Thinking Heterotopia

Design Unit. Sem – II, ‘95-’96 & Sem-I, ’96-97.
BENARAS GHATS Cities plundered by an alien desire, blighted cities, stunned cities. Consider the classical Indian city a paradox, its “life” screaming and dying, its form preserved and inscribed! Colonized! consider it as it is assaulted by the modern, on the one hand; Fossilic! preserved and ascribed to by those who have uses for the values embedded in it's body, on the other.

Introduction

If there is to be an architecture sympathetic to the project of re-writing modernity, it must (unlike its modernist counterpart) turn reflexive, ever self-critical, towards the issues of power and domination. In the colonized world, an understanding of this injunction would be gained through meditation on architectural operations upon traditional city – fabric, where our incomprehension itself can guide us!

The Benaras Ghats, as an example of traditional Indian urban public space; can be viewed as one opportunity for such understandings. As elements of significance to the populace, they have remained contested territory throughout a history which, being so burdened specifies it’s own mode of forgetting. A history which is not monolithic and uniform, rather, composed of many layers, from the history of origins [and Benaras has many], in the deepest of all embodiments: myth; to the history of beginning(s) : the chronological. A long narrative of domination is to be written here. Starting from the neolithic inhabitation of the forests that were here to their transformation into urb, it's consolidation into the various strategic |identities| since the 1100s, it's self-organization in the face of imaginary realities and the symbolic, appropriation of the river front in the 1850s and reformation of the Ghats under the colonial……. to their expropriation by the ‘new’ Indian urban elite (e.g.; in the name of “conservation”).

No attempts have been made to really understand the terms and conditions by which the Ghats exist in the city, and constantly reconfigure (without any help from the aforementioned elite) in the face of emergent realities. No attempts have been made to understand the urbanity of the Ghats and their significance – their law, amongst other things – of the constant deformations of that normative. And to a trained eye, consequences of this lack of understanding seem grievous. Especially as one sees the recent attempts at conservation and (partial) restoration of the Ghats. Even if one accounts for the common difference between a professed intention and intention-in-use, this is as sympathetic a surgery as the one the allies recently performed on Baghdad.

This is not surprising. As traditional city cores represent that area of urbanity that “we” the so-called elite have left behind – we are no longer home within. With that, we have lost our sense of what could be considered desirable in terms other than of Governmentality.

I propose a one-year long design exercise in responding to the urgencies posited above. The question is how to architecturally represent ‘ourselves’ within traditional Indian urban spaces in anticipation of things to come? And how to let the traditional pose questions to our (often mediocre, often complacent) design methods?

The pedagogical value of this exercise is in a) our learning to assess the significance involved in the city, and its history of the last 400 years or so. b) In our empowering ourselves in comprehending, analyzing and acting within this milieu. C) In developing capability to translate the knowledge of this world into a professional idiom of action. And I would ask two things of the participants. A will to not despair in front of the ‘realities’ they observe, and a will to develop the skills to live with obligations demanded by the powers they would (inevitably) assume in the process.

Objective

OBJECTIVE: Using the notion of habitus (taken as a root word to habit-e.g., of dwelling in the city – or habitat as in TVB School of Habitat Studies) in both its linguistic and spatial sense….”

1. To close-inspect the city of Benaras, and the shaping of the city. In the hope of arriving at a contemporary characterization of a traditional Indian urban system.
2. To represent this characterization in architectural terms.
3. To take measure of the violence performed on the classical Indian city by the contemporary languages by which one describes it.
4. To name the language sanctioned by the us to bare patterns of its dominance over the context they claim to treat. To de-structure and irritate grounds which support these in our imaginations.

On a more theoretical plane, to inspect the co-relations amongst ‘language and space’, where the dominance of verbal language over space is de-constructed. To plot the working of power within these. I should also confess my determination to blunder into Michel Foucault’s three attitudes to the study of history. Of which his term problematization will be used in a particular sense: instead of tuning outwards, I will direct it inwards – interrogating our own methods.

I would control the design exercise with the following three junctures of control. These, in Foucault's terms, would emerge as ‘unities' of discourse.

