concepts in architecture: webinar

Constructionguru will arrange a webinar by me on 13 October 2010. See the link:
http://www.constructionguru.in/news_detail.php?news_id=148

published in trendsideas

See the link: the magazine is published by Times: both hard copies and on net

http://trendsideas.com/ViewArticle.aspx?article=14218®ion=72&topic=14

AA School workshop comes Bangalore

Hyper-threads

A 10 day workshop and 1 day symposium conducted by AA School of architecture, London and BMS College of Engineering , Bangalore.



This August the AA School of Architecture, London, Zaha Hadid Architects Computation and Research group (ZHACDRG), Autodesk Inc and Department of Architecture, BMS College of Engineering , Bangalore will bring a unique architectural workshop and 1 day symposium to Bangalore. The workshop as represented by the diversity of the collaborators, will explore the relations between contemporary software technology, design techniques, creative expression and its manifestation within India’s emergent economy and ancient built traditions. The intention is to look beyond Computer Aided Design (CAD ) as simple design automation to CAD as enabling architectural creativity whilst still responding to complex spatial and material performance constraints of our times.



Objectives.

The workshop will focus on exploring connections between architecture, New Media and fabrication. The aim will be to provide the participants conceptual and programming framework for advanced digital methods within collaborative architectural design. Towards this, the workshop intends to make available a rich, varied and international talent pool from institutions such as Zaha Hadid Architects London, AA School of Architecture , London, Southern California institute of architecture ( SCI-Arc ), Los Angeles apart from local partners including BMS college, Bangalore. Further, the workshop expects to tap into expertise of Autodesk, who are on-board as software-development / training collaborators of the workshop.



The workshop will initiate participants into a compressed version of design to production cycles in contemporary architectural practices. The design brief for the workshop will centre on the design of a canopy/shelter and the emphasis in the teaching will be placed on emergent computational design-production tools and techniques. Aiming to extend the knowledge base of the participants, the workshop will use production-proven design methods, and software platforms – both for concept development and material articulation. It looks to build on previously successful workshops at the AA and elsewhere, and generate a platform to show case India’s architectural design talent.



Certification.

AA School of Architecture and BMSCE will individually certify participation in the workshop as part of their design curricula.

Autodesk Inc will certify participation as part of their Autodesk training certification for specific software used / taught during the course.



Applications

The deadline for applications for both the workshop and participation in the symposium is 15 July , 2010 .



Workshop - 10 days

Generative structures : Emerging design technology and contemporary architectural practise.

02 -12 August 2010 , BMSCE , Bangalore



Symposium - 1 day

Emergent design technology, design intelligence and creative expression.

12 August 2010 , BMSCE , Bangalore



Tutors - workshop

Chikara Inamura .

Researcher - design delivery, Zaha Hadid Architects ;

Advanced computational design tutor, and AA Design Research Lab (AADRL)

Shajay Bhooshan ,

Lead researcher, Computation and Design Group, Zaha Hadid Architects.

Advanced computational design tutor, AA & AADRL

John Klein

Technical tutor , Southern California Institute-Architecture

Mostafa El Sayed

Researcher , AA Alumni , Computation and Design Group , Zaha Hadid Architects

MadhuChand

Asst Professor, Architect, BMS College of Engg, Bangalore , Local Coordinator



Symposium – probable speakers

Patrik Schumacher, Partner, Zaha Hadid Architects

Brett Steele, Director of AA ,

Christopher Pierce, Director of AA Visiting School, AA Unit Master

Nils Fischer, Associate , Zaha Hadid Architects , London.

Vijay Sohni, President , Council of Architecture, India.

BS Bhooshan , BSB Architects, Professor, BMS College, Bangalore, India.

Kiran Venkatesh , Inform Architects, Bangalore ,

MadhuChand KR, Assst. Professor, BMS College ofArchitecture, Co-ordinator







Eligibility and target Audience.

There is not a pre-requisite to know any of the software that will be used during the course. The workshop is open to current architecture and design students, recent graduates, young professionals, and design teachers looking to augment their digital skills from India and elsewhere. The workshop will benefit students looking to pursue post graduate studies / research in architecture as also architectural firms looking to train their staff.



Accommodation & Costs



Workshop.

