Culture is like jam...

Bangalore International Centre has announced a competition and a call for ideas by architects across the globe. The programme is in essence an auditorium. This is a great opportunity for architects and designers to question the idea of public, performance and cultural space for today and tomorrow.

Culture is taken very seriously in India - it is the arts, dance forms, music, literature... - especially if they are based on Indian tradition and folklore it is even better. Below I am quoting from the competition brief:

"Modelled on the well established India International Centre in Delhi, BIC aims to become a knowledge hub in Bangalore for interdisciplinary intellectual discussions and cultural exchanges. BIC aims to fulfil the lack of a single platform that merges the cultural elite, the intellectual community, and the leaders of public opinion. It provides an inclusive interaction space for collective and cross disciplinary intellectual activity, cultural enterprises and innovations in development"

Well meaning superficial words - if any one has been to cultural exchanges in India and especially Bangalore one will be well aware of the incestuous community that it is - based on mutual admiration, cliquish affection, and back scratching. The same faces, the same views, the same pedantic way of looking at things and the same condescending attitude towards innovation and experimentation.

I would think that Pukar in India is one of the few think tanks and research communities that has experimented and embraced local thinking and pop culture.Maybe the younger architects who participate in the competition will question the role, form and exchange of culture today before subscribing to the rather limited brief with the aim of winning. 


Good luck - here is the link to the competition website.

Disability- are we so blind ?

Last week I had a crazy morning, in an hour I interacted with three disabled people and I was ill equipped to engage with it. As a person who spends most of the day at a desk surrounded by 'perfect' architects and evenings at sports facilities (gym/swimming pool) I rarely meet people with disabilities and I blame the environment that we live in. In Indian cities and I am sure in many cities across the world the urban environment does not allow for equal access for disability. This causes people like me to 'forget' that they live in the same space as us but are subjected to a life of isolation and invisibility.

Equal access is a very loaded word. You may have a ramp going into the building but if your toilets do not allow for a wheel chair that ramp is only good for healthy children to run on.

As architects we are trained to think of physical disability as the only parameter to consider while designing a space - providing ramps and choreographing movement so that they can get to most places in a building by following the yellow brick lane. They are not permitted experiences but rather are treated like vehicles - given a route and destinations.

Blindness or single eye vision is a subject that is often neglected completely in spaces - I cannot imagine many of the malls in Indian cities allowing a guide dog through their doors.... Another inherent flaw in architectural design of disability in India is the assumption that disabled people are always accompanied by a caregiver - I would think that, that assumption is flawed - this thinking is what keeps them at home because no body wants to be a caregiver all the time and no one wants to feel disabled all the time.

What is appalling to me is my lack of knowledge on the other forms of disability -  not purely physical that impede movement in space but that do not allow for experience in the spaces that we design - the inability to sense colour, inability to hear well, or read signs, cognitive disabilities, old age and all the problems that we experience with them - lessening of vision, arthritis.

We are not used to considering children as disabled - but the way that we design spaces in cities we could almost put them into that bracket - children are unable to function in our spaces - how many spaces have toilets that allow for someone shorter than 4' high to use them ? We design our spaces for healthy people between the ages of 14 and 50 or when we make an effort to be all inclusive we are blatantly banal and uninspired.

Architecturally, how are we to deal with the myriad possibilities of human disabilities? The article in the image shows the design of a cutlery set for specifically one kind of disability but how are we to think about this in the design of spaces? By creating multiple scenarios and not generic standards can we expand our spaces to be more inclusive?

Confrontation

On my recent trip to Pondicherry I visited Le Dupleix - a heritage hotel at the corner of Rue Suffren and Rue C....

Beautifully designed starting from the name plate of the hotel where the name is cut into steel and discreetly addresses the corner, beautiful entrance experience with pools of flowers floating in water and meditative interiors, white walls, glass and steel. A subtle experience combining the old and the new.

The food is very good. I ordered a mascarpone Risotto - delicious, subtle flavours. I would recommend it for sure - On Saturday evenings they  have a  French violinist playing live music (I did not know of it till the next day - so I do not know how it feels).

After absorbing all the subtlety and the beauty around - very suddenly an anomaly jumps out at you. The yellow plastic along the neighbouring construction site along with the loud Tamil music playing on not so well designed speakers that help to provide entertainment to the labourers there.

The yellow does a lot to camouflage the brutal crudeness (so maybe it was thought of or maybe it was the material that is available in Pondicherry) of the surroundings compared to the created calm, which I am sure that the typical blue plastic seen across Indian construction sites would not have been able to do - but it is also a spiritual moment in the design - the obvious failure in absolute control and the rise of the space of confrontation.

Pondicherry is a collection of these moments for me some designed (I cannot say if it was planned confrontation but they are designed spaces) and some self organised - The name 'bakers street' (with the legendary silhouette of Sherlock Holmes as mascot) for a french cafe on Lal Bahadur Shastry Street (formerly called Rue de Bussy), the heaviness of the interiors of the same cafe meeting the minimalism of the served french pastries; the jail like grill on the windows of Villa Shanti that form the threshold of designed space and undesigned space, the hybridity of the street between the gridded French quarters and the 'organic' (a polite word for unplanned) Tamil quarters;  .... The list is endless.

Pondicherry is a fragmented piece of land sited across  three states in South India governed directly by Delhi with some basic legislative local governance. The largest territory mediates between its role in Tamil Nadu and its role as a gateway to Auroville, a large intentional commune.

Confrontations have a unique role in life - they provide for a chance to move beyond the insularity of control and belief (about architecture, and object or even oneself). They shake the status quo, create chaos and drama and they inspire... Many designers and people shy away from this rather destructive, uncontrollable force - It would be impossible to know for sure the result of it, but I think that there is a place for confrontation in architecture, design and life.

So do we design the space of confrontation or do we allow it slowly curl up at the edges of openings and permeate a space ? Can a space of confrontation be designed like they attempt to design space for dissent in Singapore or place Graffiti walls in western cities? Is confrontation a space or a moment?

Are museums and galleries spaces of confrontation? Is the role of a curator to enhance these moments?

I am not an expert in this area of thought - (I am not an expert in anything really!) so this is a simple recording of a recent experience and interest.