Habitat / Design

Exploring the City | Looking for Answers

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Invisible threads are the strongest ties. #friedrichnietzsche #nietzsche #nietzschian #mixmedia #graphic #illustration #art #inktober #digitalart #visual #ties #nihilism #phoneart #artistsoninstagram #instart https://www.instagram.com/p/BoZ1N51F6Lo/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1pvdj4rpmduhp

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Architecture Today : The 21st Century Triad We Need

Architecture is what is left of civilizations centuries after they’re washed away by war or disaster. Today in the 16th year of the millennium, if we were to be suddenly buried underneath the earth with all our confusions and contradictions within & without; our descendants would surely be in for some amusing excavations centuries from now. The era that we dwell in is made of this confusion, the chaos of hundreds of exabytes worth of information bombarding our smart devices every minute. It is indeed a big responsibility that architects pose, as the profession responsible for the quality of living of an entire civilization. The four primary types of infrastructure namely, housing, educational, industrial and public stand as the foundation to any civilization that has been under the sun. Hence, as planners, architects & engineers our generation needs to step forth and make sure that the balance amongst the four is maintained in our cities lest our civilization may crumble and fall.

Better Infrastructure makes way for a better society.

Design has an immense amount of power when it comes to influencing the way we function in our day to day life. The measure of growth and prosperity of any nation/kingdom/region has been taught to us in terms of the richness of it’s art & architecture. In the current context though, the pseudo-progress that our world believes in requires some amount of reflection. Architecture today, much like the other components of our lives has become extremely fast paced and short sighted. The rate of technological advancements today is exponentially larger than the post Industrial Revolution era, yet the focus is merely on quantity not quality. Monuments from the Ashokan & Mayan dynasties stand tall even today against the test of time & earth, while no architect/engineer guarantees a life of more than 30 years for the structures built in the present day. At the end of the day, what we get in return of the thousands of hours of the research and development is unplanned growth & uninhabitable spaces (read as decay). Such a state of architecture is not necessarily a sign of better life, and as Brecht says through Galileo's character in his play 'life of Galileo': "unhappy the land that is in need of heroes." (Brecht, 1937-1939, p.95)

Is it really impossible to be iconic and sustainable simultaneously?

Isn’t it time for green to be the new black.

The 21st Century Triad

For centuries now, architects and designers around the world have looked up to Vitruvius and his Ten Books on Architecture and the Vitruvian Triad as a reference that could help us get as close to perfect harmony as possible. Vitruvius was lucky; the earth wasn’t dealing with the issues it’s dealing with now hence he could explore the various aesthetical aspects of a structure for the generations to come. With the brief experience of three years within the architectural community and twenty years of experience as a human being, it seems like the Vitruvian Triad needs revision.

Firmitas-

It should be structurally stable and environmentally responsible.

Living in the age of steel, concrete, and carbon fibre architecture is supposed to be in its strongest form today. Yet we haven’t mastered the art of building structures that are sustainable, climate responsive and structurally stable. The world is still divided into sub divisions of Vernacular, Earth, Contemporary, Sustainable, Climate Responsive and various other types of architectural practices. While the mindlessly built everyday concrete+steel structures get approval from the planning authorities, brilliantly designed earth architecture is still not considered “permanent” and is treated as temporary mud structures. A policy level intervention will play a huge role, but meanwhile we must think of ways to converge all the various disciplines’ best into a single theory of reliability & responsibility towards the Earth and its inhabitants.

Venustas-

It should be beautiful both within and without in terms of quality and aesthetics.

When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know its wrong.

-Buckminster Fuller

The aesthetic must be derived from within. Superficial ornamentation must not be the basis of a good design. When something is made with the intent of provision of superior quality, the end product will never fail to be appealing. We are so many of us that there is a constant struggle within everyone to stand out and be iconic, or make/do iconic things, there is a need for revaluation and reflection about what/who are we trying to stand out for. Isn’t too much emphasis no emphasis at all? All the monuments that we know of aren’t just beautiful but along with their beauty they also carry an extremely superior quality of craftsmanship which makes them what they are.

Utilitas-

It must have a practical function and use innovative technology that adds convenience to function.