. The AA Global School requires a fee of 500 Euros per participant which includes a 50 Euro Visiting Student Membership, made payable to the AA School of Architecture. Fees do not include flights or accommodation. Accommodation is not provided, but advice on affordable hotel can be given. Students need to bring their own laptops, digital equipments and model-making tools.



Early bird discounts : 400 Euros per participant for those registering before 15 June 2010 .



Symposium.

Participation in workshop automatically qualifies for participation in symposium. Fees for symposium alone is 25 Euros.



Early bird discounts : 10 Euros per participant for those registering before 15 June 2010 .



Website and more information :

http://bangalore.aaschool.ac.uk/



http://www.facebook.com/pages/AA-Bangalore-Summer-School-2010/128450967170498?v=wall&ref=search

Kolkata Urbanism: Coexistence of glitter and litter:

 December 2009

It was almost my first personal encounter with Kolkata. I have been here on short visits before, but never encountered it like now. I did it alone walking around and exploring. I have heard a lot of stories and not-so-good epithets about the city and I expected a chaotic hell. I did see a ‘hell’ all right, but it was not dissimilar to many other ‘metropolitan hells’ in India. What it displayed was a quite ease and predilection with its disposition than the usual uneasy grumpy rashness of metropolitan India elsewhere.

On the morning of December 26, I reached the Dalhousie square; the epicenter of Kolkata; the seat of its political power. Compared to the pompous aloofness of Bangalore’s Vidhansoudha and its pretentious facade, this red building looked more like a huge distinguished but ravaged old man standing by the roadside. The pompousness of arcades and barricades and also the battalions of police and other vehicles around made it seem formidable and powerful though. The bamboo scaffolding put up for painting made it look precarious as well.

I walked across and strolled into the side streets. And the city really punched me hard.

Frying masala. The smell of it and the hiss of cooking on kerosene stoves and make shift fireplaces on the sidewalks hit me. It is on and on endless in all the streets. Smell of food and the sound of it being served and eaten by people sitting on wooden benches and tables, the clutter of plates and tumblers, the smell of dirt and filth mixed with water, the sound of rushing water from hoses and hydrants, the sound of chattering men and women bathing and washing clothes on the road from those hydrants, the sound of tinkering and welding , the men repairing small electrical machines on the side lines, the shout of rickshaw pullers with their shameful burden of yore, the bells of cycles and horns of cars, the clickety-clackety relics of trams, laugh of happy looking men and women, the tactility of walking on rough broken pavements, the slush of mud, the colorful clothes hung on steel barricades separating the road and sidewalks, the thud of things thrown down from roofs , colourful ads of digital cameras and laptop computers, and the mosaic of clothes and mobile phones and electronic goods on the elegant shop windows of rundown buildings, men and women in soiled working clothes, babus in their best attire, puppies, street dogs and cats, dying flower plants on broken planters, food gadis under colourful cloth umbrellas …Ah a rioting attack on all of one’s senses.

That was my first sensual phenomenological adventure in and around Dalhousie square. Later I found that this mixture is not just in one street but in all streets of old Kolkata; Chowranghee, MG Road, Esplanade, everywhere. Nowhere in India, I experienced this real boiling cauldron of urbanization unabashedly mixed. No attempt here to separate the glitters and litters by barriers of law and semblance of westernized order. The rickshawala blissfully sleeps on his vehicle on the side of a street. So do many on paved surfaces and benches and even on the balustrades around the tranquil yet filthy central lake in front of the Writers building- the secretariat. The migrant worker families live on huts around the large unkempt maidan with its unclean pond, like they do in the villages. Men and women bathe in those waters, the embankments are misused, dumped with waste and dirt, and growth of wild plants abounds and there are many huts. No manicured lawns and plants as one would expect on the side of a lake which reflects the Secretariat. Across the road that is full of yellow couloured ambassador taxi cabs, there stands the remnants of the Raj, the majestic white postal building; the red bricked others with Corinthian and Ionic columns. A real contrast of life situations, a miniature of life in India.

One may find this coexistence of various strata of society, luxury, middle class and poverty in all our cities, in Mumbai, Chennai or Bangalore, but not the way they ‘peacefully ‘ occupy the same urban space. Am I imagining? I checked again, no it is real. Right in front of the seat of power, the Writers building, it is there, the chaotic disorganized unsightly yet peaceful coexistence. Visual poverty and ugliness is not pushed out of the main roads. Not to be visible for the upper class and powerful elites. Is the ‘Bhadralok’ tamed enough? The streets, all of them, do have a side walk wide enough for people to walk, but occupied by venders of all kinds of goods and road side eateries (a poor man cousin of fashionable food courts, a distant cousin of roadside restaurants of Europe) yet leaving enough space for people to walk and shop from the upper class outlets in the adjoining buildings. Three decades of communist democracy made poverty as visible as luxury. Decadence of edifice is not apologized nor covered up. I wonder, is it by design?

