ticking around architecture: Relating my two most favorite creative personals QT AND RK

ticking around architecture: Relating my two most favorite creative personals. ...: "It might come across a little strange but, as strange as it might seem, I see both Quintin Tarantino and Rem Koolhaas with the same perspective..."

ticking around architecture: Dutched Danish Landscape.

ticking around architecture: Dutched Danish Landscape.: "This post is just to record a thought on the phenomenon sweeping the Danish architectural scenario. While Ar. Rem Koolhaas is busy propagati..."

ticking around architecture: 'OCULUS' - An inception of a dream.

ticking around architecture: 'OCULUS' - An inception of a dream.: "All we had in our minds was a will to do something for the alma matter, to 'leave a dent', to do something that would not only be just memor..."

ticking around architecture: Continuity is not simply a horizontal line of human history. - A Study Tour Report

ticking around architecture: Continuity is not simply a horizontal line of human history. - A Study Tour Report

Case 2: interviewing (investigating) Ar. Prem Chandaverkar

Case 2:

Date of Investigation: 24/04/2010

The interview was conducted on behalf of my college for our Dept. magazine. The interview was largely focused on general and current issues concerning the present day architectural practice and education in India. It has published in our Dept. Magazine "OCULUS" 's second issue.

Investigators:

1) Shreyank S Khemalapure: Gets fugitives talking.

2) Praveen Alva: Criminal Journalist.

3) Prasad Rotti: Guest interviewer.

P.A: Did you always wanted to be an architect?

P.C: Not always. In fact before sitting for the entrance exam I was looking for various options.

P.A: Could you describe what is, your kind of architecture?

P.C: Well that’s a deep and long question, very difficult to answer easily. Basically architecture I would say, where the joy of inhabitation takes priority over the impact of the visual. I feel that too many architects design from a view point that someone will turn to a corner and look at the building and say ‘WOW’! I would like to do work where the priority is that someone can inhabit it for 5 years and then look back at those 5 years with affection. So what we do is we facilitate cultures of inhabitation, then through repeated acts of inhabitation breed memories which build up your liking and love for the place. There is an aesthetic that develops after the architect has finished his work and you have to design from that point, as to what happens when you’re no longer there.  Architecture is very different from the performing arts in that sense, because those are the arts which live in the presence of the artist. But architecture is like many of the visual arts; it has to survive in the absence of the artist. We get too preoccupied with what we have to say about the work and we believe that the meaning of the work comes from what we put into it. But actually the meaning of the work comes through the pattern of inhabitation that happens after we have done our work.

P.A: What does style and signature mean to you?

P.C: I think style is a wrong starting point; style should be a by-product. It’s should be a by-product of trying to doing something meaningful. It should not be a starting point by which you can just fix meanings with some predetermined solutions. It’s unfortunate that many architects get preoccupied with questions of style, I don’t think about it. In fact one should avoid labels of any kind, because once you start attaching yourself to a label then that begins to constrain what you do. Rather then that, just focus on the essence of what you’ve got at that very moment.

P.A: According to you what makes a building iconic?

P.C: Iconic is a very loaded word and I think it is much trapped in this question of style. What we really need to get comfortable with, are buildings that can be part of the background and still be great architecture. Iconic is not high on my priorities to what I wish to achieve. But sometime I might do some building which because of its specific location needs to be iconic but you need to be very careful and try for it only in those locations. For example Brigade Rubix is a building that we are doing which seems to be iconic that’s because it’s a focal element in the approach road to that neighborhood. Another aspect would be that the building by its very program should be a public symbol like a sports stadium or a major museum.  Then we can look at making it iconic. If I’m doing a house or a regular I.T park or a hotel, then those need not necessarily be iconic.

S.K: What is your take on architectural practice in Bangalore?