Material must be given its due respect, in order to bring out the best in the structure and the design. Every line and every stroke that we draw on the sheet of paper must have a purpose/function behind it. Mindless use of imported material over the locally available material has to be avoided, and the masses must be made aware that the ecological damage to the earth for their posh Italian marble isn’t feasible.

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Modern Times - I

While you sit in front of your screen

Trying to keep up with the times

And debate what a film’s title should be

Whether you can drink, what you can eat

And other Primetime Debates streaming on repeat.

I wonder if things had always been this way?

Have the times changed, for better or for worse

Or is everything still the same,

And evolution playing it’s favourite game.

Survival of the fittest

As much as we all could detest

Prevails.

They divide us, and we play along

Butchering those we disagree with

And then chant a religious song.

Love thy Nation, Love thy Gods

Love the Army and the Frauds.

Love everything we tell you,

Except your own life

Think of how much that Minority Man will fear you

When you rape his beautiful wife.

Fear the Government, be afraid of their powers;

Fear the Science that doesn’t comply with your bigoted mind

Fear the Woman who thinks she’s equal to a man

Fear the Artist, practising their Freedom of Speech

Fear the Minorities, slowly rising up the ladder

Show them their place in the dirt, right where they belong.

Annihilate the Science, the Woman, the Artist & the Minorities

Worship the Government, you’re their only priority.

And once you’ve served them well, you will be rewarded

With a New World

Where only your kind exist.

Because Life is about

Survival of the Fittest.

There is no place for Compassion in this World,

Because compassion is not good for wars

War, the business that funds and supports all other businesses.

Human Flesh / Guns / Roses,

Available fresh at your nearest International Border.

Border, the dot-dash-dot-dash-dot fictional line

That defines & divides a Nation

And our minds.

Compassion won’t fetch a mob willing to do or die

Empathy will only make our soldiers cry.

What good will be brain-washing exercises we fed them

If they find out that everything they knew about across the border

Was all a Great Lie.

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A Tale of Two Buildings.

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Design : Exploring the Art Deco in Bombay (Mumbai) and it’s relationship with the typography & fenestration

Marine Drive

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Crime Scene- Gutka on Mumbai Roads

Why isn’t littering a real crime in our country?

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Don’t Encourage Hawkers

And they said it’s a free world.

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Mythical Mountains of Garbage - in my backyard

It could’ve been just another day at work for Mukesh, with his eagle sharp eyes scavenging for something worth a day’s square meal near the mountain where all the rich men discarded the things they no longer needed. The mountain was growing higher everyday as the rich mens’ graves dug deeper on their road to development. Mukesh had seen this mountain as a kid, it wasn’t so much of a mountain back then. Just about the size of a hill maybe. He used to come here with his father, when it was his duty to win the bread for the household. Over the past three decades he has seen the hill grow into a mountain alongside him, as he grew into a Man himself. Calling him a man though would be a bit of a mistake, his kind were never considered worthy of that title by the society. They were lesser, always destined to be lesser. The impurest creation of heavenly creatures that were given the opportunity to be put on this earth just to clean up after the rich men were done defecating.

Something was different that day, he could sense it with every step he took. This was his playground, his hideout, an now his workplace (talk about being passionate about your job); he knew this mountain at the back of his hand. He saw something glittery, it was probably a discarded phone and he knew what a fortune that could be! Those things could get him enough money to last for a week’s food for the family. But it was further up on the steep slope, he had never trekked up those altitudes before. In his community they say a ghost eats up those who try to reach the top of the mountain and anyone who tried to be ambitious and trek up, never returned. Mukesh wasn’t one with a faint heart, in fact his mother always told everyone that he was the prophetical saviour for their community and one day he would save all of them from the misery that their lives have been for centuries.
 So Mukesh started trekking up and got pretty close to his trophy, and then just when it seemed like he could grab it; the earth below him broke and the mountain came tumbling down on him. This happened in such a minute fraction of a second that nobody saw him getting crushed under the weight of 25000 metric tonnes of a mountain; but there was another burden that caused his death by crushing him underneath and sadly nobody saw it happen either because it happened over centuries of exploitation.