The centre and old part of Kolkata presents no evidence of glittering sheen of consumerism dominant in new urban spaces and in central part of other cities. It does not mean consumerism is not there. One look at Park Street tells a lot. However, hardly one finds any new buildings there. All old ones have seen paints decades ago, no new aluminum windows or structural glazing covering the facades. All these are reserved to comparatively newer areas a like Salt Lake City or Rajarhat and other peripheries. Capitalist real estate dreams are catching up the citadel of communism on the periphery.

One finds an addictive abandon. (Gay abandon?) Starting from the beautiful pond of the centre, there are many useful relics of the past which are abandoned to languish. Kolkata is the only city in India continuing to run the transport heritage of trams. But what they have today is an apology of its early traffic wizardry. Its coaches are rattling ramshackle of wood and steel, the connectors are archaic slipping the electric network so often that the conductor has to do a repair magic with a rope more often, the people who travel are all too poor to pay a decent fair. No wonder that the Calcutta tram company (CTC) runs buses to rehabilitate their redundant employees, who cannot be retrenched and to cover the losses. All the main streets of old Kolkata have hydrants established by the east India Company with water pumped directly from the river for washing the streets. They are still there, used by poor to bathe and wash. Nobody do bother to remove them though they add to the filth of streets. It certainly serves the migrant labour.

With all this palpable chaos for an upper class elite eye, there appears an invisible equation; a balance between the various strata of society. The lower strata do not seem pushed out of sight as in other Indian Metropolises. They are very much there everywhere, the poweful votebanks, perhaps. Kolkata is not pleasant to eyes, it doesn’t show off wealth, it may be repulsive and unsightly, it does not hide the contrast with in a gleeful veneer, it does not boast of a westernizing metropolis trying to be hightech with poor parts and filthy unsightliness canned up beneath the surface. Not so far at least. The human face of Kolkata is pleasantly smiling. Metropolitan misery seems internalized and expressed. It is a metropolis of poverty with a facade of poverty. Does it provide a base to build a future Kolkata; a metropolis of progress, a city of promise? or Will it wilt and wither away faster? Does it hold a promise?

I did not see much in three days of aimless walk, perhaps. But this was my impression, I may be wrong.

Habitat design

Today more than 30 % of India’s population lives in urban areas. In 2032, it will be in 41 %. Still it will be lower percentage than most of Asian countries. The problem is not its low percentage, but that too few cities are growing too fast. Miseries of bigger cities and metros are compounded by haphazard growth. The smaller cities and towns are other hand stagnating. All are in bad shape as much as infrastructure and housing are concerned. Channeling urban development is and will be one of the challenging tasks of India.

India is building. Building very fast too nowadays. The urban planning and the other hand has had a piece meal approach and did not and do not pace with building spree. Planning exercise in India has been based on selective and corrective bureaucratic measures, a legacy left by the British. And it depended wholly on controls on land development with very limited proactive role. The processes are too slow. Planning traditionally has been an exercise of distributing activities on two dimensional space and introducing networks and controls. And then wait. Architecture on the other hand has been concentrating on individual buildings and smaller complexes. Without a holistic vision of the city. While the new economic thrust invests heavily on real estate and buildings; the infrastructure and planning are lagging.

There was a need felt some decades ago for a discipline which will bridge these two areas and work in between buildings at one end and the city on the other. That resulted in ideas of townscape design and city architecture and then urban design. Design is a positive activity which is efferent from planning and it is meant to be proactive though planning tools could be used at times. The idea is to see urban development, buildings, architecture, heritage, transport, other networks and social concerns in a 3 dimension and not in a two-dimensional plane and also in an integrated way. Like town planning, Urban Design as a new academic discipline also originated in the West and looked at urban traditions developed in the western culture. It also had efforts concentrated in metro cities and leaned much on architectural aesthetics and theories. This certainly has undergone tremendous change in last two decades of evolution wherein behavioral sciences and social sciences as well as other humanities, law, finance and technology and more importantly the ecological aspects and resource utilization are getting integrated. So when we talk today about the metro lines, for example, we talk not only of its effects on traffic or its technology and alignment and legal aspects alone or how it changes the skyline, but also about its impact on the surroundings, on the behavior of people and on the additional development that may happen around etc. Essentially on what will be its impact on life on ground? This integration is not a projection of past it is also of proactive speculation and therefore, the domain of design.

