boundary

what i love about the first year projects, both architectural design and basic design, at krvia is the ambition of their intentions and the active engagement in the city. compositional and formal questions are raised firmly as responses to particular experiences that are analysed and represented. the architecture comes out of these observations. you find the architecture and you find the project. ‘scripting the project’ rupali called it in the last faculty meeting. i like the phrase.

yesterday was the last day of college and the final basic design jury. this time the students were asked to find a boundary in the juhu area to explore. the boundaries that emerged were not merely experiential but naturally those seeped in competing claims over space. boundaries were then emphasized, revealed, blurred. incredibly more difficult than the beach project from last year- and maybe therefore- not as much of a hit. but the questions were complicated and difficult and some of the work terrific. i especially loved the projected fragments of the markets in the av room. like a shattered city. and the chairs in the no-mans land that interacted daily with the users of the space and gradually changed form through the week. The art object and the subject in a dance.

image post: retaining wall under construction

when the highway widens the slum is held back by a concrete wall. strange machines like insects help in building it.

image post: the new mall on link road

le marche like a slab of aluminum glistening in the morning light. the oshiwara river flows alongside black to the mangroves.

the sentinel

do i have to review this? sometimes i get so weary of my compulsive need to record every single film that i see. not that the film was awful; it was just, i don't know, blah... another film about the probable assassination of the american president, wishful thinking- i am sure. another film with michael douglas playing middle aged white man being framed, good cop gone bad, old friendships gone sour. some ridiculous transitions of supposed death threats to the president were supposed to add a layer of suspense and end up being just another device in another hollywood film with a hollywood formula.

a case for boring architecture

what is it about the permanence of architecture that frightens us so much? is it its inherent stability that is difficult to shift- the making of boundaries that is its inherent nature? the urge to transgress them leads to construct complicated formal operations.

we are too afraid of immobility. with a culture of 5 second attention spans fostered by television we get anxious when we are confronted with stillness. we are afraid of being boring- not entertaining enough to command attention. complicated maneuvers are performed. folds, blurs, twists and turns- because one can. i do realize the overtly proselytizing tone of this post but these acrobatics seem like distractions created to hide the shallowness of our concerns. experience and habitation seem to be relegated to a lower status than the projection of seductive form. ‘the soft pornography of the rosebud’, i have said this somewhere else.

the problem is the urge to be ‘interesting’: as in unusual, odd, eye catching in magazines and drawings. the represented space is far more important than the lived. and that is the bind of architecture- because it is about represented space- only. architecture naturally then, to survive and flourish, must consign to a lower rung the non-pretty- the domestic, the body, the deformed, the ordinary, the mundane and elevate what is ‘interesting’.

assumed in this situation is that everyday life cannot be exhilarating. experience, unless it is mediated through formal operations cannot bring joy. within these operations, if experience has a part to play then it is the active body performing antics that is considered (like in an amusement park or playground). otherwise form must play with itself. turn, twist, swirl. when the body is still it is form that must dance.

a day at the disappearing mill lands (bharat mata/lalbaug)

spent a sunday morning at two soon-to- disappear landmarks of the city's industrial history.




on its last legs is the bharat mata cinema where even today good marathi familes come to watch the whacky tacky comedies and the sentimental tearjerkers that make up the new marathi cinema. the projectionist custodian of this landmark of the marathi manoos (raj thackerey please note) is a u-p bhaiiya.















at lalbaug cricket matches are being played as the terribly built older buildings come down and are replaced with terribly built newer ones. old men still sit at corners discussing politics and the shops still sell the paraphernalia of a good marathi middle class life.

living along the mithi

as the river flows black and swift to the sea the home is a frontier of scrap metal, shadows, infrastructure and all that remains of nature.

stories from the city- corporators' meeting

today we collected stories. at a meeting in town where corporators from different parts of the city were bidding for us to ‘study’ their wards and propose development guidelines a variety of city landscapes collapsed into one another. for a change we heard the voice of the representatives of the people at the local level that sifted through individual narratives and made into patterns. these patterns formed a collage of modes of habitation and work, leisure and desire. the scale was that of a neighbourhood- and each was incredibly different from the other.

