Friday, December 31, 2010

New Year resolutions

The New Year is here. A new year provides what most people long for – a clean slate. It is a chance to do all the things that we have pushed till the beginning of next year. “I’ll eat as much as I want now, and from the first of Jan I’ll go on a diet.” or “In the next year, I will start saving.”

The resolution could be anything, what matters is the emotion behind it. The prospect of having a deadline to stop procrastinating, however ironic, appeals to everyone. We like believing that with the start of a new year, we start at ground zero. And that nothing we did in the past has an effect on the New Year. It’s a new day, it’s a new start – this is the thought that gets people motivated to do the things they’ve been putting off. Because a new year means that they are not procrastinators, but doers. The whole beauty of the New Year and the basis of its appeal lies in the newness and shininess of it. The fact that the resolutions don’t last very long, doesn’t occur to people during the holiday season!

So Happy New Year everyone. On a parting note, because the next post will be in 2011, here is a joke we recently read.

Q. “What is a New Years resolution?”
A. “It’s a to-do list for the first week of January.”

"Companions and Early Mentors at the Beginning of a Long Journey" by Christopher Charles Benninger, Architect.

As a teenager four young teachers touched me and motivated me. One, Norman Jensen, a little known but great painter, would laugh at my aerial view sketches and ask me, “Why don’t you draw what you see?” Harry Merritt was a classic modernist, building unpublished masterpieces in North Florida. Though shy for publicity, he carried the stature of a Master. He made us proud to be young architects. He was an “architect’s architect” who made us follow strict rules. He preached a truth in every decision, shooting rational questions at our every line. “If a closet projects out of the wall on this elevation and it’s doing the same thing on another, than the expression has to be the same!” He called this “honesty of expression.” Robert Tucker was a teacher to the core. Thoughtful, humorous, probing and penetrating, he knew how to take us down into the depths of our weaknesses, only to pick us up to euphoria of some small strength the next day. He knew the craft of creation; he saw within each student their own little nugget of gold; and taught us all how to become small jewelers, crafting within the limitations of what we had, instead of wishing to be something we were not! Blair Reeves was a father image who nurtured young architects, having them by the dozens to his beautiful modern wood and glass house for food and slide shows of the masters’ works. His own house was a living example which he need not talk of…it was there! He taught the introductory course to architecture hopefuls, wherein about two hundred aspirants were registered for his lectures. In the first lecture he would ask everyone to stand up. Then he’d ask the front half of the students to sit down, stating “this is how many of you who will be left at the end of this course!” Then he’d ask half of the hundred left to sit down, saying, “This is how many of you who will be here at the end of this first year!” Finally, he’d have twenty of us standing and say this is perhaps how many of you who will graduate as architects; of whom half of you may ever build a structure you design!” But Reeves was not the terrorist this story makes him out to be. He was a thoughtful nurse to the survivors! As the semester wore on, and the number of empty seats grew, he introduced to us the huge canvas of modern art, architecture, design and the people who created the modern movement. His true love though was the preservation of historic buildings and he introduced us modernist fundamentalists to the fact that we have a history, that we live in a history, and that we are a part of the continuum of history.

Many of my mentors were my classmates and contemporaries. Marc Trieb who teaches at Berkeley and I shared a small “match-box” cottage in Gainesville. His recent books analyze what makes modern landscape architecture what it is, how the Bay Area Style emerged from its context and how Le Corbusier conceived the Electronic Poem! At the 1962 American Institute of Architects Annual Convention in Miami, we ignored the thousands of commercial architects down for the party, seeking out Paulo Solari and Buckminster Fuller who were there to win Gold Medals and give major lectures. Solari was very approachable, walking about in leather shorts and barefooted in the grand Americana Hotel. On the last night there was a huge dinner on the open grounds of the Hialeah Race Course where thousands of happy architects ate and drank, catching up with old friends. Aged only nineteen, Marc and I had yet to discover the miracles of hallucinates! Totally sober we walked bored about the tables of drunkards, laughing and singing merely! With some amazement we noticed Fuller and his wife surrounded by admirers, but alas drunk admirers! We joined the table and managed to move the discussion from boisterous questions, into things more to Fuller’s interest! After a few minutes he turned to us and said, would you like to join my wife and I back at the Americana? Bright eyed youth that we were, we jumped at the opportunity. In the coffee shop we stayed up until two in the morning, asking a few questions and getting long answers. Some years later on Doxiadis’ yacht in the Aegean Sea I was amazed when the great man walked up to me, shaking my hand, and asking what I had been doing over the past five years. This was the kind of personal touch, which today seems unbelievable. Marc Trieb has gone on to be a great teacher too. Bruce Creager and Gene Hayes, just a few years our seniors kept us spell bound with their seemingly vast experience readily shared with us over candle lit dinners and wine. Lydia Rubia was an artist and a powerful designer who mixed her Latin passion with a keen rationality to create wonderful designs. Peter Wilson has continued through the years to be my alter ego. Daniel Williams has become one of America’s leading Green Architect. Thomas Cooper is a devoted New Urbanist with whom I can openly argue a counterblast. Garry Rigdale accompanied me from Florida to Cambridge and returned to Gainesville to devote his life to teaching. Luis Kizonak joined Harvard with me, topping our first semester and became a leading designer for TAC before he prematurely died in Kuwait of a stroke. Edward Popko creates the IBM software from which great ships are built, and many others who were my classmates from those times have gone on to gain recognition in their chosen paths. At MIT and Harvard my classmates and later my students were great sources of inspiration. Urs Gauchat has gone on to turn the New Jersey Institute of Technology School of Architecture from no place to some place, giving up a successful practice in Boston to do so! Michael Pyatok, my closest confidant in Sert’s Masters Class, is America’s leading proponent of affordable housing. He builds what he talks about! Christine Boyer, at Princeton, has written the profound analysis on planning and capitalism, which is required reading in every school of planning. Anna Hardman carries on our tradition at MIT, enriching students and fellow faculty. What I am trying to emphasize here is that like sand on the beach, gurus are everywhere. It is for us to find them and to learn from them.

In Herman Hess’s classic Siddhartha, a student walking in the forest seeking The Great Teacher, happens upon Lord Buddha and asks him if he knows where The Teacher is. Lord Buddha explains to the boy that there are no teachers, only seekers of truth!

When I went to Harvard University to do my master’s degree in architecture and to study urban planning at MIT, I was surrounded great teachers, who had loomed in my head like rock stars did in my contemporaries! Walter Gropius was actually a real person! He walked and talked in our midst. His wife, Alda Mahler Gropius, was a mother figure to young students. Sert, then Dean, had started the world’s first urban design course, and was a pioneer in the dialogue between architects and urban planners, being both himself! Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, founding editor of Ekistics, would never leave a bad idea alone! Gerhard Kallman, architect of the new Boston City Hall, was an icon of the 1960’s for his bold and daring statements. Jerzy Soltan, who built Jacqueline Tyrwhitt’s lovely home Spiros in Attica, and co-author of Le Modular, challenged students, faculty and guest critiques on any topic possible. Juan Miro, the Catalonian painter, was often in residence as Sert’s childhood friend. He painted amazing black forms on Sert’s patio walls, turning them into masterpieces! My Master’s Class of twenty candidates dwindled down to sixteen within the first month! That was before the days when Harvard filled chairs to collect its humongous fees! There were high standards, ruthless performance expectations, and a family atmosphere amongst the survivors! The sixteen of us were privileged to have our own time and friendships with Yona Friedman, a colleague of Soltan’s in
Team Ten, Louis Mumford, Fuhimiko Maki, Dolf Schnebli, and other past students of Sert, who came back to crit and jury our works. At MIT we had Kevin Lynch who wrote the Image of the City, John F. C. Turner who wrote Freedom to Build, Herbert Gans who wrote The Urban Villagers, Lisa Pittie who invented Advocacy Planning and Lloyd Rodwin who was the Master Regional planner! Shadrack Woods at Harvard, who had just won the competition to design the Free University in Berlin, and was preparing the new plan for Toulouse, was notorious for his fiery arguments at juries, usually ending in his apartment at Peabody Terrace at three in the morning, with loving students and young faculty still throwing hypothesis. These were all people who took us students into their homes and hearts and invested their time into our personal development, as well as our academic and intellectual molding! We worked, studied, questioned, analyzed, drank, partied and ate together. Their combined intellectual and human force was like a juggernaut plowing through all obstacles! They understood the necessity of carrying students along with them, as their investment in the next generations. They knew that they did not live for the moment, but for the future. Some of the people who had the most profound impact on me were not my formal teachers. Teaching design studios with Roger Montgomery, Gerhard Kallman, and Jane Drew, who all became guides in my search, left me with a personal legacy.

Sir Robert Jackson gifted me a life subscription of the Ekistics journal in January of 1963 when we met briefly at Adlai Stevenson’s apartment. From that journal I came to know of a larger world, and one not as happy as that I had grown up in. Some years later when I was a student at Harvard, Jackson’s wife, Barbara Ward, took me under her wing as a protégé. She thoughtfully invited me, at her expense, to attend the Delos Symposium in Greece. I flew to Paris and bought a Mercier ten speed bicycle and proceeded the next fifteen hundred kilometers via road, with my Harvard roommate, Christopher Winters. Reaching a bit exhausted, but in great spirits, I was yet again welcomed into a new world. Constantinos Doxiadis, Margaret Mead, Arnold Toynbee, Philippe Hera, Roger Gregore, Edmond Bacon, Katherine Bateson and many others were aboard Doxiadis’ yacht which meandered through the Aegean Sea, stopping at Mount Athos, Samothrace, Thebes, Mikanos and finally at the Delos amphitheatre, where the Charter we had all worked on was read out by Margaret Mead with the sun setting over the Aegean Sea behind her. At Samothrace Toynbee and his life companion, Veronica, asked me to accompany them up a steep hill behind the Samothrace Temple, from which the Winged Victory of Samothrace had come. Toynbee surmised that there should be the ruins of an ancient Crusader Fort there, which did not figure in any of the literature. Surely when we ascended to the peak of a small mountain, the walls stood testament to his academic prowess! In his eighties at the time, the small mountain climb was no easy task for Toynbee! Looking toward the east I saw an amazing sight. The entire horizon was covered in an ominous, dark pall of haze! “My God, what’s that, I exclaimed!” Toynbee laughed and said, “Oh, that’s Asia!” Having spent most of my life in Asia I always think of that day as prophetic! I didn’t know then that my life’s work would centre east of that pall!

Alex Tzonis, who was a young professor of architecture with me at the Graduate School of Design, along with his brilliant life partner Liane Lefaivre, have continued to encourage and teach me all at the same time. Their publication of my work, the Mahindra United World College of India, in their recent book called Critical Regionalism, has been a source of encouragement. At the risk of boring my readers I have searched over my past with fond memories. I feel there is a lesson in this small review, which is that teachers challenge one, fire one’s will to struggle for truth and become good friends too. Maxwell Fry founded the modern movement in Britain in the late 1920’s. On each journey traveling back and forth between America and India in the 1960’s and 1970’s, I always relaxed for several days at Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry’s Gloucester Place townhouse. As Jane’s life partner, I fell under Max’s influence. He and Jane, along with Le Corbusier, had designed Chandigarh, living in India. We had much to discuss and share. Maxwell Fry was the man who offered Gropius half his thriving practice so that the master could escape from Germany, getting out while he was still alive! “Come and take half my practice, but for God’s sake get out!” Gropius was instructed by all well wishers at the CIAM meeting in Venice. Without packing their bags they just left for London, leaving the Bauhaus behind along with their precious art works and personal effects! Maybe the Second World War was a great cauldron which molded giants out of midgets. But the humane nature of these giants, were the distinguishing features separating them from the midgets around them.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

"Themes and Motifs in Architecture: The Dilemma of Style" by Christopher Charles Benninger, Architect.

One of the characteristics of being human, a characteristic not found in other species, is the ability to use symbols and signs to manipulate concepts within one’s mind. Here I do not mean using symbols for the mere communication of ideas. We go beyond the intellectual life of fish and birds and formulate ideas, constructions and concepts.

Our ability to conceive things is critical to human development. Symbols are used in human thought to stand for things which are not present. Words are symbols we constantly use. Imagination is the human function of making images in our heads.

Human being can imagine situations which are different from those in front of their eyes. A child can remember absent things, but only later in his development can he manipulate non-present things, even adding components he has invented, but never seen. We explore a fantasy world and experiment with the rational world in our minds.

As architects we are interested in the rational exploitation of future experiences. We want to visualize in our minds different images and alternative situations in terms of built form which can arise out of the same given conditions [site, regulations, programme, geo-climatic context, budget etc.] Though the constraints are very limited the variety of images is great! Our language of build is full of symbols which allow us to create fabrics of build in great variety.

Caught in a world of vast choice, how does a designer go about deciding on which mental image to pursue through an investment of effort in design? Unfortunately, like a child; most designers can real intellectually one with things they can remember having seen. Or thing in front of them! They have not developed their ability to manipulate absent symbols. Creating new symbols, perhaps a third stage of imagination, is beyond their consideration. Only education can overcome this gap.

The above lacunae bring forth the need for style! Styles present the designer with a ready made “kit” of images to choose from in which different assemblages appear “new” or “different”. At best the designer pulls forth in his imagination bits and pieces of absent things which he has already seen assembled according to simple rules usually in magazines.

