itself from the landscape the other immerses and rises from it. --- The entertainment retreats in the periphery of the city use nature as a playground. Water becomes swimming pools and water parks. Water dances around us like a playful puppy which entertains us because we know it won't hurt us. These playgrounds for us are like gardens where nature is tamed. This is designer nature- the epitome of artifice. Through elaborate and self-conscious methods we control and tame the wild into geometries that sometimes evoke the diagram of the world like the Moghul garden, and at other times a nature picturesquely untamed like the English garden. In the most surreal of these, topiary in a French garden returns to nature the forms of the world, both natural and man-made, in carefully pruned dark green. shrubs are shaped into rudimentary three dimensional models of the platonic root forms of giraffes and elephants, houses and castles, as frighteningly uncanny as the drawings in children's fairy tales. like dark green apparitions from another world. --- The idea of an untamed nature is also seen as the place where an artist can find inspiration in the purity of his own mind. A romantic ideal of the wholesomeness of it has thus been meditated upon for inspiration by many artists and poets- or rather we imagine that poets require these pristine untainted surroundings as a muse. It is here they can return their primitive essences as artists. One is reminded of the claude glasses that landscape painters from the 18th century used to use to turn a view into the picturesque. these were black mirrors through which one saw the world. It made beautiful by making strange. The real is made unreal through the making of a picture. Nature here is in reality merely a view, not that much different from the one sold in the many 'sea view' apartments that dot the edge of the city. We dream of evenings sipping cocktails watching the sunset in numerous developr housing dreams. --- Perhaps a similar romanticization pervades the way we look at people who live off the land. As if they are in a certain way more pure, untainted by the corruption of modernity. Images of farmers and fishermen are evoked by every nationalistic movement whether that is Stalinist social realism or Manoj Kumar's brand of patriotism. Similar is the 'son of the soil' brand of local community identity bandied around by the extreme right- like men are grown like plants rooted to the earth. Water them and feed them fertilizer to help them survive. --- So much orientalist literature written by the colonizer regarding its territories in the east also reeks of a similar romanticization. By primitivizing the native it forms the basis for othering them into the past, and places the 'white man's burden' squarely on the shoulders of the colonizer- to find the balance between tradition and modernity. Against the purity of the natural is often placed the sophistication and the evils of the city- for isn't it the city that is imagined to be the most unnatural- the evil force that ravages and destroys pristine forests and lakes. But the city can never really exile nature. It breathes it and excretes it. It is made from it, of it. It is the place where the boundary blurs between the 'natural' and the 'artificial'. The city is a cyborg - part natural part artificial. --- The futurists made their machines into beasts and loved them, lusted after them- caressed them and brought them to life. Machines are after all extensions to our own bodies- ways to speak better, see better, work better. Prosthetics. our bodies are cyborgs extending into bicycles and cellphones. Where is the boundary between the machine and the natural here? Nowhere is the blurring more controversial than in the creation of artificial life and the debate that rages over cloning and stem cell research. Yet dont we constantly consume manufactured nature in our food. So many disaster films capitalise on the appearance of nature untamed in the civilized cities; and so many horror films play on the opposite. In Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go' our terror and our fear grows with every page as the protagonist gradually realises that she is completely manufactured. --- The city constantly is creating new ways to consume nature. machines morph into nature through a process of simulations- the wearing of masks. Plastic flowers in a window bring all of nature into a window. Floral wallpaper brings all of Switzerland into your living room. And the bird cage- the sky; the fish tank- the ocean. Floral patterns, paisley prints and animal prints cover clothing of all types. As if primitive man still exists clothed in a new version of humanity- flowers being the fragrant and foetid symbols of sexuality; animals echoing our desire for untamed pleasures. But both flattened and made into ornament. Safe. --- There is an excess of flowers in the city - fragrances hover in massage parlours- jasmine, roses. Pleasure through all the senses- through nature sensual. and of the flowers none is so potent as the rose. One wonders about the soft pornography of the rosebud- as a symbol of asexual love- perhaps nothing can be more appropriate. After all what is a flower besides a monumental sign signalling a readiness for procreation. Naturally, it is the