P.C: I’m very encouraged by the general cultural of architectural practice in Bangalore. One is that there is this concern among many practices to creating this very strong sense of place and not get preoccupied with iconic form or fashionable trend, so that’s a very healthy sign. This has been a legacy of Bangalore and I think our firm has something to do with it. Being the first practice in Bangalore and have been very comfortable with the idea of architecture of the background. Even if you look at what the firm was doing in the 1950s of 1960s, at the time when that generation of contemporary Indian architects was very concerned about creating the symbols of the newly independent nation, the priority here was more to the earn respect of the local community rather then building grand public symbols. And to a certain extent, I think this has affected the culture of practice in Bangalore, were there is this local rootedness and not so much of a concern for grand symbols. If you look at what was happening earlier it was architects from Mumbai, Ahmadabad, Delhi who were grabbing the limelight and winning most of the design awards.  If you consider design awards as a form of measurement, then the center of gravity has shifted to Bangalore. I think Bangalore will become a center for influence in Indian architecture.

S.K: Do you believe that there is degradation in professional education in India?

P.C: Yes, in all fields. It’s tending to be more vocational, and there is no emphasis on critical thinking. I think the mistake that we made just after independence was that we separated research from education, a trend which was created in the basic sciences and which spread into education in general. So the education system had people who just taught and who were not researchers. In India the mistake what we make is to get trapped by the fallacy that in a college the only people who are coming to learn are the students. What we really need to create is places where the faculty members are coming to learn; and that energy should be driving student learning. A large percentage of our colleges unfortunately have faculty who are not learners, not researchers, not even exceptional practitioners. A basic qualification to teach architecture should be that you should either be doing original research work which is published, or doing original practice which should be winning awards, competitions, getting published. You should be a cut above the rest to teach but unfortunately it’s not the scene.

S.K: How important do you think publication and documentation in terms of architecture?

P.C: It’s very important and it’s something that is unfortunately neglected in India. It’s an essential tool, it’s a very mundane tool but it’s a foundation on which a profession builds theist own sense of tradition,  history and criticism. Without that the publication doesn’t follow, the research doesn’t follow, the historical analysis doesn’t follow and we lack that.

P.A: Do you think the architectural education abroad suits the way we practice in India?

P.C: This question doesn’t have a straight forward answer. You got to remember, to go abroad takes quite a bit of effort, and the people who have taken the initiative to go to abroad and come back are the kind of initiative taking people. In that sense they are the cream of the overall pool of architects, and they would do well even if they have continued to stay in India because they are that kind of people. The training overseas in most part has much greater deal of rigor, because they make you think critically and they have faculty who are researchers and cutting edge practitioners themselves. But that doesn’t necessarily create the kind of architect one needs, because eventually something has to be internalized within your sense of self. Education is really using the context of knowledge seeking to internalise something and build your sense of self and identity. Each person is unique, they have unique form of expression and you have to come in terms with that and let that flow naturally. But unfortunately too many of us get influenced by trends, and ‘isms’: something like Deconstruction catches in as a trend, and suddenly everyone is doing that. If education builds’ a strong sense of self we would get a greater depth of critical thinking in terms of architecture everywhere. But unfortunately we have international culture of heroes and imitators.

P.A/ S.K: How do you think we can create a loop between what is taught is architectural schools and what is practiced in office? Do you think there is apathy?

P.C: Yes there is apathy. But for example in a place like Bangalore, there is a large pool of fairly talented architects who would be more than willing to teach if the system is more responsive. Because you know a practitioner is also looking for forms of learning, and teaching is a form of learning. Even if you are teaching something basic for 1^st year students, to stand in front of 30 students and to clearly articulate what you know, one would be challenged by that very act. As for now the interactions happen at an informal level, where the students approach us. But for some reasons colleges doesn’t encourage such things and they don’t encourage it because we have not raised this high standard of faculty as learners.

S.K: Around the world the global events are marked with spectacular architectural masterpieces, like Beijing Olympics and forth coming London Olympics for example. In India the commonwealth games are round the corner and we are sidelined in terms of creating an architectural statement. Why do you this is happening in India?