Post modernism is the current style for the simple minded. It is a system of symbols [Greek pediments, classical columns, Palladian rose windows, and “period” windows, etc. which can be thrown together to make interesting facades. Even images from Disney World have been taken into the pantheon of readymade, post-modern, components. Whatever weakness this style may have is overcome by the application of expensive materials [granite, Italian marble, minored glass, tinted metals etc.]. A kind of make-up, like lipstic, is applied as if buildings, like an unattractive person, can be ‘treated’ for defects according to occasion of time of day.

The legitimacy of symbols is an area of debate. As a classicist I believe that our architectural language must emerge from the THEMES of construction. Quite simply these themes are:

[a] Support
[b] Span
[c] Enclosure

To explain this let’s consider the theme of SUPPORT. We are limited to bearing walls, on the one hand, and columns on the other. There are geodesic and hyperbolic alternators, but these are limited in applications due to cost, labour and constraints of techniques.

We basically have to choose between a frame structure and a bearing wall. But herein there are numerous choices as to materials, geometry, configuration. At the CDSA campus I have chosen a simple system of parallel stone bearing walls. But their orientation, rigour of spacing, and play against one another build a higher order of positive – negative rhythm. Likewise SPAN is a simple system of beams running across these walls with tiles above. ENCLOSURE is in the form of sliding glass panels. It is in the simultaneous choice of THEMES and their inter relationship that imagination is required. Motifs are stuck on later! At CDSA the motifs support the themes by locating vistas [windows], modulating wall planes [window boxes] and directing movement in space [ottas, stairs, small walls]. Directionality and orientation are confirmed [only confirmed mind you!] by statues, pots and various anqtiques. But all of the motifs we have applied are incidental to the overall effect of the building cluster. We could have successfully used a totally different set of motifs, maintaining the essential themes.

Architecture, true architecture, emanates from a language of themes, not motifs. Post modernism is constructed on a language of motifs. It does not qualify as architecture. It is exterior decoration wherein motifs are applied to wall surfaces just as interiors are “finished.” Architects are not in the business of decoration. God knows, however, that there is a great need for many buildings [inside and out] to be hidden under decoration. But this is a kind of cosmetics, rather than a search for raw beauty. Intellectually, the manipulation of motifs is child’s play. It would be better to design as birds and bees do: they use single minded fabric of build [wax honey comb or woven basket nests] and stick to their THEME. Yes, bees and birds who can’t think per force of nature, build architecture, while the thinking mind makes a mess out of motifs!

DECORATION.

We are not the doyens of a fashion industry. We are not the slaves of an ignorant quick-rich cliental who know nothing of architecture. We are the guardians of an intellectual tradition in which principals of proportion, structural systems, appropriate use of materials, choice of meaningful motifs are the essence of art. It is the ability to make components of build into symbols and configurate them through of relation that architecture emerges; architecture of some lasting value; architecture which represents man’s higher aspirations.

Style is the illness of the feeble mind. Be it post modernist, Punjabi Baroque or Ethnic – style is merely an excuse for something which has not been conceived.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Being sick - good or bad?

Being sick could be the worst thing to happen to you. Runny noses, rising temperatures, aching bodies, etc – YUCK. It’s just the worst. The feeling that comes over you when sick, the feeling of just wanting to collapse into a heap and curl up on the floor is universal. So is the feeling that this will never pass. And there is absolutely nothing anyone can say or do to make you feel even a little better.

Except, a handful of things can. Like the hugs of a loved one. Like hot soup. Like a nice steam to clear passages. Like snuggling in bed with a good movie on. Like having someone do every little thing for you, just because you can’t. Like getting out of boring commitments.

On second thought, being sick could be the best thing to happen to you.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

"Omens of a magic gift" by Christopher Charles Benninger, Architect.

As a child I spent my days drifting in confusion. Nothing inspired me. Neither my teachers nor my studies enthused me to seek knowledge. My parents thought by putting me in school I’d be educated; by putting me in sports I’d become athletic; by putting me in a church I’d be in touch with the ultimate truth! They confused religion with spirituality! Most of what transpired in these institutions seemed like a dull black cloud hovering over me, with no respite.

What did move me were the autumn leaves in reds, yellows and oranges and their winter nude fingers reaching into moody skies. Come snowfall and the black fingers would frost into white powder, momentarily melting, and then freezing stick trees into gleaming crystal candelabras of ice-glass, glittering up-side-down in the bright sun. These were the things that grabbed me and drew my attention. My personal life was composed of all things natural and my friends were the squirrels in the trees and the rabbits in the forests. These were all omens of an organic truth to be revealed!

Thus, I was composed of two different parts, each amplifying the meaning and the meaningless of the other. Like the yin and the yang, a white and a black force intertwined within me, chasing after one another. The black made the white more pure and beautiful, and the white made the black more foreboding and ominous!

One Christmas Day morning my eyes were drawn to the one gift I had not foraged in my parents’ usual hiding places. I knew all of the others from looking under beds, in the attic, or on the high shelf over my father’s cupboards where he hid his condoms and porn magazines. So I reached for the unknown first, as my family members all gasped with hypocritical surprise opening boxes they’d all secretly discovered only a few days before. Like all children that fateful morning I reached out for the most intriguing gift first, but unlike the others this portended to be a talisman of my future! It was a magic book that would change my life forever.

As I read the first words, sentences, paragraphs and pages of Frank Lloyd Wright’s The Natural House I discovered who I was, and what I wanted to be. I gained my first insight into what my life’s search would be all about. Reading the pages I felt like a reincarnated avatar discovering who he had been in previous lives and what he would be in the future.

It was not just that I liked the designs, the drawings and the photographs, or that I gleaned meanings from the words; it was a testament that unfolded a truth in me that in fact had always dwelt deep within me! Something that had always been there slumbering inside of me, concealed from my consciousness, was now unfolding. I suppose this is called inspiration, or even self discovery. From the moment I opened The Natural House I did not put it down until I had completed the last page. In a sense I have never put it down and I am still reading it in my soul, discovering and searching for what inspired me on that Christmas Day more than a half century ago.

When I closed the book just past midnight I was living in a different world. I walked out of my house into the freezing air with thousands of stars glistening in the vast heavens. Everything I saw looked different. It was not only nature that was singing a song in my heart, but my soul had switched on and my mind had started to think. I saw things I had never comprehended before. Finely carved balustrades caught my fancy. Sculptured stone gargoyles made me smile. Sliding my fingers over materials I could sense their inner souls and I spoke to them. I argued with sloppy workmanship and clumsy details.

Wright taught me that the human mind is an analogue for all things beautiful and all things ugly. He taught me that a human being is both a monster and a saint all rolled up into one, capable of creating incredible beauty, or of inflicting deplorable destruction and ugliness. It is only the mind that separates us from other animals making us the monsters of terror and the creators of poetry, art and architecture. We alone may know the exhilaration of transcendence!

After reading The Natural House the yin and the yang within me merged into one presence, instead of playing against each other, exhausting me, the black force empowered the white beauty. I was now driven in whatever I did. I gave up on education and embarked on an inner search! Something magical had grasped me. I stopped attending church and I found spiritual moments in fits of creative discovery.

Such a moment of self discovery is what I call INSPIRATION!

It is a flash of wisdom that calls out to us, telling us what we want to be and forces us to yearn to be that. It catalyses life’s search; it embeds an urge; it creates a desperate need to seek what we do not possess; it beckons us to know our inner soul; it sets us upon a path from which we can not return.

Wright taught me in that simple book to seek the generic order in things; see beauty in the truth! I understood that buildings are merely mirrors of the people who live in them. They reflect how people behave, how people think, what their aspirations are and how they deal with materiality. They illustrate how evolved people are in their spiritual realizations; whether they live for material things, or they employ material artifacts to reach transcendence. They place people and societies somewhere along a scale between beasts grabbing at survival and saints blessed with transcendental awareness. Architecture distinguishes people who only “take,” from patrons who nurture and “give.” Buildings indicate the extent to which people are in touch with the environment in which they live; the extent to which they are a part of the places within which they build; and are harmonious with the social traditions and modalities which bring bliss and peace.

But life is not a fairy tale story. It is a maze of choices and we have to learn as we go. We make some good decisions and some bad ones. But I believe we are driven by our GENERIC INSPIRATION to learn from our mistakes and move on. We are guided to recognize lessons when they come our way and to learn from them! With the fire of inspiration inside of us, life itself becomes a great university of learning. We are learning lessons all the time.

Let me share some lessons that life has taught me. I feel my rendezvous with Wright, his inspiration, made it possible for me to learn from them.

ONE: To gain something beautiful, one may have to give up something beautiful.
Until age fifty-two I was immersed in an academic career. I was designing buildings only for my friends who were social workers, and for myself I designed a campus. One day sitting in my lush green garden campus in near Pune, surrounded by fifteen acres of fruit trees, flowering plants and verdant lawns, a young architecture student came unannounced to meet me, insisting to have our picture taken together. Like many students who visit the Center for Development Studies and Activities he was studying my designs and my campus layout!

At that moment I was completing the fiftieth policy paper I had written on “development” and it struck me that no student had ever come to have a photo session after reading one of my hefty papers!

At about the moment we said “cheese” I immediately decided to quit my post as Founder-Director of CDSA, and to devote my remaining life’s efforts to architecture. Amongst other things, I had to give up the sprawling campus I had created for myself and move into a tiny rented apartment studio with modest equipment. The decade since that fleeting decision has never allowed me time for regrets, or even to look back with nostalgia! But I had to give up my very own little dream world, created over twenty-five years, to seek transcendence through my art. By giving up something beautiful, I found something more beautiful!

TWO: It is better to BE what you are than to SEEM what you are not!
Human beings are conformists by nature. We feel comfortable when we look like and act like the people around us! We seek norms and standards, instead our inner reality! We think we are searching individuality and freedom when in fact we are mimicking personalities and images we aspire to be like. We are seeming to be what we are not!

In 2001 I made a presentation of my new capital plan for Bhutan at the European Biennale, along with some of the greatest painters, cinematographers and architects of our times. I noticed something very interesting. To seem a “creative artist” in Europe you must wear the black uniform of an artist! To be a creative youth in Europe you must attend concerts waving your hands in the air just like several thousand other conforming youth, pretending to be “free!” To be different, unique, and “an individual,” you must wear the “uniform of the different!” You must wear a uniform----dress totally in black; wear black shoes; black socks; black pants; black belt; black shirt; black tie and black jacket! Even your underwear must be black. I realized that for these people, in fact for most people in the world, being creative is not a form of liberation, but is living a lie! There are people who never design anything, never write, never draw, and never search, never question, but who dress in the black uniform of creators. They are not being; they are seeming. If I have any lesson from Wright to share with young students and old men, it is to BE, and not SEEM!

THREE: Don’t be euphoric when people praise you, or depressed when people criticize you!
In Buddhist thinking there are axioms called the Sixteen Emptinesses and there are two of them where I have learned to keep my emotions “empty.” I became euphoric when my design won the American Institute of Architect’s Award: 2000, but having reached the final list for the Aga Kahn Award in 2003, I lost! I realized that my happiness should come from the process of design and from my own understanding of my efforts’ inherent beauty. About the time I settled with myself in this philosophy of emptiness, I learned that the project which won over us for the Aga Khan award was disqualified as a fraud; the authors had misrepresented it as a design created by the village people! But that did not make me happy either! I have learned that creation is a patient search, and is not some kind of competition. To be true to one’s art one must be empty to both praise and criticism and know oneself! Truth is the ultimate search of all artists.

FOUR: Even then I feel, “It is better to Search the Good, than to know the Truth!”
I suppose it took me too long in life to distinguish between Ethics and Aesthetics; Morals and Artistic Balance! Ethics is a rather exact science of rules; of right and of wrong; and there could be some generic truth within them! However this world is not black and white, but rather grey and fuzzy! On the other hand, aesthetics is the search for pleasure, which I call “The Good!” Pleasure is gained through the senses: feel, smell, taste, sight and sound. These elicit excitement, contentment, fulfillment and a range of human happiness’s! Thus, we find the good in the sound of music, in the rhythm of dance, the taste of food, the arousal of romance, the smell of flowers, the stimulation of art, the titillation of reading and discourse and the inspiration of architecture. But one can have too much of a good thing! Aesthetics is a question of balance, or what the Buddhists call the “Middle Path.” Beauty is a search for that Golden Mean, that harmony which brings all forms of visual, sensual and intellectual pleasure into balance! Harmony is the search. If you are a lover of food, don’t eat too much; don’t over do this or that spice; don’t cook too long or too less! If you love wine, don’t drink too much, but be sure to drink some! In your love life don’t be too passionate, or too neglectful!

The Good Life, or the Sweet Life, is all about balance, pleasure and the pleasure principle! I realize that most of us are trapped in our Victorian fear of pleasure and have no aesthetics! We are on an endless trip seeking the truth! We are judging others, meting out what is right and what is wrong; dying as empty drums that never made ourselves happy, or spread that happiness to those nearby them. Art and Architecture are the paths to “the good!” They stimulate enjoyment, delight and balance...la dolce vita…the sweet life! It is better to search this good life than to think one can ever know the ultimate truth!