1. IDENTITY - FRAME.

The progressive transformation of the (initial) diagram constituted by the statements above. And its transformation into architecture becomes the task of the unit. This diagram represents a provisional mapping of the mobilisation of our desires. Though I have derived it from elsewhere, it corresponds, to the central intuition in the widely accepted oeuvre of Srinivas

I would work with this double articulation of domination as a scheme of our identity. I would not be ashamed in admitting its subjection of our bodies for control and dependence, and its capability to tie down our identities by its self-evidence.

This identity-frame would enable me to operate on the linearity of this proposition by demobilizing yet using its inner logic. I might call this pseudo-sign an abstract machine.

2. LANGUAGE

This circularity of power is indexed by the language developed by the indigenous elite. Whose present form is determined by process of pro-tension (dialectic between the present and its anticipated future) and retention (dialectic between the present and a fabricated past). On the part of the Indian elite, the retention is of the language inherited, dominantly, by the steel frame of the previous colonization and its encounter with what one might just term the local. This is having evolved into our (partially, inherited, partially interpreted) techniques of Governmentality should, in principle no longer be alienable from the body of this exercise.

As architectural practice does not appear to be 'clean', a scheme of double articulation may be proposed in the conspiracy of language borne and spatialised forces (the entailment of two different forms of expression/re-presentation). That is in the exercise of power over bodies human and by reciprocity architectural. The genealogy of these forms would pose their own problems of causality. One would resort to diagrammatic and hieroglyphic representations to make sense here.

We can analyze domination by locating our choices – judgment of values and action – by constructing matrices, or the kernel of machines.

3. TRANSPOSITION.

The above said can incite an architect's pseudo–sociology which speaks a language made of words rather than buildings. A logic of its interpolation into architecture, and going further, a logic of problematising this interpolation has be sought. And this double logic is the task of design – here, in converting the terms of the world into architecture representation (i.e. the language of plan, section and axonometric), and treating those representations as architectural propositions. And then treating translations in a process which meditates on our design methods.

This transposes from a predominantly linguistic habitus to an architectural disposition of things, taken conversely, it entails the architect’s capability to adequate the linguistic into his work.

This demands a basic skill on the part of the student. A skill in not being seduced by the aesthetic but rather by urban space, by discourse and by the diagram. He must take measure of the representation of buildings (for buildings are a product of drawing, either of cartographic kinds or tracings) and what are drawings but a curious amalgam - a Machine - made by writing and diagramming?

Logic

Architecture and the questions posed of an embattled mind have affinities, consider the following.

One rejects the doctrinal urban design strategies – utilising information/knowledge and determination, translated into a plan – e.g. master plan (operationalization on a broad, generalized front). And execution of plan on an orderly manner.

I rather a logic which finds its scale and meter in the on the inside: it is Irruption. Where the strategy itself its operationalization, operations are left to the battle, is left to mobilization. Mobility is of the essence, as is the retention of goals in the abstract, objectives are obtained through a fluid, disruption of the previous technologies of design. Hierarchies are flattened on all sides.

In substituting irruption for the eye-head (thinking) and concentrating for eye-hand (drawings), we can articulate this technology in other words, we arrive at the architects equivalent. Where the production of destruction (art if war) meets it nemesis.

We will begin with the following studies:

The analysis of the language born (serial) forces of domination operative in the history of the city and their operative codes. These would be identified by observing propensities of locational logic of architectural programs in the city, and mapping its particulars in Benaras.

And a tissue analysis of the city, using a method derived from typological studies. This incorporates Foucault’s modes of mapping history.

The two would provide an initial notion of the codes of the city.

It follows that the exercise would consist of three stages. Of which, the stages a & b are to be completed within the period of one semester. After which students may opt for the stage c……

• To understand the forces that go to construct the site, its history and the Language acts as well as the Diagrammatic thinking that construct space.
• A schematic design that represents these issues in conventional design terms.

A critique of this translation and re – representation of the architectural product. Also refer the schedule. In which the funicular |)(|represent the design exercise proper, the grid is a conceptual metric unfolding in time.

In keeping with the professed intention an inspection of the disposition of habits within the city, the site is considered a strategic zone. Within the phenomena of territorialisation will be inspected

To Have - Spoken