P.C: There is more of politics and government interference in how large public projects are carried out. That’s a part of the problem.  The other problem in India is that we don’t really have a tradition of urban design. We tend to look at the cities only as functional entities. Our cities have problem of sense of authenticity in India, because when we talk about Indian culture, any definition of authenticity tends to be located in the village. If look at the research in social anthropology it was largely focused on the villages. It’s only now that people have started to look at the cities but even then it’s more of technical rather than cultural research. The city as a site of culture, as a location of the avant-garde, the city as the cutting edge of cultural production – these notions have not come into light as yet in India. We tended to look at cities very functionally. We just produce 2 dimensional land use plans,  and we don’t have the tradition of urban design, seeking to build neighbourhoods, public symbols, visual identity of the city.  These things are still lagging in our urban design intentions.

S.K: Could you explain the notion ‘belonging to a place’, or ‘of the place’?

P.C: I have to come back to the earlier point I made of facilitating a culture of inhabitation and memory. It’s like you live in a house and suppose your family keeps meeting at your house. And one day you sit in the verandah and you keep chatting till 4 in the morning after dinner. After that you keep talking about that day saying ‘do you remember we sat in the verandah and we kept talking till 4 in the morning’. Then the verandah takes on a new meaning. So that’s how that sense of place and memory builds up. And one has to create architecture to facilitate that culture. Another aspect would be climate. It’s by recognizing climate, the natural contour, flora and fauna, responding to site, those also create a sense of place. So I would say it’s really being sensitive to context, physical & climatological context and social context of pattern of inhabitation.

S.K: Your take on, Indian identity in architecture.

P.C: Its same again say as style. It’s a wrong starting point. When you take it as a starting point then you will be looking at superficial labels and facades, you will never go beyond the surface. You’re dealing with Indian sites, Indian clients, Indian material, Indian climate so many things are Indian. Just deal with these things honestly and rigorously, the final product will surely be Indian. An identity or a culture is something that is alive, so never try to define it. When you define it, then it’s like culture with your head turned backwards all the time.

P.A: Is there any architect or designer whose work you admire?

P.C: F.L. Wright is one who I really admire. Corbusier for his attitude. Carlos Scarpa,  and Tadao Ando only that I’m bit concerned for one language dominates all of Ando’s projects. But the quality of work is good.

P.A: How do you unwind yourself?

P.C: Very simple things, read books, listen to music, and talk to friends.

Quick fire:

Chandigarh city: visionary for its time

Bangalore metro: technical great, disastrous in terms of urban design.

Brand architects in Indian: who are they?

Landscape: neglected dimension of architecture

Corbusier or Wright: Wright

Form follows function or function follows form: Neither . I will say, ‘form should transcend function’

Tschumi or Eisenmen: Neither.

Guggenheim New York or Bilbao: New York.

Top five:

5 books: Complexities and contradictions in architecture by Robert Venturi, Art, objects by Jeanette Winterson, Forgotten truth by Huston Smith, The ethics of authenticity by Charles Taylor, Welcome to the Urban revolution by Jeb Brugmann.

5 buildings: Falling waters by F.L. Wright, Barcelona pavilion by Meis, Querini-Stampalia Foundation by Carlos Scarps, Church on water by Ando, Crystal palace by Paxton. I got a list of historical buildings like Fathepur sikri, Padmanabapuram palace, just go through the city of Rome.

5 people: That’s getting too personal.

5 places: Bangalore because of my own personal history, I enjoyed Philadelphia, Barcelona, London.

5 film: Pan’s labyrinth, Italian film El Postino, One flew over the cuckoo’s nest, some of the Guru Dutt movies and early Shyam Bengal movies like Pyaasa and Ankur.

P.A: Do you think that after such long successful architectural practice, do you think that you have achieved everything that you wanted to do when you started as an architect?

P.C: At every moment (even now) I feel like I have just started.

Drain Brain

If 'Brain-Drain' was a situation when India was loosing great load of skilled labor to the west, then 'Drain-Brain' is loss of knowledge -and hence,perhaps, skill- itself in India.