in juhu the stories were of an upper middle class neighbourhood with film star bungalows in the midst of which are old fishing villages and a few slums that run along the irla nallah. the desires there as voiced by the corporator was of film star ungalows as tourist destinations along with the old koli villages transformed into ‘home stays’ for tourists and cute pieces of the past preserved as artifacts. irla nallah was to be covered and turned into housing and in other areas was to have a garden on both sides- like in venice. an ‘art house’ theater and a bollywood museum was also on the cards.

at kherwadi 75% of the population lives in a slum whose real estate values are shooting up everyday. the area supplies unorganized labour to the city- carpenters, electricians. munier and mustaq live close here. the corporator here complained about the maintenance costs of the new high rises being built for the slum dwellers, the eviction of the entire population of subtenants and other complex tenancies from the area. low rise high density housing was suggested. the area was a classic case study of all that we claim to be faulty about the slum rehabilitation policy of the city.

at worli it was the bdd chawls- that large complex of industrial housing in the heart of the city. as the mill lands around are being transformed the corporator took serious issue with the term ‘redevelopment’ as according to him, it implied a removal of the old. and the old in this case were families that had outgrown the 160 sq feet of area allocated to them and were spilling out into the common corridor between units and sleeping on the terrace of the chawls. almost 20% of the people he claimed will not be able to pay even 15 rs per month as maintenance. do we throw them out? will they get a terrace to sleep on? and then the suspicions that emerge from political alliances, bureaucratic wrangles and caste. there are open spaces in the area that belong to the pwd department. the bmc can’t maintain them and pwd does not seem to have the mandate to. in between this red tape the spaces are being encroached upon. the crporator watches from his home in the high rise as his neighbourhood transforms- ‘tower’ he calls his new house. his father lived in one of the chawls that has been redeveloped. all his old friends have moved on.

but nowhere was the wrangling between bureaucracies more frightening than at reay road. the bit chawls are all undergoing redevelopment. towers appearing in their place. but across the road on the eastern waterfront homes for migrants stretch out over the water on stilts. disease is rampant. the municipality cant provide infrastructure as the land belongs to the bombay port trust. the bpt does not have the mandate to provide for housing. sandwiched in between at the slum dwellers living on narrow promontories named after the goods that they used to transport. reti bandar, lakda bandar.

at malad the slum stretches on both sides of the highway towards the hills of national park in the east. from madhus house, you see them like an ocean of roofs that turn blue in the rains with the tarpaulin stretched over tin sheds. an old river system has narrowed down into a drain and no infrastructure exists here. no roads, no sewage, no water supply. that’s all that exists in this ward. nothing else.

near the bhabha atomic research center, anushakti nagar with its scientists and researchers make up for most of the population. the rest of the area is a slum and some middle class housing. an agri and a koli village also exist. our corporator was a suave smart engineer from one of these villages who had made a development plan for the area already. he had enlisted the help of experts from the barc to develop local waste management systems and was claiming political infighting to be the only obstacle in the effective execution of it.

views from the santro recliner passenger seat at the mumbai airport junction (flyovers and hotels under construction)

play

play is time off. as such it does not belong to the strict system of the city- the ‘rat race’. play is a walk to the flyover to watch the sunset with your best friend, or a card game in the railway compartment, or even an afternoon nap in the park, or on a railway station. play is rest in a city where movement is the norm. play is uselessness in a city where efficiency of use is the norm. play is the questionable in the logical, the odd in the conventional, the empty in the full. in this city it is deviance. in an age of this paranoia regarding safety it is frightening. young man lounging at the corners of the streets- who are they? are their eyes following me? are they going to walk across to me? i guess it is important to separate issues regarding health with those of play. a morning jog is a ritual of health. play it is not. nor, i think, is the squash game in the local club really unless its real purpose is to have a late evening drink post-session with your best friend. children play and they are cute. we give them jungle gyms and swings in gardens- or replicas of airplanes where they pretend to be of age flirting with air hostesses. for the adult- play has to be institutionalized. designed. but how does one do it when deinstitutionalization is its very fundamental nature. is the only answer jungle gyms and slides for adults? making the adult a child again. are amusement parks play forms? and yet the city offers no solutions. the first year project provided many answers and questions regarding this. what is play? who is allowed to play? how does one design play?