FIVE: There is only one form of good luck: having good teachers!
Years ago the industrialist Adi Bathena, who founded Thermax Industries, introduced me to his ninety year old teacher. Adi himself was seventy-six! We were sitting on the lawn of the Turf Club and Adi went into a long story how he quit his comfortable job at age forty to risk all in a new venture making boilers. He explained to me his middle class roots and that it was not within him to adventure out so far financially. Smiling at his teacher, he noted that without his encouragement, guidance and assurance he would have continued in marketing Godrej products as a salesman. Then he turned to me and said, “Christopher, in this world there is only one kind of good luck, and that is to have good teachers!” I have never been able to forget that truth over the years that followed, and I realize that my teachers at Harvard, MIT and in India have been my only “good luck.” They gifted me inspiration, that inner need to search! They challenged me to do better, they taunted me to work harder; they opened new windows through which I could see myself in some distant future; they were role models of hard work and devotion.

Friday, December 24, 2010

"De-Schooling Architecture" by Christopher Charles Benninger, Architect.

“I wanted a different structure…one that would be like a monument. Of course if Christopher even designs a square building it will be a monument”, said Dr. Gunwant Oswal, founder of The Center for Life Sciences, Health and Medicine (CLSHM), a center that treats brain and neuro-developmental disorders, especially in children, based on a holistic system of medicine. From 1968- 2000, Dr. Oswal operated out a 800 sq ft clinic in Pune’s Bhawani Peth; however as word of the efficacy of his complementary system of medicine spread, he felt he needed a larger space to carry out research and treat children with special needs. For two years Dr. Oswal looked for an appropriate site, a place where children and their parents would feel at ease. Finally he found a quiet site on a hill in Kondhwa with a sweeping view of the city and adjoining forest land.

And then there was the quest to find an architect who would design premises that would be conducive to his practice and patience. Seeing Christopher Benninger’s design of The Mahindra United World College on the outskirts of Pune, Dr. Oswal, approached him carrying with him the tome ` Frank Lloyd Wright, a Visual Encyclopedia’, with post-its marking pages featuring different architectural elements that he wished to have in the centre. Dr. Oswal’s commitment to his cause of treating special children, not turning away any child for the lack of finances, and the fact that Christopher is also deeply interested in Wright’s architecture, set the pace for the project. Dr. Oswal invested his life savings into the centre, supported whole-heartedly by (NAME) his wife; as well as daughter Pooja and son-in-law Shrirang, both doctors, who also practice at the centre

“I realized this is a project for very special children. They are eager to live and to learn. They are lively, loving and observant. But they are deprived of the normal joys of childhood; growing up and coming of age. My first intention was to reach out to them, rather than to draw them into a dull, rectangular, monumental institution which says: “You don’t belong here! You don’t belong in this world!” So I wanted to make a very different kind of building, but not in a patronizing way, that mocks mental disabilities. I had to allow myself---my child-like self---to emerge, let go and to speak out. I had to de-educate myself from all of the Cartesian ways of thinking; the X and the Y axis; the squares, rectangles and boxes, which for normal children is called SCHOOLING. I realized that I too had been taught in squares and boxes; taught to think in parallel lines! It was very easy to stick in that tried and true path, but the result would be a box!”

“In my “letting go”; in my DE-SCHOOLING of ARCHITECTURE, I travelled through a trajectory which crossed the trajectory of my user group. This is how I very consciously took on the behemoth of CARTESIAN THINKING and tried to break that down the way an ancient army would attack a fortress wall: ramming the closed door of thought; breaking the walls of false knowledge; destroying the culture of thinking which would put me into a BOX! In my struggle to de-school myself, I could come up to the beautiful, uncluttered level of existence of these special children where they can see things putatively, naturally and in the essence. I realized that seeing things generically, getting a glimpse of the essence of things, is seeing beauty!”

After spending hours discussing the project, over several meetings, one day looking at a tile roof-courtyard scheme, Dr Oswal asked, “But how does the wind travel through this structure?” The question offered the solution for the design. “In the end it was the westerly winds which ordered the structure into a series of pathways for wind to travel in, which we would also walk in! Air and people would move in the same channels, which like the wind would meander about! The high walls on the south would provide shade from the southern sun! There would be pocket gardens and secret places. There would be plantation here and there, and each space would integrate with some outdoor space. The angular wind walls would form a honeycomb of indoor and outdoor spaces and places, generating a lot of energy”, says Christopher of the unusual (X sq ft) complex with a 200 ft frontage and spreading across a basement, ground and first floors.

A hint of the architectural approach of the complex is offered at the main entrance where flower beds seem to define the compound and the main boundary wall is set away from the road. “In Europe institutions are filled with people in the evenings. I wished to offer a similar expression. So the main wall is set within the premises and there are low broad steps for people and passer-bys to sit”, says Dr. Oswal. Beyond the steps, transparent gates offer entry into the complex graced with pristine white walls creating a sense of peace and space. “White walls are something I have always loved since my youth in the Aegean Sea where azure blue waters, shaded white walls, a touch of blue woodwork and shadows everywhere, caught my attention. I felt in this project- which is a small project -the use of stone might be dark and oppressive, and used white walls instead. Dr. Oswal shared this concern and the outcome is rather natural”, says Christopher.

The ground floor takes care of all the needs of patients-from the reception room, waiting areas, doctors clinics, dispensary, green spaces to relax, a pantry, an area for patients and their parents to dine, a lotus pond, statues of the Buddha as well as of a mother and child in open spaces –that are easily reached as the building runs along two meandering west-east movement lanes that offer shade and catch the cool westerly breezes and direct them through the structure. The first floor has a bedroom, a guest bedroom, terrace and lobby; while the basement, with direct access also with a ramp, is a venue for seminars. Along with the pockets of flowers and foliage within and around the structure (planted with a variety of exotic, indigenous and foreign plant varieties), the all natural flooring of Jaisalmer, Dholpur, Red Agra and Kotah stones make for a natural and soothing ambience. The gentle mist of water droplets being sprayed on plants cools the temperature, offers a soothing sight and its soft murmur is also soothing.
The bonding with nature is also conveyed in the slightly sloped water spouts that return rain water to the earth.

Walking through the building, space -enclosed and open as well as interior and exterior- engages and merges with another. “The idea was that each out-of-doors space would have two or three relationships with at least two or three indoor spaces! And each indoor space would relate on its sides with sequential outdoor spaces. Thus, there evolved a number of sequences, links, chains of experiences which would always be different in iteration, depending on the way you moved in the labyrinth. The skylights and the light wells and the light courts are all vertical and horizontal mechanisms to achieve this”, adds Christopher. The columns are triangular and were placed to turn spaces into arcades and make the spaces integrate as one. They are fitted with coloured ceramic tiles to enliven them and make them playful.

Apart from designing a center that would be child-friendly, there is also a commitment to being eco-friendly as no wood has been used in the design; solar panels have been fitted to warm water; and most importantly space and materials have been used to minimize dependence on electricity. While there are tall glass windows inside the building that bring in natural light, breeze and outside views, there is hardly any glass on the outside. “We really are not inconvenienced when the electricity goes off, because the rooms are all full of natural breezes and light. What else do we need fossil fuel energy for? Maybe the gadgets that clutter our modern life need power. But the architecture here is “energy free.” I think this can always be accomplished if one leaves openings on several sides; if one uses light shafts and wells; if one mingles nature in courts and walkways. These things come naturally in India where the climate is salubrious”, says Christopher.

The architecture and design of CLSHM conveys a meeting of minds and hearts of the architect and client, and their commitment towards creating a space and environment that offers visitors with special needs much needed solace, as well as a positive, enriching and meaningful experience during their visit.

To create and be creative.

Creativity is a trait that is unique. Every person is creative in some way or the other; it doesn’t need to be an overpowering and all engulfing quality. Creativity in everyday things is sometimes more important than it is in career-oriented things. Everyone wishes to be creative enough to paint beautifully or to write effectively – confusing creativity with the ability to create.

Creativity is not the ability to create, it is the ability to incorporate originality in things other people would not. If a mundane task can be made enjoyable, by using a little imagination, it is the creativity within us. Seeing the world differently than others do is the key to being creative. It isn’t difficult, you just have to know where and how to look.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

The Big, Fat Indian Wedding.

Weddings are fun. They signify the union of two souls, and the coming together of the lives of two individuals. Not to mention, they are a whole different interpretation of the word “FUN” – the hustle-bustle of people, the joy on everyone’s faces, opportunities to drink and make merry.

Indian weddings in particular, are a lot of fun – they’re colourful, they’re loud, they’re thoroughly enjoyable. The clothes people wear; the many days of long drawn-out ceremonies; the many family members, the numerous relatives, the friends and acquaintances; the varieties of food, from the starters to the desserts; the ceremonies, mehendi and haldi and so on – everything works its magic in enhancing the charm of the great Indian wedding.

And people complain – they complain about the many days they have to spend in the wedding, they complain about the number of outfits they have to think of, they complain about the noise, they complain about the small talk they’ll be forced to make. Everyone has something negative to say about weddings, but at the end of it all who are they kidding? Everyone loves the big, fat Indian wedding.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

"In Search of Architecture" by Christopher Charles Benninger, Architect.

Architecture through history has always been a part of mentalities which criticize, question and ultimately rule the society. Architects have always left the lasting images of the societies which patronized them. As societies fade away it is the architect’s foot prints which remain as the patrons. They leave the final images by which each era is remembered---made into a myth.


Contemporary Architecture

The dominating role of the architect is fading in the fashion-driven market that gives form to most of our environment. Modern civilization seems to be enchanted by the realm of the image, by projecting the values of “packaging” to the determent of architectural contexts. Contemporary architecture is seen as a permanent surface decoration; the wrapping of materials around functional interiors. Urban deterioration and “ugliness” reside in the interaction between economy and politics in a manner which determines the role of architects in society. Mostly, contemporary architecture is a kind of escape from the vapid world of materialism, into a shallow amusement, or at best into self indulgent deception. It is aiming at a new creative statement which actually discloses a wide spread dearth of ideas. The architect is driven by tasteless clients to provide forms, colours and textures which are understood in the media of fashion as “being there,” when in fact the resultant buildings are nowhere. The architect has merely put his signature of approval on a client who craves for social recognition. Beyond the graphic frenzy; somewhere past the Babylon of symbols and signs, the abiding force of architecture demands a commitment to human dignity, an honest expression of materials and technology and a search for meaning, as opposed to the frantic stimulation promoted by current design trends.


On the Role of Patrons

One must add that goodness lies deep in the human soul and there are patrons [as opposed to clients] who call forth the good in the architect, and from such a relationship beauty can emerge. Whatever good we can achieve, lies deep in our patron’s faith in architecture and the free hand they give to “create something beautiful, which would be a lasting gift to the world.” Inundated by the desensitized environment, the
thrust of architecture constantly struggles to create precincts of peace and meditation. In such a sanctuary, protected and free from time---architecture exchanges its mechanical

form, and its crass packaging, for a poetic and mysterious one. The immediacy of contexts and their poetic ambiance reveales what is most real and fundamental. The architect must aspire to construct a sustaining spatial domain that goes beyond the allure of mere packaging.


Architecture and Fashion

Architecture reimpassions a world whose values have been destroyed. In an era when civilization has deployed its most devastating forces against man and his environment, architecture must maintain faith in a transcending future: a future that can mend a wounded world, crippled by the onslaught of signs, symbols, images, tricks and flippant styles; a future that challenges a society immersed in self-indulgent visions. Architecture ceases to be a mere “package” when it ceases to conjure fashion, and it begins to unfold its unique pursuit. It is in the bliss of its presence that architecture deducts from all the chaos a life - affirming reality.


Architecture and Context

My own pursuit for architecture was rekindled in the vast Sahayadris Mountains; in nature; where trees meet the sky; a place of unencumbered horizons, yet where nature dominates each possible view. There is a resolute beauty in the profusely barren hills of this dispersed environment, haunting in its solitude---not a solitude filled irreverently with the urbane glamour of disposability. The ever present mountains tenaciously project fantastic architectures of shade and form. During the hot seasons the mountains offer no shade from the relentless sun. During the monsoon the mountains offer no protection to push back the storm unleashed. In this natural setting one can not hide in fashions.

The mountains cast cool radiant shadows over villages, over lakes; across rivers and vast territories. Each shadow pointing to another; not contrived on economic impetuses [like a city], not devoid of any shared, transcending vision [like a city]. This is not a setting for the fabricated urban packaging, all wrapped in yesterday’s new idea. Architecture in such a setting must take a stance resisting alien, urban conditions, rather than a perpetuating attitude towards them. In this context I built my own institute, CDSA and more recently the Mahindra United World College of India.


Principles which Guide Design

The task of struggling in this awesome landscape, trying to find a meaningful way to build, drew me toward some abiding principles. It was under the cover of these principles that I felt prepared to address the mountains; to work with nature and to reject fashion. Let me be more specific about these principles---what values I feel should rule architecture:

Context

A building should be part of its context. It should reflect and extend the scale, proportions, textures and colours of the parent area. It should integrate into the existing movement system, into the contours, and into the visual back drop.

Scale

Buildings should engender a human scale. An inhabitant, or a visitor, should be greeted by a low-level landscape and entrance; move in under low spaces, or through a small foyer, and then be introduced to larger spaces which emphasize the human scale through counter-point. There should be motifs, like windows and doors, which scale down massive walls; or motifs like water spouts---which are almost antropromophic---which throw poetic shadows over strong stone walls.