Architect Rem Koolhaas admits that it would have been almost impossible for OMA to be able to build CCTV headquarters today. Not because the gravity defining technology vanished but because the amount of knowledge transfer that has taken place since the beginning of the century from west to east is unbelievably tremendous and he acknowledges the fact that there would have been a possibility of a better design by some Asian architect. On an average an Asian architect gets and builds more projects as compared to an architect from the western nations of the world (European and American.) But if a graph is to be drawn for the implication of the innovative and progressive knowledge of architecture the graph will show a huge convex curve dipping in India. But sadly more and more Indian Students are learning in the most creative schools of the European nations and when they return back to India, the knowledge seems obsolete as they are caught up in spur of understanding the alien architectural system of the nation and the need to survive. All the knowledge acquired from the greatest of schools start to fade away. Only if the architect becomes quite successful then he revives the urge to “do something different” forgetting that all his money, time and intellectual workouts were carried for a better architecture and for the progress of the architecture, not simply for a second act of doing different stuff.

Then what’s the point studying at such great architectural schools and be literally paralysed when it comes to the implication and growth of that knowledge? One of the architects replied “they make us learn to ask the right question at the right time.” Fair enough! But imagine the amount of knowledge that goes un-attended, un-utilised –not even under-utilised- There was once a crisis of Brain Drain in India where best of the talents were fleeing to the USA for better pay and better jobs. But in architecture there’s a reverse situation. People get nurtured in amazing pool of knowledge and return to India and let their intelligence be drained away. In either cases India loses but worst with architects is they too loose tremendously in this Drain Game.

Who is to be blamed? Is it the client? Is the government? Is it the market? Is it the economic condition of the state? Is the non-appreciation of Architecture? Is the lack of architectural events? Lack of commissions? Or is simply plain apathy of everybody.

I’m just a new graduate (perhaps yearning for some change, not exactly knowing what, with a known enthusiasm and cynicism) who has a lot of questions to ask to hundreds of them and to myself.

I may sound easily cynical, but the condition, I fear, is really horrifying.

P.S: I really don’t believe that creative acts have anything to do with nationality or race. But considering the huge number of creative professionals serving one of the biggest populations of the world makes me think about their role in my bustling and yearning nation of India.

“How You Doin?” Sketching as a way of cozying up with design settings.

This is the article I wrote for the Student magazine of GIT Architecture department. I am putting this up on the blog so that those of us unfortunate souls who cannot read the magazine, can access some part of it. (Hint to the editors of the magazine if they read this: you are welcome to make the magazine part of the blog)