end of semester / education and bureaucracy / fluxus / leona lewis / recombinant

after monday the classes i have to take every week have disappeared. instead there is all the administrative work of the school. end of the semester moderation meetings where students are discussed case by case and their relative merits and demerits in various subjects analyzed to determine their moving to the next year. in the mechanics of the complex matrices that the bureaucracy creates it is easy to forget that these are kids we are talking about. wednesday was spent talking about the future of architectural education and whether and how we could contribute to restructuring the course that the university prescribes. first a long session distributing and redistributing hours across 5 years and the next day presenting them at rizvi to make a case for a more flexible syllabus and the examination system. “if you pay people peanuts, then they are bound to be monkeys” a faculty member at the meeting told me. it was less volatile than we expected it to be and things seem like they might get better for architectural education- at least within the bombay university. so we hope. but it is too soon to speak. meanwhile a faculty member from another college drew on the board a sure-fire method to know whether a kid is an architect or not. he drew two sparrows on the board- one with crooked legs (the architects version) and the other with stick figure like legs (the non architects version). kaushik insisted that both of them were in fact magpies.

friday- after rupali and me drafted the first of what is going to be a series of possible time tables for the next term we drove to academy where we picked sonal up from a second year design jury.

at the ngma right now is an exhibition that i must recommend very highly. the fluxus group was a bunch of multinational anti art practitioners. rebelling against classical traditions and the cult of personality surrounding the artist, their work was ridiculous, funny, powerful and brilliant. at the exhibition, there are videos of the ‘happenings’ that they staged, music scores by john cage and others, do-it-yourself music and art work and sculpture.

met bahaar on colaba causeway for a while and then ran back home.

other random thought – after leona lewis’ new number one hit video ‘bleeding love’- why do women in music videos make love to walls, or sheets while men seem less attached to the architecture?

and yogita has a few questions of affordable housing on the recombinant. please read and comment.

the 8/288 studio meanwhile seems to have turned into a warehouse cum shop for usha maushis clothes. piles of colored salwar kameez and tops lie where the computers once did and amit’s light fixtures have become flower pots. i miss the space.

after monday the classes i have to take every week have disappeared. instead there is all the administrative work of the school. end of the semester moderation meetings where students are discussed case by case and their relative merits and demerits in various subjects analyzed to determine their moving to the next year. in the mechanics of the complex matrices that the bureaucracy creates it is easy to forget that these are kids we are talking about. wednesday was spent talking about the future of architectural education and whether and how we could contribute to restructuring the course that the university prescribes. first a long session distributing and redistributing hours across 5 years and the next day presenting them at rizvi to make a case for a more flexible syllabus and the examination system. “if you pay people peanuts, then they are bound to be monkeys” a faculty member at the meeting told me. it was less volatile than we expected it to be and things seem like they might get better for architectural education- at least within the bombay university. so we hope. but it is too soon to speak. meanwhile a faculty member from another college drew on the board a sure-fire method to know whether a kid is an architect or not. he drew two sparrows on the board- one with crooked legs (the architects version) and the other with stick figure like legs (the non architects version). kaushik insisted that both of them were in fact magpies.

friday- after rupali and me drafted the first of what is going to be a series of possible time tables for the next term we drove to academy where we picked sonal up from a second year design jury.

at the ngma right now is an exhibition that i must recommend very highly. the fluxus group was a bunch of multinational anti art practitioners. rebelling against classical traditions and the cult of personality surrounding the artist, their work was ridiculous, funny, powerful and brilliant. at the exhibition, there are videos of the ‘happenings’ that they staged, music scores by john cage and others, do-it-yourself music and art work and sculpture.

met bahaar on colaba causeway for a while and then ran back home.

other random thoughts – after leona lewis’ new number one hit video ‘bleeding love’- why do women in music videos make love to walls, or sheets while men seem less attached to the architecture?

and yogita has a few questions of affordable housing on the recombinant. please read and comment.

the 8/288 studio meanwhile seems to have turned into a warehouse cum shop for usha maushis clothes. piles of colored salwar kameez and tops lie where the computers once did and amit’s light fixtures have become flower pots. i miss the space.