Proportion

Buildings are assemblies of elements and motifs. These must all relate to one another. The sizes, measurers, placement of things, and locations of elements, must all fit into a system. Like a human body everything has its place, its proper size, its relationship to all the other parts. What appears to be fanciful must have some deeper logic.

Simplicity

“Genius,” Albert Einstein said, “is making the complex simple, not the simple complex.” In architecture this means one defines a language. For each element [support/
span/enclosure] of a building, or a campus, one must define the simple “words” one wants to use and stick to them. For “support” one could use the word stone bearing wall; for enclosure, one could use the word glass sliding walls; for span one could use the word sloped tile roof. What ever the words, choose them carefully and stick to them.

Nature

As far as possible we should use natural materials, expressing their inherent beauty. Climate, budget and context may temper this; we may have to dress a brick wall in plaster clothes and colour the plaster with paint. But we should seek out natural colours---earthen hues! Our buildings should not appear like over-decorated and painted hardequins. The natural beauty should come out. This aspect can be enhanced by merging landscape with built form---bringing the outside into the building. Courtyards, quadrangles, verandahs and porches all work toward this end.
Function

Buildings have specific functions, and more important generic functional systems as well. They demand to be divided into long spans and short spans; into noisy areas and quite areas; into public areas and private areas. The “zones” must be connected by an appropriate circulation system, dividing pedestrians from vehicles; service areas from user areas; etc.

Motifs/Decoration

Buildings are not mere machines to live in. They transcend mechanical necessity. But the spirit of transcendence must not be confused with the glitter of costume jewelry, with gaudy make-up---a kind of interior decoration turned inside out! A more relevant search may be for “motifs” or “objects” which solve little problems, and in doing so add an element of delight to our work. These could be water spouts; columns; steps; ottas; little windows, doors, statues, reliefs and lintels. These could be incidental, yet powerful adjectives and adverbs which describe and embellish our architectural language. These details must be used with constraint and consistency. They must play against the strong “nouns” and “verbs” of the architectural language [support enclosure, and span].

When I faced the Sahaydri Mountains; when I was constrained to speak in their hills; both humbled by their immensity, and encouraged by my ego, these principles became my code and with a certain confidence I attempted to create architecture

Friday, December 17, 2010

"Imagineering and the Creation of Space" by Christopher Charles Benninger, Architect.

A number of urban theorists have raised a core question regarding the determinants of urban form, urban planning and design. Most notable question the assumption that rational decision making by professionals would continue to be the method of designing urban spaces! Rather theorists propose that urban form could become just another commodity, a product to be consumed--- if not produced for profit. Or perhaps, as illustrated in God’s Own Junk Yard, our urban environment may become just a by-product, or worse still the residual flotsam of the production and consumption process?

The Power of Design

In Delirious New York, Koolhaus substantiates the formative role of “business” and “the market” in shaping large projects. No one really doubts that capitalism is the formative catalyst in molding its own artifacts, and in guiding the plans of “people’s governments,” as well. But capitalism goes beyond just profits…it is about ruling and about the “practice of power.” Capitalism is more than just making an efficient factory, or a profitable office building; it surpasses inventions, copyrights, packaging, marketing, sales and profits. It is about images that express decision-makers’ roles, and their domains of power! The idea of Chrysler, the idea of The Bank of China and the idea of Rockefeller are as much about imagery as anything else. Without an image, aggressive competitors would well have swallowed up these entities long ago. The same is true of nation-states. In international politics and multinational business, alike, there is a thin line between survival and successful imagery.

I propose we extend the argument into the realm of domains of power and how governments, corporations and other large institutions use urban spaces and urban places to temper their domains of power.

Autonomy and the Size-Hierarchy Scale

There is another issue of the self determination of urban designers that needs to be addressed here. The issue of artistic autonomy has been brought to question. While the “great man theory”, according to postmodernists may belong in the trash heap of history, there lingers as issue of the role of articulate and considered decision making by professional teams and their integrity in a process. Corporate imagineering, the deployment of virtual reality…. versus the creation of genuine expressions…. has been muted as an integrated issue. I would like to propose that the larger the artifact being designed, the less would be the autonomy, or the singular role, of any one “creator.” For that matter, even the autonomy of any major professional design team would reduce in proportion to the size, and scale, of any artifact being created. Opposed to this is transforming designed experiences into “branding experiences”, devoid of human scale, proportion and cultural content.

I feel Team Ten was exploring this dilemma way back in the 1960s, and that they were saying, “If no one is going to be responsible, if no one is going to be the designer, then it would only be through the creation of a value system, with related principles, that we can get quality out of large, urban infrastructure projects.”

Much of their work was in the form of experiments with smaller projects that would generate these principles. Aldo Van Eyk’s parks, his orphanage, and the Free University by Candilis Josic and Woods come to mind as significant experiments in this direction. There was also a concern that “methods,” the ‘international style” and other cookbook schools of thought were devoid of the kind of value base and lyrical expressions that urban fabric requires.

At the smaller end of this size-hierarchy scale, an individual can still design coffee cups, chairs and houses. The issues arise in the design of larger slices of urban fabric. While an artist can design his own chair, or make a sculpture, s/he cannot compose a town! This size-hierarchy scale seems to make eminent good sense, because a town design impinges on more people than a chair, and there are more technology options that will affect the lives and consumption patterns of thousands of households, enterprises and individuals in a town. On the other hand, the likes of General Motors should not become the “artists” either, effectively lobbying governments on the kinds of subsidies to be placed on energy, transport modes, roads and urban layouts!

What is disturbing is when a convergence begins to appear between thinking trends, corporate interests, and political naivety. The American creed of The New Urbanism, like the creed of CIAM, carries with it the danger of cookbook rules for urban design. Even Smart Growth, while reaching back to the panacea of formulae, labels non-believers as “libertarian.” In case you do not know, in Americaneese, that’s a bad word for individualism, conservatism in the sense of advocating individual freedom, over the common good. There is indeed a deeper issue here which urban designers and planners must address. Is autonomy what we are really looking for in the design process? Alternatively, are we not looking for design that responds to some kind of social and contextual contract; responds to principles and ways of thinking, but not to rules!

Anything Goes! Ugliness Can Be Pop Art!

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown began to look at urban landscapes in much the same spirit that Andy Warhol looked at cans of tomato soup…as a form of pop art, or relevant cultural expression. A “Coke can” is, no doubt, an important part of the popular iconography. But we cannot call it “popular art” either! The 1960s protest symbol, the raised fist, is “popular art.” Unlike people’s art, we are getting flooded with corporate, common images, which are thrust on the popular imagination. Times Square is a gross example of this, but it is happening in less obvious ways, in every setting. I have always had a deep, intuitive sense of doubt about Warhol, Brown and Venturi. In their desire to be catchy…to grab the public eye… they were dignifying ugliness, aligning themselves with a way of thinking---!

Koolhaus’s barons of New York City wanted their mega projects to act as icons of their family’s names and prestige---while profiting simultaneously! But this was more in the spirit of Renaissance patronage for self-aggrandizement, than advertising products or making spaces into products or mundane branding experiences!

Walt Disney Incorporated was, and is, on a very different path. It has designed several ‘brand name,’ spatial products…each having its own market niche and commercial value, which is packaged and marketed with great success. They each sell under names we all know, ranging from Mickey Mouse to the Pirates of the Caribbean. Recently the Disney Company has opened a real estate division that has moved “imagineering” off of the film sets and into the streets---the New Urbanism market place. The Millennium Township, near Disneyland in Orlando, is their first product. While Levitt Town’s were in the same genre---packaging the American Dream into an affordable commodity---the Millennium project rests more on imagery than on mere functional factors like good location and affordability. Studies like the Taste Makers and the Levittowners explored the use of ‘packaging’ and marketing to create consumer products out of urban fabric. Our concern here is, thus, a long-standing one.

Given that urban design and city-planning fall on the “large end” of the hierarchy of autonomy in art, it is clear that few individuals will sit alone and compose large-scale urban scenarios. What are the alternatives to corporate domination and its commercial iconography?

*. Participatory design;
*. Indigenous accretion;
*. Professional planning, and value based design teams, and/or;
*. And, still the individual visionaries.
All four are becoming ever more illusive propositions. Most likely a combination of these alternatives, would be employed by large corporate, or government entities.

How Spaces Use People

In fact, it is not so much the process of space creation, as the way the spaces are used, which should really matter. In this sense we should be more concerned with ‘conception’ than production. Or, conversely, how spaces use people should be a concern to us! Do we conceive this at the outset? Disney creates the spaces, the characters and the storyline. Disney begins with terms of reference, performance standards and a clear brief on the product elements and characteristics, with a clear focus on the targeted consumers. In fact the consumers and what the product must DO TO THEM, is the core of the brief. There is something here to be learned from corporate animations! As designers we must know what our compositions are doing, how they move people, how they play with emotions and experiences. What is objectionable though is that the Disney design method rejects context completely. If a lake is needed machines are brought in and one is made. If a lake is in the way it is filled! In a similar way people are conceptualized and made into the set characters. While the project makes the same claims of higher density, footpaths and common open spaces that most New Urbanism communities do, one questions the kinds in social interaction that may emerge. The high costs, isolation from work places and limited housing design types lead one to conclude that the community will be one for older, well-to-do Anglo Saxons! The Millennium project raises numerous social issues about heterogeneity, about occupational and job opportunities and about variety in communities. It is a product, not a community!

Some spaces are convivial and catalyze social interaction. They make interaction happen! Some spaces temper one’s curiosity and direct one’s interest. Other spaces respond to the need for variety and diversity. A spatial system can “set up” sequences of events and experiences which challenge the users spatial intellect. As an urban designer, one can create ‘hang out nooks,’ stairs to sit and sun oneself on, corners to hide in with a friend, and low walls to sit on and talk things out. A courtyard can be an empty, dull shell, or a lively outdoor café. There can be a sidewalk, and then there can be a sheltered arcade, with interesting little vendor stalls? Some spaces are of human scale, making one feel a part of the ambiance. Others are monumental and tell us of our insignificance! They are so scaled out that one is offended! Or, they are “gray areas,” which are devoid of any character or quality, and are abusive to the human spirit.

Many urban spaces are bland, colorless and have no textures. There is a message of neglect in these artifacts. They speak of an authoritarian attitude of governance toward citizens. I am reminded of a photograph in The Natural House labeled “Find the Citizen?” It is an aerial image of East Side of Manhattan through the bellowing exhaust of a thermo power plant.

Is Quality Measurable?

What should disturb us, as urbanists, is the quality of life being generated, and the scales on which we are able to conceptualize ‘quality.’ Kevin Lynch taught us that cities have several aspects, or elements, which can be enriched to improve the quality of urban places. He noted landmarks, boundaries and districts, amongst others. Lynch proposed that good urban fabric is not homogenous; it is varied and articulated. In The Image of the City he emphasized boundaries and landmarks, which give further articulation and meaning to urban places. An urban core can have its own unique edge, can have distinctive entries and can sponsor movement through a network of walkways and paths. Small parks, gardens and courtyards can further accentuate these experiences. Exploring an urban core can be an Odyssey through places, challenging ones’ senses, demanding one move further and deeper into unknown domains and precincts. Laying out such a scenario is no less than conceptualizing the cinematography of a film. We are designing experiences! There are urban elements, urban components and urban relationships, amongst and between them, which generate urban systems. It is essential that we identify these parts, analyze them in terms of how they ‘work’ on us, and assess how we feel and how we think they should be used.

There are also systems of ‘architectural values’ that are used and abused (contextual relevance, honest expression of materials; human scale; building modules based on anthropometrical dimensions and production sizes; graphic proportions, etc.). All of these factors come to one’s mind when lamenting the banality of the new urban forms emerging. These forms are more concerned with “appearances”, with skin, with packaging, than with any of the concerns and values I have noted above. While we should be moving into the four dimensional world of experience, such forms move us back into the two dimensions of graphics.


Most important are the unplanned, serendipity and pleasant human interactions which are facilitated and enriched by catalytic urban spaces: A chance meeting; eye to eye flirting; boy meets girl; and boy meets boy! Good urban fabric leaves the parks and the boulevards open for all to walk upon, hawk upon and play upon.


Images As Antidotes

America becomes a focus of thought, because it has a narrow vocabulary of traditional patterns from which to evolve new forms. There have been a plethora of books on American barns; on highway hoardings; on shopping centers; on massive industrial complexes… all with the intent of proving that there is, indeed, an American urban tradition that we can learn from. While such studies are popular American doctoral thesis topics, they exhibit little virtuosity in the form of defining an urban language. The repertoire is a very limited one to draw on! It raises the question, is Learning From Las Vegas possible? While bland America provides, so to speak, a ‘clean slate’ to work on, the reality is a milieu of “sameness,” or at best the trivia of endlessly repeated Disneyland imagery. The New Urbanism is a remake of the Leavitt Towns of Long Island. We’ve added sidewalks, Victorian gingerbread motifs, and front porches and then declared that a kind of miraculous ‘smart urbanism’ has resulted! Indeed the sameness, the trivia and the banality of the Leavitt Towns is more hurtful, because they are surely the tradition. Disney knew well the boredom of his compatriots, as well as their lack of exposure to varieties of experience. He provided an antidote of sorts, in the form of packaged milieus, each with its own contrived traditions and fantasized geographical settings, which were then effectively marketed as themes! The problem here lies within a kind of reality wrap; a large and influential society began to gain its intellectual and emotional stimulation from fantasy and escape. Substance began to fade away and wither into a new virtual reality, created and produced by corporations.