When we integrate all this and take the discipline of urban design even to smaller settlements and to look at holistically with an ecological perspective, it is appropriate to name it Habitat Design. Habitat is more an inclusive a word than urban. Habitat Design is same as ‘urban design’ with a thrust on ecology and with a more integrated approach.

When we started the course on M. Arch (Habitat Design), at the BMS College of Engineering, Bangalore, we had this in mind. The courses and studios were programmed with this perspective and tried to learn from the existing urban design programmes in the country.

This will give opportunities to the participants to develop skills and attitudes to work in a variety of urban situations, not necessarily in planning or architecture alone; in urban governance or in areas of nongovernmental community work.

The approach to learning has to be a cooperative effort with students and teachers working together. That is where the studio approach comes to use. The design here is a process rather than a product to be thrashed out at the end.

An interview

An interview given to Ms. Prathima Manohar, some time in 2008 but never published anywhere for some reason.

Some of the questions were interesting, so I thought it could be here

1. What's the latest trend in architecture in urban Indian homes?

There is no single discernible Indian trend. Historically, the show of vanity and wealth has been a major trend and it continues. But one can also perceive that simplicity and environmental concerns are catching up. If there is a pan-Indian trend visible today- it is that the  regional variations of the past getting obliterated in the large cities given that similar techniques , services and materials are available in all our cities.

2. Is there a shift towards efficiency from elegance? Are elaborate elements out of favour?

Both efficiency and elegance have never been major concerns except perhaps in rare academic discourses. Ornamentation or ‘elaborate elements’, is also not completely out. It finds different ways of expression. Cladding is often ornamentation. So is excessive use of glass. This alone does not guarantee elegance. Sacrifice of ornamentation cannot  bring in efficiency automatically.

3. What do you feel should be the guiding factors while designing a home - architecture and interiors?

It depends on the person you are designing it for. There is a class of the elite who look for ‘architecture’ beyond an ordinary lovable home. This category is increasing in all segments, due to media and higher appreciation of the value of design. A home should fundamentally celebrate the virtue of life. In the current predicament of global warming, run-away economies, appalling political scene, and insecure life- architecture could be meaningful and not simply a show of what one can afford. It could be what one can consciously avoid to make life meaningful.

4. What does good architecture do to make a house warm and comfortable?

Warmth and comforts are personal and cultural. One who is comfortable at certain environment may not be comfortable at another. I believe that there are no universal standards of warmth or comfort. All of us get used to certain comfort levels. A concern and understanding of larger values of life and society often results in an environment with more of natural elements like light and air and a choice of materiality. Thus articulating a thought process that went into the design, could be considered warm at personal level for many. But some can be easily comfortable and feel warm in an artificial and synthetic environment as well, like that of an aircraft. This depends on the basic value system one has developed with or imbibed. One can make a personal conscious choice or go by fashion. It is impossible today, perhaps meaningless as well, to be building at any one extreme, as conditions and contexts are constantly changing beyond individuals means.

5. The social fabric of societies is changing. What sort of influence is this having on architectural trends?

All changes are not deep. Most of them are transient. Economics is changing a lot of lives and lifestyles in large cities. Work pressures are also changing. Age pyramid is getting tilted towards the young working groups. Bachelors with higher disposable incomes are also rising. Nuclear families are on the increase. The demands and hold of old generation is resented but nor revolted. Women have more voice and more visible. But men have not changed as partners in many of habits. Servants are not completely dispensed with; in fact, they are becoming more and more essential. Cooking styles are also not changed fully.

This hybrid situation is perhaps more volatile and is reflected in the architecture. “Multiplicity” seems to be the major tendency in today’s city architecture. The home buyer today is also much younger. In the past, one looked towards having a house as permanent. Not so much today. Therefore, the saleability at a later stage becomes a priority. Modular kitchens and imported toilet fixtures are becoming norms. But one still finds period furniture and moulded shutters behind sleek cabinets and by side of imported electric chimneys. The mood today seems to be one of fashion and not of prudence. I think a maturity to develop out of this hybrid situation over a period of time.

