From Shooting star to Black hole

( dated early 2007 when i was working in india)
So what’s this about. Well its not about astrophysics of course, but it is certainly about life in architecture, nothing serious, not anything specific , just a kaleidoscope of random thoughts in the mind of a graduate….err… or to put it better.. an architect engaged in private commercial practice…..did u sleep off yet ?




I don’t know when it occurred to me that I could be an architect……?? I guess it was sometime after I joined B-Arch here at NITC. Somewhere towards the end of first semester in the Architecture Design studio. I of course don’t remember the exact moment, day or even week. Quite pathetic because some poetics of inspiration is what one would expect from an architect. Well Not from me, anyway…. not at this moment definitely when all that is running through my head is the daily calculations of sq feet to msquare and cent and acre and back to feet inches. But I guess it started sometime when a particular professor who reeked of cigarette smoke , (ya I know…how stupid… my whole batch was reeking of smoke towards the final years- yet let me state this for the record - just for posterity’s sake – even we were once innocent and undefiled ) . So where did I stop….yup when this man taught us the 3 golden words of architecture- Scale proportion and the most holy one of all ..sssppace. Ya ya …U .fundoo…I know Space is the spelling…I was just was trying to recreate how he said it -- cause there was something about the way he said it which stirred something in us - the way in which he lifted his nose in the air and uttered those words with a sparkle in his eyes and a hiss like he was releasing some mysterious energy… ..”ssssppace”.
Well I found I liked space. Hell I found I could even conjure up and draw “space” pretty well !

Yup Basic Design was quite miserable, though all the principles they taught were damn interesting - because the girls were at their artistic best – soaking their sheets with whole bottles of paint for the slightest reason- scoring so thick and fast, that the closest comparison would probably be Adam Gilchrist & M.hayden opening the Aussie innings. But even with all this happening, it was when I discovered that Architecture, in college at least- is not entirely (I repeat not entirely-but a major part of it is ..) a matter of execution – of how it looked, or how it worked - but of why it had to look the way it did – why it had to work the way u imagined it should – and in no other way …….and the way in which u figured that out….. that I got my act together in B-arch. In simple words let me put it. Architecture at its heart is personal expression – but used to solve a problem, physical, spatial, visual, social or mostly all these together. Sometimes when there is no problem ,you create an imaginary problem and solve it- that’s how all these imaginary/futuristic projects that architects draw up are born. How wonderful isn’t it ? ( I can see the “ you poor fool” look on my engineer friend’s face…..still)

Anyway the beauty of it is that though we rely on the laws of nature – the laws of gravity and mechanics to make our architecture stand – yet we contort entirely new formulas when we design space - when deciding how its going to look, work and feel. And then it becomes a huge live mechanism/organism in real life affecting people using it or going through or just passing by. I believe architecture really happens in that transition when that great dream/vision of yours is translated into a doodle, then to a sketch, and then to a drawing. And of course like engineering teaches us(if it doesn’t…use “like how frank Gehry shows us” instead) whatever that can be drawn can be constructed.

All these beliefs were cool in college , but when u actually start working in a commercial firm u start swallowing the “poetics” of architecture and start trying to digest the “business” of architecture. Large glasses of water would be helpful for the demands of that business will not go down easily. Take a client who wanted his customers to reach the first floor without even “they themselves” realizing it”. No in case u are thinking lift, escalator and such…..he wasn't referring to them. For a moment I even doubted whether he was suggesting that I carry each of his clients up and down the stairs for a lifetime. Or who wants 3 steps instead of 4 just because it is a better number..??
Who takes a brief look at the 3D view you have drawn(the only satisfying effort that goes into countless hours of adjusting and readjusting plans and sections according to the clients whims and fancies and to meet his square feet requirement) and draws a clumsy arch on your beautiful composition or fishes out a shoddy pic of some other buildings arch and tells you ..I want 5 numbers of this on my building.(like he was buying fish at the market or something !) Clients who don’t want to give the minimum no. of toilets that the building rules specify, cause he believes that’s wasting space and yet expects u to get building permission. Which brings me to the fact of bribery and corruption in this business – if u are asking the areas of our involvement..... we help bend and break town planning and building rules....

And while you sit at the computer furiously clicking away in CAD, trying to meet another deadline ,u sometimes wonder where architecture is in all this. At these desperate moments, thankfully an IIA(indian inst of architects) meeting comes up, with the promise of free food, booze and…….. well no girls… but you can stare at the beautiful wives of rich architects or their US employed daughters or sometimes a fellow female architect( who will most probably have a boy friend or fiancée in 90% of the case). And it is as you sip the free booze and talk about practice with ur fellow architects that u realize that U are in a process – a process of learning how to give the crap back to ur clients - how to brainwash them and build what YOU want, like how YOU think it should be, have sweet revenge on all those junior years as an architect and do architecture the way u want to. Well its not simply that some of our wisest teachers said that an architects life starts at 40. We are like wine it seems…. as we age we are better valued… and I asuume even our lives start tasting better!

All that is ok….and I can end my long purposeless writing right about now.... but ….let me raise something that worries me in this context ….a doubt that some of my more thoughtful archi-friends have raised..... whether to stay a bachelor till 40 or marry and divorce at 40...when our lives get a nitro boost...or in general what do we do.....
I don’t know the answer fully for that yet. But I suggest you check up on the personal lives of FL Wright, Louis Kahn and few other great architects to get some ideas. Or its better still if u have fresh ideas ….



Note FL Wright 4 wives among countless other flings.
L. Kahn- 1 legal wife but father to 2 other families.
The list is long...
U can add to the list…..

Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India—the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world's elite.

This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India. It has its own newspapers, films, television programmes, morality plays, transport systems, malls and intellectuals. And in case you are beginning to think it's all joy-joy, you're wrong. It also has its own tragedies, its own environmental issues (parking problems, urban air pollution); its own class struggles.

An organisation called Youth for Equality, for example, has taken up the issue of Reservations, because it feels Upper Castes are discriminated against by India's pulverised Lower Castes. It has its own People's Movements and candle-light vigils (Justice for Jessica, the model who was shot in a bar) and even its own People's Car (the Wagon for the Volks launched by the Tata Group recently). I

It even has its own dreams that take the form of TV advertisements in which Indian CEOs (smeared with Fair & Lovely Face Cream, Men's) buy over international corporations, including an imaginary East India Company. They are ushered into their plush new offices by fawning white women (who look as though they're longing to be laid, the final prize of conquest) and applauding white men, ready to make way for the new kings. Meanwhile, the crowd in the stadium roars to its feet (with credit cards in its pockets) chanting 'India! India!'

Arundhati Roy
excerpt from Article in Outlook.