One laments, with a bit of nostalgia, that real places very much existed in America as recently as the early 1950’s, with there own styles, local dress mores, accents, and even food habits. There were places like Cross Creek in Florida that ate its own alligator soup, Key West where Hemmingway could escape to write, New Orleans with its own music and style, Cannery Row with its unique culture of poverty, Greenwich Village with real thinkers and painters. Even Faulkner’s hometown, Oxford Mississippi, has been transformed into a cartoon of the Deep South, a stylized hyper-image of itself. Any ambiance that had genuine qualities, or a unique character, was “made over” into a kind of hyper-reality of what the place once was in the public imagination, depleting its authenticity. These “made over” packages were then marketable---products for sale. Tourism became a vehicle to distribute these products to millions of consumers. These hyper-real settings provide relief to the real urban ambiance of Coca Cola signs, McDonald Arches, and curtain walled buildings.

If religion was the opiate of the masses in the Nineteenth Century, Walt Disney is the opiate of the masses today!

Tourism/Urbanism

In such a milieu, it seems appropriate that most genuine architecture is in the form of new art museums! And most genuine art is found in those museums. Galleries, where something “new” can be seen, either sell high-end “art investments,” or trivial “arts and crafts” brick-a-bract. Again these are largely destinations for tourists, who are the consumers of these products. There was a time when people traveled, without any planned schedules or destinations. They were seekers---adventurers! In fact the entire concept of “tourism” has emerged from consumer societies over the past several decades. The key requirement of the new tourism is that “nothing should happen!” There should be nothing unexpected, unplanned or serendipity. The new tourism that is conceived and packaged, allows people to consume places! Tourists use expressions like “let’s DO SPAIN” next year. Having DONE SPAIN, they will have to “do” some place else the following year. Again, consumerism! Tours have been designed, packaged and produced so that the essential qualities of a traveler, an explorer, or god forbid, an adventurer, are methodically distilled from the product. All risks, all dilemmas, and all strange people have been removed. Tourists do not need ingenuity to solve problems, to mediate with people, or to just plain make friends. In fact they want to consume people, instead of meet them. They feel uncomfortable unless the native people are being paid by them to do something for them.

Tourism has become an analogue for urbanism. Variety, diversity, and experiences are to be removed. Nothing unplanned, nothing unforetold, in short---nothing new should happen!

Meaning Systems

Having thrown up that paradigm, I would now like to drift into my work in the Himalayas. Here we are planning a new capital city that is an over-lay on to an existing scenario. To describe that scenario fully would take thousands of words. So, instead I would like to explain to you what a prayer flag is! In a way it is an analogy to an urban design.

In its most simplistic form, a prayer flag is a form of votive offering. A very long strip of cloth is tied along a very tall pole! The color of the cloth signifies a mood. The mood may signify an event, like a death in a community, or the initiation of a new house, or the starting of a new season! It may just forebode of good will! If one looks closer at the cloth, there are characters hand painted or block printed on to it, which are in fact words, which lay out mantras. As the wind blows over these flags, it is believed that the mantras are endlessly let off in to the breeze, and that they float about over the city.

When one walks through Thimphu valley, along the Wangchhu’s clear streams, they are enclosed by verdant forests, which reach up the mountain walls from the river. There at the top, or better said, at the edge--- making a silhouette of the hills against the endless blue sky---one can make out a strange articulation. If one looks more closely, and analyses that edge, it is finely articulated by rows of large prayer flags, of varying heights and configurations, presiding over the city, letting off their favorable mantras!

So we have this image and there is also this hidden meaning. The city is being protected, enriched and empowered by this guardian wall of auspicious prayer flags!

There are other artifacts, with other meanings. There are mani walls, or prayer walls; there are prayer wheels; there are chortens with prayers inscribed within them; there are lakhangs, or temples, and there are monasteries full of monks. There are also gateways, which welcome visitors. There are decorative signs and symbols, which emanate good feelings. And there are prayer flags that preside over the Thimphu Valley and gather the geographic space into a “place.” Spaces are empty; places are full of meaning!

All of these artifacts---all of the meanings they communicate---charge the atmosphere with an aurora. The mutual understanding of this meaning system, and the sharing of its aurora, generates a deep form of conviviality.

These artifacts then, are kinds of mechanisms created to generate meanings. And these meanings are shared feelings and sentiments of the inhabitants. These meanings are the essence of their community.

So now there are the elements of “shared meanings,” and “conviviality” in place making.

Urban Verbs

Just as Kevin Lynch defined districts, boundaries, landmarks, etc. as the nouns of urban design, I would propose these meanings are the “verbs.” They begin to move feelings and sentiments in directions, just as static, immobile “nouns” in literature need verbs to “get things going.”

In this context decoration becomes important because different motifs become symbols of various intangible attributes: like “good luck.” By applying, what appear to be decoration, onto these components, additional meanings and emphasis is provided. Are these then not the adjectives and adverbs of urban design?

All of these signs, symbols and elements become a language, which “speaks” a knowledge system.

The “auspicious” is elemental to the Bhutanese knowledge system; just as the “rational” is elemental to our own Western systems of thought.

The Urban Uniform

New York City, the Cartesian grid, the ‘x’ and the ‘y’ axis, are all our tools for thinking. We Westerners are mental animals of paradigms; we tend to think of one thing versus another, of ’x’ versus ‘y.’ We like a world of good versus bad, of polar views. We feel very comfortable with questions which ask if there is a god or not, but the idea of their being multiple manifestations of something, or many aspects of an idea, is not a comfortable proposition. Part of this emerges from our written tradition, as opposed to verbal ones. The written tradition means we must be able to write things down, and that begins to mould how we think. For example there are thousands of Hindu gods! It is not really practical to write about several thousand gods---One with a few saints---that’s within the bounds of the written media. Verbal traditions are more expansive, flexible and imaginative. Pagnini, the two thousand aphorisms on language, was put to written form four hundred years after it was created. It was passed on over those years through root memory from teacher to student! Consider a mandala? It is a four dimensional diagram! It is a diagram of the universe, which describes matters in terms of mythological beings and places and relationships between places. Most important, every significant thing is a manifestation of something else; and has hundreds of forms of manifestations! These can be ‘avatars’ or accretions. And these are not mere forms of things, but interpretations of feelings, moods and attitudes.

The experience of ‘this life’ then is an adventure, that of a traveler, not of a tourist. Nothing is sure, or truly understood, or if it is--- it can be looked at in many different ways. Milind Kundera, in The Art of the Novel, opines that ‘uniforms’ possess the Western mind. He explores the possibility of a culture of ‘multiforms.’ He laments the fading of individual choice, the loss of the inner freedom; the absence of uniqueness! I feel we must address the same issue in urban planning and design. In another essay, Slowness, Kundera vents his anguish on the ‘hyper-experiencing’ that characterizes contemporary life. Everything is momentary, fleeting, at high speed; one image comes quickly over the other, like the nervous clicking from channel to channel, from website-to-website, while one is still bored even of the clicking itself! What is most disturbing about the emerging, consumer generated ambiance, is that it is a kind of media for a Cartesian, monosyllable kind of thinking. It is devoid of variety, of differences and of manifestations. It is fundamentalist in the worst sense! There is a subtle fascism in it all. Boredom is the least of its sins; mono-thinking, intolerance and a kind of mental blindness are the deeper states, which are causes for concern.

The Ethos of Urban Space

Image-makers are media makers, and we define and design the ‘ethos’ that control essential feelings. “Ethos,” according to Gregory Bateson who created the term, is the way a culture emotes about events and happenings. When Bateson derived this term he saw it as a tool to distinguish between cultures according to their defining elements. He knew that the way people felt about events and places, was the way they were---their essential culture.


Different spaces emote different behavior. In India visitors to Hindu temples, instinctively remove their footwear, regardless of their own religion. Entering a mosque will evoke hushed silence. While in a marriage shamiana there may be a lot of chitchatting. Places then emote signals, which request specific forms of behavior, let off an ambiance. Imagineering, no? A thread of history woven into everyday behavior,yes!

A Design Approach: The Differentiated Web

The basic concept of the Thimphu Plan is to create a network, or movement system, which separates pedestrians from vehicles, and which promotes movement. By movement, I do not mean movement for fun or pleasure---I mean movement that engenders social interaction! The concept is not so much a geographic one as a conceptual one. If there are “server and served” spaces, as in Kahn’s sense of things, then the web is a facilitator to various specialized modules of spaces that have to fit into the web---houses, shops, religious and institutional structures. We decided at the outset, to use the traditional building components of the Himalayas as a kind of “Logo Set” to play with. The Served Spaces, or Buildings, could be plugged into or “set-into” this network. We see the network as a “differentiated web.” One line of the web becomes a long corridor, or as Shadrach Woods would have said, a STEM. The stem runs parallel; along the riverbed and is so planned that over decades it can adapt to newer, and varied technology. Trunk infrastructure would also run along the corridor. The corridor will be differentiated by Nodes and by Hubs. The nods and hubs are points in the system that are in fact public transport stops, place of modal split, as well as the centers of various types of pedestrian precincts! The nature of these precincts are discussed below.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

It's the most wonderful time of the year...


Christmas is here, and everyone is in the spirit of things. It’s the season of joy and love and happiness and cheer. Not to forget, it is also the season of PRESENTS! While receiving presents is more joyful than most things, giving them may not be so joyful. Because let’s face it, people are difficult to shop for. The perfect gift doesn’t exist. And if it does, it’s extremely elusive. And every ounce of excitement is taken up by the thought of that perfect gift.

Most people prefer giving gifts that mean something, rather than store-bought, mass-produced items which don’t have any personality. But how many personalized gifts can be made this close to the day? The easiest option one has, and yet the most thoughtful, is the gift bag – the one gift that is perfect for everybody and all seasons. Christmas or not, gift bags are the best gifts to get people. Goody bags filled with tiny knick-knacks are sometimes mean the most to people. The goody bags don’t have to be too big, or too expensive. And at the end of the day, the thought will be enough of a gift for the receiver.

So go ahead, and enjoy the most wonderful time of the year!

"Evidences" by Christopher Charles Benninger, Architect.

As a child I spent my days drifting in confusion. Nothing particularly inspired me, nor did my studies, or my teachers, enthuse me to seek knowledge. My parents were of the opinion that by putting me in a school I would be educated! They made half-hearted attempts to introduce me to the Christian church, believing that religion and spiritualism were one and the same. School, church, gymnasia, auditoria, the playing fields and most of what transpired within them seemed a dull cloud hovering over me with no respite.

What did move me were the autumn trees in yellows, reds and oranges, and their winter nude, black fingers reaching for the sky, with the fresh white snows of winter covering the fields. Then the black fingers frosted with white powder snow, with the warm sun momentarily melting them to water, turning the stick trees to huge, gleaming, crystal candelabras of ice-glass glittering in the sun. The setting on of spring, with the last snows of early April; the first flowers spurting through the soft white carpets, turning to the green carpets of nature claiming the earth as its own. The grey, angry skies of winter, breaking loose to the pink and violet morning heavens of spring….these were the things which grabbed at me and drew my attention! Dulled by my school hours, I was awed by small discoveries on my walks to and from my school. My personal life was composed of all things natural and my friends were the chipmunks, squirrels in the trees and the rabbits in the forests. My grades were poor and my parents sent me for counseling!

Post-war America in the early 1950’s; the social and economic milieu of a nation starved by decades of depression and war; the institutional ambiance left over from decades of neglect; all reflected themselves in the soulless, cold institutional architecture where I studied, lived and played. The regimented lessons, competitive sports, the organized Boy Scouts, and the moralistic church all imparted biases, prejudices and a judgmental bent of mind! These institutions of opportunity, were actually the machines of conformity, all designed to churn out little copies of one another, entrapping the new citizens in molds of pretended individualism. We all wore Levis, “T-shirts,” tennis shoes and white socks. Even our underwear was a choice between Fruit of the Loom for slacks, or a Bike jock under jeans! When pink shirts, little pink suede belts, black pants and pink suede shoes were “in,” we all felt very different, all wearing the same uniforms! And even Elvis Presley crooned, “Don’t step on my pink suede shoes!” How different we all thought we were, wearing the same uniforms and listening to the same music.

As a youth, I once boarded the “Tube” in London to Wimbledon, immediately focusing on three very individualistic looking skin heads, with black unkempt jeans, black “T-shirts” and black leather jackets. Just over from the States they looked weird and unusual! With their shaven heads and casual, sloppy black attire, these boys seemed very idiosyncratic and individualistic! At the next stop five more boys dressed in exactly the same attire boarded the Tube, then at the next stop ten more, and finally the entire train was packed by these uniformed clones, all packaged and decorated to be individuals. At Wimbledon thousands of these robots were vomited out onto the platform, courtesy the London Metropolitan Transport Authority! In my childhood one needed a uniform, even to be an individual! Later my teacher John Kenneth Galbraith described our society as the “military-industrial complex,” and explained how a vast “free enterprise” was controlled and directed toward the construction of a powerful nation state vectored to rule the world. My boyhood friends were becoming narrow minded, ethnocentric and sour hearted souls, molded to work in factories, in banks, in schools, in hospitals and ready to die for mother, country and apple pie in foreign lands!