6. How should an architect balance his creativity and client's needs?

Why do we put too much premium on architect’s creativity? Can all architects be highly creative? Can ordinary but well done work be not a good one? Architecture as a profession can happen, at various levels of intellectual or that of a responsible construction. We should not expect same creativity at all levels.

Client’s needs are important to be satisfied. But they should not contradict with the larger interest of society. An architect can choose to build for a client’s wish for a Mediterranean villa or an acropolis in the middle of Bangalore. Those are his fancy needs. But I will choose not be the one to design it, as it revolts against my beliefs, not because it affects my creativity. Attitude makes most of architecture not creativity alone. Talent can be wasted easily.

The questions of name?

The supreme court of India made a judgement in a petition that a divorced women should not be allowed to keep the surname or name of the previous husband.

Curiously it raises many questions about name.

First a silly one:

I wonder how will this law get enforced, if a woman had the same surname before and after the marriage? Or if she changes it by making a slightly different spelling.

More seriously,


Why is that the surname or the name of the husband be attatched to a woman in the first place? Most of the time it is done forcibly by the husband or his ilk?

This was not the pattern in many parts of India before.
Why has it become a pattern now? It is a practice picked up from the British, and the West, perhaps. I know my mother or grand mother did not have a name other than one given to them at birth. They remained so even until and after their death.

Another related question,  why children, boy or girl,  should have the names of father's only atttatched to theirs? and why not the  mother's. Is it a practice showing women are of lesser gods? Are godesses lesser than gods? These are not legal questions, but curious ones.

More practically, if a married women is made to change her name after marriage, should she not be compensated for further change after divorce? Because she will have go through difficulties of name change? Like alimony being paid. Or else she could keep the names if she wants to. It is her choice, then.Does'nt it make sense?

Thinking more about names. Name is after all an identity. Two or more part names are required today, perhaps, as a means to identify a person precisely . Especially when there are more children born than the stock of names available. The name is an identity. The given name, first name,  is the first identity of the self or the person. The other attatched names are identities of the larger group the person belongs to. In a really free society, it could actually be the group a person wants to identify with.  So one should have the freedom to choose "six-footer" or "lamboo" or "thin-one" or a "budhivantha" or intelligent-one, "punditha", a "professor" etc as his second name. In fact, many of these names are actually used by many even if they are not really so. They have come as default of being born to a family. There  are people who have also given titular names  to themselves like "manthri" or "senapathi". One can also have a nom de plume  or  a pen name like  the French architect of Chandigarh, who called himself Le Corbusier. It meant the 'enlightened one' in French. His real name was Charles Edward Jenneret.

Most commonly used second or third name are caste names.   Place name, family name, surname or combination of some or many of these are also in use. But in most of the cases, a father's name are found as part of one's name. One could choose or not to keep the surname or caste  identities, though one cannot choose the father's name. In matrilinear societies like Kerala, people used to be identified by the uncle's name and not the father's. Most often people keep or remove these identities for some benefits or for some ideological reasons more than just being plain convenience. For a long time keeping caste names were considered not 'progressive' enough. Many children of some 1950s to 70s in Kerala, for example, did not have caste names attatched.  In fact, some people deliberately gave their children names which were of very different caste or even from caste names from diffrent places. So it is not uncommon to find given names like Rao, Kothari or Ajay Ghosh or Winston Churchill, Lenin, Stalin, Gandhi, Choudhari etc confusing the identities very pleasently. In recent times, the ideologies seems to have taken a reverse swing so much so that some 'caste less children' of 60s and 70s have started  getting their names changed with caste names attatched taking the required troubles. The caste identity seem to give a new found advantage. Some persons have even modernised old caste names to more stylically chic sounding ones!

Whoa! What a problem with one's name? Am I a mere name? Does my name mean everything? Should it mean anything? Can there be names which does not mean anything?Can I be with out a name? May be an alpha-numeric identy?  Why not? Why do we want nice sounding names?

With Nandan Nilekani's efforts, some of us can just choose to be known by a unique nuetral (in gender and caste) identities pretty soon! Till then live with the problem of long and short names, nice sounding, confusing, irritating, rough, sweet etc.