young who are obsessed with the ritual of giving roses- a claim to perpetual youth against the inevitable deterioration that old age brings- like plastic flowers that never die placed in vase on a glass side table in our houses. Nature is here is the sign of nature- as the promise of sex. --- As against the pleasure we take in the floral and the botanical is the mixture of pleasure and embarrassment with which we deal with the bestial, animalistic nature of our bodies. The sexual here blossoms into the unbridled passion of leopard skins and snake skin bags - real or fake. Environmentalists rage as animals are made extinct over the sought after feel of soft fur around your body. Protestors throw red paint like blood on the skins wrapped around the shoulders of american pop stars on the red carpet. Or if the pop stars are environmentalists they strip themselves of all clothes and stand naked on billboards proclaiming 'i'd rather go naked than wear fur.' Another return to a primitive purity. --- Of all our sensory organs perhaps none is as favoured as the eye. As our obsession for the visual begins to take on even more colossal proportions with the crazy production and consumption of images the drive to control and distribute them and at the same time to suppress other senses becomes even more desperate. One is reminded of the many 'purely vegetarian' apartment buildings in South Mumbai where a gastronomic preference colludes with class and caste based xenophobia to mark a new terrain over the city whose boundaries are not only physical but also related to smell. An amusing episode in such a new demarcation of boundaries happened when, in a discussion with a powerful community group regarding the placement of a platform for loading and unloading fish at Churchgate station, the entire project was held hostage by a lady who did not want it placed anywhere near her bedroom window as the smell would offend her religious sentiments. --- Similarly, bodily functions that express our base natures are removed from our experience of the city through architecture and urban design. These include the removal and the denial of the enormous amounts of garbage generated by use in the form of excrement and also the people associated with them. Architecture after all has always been the art of organisation- clearing and classifying- and removing all that might be dark and dangerous. Bataille spoke of the slaughterhouse as a space where these fears concentrate. We can add to this the sewage treatment plant, the tanneries, the garbage dumps and all the people who work in them. An embarrassment of this imagined filth removes them from the world of our daily experience. In this ostracization of the base nature of the body, the body is reconfigured into a new cleaner purer 'unnatural' form. --- The city makes the edges outside it an 'outside' to accommodate the undesired. The proliferation of low income housing projects on the edge of the city and perpetually shifting garbage dump away from the centre of the city to newer peripheries are symptoms. But this idea of the peripheral landscape of the city as an empty outside is a myth like all the others. This imagination plays no attention to different modes of living that occupy these lands whether that be farming or fishing communities. Seen as backward and belonging to a pre-historic time their ways of life are undermined and annihilated. While at one time they are romanticized as the true inheritors of ancient heritage, they are at the same time being rapidly removed as new lands is required for the great leap to be made into the 21st century for new cities and Special Economic Zones. But this transition cannot be made without a fight. Farmers have quite a different view about the role of the land their way of life and sometimes refuse to comply. --- What is architecture if it not the first shield of the body against the violence of nature. Our delicate bodies need armour against the heat of the sun and the chilling cold of the wind. Our first line of protections against nature is architecture. In here is where we live like noble savages; testing our bodies against the wild- primitive us in a 'primitive hut'. Laugier spoke of the root of architecture as this assembly of logs and thatch; or whatever exists around us - a cave or roof. Within this boundary we establish our hearths; where we begin civilization. Architecture is what is formed in this love/war dance with nature. --- Speaking of love/war.. Or devotion/fear- anthropologists propose that we make gods we make sense of that we don't understand. We perform rituals to please the unknown and to banish the untameable. Our festivals respond to the forces of nature. The position of the sun and the coming of rains mark for us ways to reconnect with a primitive past buried under layers of civilization. Primal forces that connect our bodies to the world are evoked in many of the rituals that we perform towards these forces like the daily prayer on the ghats of benares looking through water at the sunrise. --- 'Parkour' is urban running- a game that pits the movement of the body against the systems of the city. The city is made into an 'urban jungle' which the body is going to use as obstacle and material for running wild and free randomly across boundaries of