Thus, my childhood was composed of two very different parts, each giving meaning and distinctness to the other. Like the Yin and the Yang, a white and a black force intertwined within me, chasing after one another. The black made the white more pure and beautiful, and the white made the black more foreboding and ominous! I suppose, even today there seems to be a contradiction in me. On the one side there is my love of beauty and pleasure, my search for volume, space and form all defined in light. On the other side there is my concern with poverty, inequality and environmental deterioration. I am often asked how one balances, or even justifies, these two apparently variant natures?


A MAGIC GIFT

One Christmas morning, the myth of Santa Claus, and the ritual of giving gifts was to begin, with the usual tree all decorated in tensile, blinking colored lights and glass bulbs uncrated a few days earlier, to be repacked a few days later for the years to come. My eyes were quickly drawn to a gift I had not foraged in my parent’s usual pre-Christmas hiding places. I knew the others from looking under their bed, in the attic or in the high shelf over my father’s cupboard, where he hid his condoms and porn magazines. Strange, I thought, that I’d somehow missed this in my stealthful investigations of the previous week! It was in green paper with a bright red ribbon, flat and rectangular. So I reached for it first, as our small family of parents and one sister took turns about the tree with gasps of surprises, opening boxes we’d surreptitiously uncovered just a few days before. I suppose the real fun of Christmas was the cheating, the sneaking into others’ private hiding places, finding out what we’d get and the charade of surprise! But I’d missed this one! Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, who’d clearly flown in the night before on his sled, pulled by reindeer, slid down our chimney and snuck into our living room to leave this special gift for me.

Like millions of Americans on that fateful morning, I reached out for the most intriguing of gifts with my name on it, not realizing that it would change my life forever. It was a book from my favorite aunt, Roxanne Eberlein. She was my favorite because of all my three aunts she traveled the most; she was the most thoughtful, and she was having an affair with Adlai Stevenson, who insisted on running for President of the United States twice and loosing. The guise of their relationship was her being his confident, executive secretary and advisor. As a child, this was particularly embarrassing on the day after the elections! It happened twice in about four years! He redeemed his position in my childish mind when President Kennedy made him the United States Ambassador to the United Nations! This came along with the Ambassador’s residence on the top of the Waldorf-Astoria Towers, about forty-two floors over Park Avenue, which he used perhaps twenty days in a year, leaving it to the nieces and nephews of his lover, and even to his own children from a past marriage. Besides my sister and I, who were regular freeloaders at the Waldorf, were Sir Robert Jackson, who was re-organizing the United Nations, and his wife, the economist-Chairperson of the BBC, and the once-upon-a time editor of the Economist, Barbara Ward. Natalie Owings, daughter of the famous architect Nathaniel Owings, along with Stevenson’s son, John Fell, also dropped by. I slept under huge water lilies rendered by Claude Monet in oils from his garden at Giverny, loaned to the Embassy by the Metropolitan Museum of Art!

Back to the book! It was written by the architect called Frank Lloyd Wright, and though in black and white (this was in the mid-1950s) every picture and every drawing grasped my imagination. As I read the first words, sentences, paragraphs and pages, I became catalyzed and moved! As I read through The Natural House I discovered who I was and what I wanted to be. At least I gained the first insight to what my life’s search would be all about. Reading the pages, I felt like a reincarnated avatar discovering who he had been in previous lives, and what he’d be in this one! It was not just that I liked the designs and the drawings and the photographs, and that I found meaning in the words. It was a testament that unfolded a truth to me that actually already dwelled deep within me! Something that had always been there inside of me, concealed from me, was now unfolded. I suppose this is what is called INSPIRATION?

From the moment I opened The Natural House, I did not put it down until I completed the last page. In a sense I have never put it down and I am still reading it, discovering and searching for what inspired me on that Christmas Day. When I closed the book and walked out of my house, I was living in a different world. It was after midnight and the black sky was clear with thousands of stars gleaming in the heavens. Everything I saw looked different. It was not only nature which was singing a song in my heart, but my soul had switched on and my mind had begun to think! I saw things which I had never noticed before. Finely carved balustrades caught my fancy! Sculpted stone gargoyles made me smile. I noticed that one wood was different from another in its color, grains, nature and use. I was drawn to feel wood and to slide my fingers across it, appreciating its inner soul. I noted that a wood floor was warm in the winter and cozy to look at, while a marble floor was cool in the summer and soothing to sit upon. Stained glass windows, fine brass handles, well thought out paving patterns were my friends. I spoke to them, and I argued with sloppy workmanship and clumsy details.

Wright taught me that the human mind is a huge analogue for all things beautiful and all things ugly. He taught me that a human being is both a monster and a saint all rolled up into one; capable of creating incredible beauty, or of inflicting deplorable destruction. It is the human mind which separates humans form other animals, which makes us the monsters of terror and the creators of poetry, art and architecture. We alone can know the exhilaration of transcendence!

After The Natural House, the Yin and the Yang in me merged into one presence. Instead of playing each other out and exhausting me in confusion, the black force empowered the white beauty! I was now driven in whatever I did. And, good luck played an important role in my life too!

I gave up on education and embarked on a search! Something magical had grasped me. I stopped attending church and I forsook religion, finding spiritual moments in fits of creative discovery. I quit the Boy Scouts and began scouting for the real boy I was. I began a search for myself, which continues.

There is a story in Hindu mythology that when Yasoda opened Krishna’s mouth and looked into it she gasped with amazement, seeing the entire universe! She also saw a glimpse of herself! In Wright’s words and works I saw a glimpse of my own creative possibilities and I was galvanized to go forth and seek! I saw that there was a chance that I too may one day search and discover something of my own, which is but a small slice of the universe.

NOTE TO A YOUNG STUDENT

What Wright taught me was very simple: seek out the truth, find the generic order in things! See beauty in the TRUTH! What he meant by The Natural House was the natural self and the natural life! Buildings are merely mirrors of the people who live in them. They reflect how people behave, how people think, what their aspirations are and how they deal with materiality! They illustrate how evolved people are in their spiritual realizations; whether they live for material things, or they manipulate material things to reach transcendence? They place people and societies somewhere along a scale between beasts grabbing at survival to saints blessed with transcendental awareness. They distinguish people who only “take,” from patrons who nurture and “give.” Buildings indicate the extent to which people are in touch with the environment they live in; part of the context of the places within which they build, and harmonious with the social traditions and modalities which bring bliss and peace. Teachers like Liane Lefaivre and Alex Tzonis reinforced my credo, through their work on what they call Critical Regionalism, in which new functions and technologies are integrated with places, climates and cultures.

I believe there is something called GENERIC ARCHITECTURE: that is architecture of carefully composed fabrics, of structures, of systems, of materials that all participate in a common order of nature, tradition, appropriate technology and social harmony. There is some rational stream of thought, some common process of analysis, some general considerations and modalities of study, which are always the precursors of beauty! In this there are eternal principles, truths and modalities, bringing all architecture into one immense realm of knowledge. In this sense we all belong to one huge “gharana” of architecture whose past masters are Michelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci, the Emperor Akbar and Thomas Jefferson!

Today we live in a world dominated by contrivers, posing as architects, who are just screaming and shouting for personal attention. Our “architectural world” is like a crèche full of anal retentive babies all whining and screaming to be noticed by anyone who will look at them. I would say these charlatans are less famous, and more notorious. Like the Bandit Queen, they are well known for their outrageous acts, rather than understood and appreciated for their contributions in a common search. As urban planners they carve out their own city blocks and surround them with walls, turning once friendly public domains into private spaces one pays to get in to. Inside of these secured, commercial turfs stuntmen are employed to amaze us with things bizarre! We live in an age when “being different” is mistaken for “being creative.” Ours is a time when “doing something new is mistaken for creating beauty! Being different often means being a conformist of a specific nature. The skin heads of my youth were seeking non-conformity through uniforms, so that they would be accepted into a larger group! Instead of seeking to be different, we should seek to be ourselves and to be happy with ourselves, whoever we are. Only when we are happy with ourselves, can we make other people happy with the honest products of our honest toil.

In October 2001 I was invited to make a presentation at the European Biennale at Graz. I noticed something very interesting! To be a “creative artist” in Europe, you need not create anything, but you must wear the black uniform of the artist! You must dress totally in black. You must wear black shoes, black socks, black pants, black belts, black shirts with black buttons and black ties. When the cold rains blow in you must wear a black jacket and a black hat. I found that the super creative Europeans (as opposed to the merely creative ones) wear black capes! For these people creativity is not a form of liberation, or the finding of the truth. It is the creation of a lie in the form of a self imposed trap, and a make-believe world. There are people in America and in Europe who never design anything, never search, never question, but who dress in the costume of creators. They worry over finding just the right black g-strings and bikinis! They are seeming and not being! If I were to speak out any advice to a young student, I would say, BE NOT SEEM! Carrying this paradigm further, there is an entire industry in the West creating images and promoting the “uniforms of creativity,” at the cost of the truth. This is called the media, the fashion industry, public relations and notoriety! The taste makers are telling thoughtless people what is “beautiful” and what “art” is. The taste makers are telling people to drop the names of fakers who can not even paint! There are people who pay to be photographed drunk at parties, standing about with illiterate chatterati, thinking of nothing, making no contributions to this world. This projects an image to the youth of our times, that these notorious personalities have achieved something.

It would be better to live as ones own self in oblivion, than to be notorious for living in a trap! And this is exactly what the modern world is becoming: a trap! Brilliant professionals and artists are leaving their friends and native places finding wealth and huge spaces, but emptiness. They work in cold offices to be granted two weeks of vacation in a year when they can “be themselves.” They wear “correct uniforms” and speak politically correct statements, dropping the right names and muttering endless clichés! From dreaming of creating beauty, they end up worrying how they will pay their house loan installments and their credit card bills! They think by wearing black, that they can live the make-believe life of a creator, when in fact they are slaves of conformity. I hope that all young artists, poets and architects who read this will avoid all of the uniforms and traps. Be yourselves and never seem to be what you are not.

TEACHERS AND GURUS

So my life as an architect, which began in my early teens, has been a life of searching for truth. At first, when Wright visited me, I felt I had been visited by the Archangel and that I was the only anointed one! How wrong I was. Revisiting Wright some years later I realized that most of what one learns is learned from others. One cannot know everything and need not know anything! But one must search! One can learn from a leaf by studying its shape, its veins and its tapestry. One can learn from the spiral of a sea shell. One can watch birds in flight as they glide in the sky, or just study cloud patterns meandering about, for subtle structure and illusive orders in our minds. One will learn through search and not through mugging up knowledge!

I have known Buddhists who frown on kicking stones, because they know that even stones have souls. There is structure and beauty in everything on this earth. In each part of the universe is the entire universe! Pick up any stone and study it and you will discover the truth of its texture, shape and strength. Perhaps a good teacher just teaches us to look down our own mouths and to see the universe. A good teacher never teaches facts or knowledge; they open windows on how to search, or maybe even just to search. Maybe the “how” and the “what” should be left to each student? Teachers, I realize, do not tell us of techniques, or put facts in our heads. What they do is inspire us to search for the nature of things, the truth in matters, which is where beauty dwells. They often do this by revealing a glimpse of beauty through humor, through a bit of unexpected love, or maybe in some quick sketch revealing the rudimentary simplicity of some highly complex system. “Genius,” Einstein said, “is making the complex simple; not making the simple complex!”

My true gurus have always been able to cast such unexpected light on the world. I remember the great architect Anant Raje taking me to meet his mentor one Sunday afternoon in Philadelphia. Luis Kahn had privileged us several hours alone with him in his studio. A bit of good luck! At one point he crumpled up a sheet of A4 paper and handed me a pencil and asked me to quickly sketch it! As a young professor of architecture at Harvard, I was keen to impress Kahn, so I immediately began creating a brain like image, trying to get in all of the impossible complexity. Pretty good I thought, not knowing I had entered the Master’s labyrinth! He threw a fatherly laugh at me, grabbing my pencil and making four quick line strokes into a rectangle of the A4 proportions! He had showed me a nature of myself to overlook obvious simplicity, in search of wrong, complex truths!

Creative attempts, exploratory acts and processes of discovery are modes that search for self! I have heard Kahn talking to bricks in Ahmedabad and philosophizing at the Fogg Gallery about the sky being the ceiling of his grand courtyard in the Salk Institute. But this one “teacher’s trick” was a personal gift to me, that I shall never forget. Inspirations are always in the form of gifts of one kind or the other. Gifts of inspiration are perhaps in the form of an image such as a quick sketch, or a gesture (like a smile, just when we need encouragement), but it is always in a sign of what we can be, what we can envision and what we can become. My own attempts at architecture are but small analogues of something I yearn to discover, to draw into myself, and to make a part of me. These are my feeble attempts at becoming something, which is already there within me, yet undiscovered.

