The method chosen was an already exploited one: to construct a dynamic couple. To construct a 'theory' course based on the principles of consistency: tracing to origin ideas still used by the work people. Ideas that could be expressed in the common tongue. Pointing at that which has almost always remained the same: principles of Organisation, Power, Knowledge, techniques of Representation in their consistency. And one constructed a history course based on the same principles, but focussing on the discontinuities, the ruptures, the shifts and the resulting pathos.
This course takes the year of India's accession to the Empire-the event of colonisation, 1857, as the Year Zero. It is written as an analysis of power-relations centred around the Act of Building. A history of the Organisation[s] resulting in the Act of Building, this is not a compact listing and 'talk' about influential buildings and architects. "this is a history of expectations and desires vested into the architectural. ..., this is a history of the methods of architectural production... "
Written in '94, born of an anger bordering on frustration as one observed one's surroundings. And the developments of that time: India was being 'liberalised', the media hype over the new economy [called 'free' markets] almost nauseating. There was shock. We were, as Rajat Ray said recently, to become the first-hand witnesses of an India poised to be driven into memory. One was inspecting a history far too tumultuous, too discontinuous, scarcely documented. A history constructed by rather too few.
One saw many possibilities at each point, a number of paths left untrodden. It became rather easy to focus on the discontinuities. On the questions not asked. One struggled to fit the architect in this history: a daunting task.
A course in 'advanced' architectural history would have two objectives: first, to instruct students in identifying and 'using' complex formations of historical facts in order to state precise architectural problems. And simultaneously, to instruct the student in the theory of history, and providing them with methods by which architectural objects can be inspected.
This course is written as an analysis of power-relations centred around the Act of Building. A history of the Organisation[s] resulting in the Act of Building, this is not a compact listing and ‘talk’ about influential buildings and architects. This course aims:
a-1./
- To closely inspect the transformation and metastasis of the Ways of Building in South Asia after Colonisation and to identify the residue of such in the present-day Practice of Building. This inspection is conducted explicitly as an inquiry into the political implications of the act of building.
- To problematise the history as it traces it. To paraphrase from Foucault and Tafuri, the theoretical knot that must be confronted is how to construct a history that, after having upset and shattered the apparent compactness of the real, after having shifted the ideological barriers that hide the complexity of the strategies of domination, arrives at the heart of those strategies – arrives, that is, at their modes of production. But here we note the existence of a further difficulty; modes of production, isolated in themselves, neither explain or determine. They themselves are anticipated, delayed or traversed by ideological currents. Once a system of power is isolated, its genealogy cannot be offered as a universe complete in itself. The analysis must go further; it must make the previously isolated fragments collide with each other; it must dispute the limits it has set up. Regarded as ‘labour’, in fact, analysis has no end; it is, as Freud recognised, by its very nature infinite. Further, this history is in no way a history of Architecture as a ‘high’ practice (i.e., that which is legitimised by a Colonial Institution, e.g., the TVB School of Habitat Studies itself in New Delhi), nor is it a history of the profession. It considers the industry of building making in South Asia with an aim to isolating the following.
- Careers of the hegemonic within the enterprise of building.
- The acts of ‘naturalisation’ and the emergence of norms within this set-up.
- Erasure of traditions in Indian architecture under Modernism, Modernisation and Modernity.
- Under Post Colonialism.
- The replacement of ‘original’ self-identities (which does not mean ‘primordial’ or ‘historical’, definitely not ‘regional’ or having to do with place-culture) or the building-maker by the Colonial, later by the Nation State, by "Architectural Education", by NGOs
- The emergence of Modernist rituals of building-making.
- This course intends to demonstrate the patterns of dependencies, and contingencies upon the Occidental on part of the South Asian "architect". Brought about by the erasures listed above.
a-2./
- Urbanism, and its atomic ingredient- i.e.' the discipline of architecture-operate as a system of value(s) vested in spatial systems (ultimately reducible to topologies). And as such, a territorial discourse. More important, as statements, they concern themselves with the distribution -- as proximity, density and closure; as types of functions, sequences and hierarchies. In short, the semantic order of building-or, the signifying within space. In a synchronic projection, the urban system can be viewed more-or-less as a stock record of the hegemonic operative throughout history. The building, as a 'container', potentially indicates the organisation of motives and structures of power.
- Means of representation and the means of their production determine the 'consciousness' required towards the determination of the [latent] Ideogrammatic structures of a building, i.e., the internal representation that defines the building as such; and the terms of its embodiment in physical space. In this way, taken ideogramatically or as meaning-objects embedded into the site the building becomes a composite ensemble of intentions embedded into its sites. A representation bearer composed three dimensionally by codes internal to its constituent elements. The second objective of the course is to make the relation between architectural and urban codes-taken as processes in-history-apparent to students.
b-1./
- To transfer some skills at analysis and the writing of history to students.
- Methods borrowed from the so-called 'history of ideas': i.e., Foucauldian Archaeology, Genealogy and Problematisation.
- The Methodology of Communicative Action (esp., centred on the 3rd point of Communicative Action).
b-2./
- to develop skills in co-relating this dialogue to (especially the spatial/topological and typological) analysis of the architectural and urban artefacts.
Given to understand that the School of Habitat studies likes to Critique the Governmental Practices of Building, and is intended to present counter-models to such, the issue of Problematisation became significant. In forming series of questions, in-forming habits which enable us to examine cities in newer and different ways.
One will inspect a History of Architecture under Colonisation. This will be a Close Inspection of the history of architecture since India's accession to the British Empire. In other words, this is a history of the transposition of colonial institutions and the resulting formations. The 'problem' has been stated as concerning not the experience, but rather Representation in Architecture.
Briefly, the task-at-hand is to represent the spatialities arising of various habits of inhabiting cities as they came into contact with the colonial institutions: to explore the possibilities of an urbanism which takes attitudes of non-affirmational kind (which also means attitudes of the non-negational sort) toward the state.
| Semester - 1 | Semester - 2 | Method [s]/ Reference | ||
I. |
{the Conceptual Framework.} | Colonisation as a Political and Economic syndrome vs. ‘native’ systems. | Contradictions Vital to the modern Nation-State in ‘independent’ countries. | Partha Chatterjee: Nationalist Thought and Colonial Worlds. The Nation and it’s Fragments. |
II. |
Architecture as the ‘tool’ & the ‘site’: of representation of the Desires of the Powers that be!: Indian architecture and what was wished from it. | Contesting readings: nationalist and orientalist readings of architecture. ‘Reprogramming’ of the definition of the discipline. | Subversions of Value: “modernism” in the city: the Administration, legislation and planning versus commerce. | Foucauldian Archaeology. David Harvey: Social Justice and the City. |
III. |
The ‘table’ along which the [dominant] discourse is formed. | Re-territorialisation of Urban Space and re-distribution of the Markers of authority inside it: Colonial and Collaborative-Native Town Planning/ ‘Urban Design’. | Evaluations:The sets and sub-sets of players in the building business. Continuous constructions of the discursive ‘table’ for the professional architect. | Communicative action and discourse formation. |
IV. |
‘Ideologies’ that inform the architectural act. | Invention of new building types, new settlement types & methods of thinking on cities. | Changing agendas, intentions and the methods of the architectural. | Pierre Bordieu on Cultural Production and Education. |