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.

The Void

It’s a curious thing to feel out of purpose, to be at the end of your wits, to suddenly look at what u think is/was your life’s work… and feel… disinterest? No perhaps skepticism, maybe a kind of weariness…. I don’t know how exactly to describe it. Being stranded alone in personal life, also is not a small factor adding to it. But I’ve taken that for a given now. I’ve been working or at least trying to work for couple of weeks now, working through nights, trying to meet deadlines, trying to put up a presentation and make it look like I have done work and actually make it look that it makes sense ! Actually work is all I have now , and movies on the 42” wide screen TV which we roommates bought…. few hour of escape from reality. Hmm I don’t know about that, because all what I’m doing is probably far removed from reality, the architecture I create, the assumptions I make while making those design decisions. Decisions. I hate decisions, to say this is good and that’s bad, to say use this material and not that, that color and not this , that this particular form doesn’t work and some other works. I hate these decisions. I think sometimes it’s not fair, I don’t want to explain my work anymore than I intend to. What’s the use anyway ? They say contemporary architecture is an intellectual practice at least a major stream/chunk of it is. It is got to do more with ideas and theory rather than anything else. Yet architecture is not read that way. Let’s leave the real world alone. Let’s take the studio. Architecture is read God knows how, by the number of 3ds max rendered images you have, the quality of the drop shadow u have used on the plan. Ok, maybe not that bad, but what I’m saying is it is too visual. It is too on the surface. And it is not to be confused with giving a preference to a culture of visual thinking or anything. Even on the level of visual judgment there is no complexity, there is no vibrancy, there is no…..life, there is no mad experiment, there is no random merciful lapse of reason.

Even my work is all the same. I’ve been trying to be more adventurous, to not to go around in circles about making decision whether the stairs should be to the left or right or the wall should be brick or concrete, to lose myself in a delirium of form, random free flowing interplay of surfaces all those murky edges and a 100 chaotic messed up thoughts and imperfections, and that make me up. And in doing that try to balance a personal expression with the nature of a building type. Not very successful I should say, I get caught up in the same old web. Infact I’m growing increasingly tired of my own work. To put it in no milder terms, I am increasingly finding it disgusting and boring and more importantly without meaning. When a creator feels that , theres something gravely wrong and ideally he should stop. But you see I cant, I’m in the middle of a degree, I’ve got to churn out more stuff….but on the brighter side, hey it doesn’t matter anyway, so don’t worry.

One needs a goal to work to, a dream to live for, a cause to go on for, a passion to pull through when the going gets tough and I think I just might have lost all of that.

In the deep recesses of the mind I ramble,
And linger in the labyrinth of despair.
I soar for moments at long, on the wings of reason,
Sometimes even on the crest of creation.

For Meaning I search, for purpose,
Perhaps even for truth and conviction.
And in search of them, like them I wander,
Like ghosts among the living.

Doing architecture.

'd like to think I have few pretensions to what I am
Or what I can be.
I'm in this .... this joyous:depressing,stimulating:tiring, simple:esoteric, heavily intellectual:dumb, creative:painful realm called architecture.For me each moment in that realm is a continual reminder of the dichotomy - the mind numbing complexity - in myself,in life,and in the world around.
I'm lost in here and trying to find my way....but not out.
Its a pain in the ass you cant live without.To put it slightly more eloquently it gives me a way to look at the world, to order it, to understand/fight/hate/love/theorize/ it.

I enjoy its dichotomous nature not because I am brilliantly talented, but because I am so not.
Not because I can understand but because I can't.
I don't know where I'm heading...but I'm on my way.

I may not be among those whose names are inscribed on the sacred walls of architecture for all eternity- hell! not not even close, but perhaps after a life's work...perhaps I might be the wind that blew across its portals for a fraction of a second.

That in the end I think, might be more than enough.

Ramblings on architecture

I have often wondered what it is that makes the immortal, the eternal.

I've looked at great architecture and great art and wondered about the fabric that’s common to it all.

I sense strands that run through all of them...or at least I think i do

From the Amber fort that shocked me through the sheer range of its scale: from a towering majestic monumentality to light humane functional living spaces - From its sheer opulence to its disarming simplicity - from the silence and light at IIM-A: those volumes in brick silently guarding the eternal spirit of human institutions - From Corbusier’s few deft planes of concrete that trap space time and light in disarmingly simple and brilliant ways in the Millowners building - From the transformation of a simple yet vital function of accessing water to a celebration of light and movement in the adalaj step well, to the amazing spirit/concepts of modernism that I sense in the historic padmanabhapuram palace.

I've felt all these as almost universal in their spirit, they belong in the same realm of inspired creation.

From function undoubtedly they sprang, nevertheless ultimately they transcended it and became a celebration of life.

And what is life other than the celebration of living.

And what is architecture, other than the celebration of the human being.

A play of our sense of scale, vision, movement, balance, behavior – our sense of what is right and wrong in public , of right and left, up and down…….

If God made man in his Image, we make architecture in our image. Yes even the coldest, monumental, worst ones are facets of our own self.

Space and time(movement) , Light and Shadow, Mass and Void, Planarity and volume I believe are the universal language of Architecture – a language with different dialects, one used with different patterns and permutations yet the same basic language, the same grand old spirit of Architecture running through all of them.

It is quite disarmingly simple, that it seems almost obvious yet I believe that ultimately shrouded under all the theory architecture comes to down to this. I can find no other way of explaining why something as diverse as a subtle yet exquisite timber palace in South India to an outrageous Gehry building appeals to me in the same intensity of spirit. That is why a small space that is created in some corner of the world, appeals to the entirety of the world.

And that is why I can’t digest when narrow classifications are made of modern and post modern, western and oriental, ad hoc and “designed”. I believe one sows the seeds of the eternal in that very moment when concieves these combinations of space, volume and mass submitting to that universal spirit/force of architecture. There is no style, there is only the intensity of your will to create and if you have truly understood what you are creating, and convinced by its will to be- I believe you are on your way to creating something eternal – even if its not for the entire humanity - for yourself….a moment you have etched in your psyche….a moment that you know was lived creating something worthwhile.