I still remember the first time I saw a computer generated rendering of a Zaha Hadid’s building, back when I was an impressionable architecture student. The extreme angle of the perspective emphasized the distortions of the space. It was mesmerizing, almost a seduction of my mind; with me fantasizing an orgasmic feel of walking in the space lost in the splendor of the surfaces, light, materials, etc. It was this ability of the computer-generated image that made it such a popular tool for representing ideas and visions for the architect, for ‘seducing’ the clients, the buyers, etc. But I guess it is time now to stop staring at the sultry seductress, take a step ahead and talk to her.
Throughout my time as a student of architecture before, and design in general now, one question kept popping up. Is the ability to sketch well, means to sketch a ‘good looking’ or seductive image OR does sketching has a more than a skin-deep reason for its existence? Some aspiring students wanting to get into the Industrial Design Center used to mail me asking what is the importance of sketching in the selection, most of them confessing that their sketching is ‘not so good’. I didn’t think much about it and used to reply them just for the sake of encouraging them. I used to say that while the visual aspects of sketching are important, equally important is the ability to think through sketching.
And it is this aspect that I now claim we as students of design and architecture should be more interested than in the final rendered image. Let me attempt now to expand on the ability of sketch as a way of design, touching on what I mean by sketching here and also on the act of designing itself.
Starting with the Pick-Up Line:
Lets take an example, one so familiar with all the students.
It’s the design studio and I am designing a resort on a contoured site. There is a plan of the contoured site over which I have a butter paper on which I draw a layout of a room, orienting it towards the valley for getting a maximum view for the people inside the room. At the same time, on a site model of the contours, I place a 3d box of the volume of the room at the location. I then realize that the slope is too large and there is lot of cutting involved for a rocky surface. Then I push up the room either to a much gentler slope or think of how to support it above the rocks, without cutting the land below. I then come back to the butter sheet and draw the new layout.
I am sure all of us have come across similar such situations, where by the act of drawing, modeling either with thermocol / mount board OR with the computer, we go on arriving at different ‘option’ or ideas as design solutions. Donald Schön, a philosopher, looked at this phenomenon across the architectural practice and termed it as a reflection-in-action. (His book referenced below, though a theoretical book is a must at any library of an architecture school.) Here as I move from one act of drawing to other, the ‘materials’ – the site, my desire to gather the best possible view for the room dwellers, the rocky surface, the aesthetic style I want to impose – all these talk back to me through the act of drawing or modeling. Thereby the act of ‘designing’ becomes a way of ‘conversing with the materials’ – a constant series of modifications and explorations of options and ideas as the different materials give their feedback to my design actions. Note here that by materials I don’t mean the materials like wood, stone or glass, but the materials of design – the site, the settings, the program, the designer’s intentions and theories.
It is this ability to successfully hold such a conversation through ones design actions is what Schon calls as reflection in action. Hence, as design and architectural students, it becomes imperative that we develop this ability to reflect during our design action through the design actions. The good news is our design studios are a good way to start developing this ability! But as students we need to be aware of what is happening ‘behind-the-scene’ when we do our design activities. And to be aware of the importance of this ability in design, we as students have to get beyond achieving the seductive final image, and stress on having a long cozy talk with the materials!
Lets Talk baby!
The practice of architecture has moved from a single genius architect al la Howard Roark, towards a set of smart individuals forming a creative team cutting across different disciplines. In fact for complex buildings and urban planning projects, even the other ‘stake holders’ like the people funding, the government, the people who will be actually using the spaces are also part of the design team. Though one can debate the pros and cons of such involvement, what we cant get away as a future architect is the ability to work in a team, creatively. I will claim that it is here, again the ability to be reflective, to have conversation with materials that will bail us out, rather than the finished, sexy renderings.
Bill Buxton, a principal researcher at Microsoft research has written an amazing book on this topic (in the reference list). Though he mostly talks about a need of shift in the way we design digital experiences, but the core of his analysis holds good for the challenges of the current architectural practice. Moving away from the finished ‘prototypes’ he stresses on the process of ‘sketching’ as a way forward. Looking at he figure 1 below, we can say that from the architectural standpoint, a prototype is very close to artifacts, which we use for specification, construction and representation of the final concept – Walkthroughs, Renderings, Presentation drawings, Working drawings, specifications, etc. These, I claim, in line with Buxton’s argument, come towards the end of the design process. But sadly due to their strong visual appeal, we as students fall in the trap of arriving there before exploring the settings, before having a good and healthy chat with the materials. 

Figure 1: Sketch and a Prototype (Source: Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton)
Before we go and start cozying up with our design settings, let me clarify that by ‘sketching’ what Buxton means is not just drawing on the paper, but an activity of design beyond drawing. As in the figure 2, sketching is the process of early design activity and includes drawing, doodling, building models, mock up models, etc. The word sketch inherently means it is not finalized, it is not solid, is easily changeable and mold-able.

Figure 2: Sketching involves various early design activities
So, Lets Cozy Up Now!
A closing reminder, through a diagram again by Buxton, which succinctly shows how a design process should be. I need not mention that it holds good even for architectural process also! 

Figure 3: The Design Process as a Tree (Source: Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton)

References: (Books that Ought to be in any School Library)  
[1] Buxton, B. 2007 Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc.  
[2] Schön, D. A., The Reflective Practitioner. How Professionals Think in Action. 1983, New York: Basic Books, Inc.