SHADOW-LESS CITY

Photo Credit: Manoj Parmar Architects

Architecture and cities have metaphysical presence in us. We experience them differently depending on the state of worldliness that we inhabit, willingly or unwillingly. As a result of the recent global pandemic and the subsequent lockdown, architecture and the city appears to be a dream sequence of inconsequential collapsed time. The time is warped and entrenched into inscription and description of its architecture. It is like a De Chirico painting that reveals the ‘other’ city, conception of scaling and re-represented objects that are irrelevant to its own existence and moving away from any other literal interpretation. Architecture without people, cities without events are delirious to their very nature of being.

Public places with its architecture evoke another metaphysical city without people and events, destabilizing the act of perception and comprehension, engagement& disengagement, tending to be both thought provoking & disturbing and reading & writing; all simultaneously. The city has appeared to be compelling and resonating its formative circumstances while masking its contamination of time.  It encrypts the notations that are only parallel to inscriptions of archaeology whose notation brings meaning of the unforeseen &of untold stories.

The city and its architecture becomes another world of exploration because the city slowly begins to dissolve itself into its ordinary architecture. The events and people are no more remarkable sets, rather they become unrelenting glimpses of splintered utopia. The motion-less city-scape engulfed by inexplicable moods of social estrangement.  

The doors become more sceptical and the windows suddenly become lens for voyeurism. The door that was hinged in time, opens in fear, the window that frames the unframed is morphed with memories of time. The view and the viewed are in intense conflict of existence.  The architecture and the city begin to displace itself from being framed to being the frame of the unseen. It is a strange scene of a movie that was never shot with a keen eye or was desirable of wanting. It rather was that eye which is compelled to hover with utter disdain to the silence of the shadow-less city.

MODERN HERITAGE AND CONTEMPORARY INDIA

In a country like India, the paradigm of development takes place in various forms, with entangled complexity and enmeshed priorities. The emphasis on development always supersedes considerations of historical aspects. The peculiarities of geography and the very act of conservation of historical events, acts, narratives and artifacts are often thought of as an academia and not often for action. The attitude that is largely embedded within the general psyche is that abundance is always relegated to be secondary and especially when it is attributed to geography, that has manifested variety of ideas on existence and in abundance architectural forms. This manifestation is perceived as not necessary condition to move forward, or a model for sustenance or the thought on development. The progress is generalized as an act of dissolution of historical thought. 

Such attitude brings back the classical argument that the role of history is purely a recreation of nostalgia and romanticism of the past. The position of conservation is very precarious in contemporary times especially when there is a strange absence of discipline that brings about philosophy on history of thought or history of ideas or reflexive history. Hence the entire domain of conservation is singularly focused on material based restoration. The construct of conservation philosophy needs to decoded within the act of conservation. The understanding of history should be an act of embracing tools that enabled the progress of continuity. 

The conservation domain has been monolithic-ally a new discipline which was understood predominantly by the primacy of materials and less of intellectual aspects. The subject of conservation still exist in its old domain of materials and motifs. This is perhaps the reason that everything that is ‘heritage’ is often interpreted singularly in academics, no matter how rationally or ideologically one is positioned in a given institutional framework. 

The argument is quite similar when we talk about modern heritage. The word modern, modernism and modernity are not the same yet they cannot be discussed in isolation. First of all, modern architecture needs to be interpreted in generic and specific contexts, especially within the realm of Indian modernity and modernism. Secondly, the question and the argument on whether the notion of modern comes around as an implied project of global or Indian modernity which has necessitated such an idea on modern architecture. Thirdly the question of modern is often in contradiction to the thought on conservation, at least in its conventional avatar. It means that the bandwidth of conservation and ideological position of Indian modern needs academic research for philosophical continuity, perhaps such an argument can also fracture the myth of Indian modern that has been re-created institutionally, which itself is so monolithic. 

The modern is a school of thought, a philosophy and is bounded by limitless space of interchangeable ideas. It exist or existed by sheer knowledge that has prevailed over its predecessor and the circumstances that has necessitated for its emergence and maturing. Otherwise the conservation of modern heritage shall succumb to being a tactless faux pas.

Photo Credit: Manoj Parmar Architects 

ARCHITECTURE AND NIHILISM: MASSIMO CACCIARI

The author attempts to establish relationship between philosophy and modern architecture, critically examining the avant-garde endeavors to the social and political manifestation of metropolitan set up. It is an outstanding theoretical plunge into scholastic and polemics of most complex debate on aesthetic-philosophical nature of architectural theory. The author has audaciously challenged the metaphorical thread between architecture and philosophy that has prevailed in intellectual tradition of architectural theory and urbansim. 

The three chapters navigates through the authors philosophical trajectory, from Marxian trending to German Urban Sociologist tradition, along with Adolf Loos work and other prominent architectural events. The first chapter is dedicated to artistic representation leading to Loos's Architecture through the argument in " The Dialectics of the Negative and the Metropolis" The Nihilistic position is arising from the tragic eschew of negativity of metropolis, amounting to language of contradiction and sign of alienation of its Architecture. The second chapter on "Loos and his Contemporaries" attempts to frame Loos's architecture being anti-expressive, dismissal, anti-synthetical and un-compositional. 

" That artistic choice is searching for neither salvation nor consolation nor escape: the great, tragic form of the artists mentioned by Cacciari can do nothing but be analogus with the negativity of the metropolis. They describe obsessively, present the hard lines of alienation in the most literal senseof the term, alius, other, always different, never coincident with anything, never reconciled with a supposed origin or nature" (Introduction, xxxi). 

The Loos's attack on ornament perhaps has nothing to do with stylistic attack but rather emanates from the position of being metropolitan critic and logic. The utopia and artistic representation often are positioned in alignment of capital and driven by metropolitan logic. Such positions are ambiguous and hinged on "unresolved dialectics". Similarly the Otto Wagner releases the idea of city as an image of community, is an attempt to liberate metropolis form the vampire of speculation through artistic form. Perhaps he could reintegrate the ideology of werkbund, and Viennese secession, which is nihilistic in nature. 

The second chapter on "Loosian Dialectics" & " Loos and his Angels" begins it argument with critic on functional architecture. The use value in capitalist sense can not have quality to manifest. Every teleological argument is ornamental in nature because it can not be represented due to its inability to surpass its functional value. " if handicraft is "left alone or uncontaminated with the idea of architecture, will naturally express the historic tendency towards its value". But if handicraft value is mystified and subjected to poetic subjectivity or object of exchange value, then it will tend towards the ornamentation. The artistic act of representation as about gratification of ego,  necessarily comes to be destined for teleological end. Similarly, the Loos's idea on ornamentation and crime is not an act of de-materialization, rather an representation of an architectonic thought.

The authors brings in variety of argument in the sense of historiography and also cutting across the disciplines, and making un-ventured connections. This book is a must reading for those who are not content with the normative format of architectural criticism and has desire to expand the intellectual debate on architectural trending and its rationale.

Photo Credit: Manoj Parmar Architects