In the early 1970’s I founded the School of Planning at the Centre for Environmental Planning in Ahmedabad, India. There my friend and mentor, Balkrishna Doshi, had just returned from a visit to Venkateshwara Temple at Tirupati. I was eager to hear of his experiences and what had transpired within him on his pilgrimage there. He whipped out a thick, old fashioned ink pen and drew three instant lines, which captured the entire essence of the mountain top temple in a second. Again, amazed at seeing the entire universe revealed to me at one instance, I saw in Doshi the true genius that he is. But I also saw something that was within me that I did not know. I could read his abstraction, because the nature of the temple, the generic character of its simplicity, and therefore the beauty, was already a part of the catalogue of my mind. Doshi had merely revealed this existing truth to me. In fact when I went to Tirupati years later I was a bit disappointed. The clarity which Doshi had revealed to me lay hidden in the complexity of the masses of pilgrims and the chaos of the management of the place. Temporary shamiyanas hid much of the temple’s form. I understood that the “truth of Venkateshwara Temple” was not something one just looked at and saw. It took a deeper understanding of the elemental structure of the complex composition and the ability to see through the chaos and the managerial machinations to get at the root of what was there. Once more the lesson of simplicity, of the elemental, of the generic!

Again, I would repeat that my own architecture is but an analogue of something I yearn to know, a utopia I desire to create; a glimpse of paradise in its pristine reality; maybe some bit of heaven; or a small glimpse of the universe I’d see if I could gaze into Krishna’s mouth, revealing my own vast truth, proving the larger conceptualization possible! Whatever the search, we must keep in our minds that what we are searching for is already there; something deep inside of us, undiscovered waiting to be found. We also have to realize that all humans participate in that discovery and we are often shocked to see something and feel, “Hey, I’ve been hitting at exactly the same idea!” T. S. Elliot seemed to understand that we are all part of the same endless search for truth, when he wrote in The Sacred Wood, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” In that sense there is just one large studio and we are all the draftsmen of its inspiration! We work with the same vision and the same passion for truth and beauty.

Thus, searching often deals with the study of precedents, with study tours to classical monuments and seeking truth in prototypes. As a young architect I thought each design was a unique creation! Great designers just reached into the sky and pulled ingenious confabulations down from the heavens. I was thus disappointed one day when my teacher Jose Luis Sert gave me the unusual privileged of visiting the “model room” where he explored new concepts through Styrofoam models at different scales. Too busy himself to explain things to me he asked Joseph Zelewski, his Senior Associate, to do the honors. As my past teacher at Harvard, and though thirty years older to me, Joseph was my best friend at the time and was very keen to hear what a younger designer thought of the new town Sert was creating on an island, just off the coast of Marseille in France.

The opportunity to create a new town, on a craggy mountain island grabbed my imagination. I could see all kinds of new forms jutting out of the huge rocks over the sea! But to my disappointment Sert chose to make this work into a kind of summation of all of his past principles and prototypes! It was to me a terribly rational, collection of years of work. Each part could be seen in Sert’s publications and he had seemingly just assembled all of these parts in to a large, no doubt beautiful, landscape! Joseph could sense the disappointment on my face, and as he suggested we go to lunch he asked for my thoughts. Headed down the long, double running flight of stairs to Church Street, a sudden flash of light ran up the dark chasm, and the short, round figure of Sert made a black image in the light ascending the stairs. At a kind of moment of truth, a few steps below us Sert asked, “So what did he think of it?” Being truthful and putting me in an awkward position, Joseph said, (just as Sert passing me, looking me straight in the eye) “He says that there’s nothing new!” My fears that this would anger the master to call me to his office immediately evaporated as he burst out laughing! A few steps further up he turned back and said, “You know Christopher, this is not California!” He was mocking a place famous for having to be different; for everyday craving to be new; and in a frenzy to be unique. Now even Joseph smiled realizing that all was right in the heavens, and that this young upstart had been put in his place!

The search and struggle for discovery are a difficult set of processes. But one can struggle, and should not sit waiting for miracles to fall from the heavens. As Le Corbusier said, “Creation is a patient search.” Le Corbusier used to tell his protégés to start thinking over a design problem, then to put it away in the head, and like a computer in hibernation the head keeps secretly working on the design! My teacher Jerzy Soltan, who wrote Le Modular with Le Corbusier, has always been a firm believer in this. He always encouraged me to take up two or three designs at one time, and to move my conscious mind between them. But a little inspiration always helps!

Many young designers doubt if that magic called “inspiration” actually exists. If I mention music and ask them the name of their favorite song and then why they like it, they know they have been inspired! Some people get inspired hearing a romantic song that touches their heart and they yearn to sing and they do sing! Noise becomes music. Some people get inspired reading poetry and they yearn to write sonnets and they do create lyrics! Scattered sounds, miscellaneous words, a melody and some tones become magical moods!

STUDENTS AND TEACHERS

A wise sage I once met in his cave-retreat somewhere on the rocky slopes of Mount Abu preferred to read my fate from my palm! As a young student of the empirical school of thought, I withdrew from his inane suggestion, thinking what my teachers at Harvard and MIT would think of a protégé who curried the favors of sages for their fate? But he charmed me with his flashing eyes and warm smile, and questioned my logical abilities to reject his findings, should I find them so whimsical? I suppose his charisma, directed at me through his piercing eyes, and the lyrical landscape of the forested mountain slopes, perched high over the desert of Rajasthan, swayed me like some magical potion.

He told me that I was a person of little wealth, but of great fortune! He declared that luck was my life’s companion.

Tempted further, I coaxed him, “But what do you mean by good luck?”

With an incredulous sneer on his face, he informed me that there is only one kind of good luck in life and that such good luck is to have good teachers!

I felt a chill spread over my skin, as if a sudden wave of cold air blasted the desert air, leaving goose pimples momentarily all about me. He had unraveled a truth within me that he could never have made out from my appearance or from his imagination! I knew he was correct and that I would be a fool to reject what wealth may come my way! From that day on, what had been a youth’s good fortune became a life’s endless search! To meet wise people became a passion.

I believe that passion, and my fated trajectory of good luck, have navigated my life’s story from a childhood Christmas gift to friendships, chance meetings, teacher-student relationships, professional associations, chancing an encounter with my life partner, and to work with some of the most inspiring people of our times. Most of the great teachers I have had are anonymous, little known and often my own students and studio associates.I must admit that I have been fortunate to have had many, many inspiring mentors.

As a teenager four young teachers touched me and motivated me. One, Norman Jensen, a little known but great painter, would laugh at my aerial view sketches and ask me, “Why don’t you draw what you see?” Harry Merritt was a classic modernist, building unpublished masterpieces in North Florida. Though shy for publicity, he carried the stature of a Master. He made us proud to be young architects. He was an “architect’s architect” who made us follow strict rules. He preached a truth in every decision, shooting rational questions at our every line. “If a closet projects out of the wall on this elevation and it’s doing the same thing on another, than the expression has to be the same!” He called this “honesty of expression.” Robert Tucker was a teacher to the core. Thoughtful, humorous, probing and penetrating, he knew how to take us down into the depths of our weaknesses, only to pick us up to euphoria of some small strength the next day. He knew the craft of creation; he saw within each student their own little nugget of gold; and taught us all how to become small jewelers, crafting within the limitations of what we had, instead of wishing to be something we were not! Blair Reeves was a father image who nurtured young architects, having them by the dozens to his beautiful modern wood and glass house for food and slide shows of the masters’ works. His own house was a living example which he need not talk of…it was there! He taught the introductory course to architecture hopefuls, wherein about two hundred aspirants were registered for his lectures. In the first lecture he would ask everyone to stand up. Then he’d ask the front half of the students to sit down, stating “this is how many of you who will be left at the end of this course!” Then he’d ask half of the hundred left to sit down, saying, “This is how many of you who will be here at the end of this first year!” Finally, he’d have twenty of us standing and say this is perhaps how many of you who will graduate as architects; of whom half of you may ever build a structure you design!” But Reeves was not the terrorist this story makes him out to be. He was a thoughtful nurse to the survivors! As the semester wore on, and the number of empty seats grew, he introduced to us the huge canvas of modern art, architecture, design and the people who created the modern movement. His true love though was the preservation of historic buildings and he introduced us modernist fundamentalists to the fact that we have a history, that we live in a history, and that we are a part of the continuum of history.

Many of my mentors were my classmates and contemporaries. Marc Trieb who teaches at Berkeley and I shared a small “match-box” cottage in Gainesville. His recent books analyze what makes modern landscape architecture what it is, how the Bay Area Style emerged from its context and how Le Corbusier conceived the Electronic Poem! At the 1962 American Institute of Architects Annual Convention in Miami, we ignored the thousands of commercial architects down for the party, seeking out Paulo Solari and Buckminster Fuller who were there to win Gold Medals and give major lectures. Solari was very approachable, walking about in leather shorts and barefooted in the grand Americana Hotel. On the last night there was a huge dinner on the open grounds of the Hialeah Race Course where thousands of happy architects ate and drank, catching up with old friends. Aged only nineteen, Marc and I had yet to discover the miracles of hallucinates! Totally sober we walked bored about the tables of drunkards, laughing and singing merely! With some amazement we noticed Fuller and his wife surrounded by admirers, but alas drunk admirers! We joined the table and managed to move the discussion from boisterous questions, into things more to Fuller’s interest! After a few minutes he turned to us and said, would you like to join my wife and I back at the Americana? Bright eyed youth that we were, we jumped at the opportunity. In the coffee shop we stayed up until two in the morning, asking a few questions and getting long answers. Some years later on Doxiadis’ yacht in the Aegean Sea I was amazed when the great man walked up to me, shaking my hand, and asking what I had been doing over the past five years. This was the kind of personal touch, which today seems unbelievable. Marc Trieb has gone on to be a great teacher too. Bruce Creager and Gene Hayes, just a few years our seniors kept us spell bound with their seemingly vast experience readily shared with us over candle lit dinners and wine. Peter Wilson has continued through the years to be my alter ego. Daniel Williams has become America’s leading Green Architect. Thomas Cooper is a devoted New Urbanist with whom I can openly argue a counterblast. Edward Popko creates the IBM software from which great ships are built, and many others who were my classmates from those times have gone on to gain recognition in their chosen paths. At MIT and Harvard my classmates and later my students were great sources of inspiration. Urs Gauchat has gone on to turn the New Jersey Institute of Technology School of Architecture from no place to some place, giving up a successful practice in Boston to do so! Michael Pyatok, my closest confidant in Sert’s Masters Class, is America’s leading proponent of affordable housing. He builds what he talks about! Christine Boyer, at Princeton, has written the profound analysis on planning and capitalism, which is required reading in every school of planning. Anna Hardman carries on our tradition at MIT, enriching students and fellow faculty. What I am trying to emphasize here is that like sand on the beach, gurus are everywhere. It is for us to find them and to learn from them.

In Herman Hess’s classic Siddhartha, a student walking in the forest seeking The Great Teacher, happens upon Lord Buddha and asks him if he knows where The Teacher is. Lord Buddha explains to the boy that there are no teachers, only seekers of truth!

When I went to Harvard University to do my master’s degree in architecture and to study urban planning at MIT, I was surrounded great teachers, who had loomed in my head like rock stars did in my contemporaries! Walter Gropius was actually a real person! He walked and talked in our midst. His wife, Alda Mahler Gropius, was a mother figure to young students. Sert, then Dean, had started the world’s first urban design course, and was a pioneer in the dialogue between architects and urban planners, being both himself! Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, founding editor of Ekistics, would never leave a bad idea alone! Gerhard Kallman, architect of the new Boston City Hall, was an icon of the 1960’s for his bold and daring statements. Jerzy Soltan, who built Jacqueline Tyrwhitt’s lovely home Spiros in Attica, and co-author of Le Modular, challenged students, faculty and guest critiques on any topic possible. Juan Miro, the Catalonian painter, was often in residence as Sert’s childhood friend. He painted amazing black forms on Sert’s patio walls, turning them into masterpieces! My Master’s Class of twenty candidates dwindled down to sixteen within the first month! That was before the days when Harvard filled chairs to collect its humongous fees! There were high standards, ruthless performance expectations, and a family atmosphere amongst the survivors! The sixteen of us were privileged to have our own time and friendships with Yona Friedman, a colleague of Soltan’s in
Team Ten, Louis Mumford, Fuhimiko Maki, Dolf Schnebli, and other past students of Sert, who came back to crit and jury our works. At MIT we had Kevin Lynch who wrote the Image of the City, John F. C. Turner who wrote Freedom to Build, Herbert Gans who wrote The Urban Villagers, Lisa Pittie who invented Advocacy Planning and Lloyd Rodwin who was the Master Regional planner! Shadrack Woods at Harvard, who had just won the competition to design the Free University in Berlin, and was preparing the new plan for Toulouse, was notorious for his fiery arguments at juries, usually ending in his apartment at Peabody Terrace at three in the morning, with loving students and young faculty still throwing hypothesis. These were all people who took us students into their homes and hearts and invested their time into our personal development, as well as our academic and intellectual molding! We worked, studied, questioned, analyzed, drank, partied and ate together. Their combined intellectual and human force was like a juggernaut plowing through all obstacles! They understood the necessity of carrying students along with them, as their investment in the next generations. They knew that they did not live for the moment, but for the future. Some of the people who had the most profound impact on me were not my formal teachers. Teaching design studios with Roger Montgomery, Gerhard Kallman, and Jane Drew, who all became guides in my search, left me with a personal legacy.

