This was published in my column "cubes of words" in Design Detail volume1, issue 4, August 2013.
Follow the link: http://bit.ly/1e80IVi [pages 117, 118]
B
Shashi Bhooshan
Romancing water
Water
is the essence of life. It manifests in myriad forms. It delights, it is meaningful,
it plays important ritual roles in all cultures, it is fun, it is cool, it
warms, it is cruel, it destroys, it makes and breaks life. It is forceful, it
is placid, it is deadly. The purposive,
semiotic and experiential, ritual relation we have with it is reflected in every
culture, a lot of music, poetry, art and architecture. We reacted to it as
reflecting surfaces, as wonderful drops reflecting world, as music of
waterfalls, spraying water jets, as cascades and fountains, as foggy screens to
create cloud like amorphous floating illusions of buildings, as pools for
swimming, as special baths, Jacuzzis, cascades and fountains enjoying its basic
experiential quality.
Our
fundamental understanding of water is of its ‘flow’. When you drink water, you
are conscious of its flow down inside you, when you swim you know it , when in
wading water you feel , when you see waves, waterfalls, and rivers you feel is the nature
of flow. Imagine yourself caught in a heavy downpour; you know flow on the head
and shoulders down to the torso wetting every part on its way down to the legs
and the foot and to the earth. You would
experience it even if you don’t enjoy it. Every child enjoys it, it is joyful;
every farmer who works on rain would love it. It is perhaps the way we
understood water experientially and learned of its cycles and its appearances
in nature. Will you get the same feel and awareness, when it flows from a tap? Those
who have had a swim in the natural rivers ever or a bath in natural streams
would know that water flows and touches our body so differently and
delightfully than in the most expensive baths of our times. Every leading
manufacturer of bath fittings are vying with each other in enhancing the
experience in closed or even private open bath rooms with artificial jets,
digital controls, showers with remotely controlled embedded music. Would this
experience give a personal knowledge of water?
Natural phenomenon to
experience
Water
is a phenomenon of nature and a utility. We studied its chemistry, physics, biology
and devised technologies for collecting, extracting, conserving, purifying to
convenient standards and norms, packaging and even marketing and selling it. We
have created laws on its use, developed notions of ownership; our water, their
water, our bathing Ghats and theirs, and now my water under my property and my
rain over my roof. We have also
semantically and culturally and religiously classified some water more pure and
some dirty. In all that, water has been objectified.
Have we forgotten the value of experiential knowledge of universality, the
phenomenology of it which makes our consciousness aware of its cycles and its
central position in nature intrinsically? Have we forgotten its real nature of ‘flow’?
Our
dependence on it has made us to settle in places where water was available.
Most cities and villages had been located near water bodies. The size of the settlement
depended directly on the size of the water source. Technological developments
of collection and transportation of water, pipes, aqueducts etc, has freed
cities from dependence on an immediate water source. Cities today are depending
on not just water, but on the technologies connected with it- transportation,
desalination, harvesting, storing and leak proofing, distribution- and the
economics, politics and sociology-selling and billing and haggles of
administration.
Objectified commodity and a
resource
It
is no more just water; it became an object and a commodity. It is considered resource and fancily a basic
‘infrastructure’. Use of water means social status. How often you bath
ceremonially or ritually or for pleasure, matters. Control of it is a source of power in society.
Water has moved from the notion of a basic phenomenon to an object of desire
and luxury. Objectification and consumerisation of water happens in more than
one sense. We believe that greater the
use of water, higher is the standard of life.
There are large investments made in research and technology and
innovations to cater its consumer economy.
German
philosopher Heidegger pointed out two extreme use of water that differentiates its
understanding; one as a river flowing and other as flow of river as a source of
power. Heideggerian phenomenology looks
at the experience of a thing, like water, as the real appearance and the
knowledge and understanding. Looked at as a source of power, that understanding
changes. Ramon Barbazza, a Philippine
philosopher scholar points out that water is no more understood in its natural
way, but as a resource. As a thing which
has a cost and a price, it divides, as everything else today.
Sun temple.
Modhera, Gujarat. an architecture enhancing water experience. Now hardly used. Public exposure to water in public places would enhance our relation and understanding of it.
Architecture of water
To liberate
water from being a mere object or resource,
the experience of it in a natural
way has to be brought back. Can architecture and urban design do that? As
architecture today is slowly substituting sensual sensitivity with cerebral
virtuality, how will water be used and manifested in the future? Digitalising
touch is still far away though. Will it
be like flowing water on a surface, digital control of its flow, and jets on surfaces making an illusory floating cloud
like foggy form for a building, buildings or cities floating up from lakes or
submerging in it, hexagonal bubbles of water stitched up together to form a watery
cube ? As in the past and recent architecture. Would the primordial experience
of water be evoked this way? Is it necessary for the coming generations to
understand water that phenomenological way at all? Or to find answers of life
and nature from consumer economy and experiences and education it can provide? And to digitally evoke a virtual flow; of
water, of life?