 
When the mountain went on to further tumble down on  one of the rich men’s vehicles, the authorities heard about it and put the disaster on priority . Then by accident they found Mukesh’s body while finding the rich men’s. They started investigating into who exactly they needed to put the blame on. Who had the time to investigate the real causes anyway. Apparently the mountain was deemed unsafe 15 years ago, but nobody bothered warning Mukesh and his kind; instead they gave them more garbage to scavenge through. So much so that the mountain overshot its optimum height by 4 times, at 60 metres high only a little smaller than the Qutub Minar, this is a 21st century monument. This is what the civilisation will be
 remembered for, the garbage that we produced that ate us in the end. 

The world has already forgotten Mukesh, it never knew him in the first place. He and a lot of his friends from the community were collectively given one identity; “Kachre Wala” or the Garbage Man. The rich weren’t rich enough to give them more identities. Mukesh the prophetic messiah that he was promised to be, had heard of a different world where workplaces don’t stink of dead meat; and that to get to those workplaces one must first go to another place called School. So he sent his children to those places, and very recently his daughter Munni told him that there is a certain place called Swedesh or Sweden she wasn’t sure but they ran out of garbage so they import it now from other countries. She asked her father if he could send them some of the garbage from their mountain so that the could earn some money and he wouldn’t have to toil through the day. What she probably hadn’t learnt yet was that in a country like Sweden, his father wouldn’t have a job because they don’t  have the concept of Higher and Lower men in that dreamland. In Sweden, her father too could demand his right to a humane workplace.



The Gazipur Landfill site that collapsed under heavy rainfall on September 1st 2017,  is one of the three landfills that  the National Capital Region’s  garbage is dumped into. These landfills already functioning beyond their capacity, are a ticking time bomb that the city’s development rests upon. They exist not because there isn’t a better way to deal with our shit (literally), but because there is a structure that was made eons ago that put the responsibility of cleanliness on the very people that they disregarded and called impure. They found a way to put the blame on someone, a way to ensure  that the responsibility is not in their backyard. Its hard to believe that while we found a way to send 164 satellites up in space in a single launch, we still haven’t found a way to relieve the “Kachre Wala” of his job and make the process of waste disposal sustainable.
The Gazipur Mishap wasn’t a stand alone incident, last year in January Mumbai’s Deonar landfill caught fire owing to the poisonous gases emitted by the garbage rotting there for decades. And we clearly didn’t learn anything. We probably won’t, because one day the mountain ghost won’t just eat up those who climb up too high. It will reach out for the silent spectators at the base and engulf them all in the mess that they made.

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Conditioning - our minds, the air & water.

On a humid & sunny July afternoon, the narrow interior lanes of Khan Market in the capital city of a country with a billion pumping hearts; the post partition building complex still manages to generate a cool breeze inside its narrow lanes.  I suddenly felt a droplet on my face & rejoiced the rain that would finally grace my anticipation in this alien city that I had just decided to call my own, but to my disappointment a friend pointed me towards a set of large fans right above my head and not a single grey cloud in sight. 

It was in fact the compressors of the innumerable air-conditioners, that supply the air in which dream laden wings fly; inside the various stores of the historical market place. 

I turned my gaze back onto the streets & in a moment while avoiding walking into a puddle, had a sudden realisation. As I walked down these lanes, there were two visible mysterious streams of water on either of the footpaths, the origins of which I was trying to trace. All the air conditioners from all the shops were installed in these back lanes on either sides with no system to channelize the condensation that dripped at the rate of 20 gallons per day.

Now this figure might not seem like a lot but when you consider the baffling number of 200 commercial store units  all operating on at the least one air conditioning unit, the volume of these streams become 151416.47 litres / day.

Based on the UN’s statistic of the minimal amount of water that a human needs in a day to cook, bathe, drink etc (i.e. 50 litres) these streams carry with them the survival needs of 3030 people, down the drain. And before you let this statistic sink in, let a gentle reminder tell you the proportion of this market when compared with the size of the city & its innumerable air conditioning units that could possibly assist the drought struck regions with their unwanted by-product - water. Water unlike other resources that our thirsty capitalistic economy relies upon is recyclable resource, which means theres never going to be a day when there isn’t enough water on the planet; just the absence of water in the places we need it to be. It’s high time we re-think our Smart Cities, and find a sustainable cycle in the smallest & most mundane activities. Nobody waits for the government/local municipal bodies/celebrities to tell them to jump off a wrecking ship, its the survival instinct; which we must apply to the larger picture of our existence on this beautiful planet that has seen the rise & fall of species and civilisations for millions of years.