property, use and meaning. along this vector of movement all the insititutions of cilivilaztion are broken in a mad rush of movement. The wild is allowed through the performing body to express the freedom of the individual against the collective. Howard Roark stood stark naked at the edge of cliff and then plunged fearless into the river gorge. He grew up to be an architect. --- While there is a fascination with this hero figure there is also a fear. While the male body is all very fine as a mythical figure against a distant horizon, when it comes to their actual bodies and their presence in the city- they are symbols of danger for a middle aged middle class who prefer their public spaces sanitized. Playgrounds where cricket and football are played are relegated to the care of schools who can regulate behaviour within. Public open space can be a children's park for pre-teen youth to play in; or a 'nana-nani' park for retired men and women to take morning walks in or to run their laughter clubs and yoga classes. Another body that is feared and hated in public space is the sleeping body of a young man. Benches and tree guards are carefully designed to discourage lingering. Access to these spaces then is strictly controlled by time restrictions (not in the afternoon for siestas and nor at night for illicit love) and by imposing an entry ticket. --- The sciences are enquiries into the nature of the world; our place within and in relationship to it. Our ssystems of knwledge production take what exists around us and neatly classifies them on the basis of particular properties. The complexity of the world is laid out in neatly numbered boxes- each box indexed and marked. To begin to understand it we have classified the world into categories based on affinities and differences. All plant life, all animal life, the world of minerals, the microscopic world- and the list goes on. An imposition of an order allows us to know and therefore control nature. The zoo as an institution was born out of such an urge- at one level created by the colonialists as a showcase of the exotica conquered by the great powers; and also as a specimen jar of different examples of plant and animal life. The 'habitat' of these specimens is meticulously recreated in pastiche, and now have become entertainments for school picnics. Children feed the elephants and throw stones at the lions. --- Meanwhile the 'real' habitat has been contained within the boundaries of a 'National Park'. It is here that we are to find untainted wilderness. The world of human beings is to have no place here and often these include the tribal communities that used to live off these lands. This containment is also the creation of an artificial habitat as when panthers cross the wall of Borivili national park looking for food and find victims in the homes of the slum communities along the edge of the park. after all aren't ecologies much more complex and intertwined? --- Our understanding of the nature of the environment is severely restricted by the artificial division we have created between nature and man. Rather than a systemic understanding that is able to discern broader patterns we use deterministic models woefully inadequate when faced with the complexity of nature and its forms. Instead we mistake the image of the natural for the natural in the shrill polemic accompanying the campaign against global warming and the depletion of fossil fuels around the world. Perhaps this is most apparent in recent discourses on sustainability in architecture where a solar panel on a roof, or a water harvesting tank make a building sustainable; no matter what kind of energy it took to make that solar panel or what the result of the tank on the ground water table is. Unfortunately this kind of lip service to being 'green' is even more exacerbate d by the various rating systems being bandied around by builders to claim environmental sensitivity. gold ratings and platinum ratings emerge out of parameters from other context that might be completely irrelevant in this one. Otherwise, drawing from myths of the natural and the primitive we assume pre-industrial civilization to be ideal as a model for an architecture of today. To learn from the local was one of the tenets of critical regionalism that attempted to resist forces of globalization by presenting an alternative discourse that emerged from the particularity of a context. However, too often an escape into sentiment and nationalistic jingoism marked the architecture it produced, hindering it from evolving into a relevant mode of practise in the contemporary landscape. This is all not to dismiss the very real distortions that exist in the way that our cities are consuming and destroying the landscapes that they exist in. In fact it is to propose that to create a truly sensible sustainable community the relationship between nature and man must be investigated and understood far beyond the naive generalisations and quick fix solutions that are being bandied around in all contemporary discourses on architecture. Only through a clear analytical view can so many of the myths that surround our relationship with nature begin to be unravelled and can new relationships be evolved. | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| |
---
No comments:
Post a Comment