Sir Robert Jackson gifted me a life subscription of the Ekistics journal in January of 1963 when we met briefly at Adlai Stevenson’s apartment. From that journal I came to know of a larger world, and one not as happy as that I had grown up in. Some years later when I was a student at Harvard, Jackson’s wife, Barbara Ward, took me under her wing as a protégé. She thoughtfully invited me, at her expense, to attend the Delos Symposium in Greece. I flew to Paris and bought a Mercier ten speed bicycle and proceeded the next fifteen hundred kilometers via road, with my Harvard roommate, Christopher Winters. Reaching a bit exhausted, but in great spirits, I was yet again welcomed into a new world. Constantinos Doxiadis, Margaret Mead, Arnold Toynbee, Philippe Hera, Roger Gregore, Edmond Bacon, Katherine Bateson and many others were aboard Doxiadis’ yacht which meandered through the Aegean Sea, stopping at Mount Athos, Samothrace, Thebes, Mikanos and finally at the Delos amphitheatre, where the Charter we had all worked on was read out by Margaret Mead with the sun setting over the Aegean Sea behind her. At Samothrace Toynbee and his life companion, Veronica, asked me to accompany them up a steep hill behind the Samothrace Temple, from which the Winged Victory of Samothrace had come. Toynbee surmised that there should be the ruins of an ancient Crusader Fort there, which did not figure in any of the literature. Surely when we ascended to the peak of a small mountain, the walls stood testament to his academic prowess! In his eighties at the time, the small mountain climb was no easy task for Toynbee! Looking toward the east I saw an amazing sight. The entire horizon was covered in an ominous, dark pall of haze! “My God, what’s that, I exclaimed!” Toynbee laughed and said, “Oh, that’s Asia!” Having spent most of my life in Asia I always think of that day as prophetic! I didn’t know then that my life’s work would centre east of that pall!

Alex Tzonis, who was a young professor of architecture with me at the Graduate School of Design, along with his brilliant life partner Liane Lefaivre, have continued to encourage and teach me all at the same time. Their publication of my work, the Mahindra United World College of India, in their recent book called Critical Regionalism, has been a source of encouragement. At the risk of boring my readers I have searched over my past with fond memories. I feel there is a lesson in this small review, which is that teachers challenge one, fire one’s will to struggle for truth and become good friends too. Maxwell Fry founded the modern movement in Britain in the late 1920’s. On each journey traveling back and forth between America and India in the 1960’s and 1970’s, I always relaxed for several days at Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry’s Gloucester Place townhouse. As Jane’s life partner, I fell under Max’s influence. He and Jane, along with Le Corbusier, had designed Chandigarh, living in India. We had much to discuss and share. Maxwell Fry was the man who offered Gropius half his thriving practice so that the master could escape from Germany, getting out while he was still alive! “Come and take half my practice, but for God’s sake get out!” Gropius was instructed by all well wishers at the CIAM meeting in Venice. Without packing their bags they just left for London, leaving the Bauhaus behind along with their precious art works and personal effects! Maybe the Second World War was a great cauldron which molded giants out of midgets. But the humane nature of these giants, were the distinguishing features separating them from the midgets around them.

THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH

I suppose these friends, teachers and gurus, were actually examples and role models. Just as the Olympic Torch is passed from one runner to the next and is kept burning forever, through their humanity and brilliance, a spark of inspiration is passed on. Some people get inspired to support other people watching a good mother, or a devoted nurse. They do nurture others. What we may consider mundane becomes profound and it generates a meaningful life style.

Against this scenario of inspiration and “natural teaching,” we have the present day mockery of education. In Schools of Architecture we have people teaching who have never seriously worked in a studio, or even built a building. Some have done esoteric Ph.D.s and in America that seems to be the entry point qualification! Gone are the days when the teachers were great builders and expansive thinkers. Expansive thinkers do not waste their time getting Ph.D.s! People who get Ph.D.s are “pluggers” and survivors who are looking for a secure job. They know if they go through the motions toward a doctoral degree, like a good Xerox machine, their universities will vomit out their dream degrees. Every school of architecture reaches a threshold point where there are more dilatants and esoterics than real teachers. This mob of inexperienced fakers now makes the decisions. Political correctness, replaces poetics! The consensus of the ignorant replaces the direction of the wise! Just hard labor replaces insight and questioning. Writing a book, any book, raises one’s value! We must never loose site of the fact that an architect is the master craftsman! She, or he, is the inheritor of the Middle Ages guildsmen and the great sculptors of the Renaissance. Ours is a profession whose roots lie in the master craftsmen-student relationship, where even large canvases were labored over by Masters together with their understudies. No more! It is with a great deal of nostalgia that I look back to my youth and the kind of learning catalyzed even in isolated state universities, to which the present elite colleges of architecture can not even aspire. This is because today the engine that motivates the education of an architect is fees! The drivers of this engine are survivors! They are people who are just waiting for their next promotion and salary increase. They will jump jobs with any better offer! In India the situation is similar. We have people creating new schools of architecture that inspire no one. There are no libraries, seasoned teachers, or even proper studios. These educational industries produce graduates like Toyota produces vehicles! We are mass producing hollow individuals who merely hold a certificate and who can be registered. But they can not design, sing, and write poetry or nurture others!

INSPIRATION AND CREATION

Education today has no link with inspiration and creation. Creating architecture, music, poetry or love, are all the media of inspiration. These tangible products of creation inspire others. Some great wheel of motion begins to turn. The moment of inspiration is a moment of transcendence; an instance of discovery and self realization all in one.
It is when human intellect and emotion combine and take flight in a euphoric world of beauty and revelation. If there is a religion, it is a vehicle for such transcendence. For me architecture is that religion. It is meditation, it is truth and it leads to spiritual moments of enlightenment and revelation.

Still another lesson from The Natural House is that architecture is a language! Stone, wood, bricks, clay tiles, brass, luminaries, glass, steel trusses, paving blocks, sanitary fittings are all like the sounds which have to be transformed into the auditable words of a language! The language of architecture is composed of elements of “support,” of “span,” and of “enclosure.”

In the Alliance Francase we evolved a very clear system of “support,” employing fourteen inch brick bearing walls, insulating the interiors form the heat of Ahmedabad. We used a small two feet, six inches square grid as a module to make square windows, or larger multiples to make larger square doors, or medium multiples to place exposed concrete beams five feet on centre, which also defined a large square volumes below. This became a simple statement of “span.” These same “words” were further used to create north facing skylights on the northern façade and to lift skylights up, over the roof, bringing indirect light into the spaces. A square grid on the floor, in the ceiling and on the walls, using the human scale module, ordered the entire ensemble into a system of spatial cubes and graphic squares. Giving poetry and playfulness to the language are the idiosyncratic “motifs” we introduced. In the Alliance Francaise we set a tall column in the centre of the main space. This was so contrived that when a person moves in the space, they can see the walls behind the column move! This simple visual device makes the space “move,” and makes architecture experiential! Water spouts became motifs to add accent to the over all structure. Square, modular window shade boxes protected small vistas from glare. A small balcony into the main space was left floating by pulling the supporting column off to the side! These became the signature parts and components which evolved through the design process into a language. All of these emotive acts must be realized through built form, or as parts of materiality. Brick, exposed concrete, mild steel frames for square fenestration and glass were all the material vehicles to reach emotive experiences. Like written poetry, which uses printed words to reach emotions, we use “built words,” so that those who experience the spaces we create step out of the material world and into one of lyrical experiences. In this sense, buildings are the material poems that architects fabricate. Architecture is an experience of a place and not the built form! Construction is merely a vehicle for us to pick up people and move them through experiences into milieus of new experiences. In this respect there is a commonality between stage set design and the design of places. Architects confabulate material things, to make non-material experiences happen in their built compositions. These “experiences” are often related to the visual and psychological impacts of moving through space. They can also be the fall of light through space and onto textured surfaces. It may be the way the first morning sunlight slowly falls from a skylight drifting across a rugged stone wall. It is not the wall, or the light which is architecture. It is the experience of phenomena that is the architecture. It is the realization of the universe turning; it is the morning revealing yet a new day in our existence; it is the anticipation of what the new day may bring and our realization that we exist! We confabulate experiences through the medium of building fabrics. Again, these fabrics are woven from a language!

Much of what is transcendental; much of what is experiential; is created through putting together planned events, as people move through and experience space. In this sense architecture is carefully contrived. We “set people up” through ground textures which are rough on the outside, but become smooth on the inside; through a dimmed entrance opening into a well lit main space. We welcome a visitor first with paving texture, then hold him by a wall, then cover him in a porch and finally embrace him in a low ceiling entrance foyer. Then the space “explodes!” Just by raising the ceiling we can make him feel WOW!

People who manipulate emotions and feelings better than we do are song writers and those who sing them. In a romantic composition we are enticed into a mood by a light melody; a silent beat slowly becomes more auditable, and we start to tap our foot without even knowing what we are doing. A soulful voice begins to tell a story of sorrow, and we empathize with the human condition. Poetic lyrics lights the allure of love and our emotions swell! Within a few moments, the human mind, worried about all of the little irritations of life, leaves the day to day banality of existence, and is lifted up into an illusory ambiance of profound emotions. This is transcendence! Feelings of compassion and beauty are created!

How do architects achieve this? What are the visual and graphic mechanisms at our disposal? How can we manipulate peoples’ feelings, moods and temperaments? Are there modalities of color, texture and light which we can employ? Can we use scale and proportion to inject a stimulus and get a predictable response? What is the impact of a shape or a form? Do they draw people in, make them step aside, focus their attention in a direction, and what do they discover when they change their glance to the focal point we have enticed them to? Architects are masters of seduction, enticement, transformation and the transcendence of the human spirit! How is this achieved? This is the search I call architecture.

ASIA AND THE WEST

People often ask me how my design approach was affected by the diversity of the Asian environment and how this milieu differs from the western context I grew up in? With the exponential expansion of the media, with globalization at our doorstep and with cultural imperialism a reality, we all have to all consider such a question. What has happened to me over the past four decades may be a movie played backwards in the life of young Asian architects! So this is a good and difficult question.

When I left America in 1971 the great masters still influenced young architects. Kahn, Sert, Van Eyke, Sterling and so many others were still active and we could meet with them and discuss ideas. We believed in “credos,” value systems and principles. We were taught that design grew out of the rational application of these! In America all of that changed by the early 1980s. Individualism and publicity were what began to drive designers. By that time the great masters had passed away. In India we were isolated from the mass media, the magazine articles from the West, and from all of the hype! We more or less continued to follow what we had always believed in. The “new economy,” the “new urbanism,” the “stab them in the back and get rich culture of management,” had not reached us! It is like there was a fork in the road and we never saw the divergent one and kept right on going!

But the Indian context had its own logic too! First of all the huge choice of materials available in the States and Europe was not available here. Our techniques and methods were very simple. This allowed us to concentrate on light, spaces and forms. After mastering that we could get carried away by technology. The museum in Paris by Piano and Rogers brought the west back in touch with technology. This did not “grab me” until much later when I was ready to deal with it on my own terms. Unlike the villages of Greece and our work in India, technology was becoming a “look at me,” gymnastics platform for stunts. An entire school of charlatans emerged, taking technology off into the world of Disney Land! Thus, the new hype of technology and also the importance of expression of mechanical equipment, did not reach us in India, until years after it had started to mold design in the west. In retrospect, we were actually working in the same ‘technology guided’ mould of architecture, but we did not realize it, simply due to our limited choices. The design process remained a very simple visual one, allowing for innocence. I see a correlation between our simple stone and brick bearing walls and the work of Foster, Piano and to a lesser extent Rogers. In the case of Rogers, technology is no longer a means, it has become the end! Our isolation, gave us the “distance” to keep this new tool in its place. Though we do see “space frames” floating around just for the sake of floating around and with no common sense or purpose!

Fortunately, I missed out on Post Modernism! Since even those who contrived it never understood it really, they missed out too! I will analyze this in a later part of this book, but my contention is that small elite in America and in Britain fabricated Post Modernist Architecture so that a tiny group of critics would have something new to write about and a small group of their designer friends could be written about. Post Modernism in architecture and the New Urbanism in planning are kind of conspiracies! The New Urbanism is neither new, nor very much related to urbanism. The new economy had less to do with economics than “fixing” the prices of IT shares and making quick money trading in a mirage. These trends had a lot to do with the “get rich quick” and “get famous quick” culture of the West, which is still in vogue. Attention grabbing, fashion driven packaging is what I missed!

India allowed me to find myself and work in my own contextual world. I could continue my search without the distraction of all the hoop-la and hollering! As an aside, many Indian motifs influenced me: Khund-like steps; ottas, sitting walls, niches in walls for statues, and the placement of lights on small projections….so many unique Indian details. These began to enter my work as regional motifs. The Indian climate also allowed the kind of opening out into nature that I loved, and bringing the out-of-doors indoors! This is so evident my Centre for Development Studies and Activities, in the United World College and others. In the YMCA International Retreat structures are literally “in the ground.” This could only happen in India. In the west structures were becoming hermetically sealed, centrally air conditioned boxes! These “boxes” were only to be cleverly decorated. A global architecture was emerging with no roots in climate, history, context, or landscape. In the United World College the angular walls and roof slants are all drawn from the mountain forms in the distance. In the west a building would use glass walls in the hot sun of Miami, or in the dark, freezing cold of New York City. If Greek columns were this year’s fad, they would pop up like mushrooms in LA, in Bangkok and in Hamburg! This is Globalism at its worst. In India we could follow what Liane Lefaivre calls Critical Regionalism. We could deal with the issues of people moving through space; we could deal with the tactile interaction of people with materials; we could make scale changes out of stone and brick and help people to experience them.