codename albacore

Guangzhou Opera House - Zaha Hadid, 2002-2011

2012-02-11T10:51:00.000-08:00

Contrary to what you might expect, both the archinerd circle and the lay public love to see great architects make shoddy buildings. For the former, it's a chance to exert a personal sense of superiority over the big shots of the art-house circle; for the latter, it's a chance to take those high-falutin' ivory tower types down a peg. Practicing architects tend to fall into either of these two camps, or break off entirely and proclaim sincere disappointment, fearing that these high-profile examples damage their reputation as service professionals. As a study-abroad chaperone I feel I need to steer some kind of middle course: some students are far too eager to gleefully gloat over the failings of their onetime idols (what better way to feel like you yourself have your head above water in this vast, bizarre field?), or to unreservedly defend them against all challenge.

It's an old story. "Great architecture leaks," we're told. Frank Lloyd Wright failed in his trust as a professional when he let Fallingwater become, in the client's phrase, "Rising Mildew" - but would architecture as a field be better off without that building? Certainly not. Alan Berman's recent Jim Stirling and the Red Trilogy is an extended and largely even-handed treatment of a more infamous case, Stirling's influential, inspirational, and barely-functional university buildings. If he's too eager to excuse all failings (as part of an attempt to get the powers that be to shell out for architecturally-sensitive fixes), he does make a strong case that not all of the failures were down to the architects. The memorable issue of the terra cotta tiles that detached themselves from the Cambridge Library and began falling on people, for example, was legally taken off Stirling's shoulders. The architects had done their homework and designed their details correctly, but they were let down when, under cost pressures, a contractor recommended a new adhesive - - which, it turns out, did not perform to the guarantees and specifications of its manufacturer.

But the questions are not so easily settled. Couldn't Stirling have taken some time to do a mockup wall with the untested glue? And what about the other problems? Whose fault is it if the building overheats, when the client rejects the architect's plea for air conditioning? Well, it was Stirling who specified giant fans as a halfway substitute. It was the client who decided not to turn the fans on because of noise concerns. But it was Stirling who specified too-loud fans! These things can go around in circles for a while; I think the most useful thing, educationally speaking, isn't necessarily to fix the blame for these particular buildings and these particular failings, but to make the young architect aware of all the ways things can go wrong, and of the architects' fundamental responsibility to steer clear of these rapids.

This brings us back around to our actual topic today: Zaha Hadid's newly-built ruin of an opera house in Guangzhou, one of the four flagship cultural buildings at the southern head of a new, monumentally axial CBD. As word about this building's numerous constructional faults and garish, improvised fixes spreads, I suspect it will overtake Frank Gehry's Stata Center to become this decade's go-to building for architectural skeptics. No doubt this process will be aided by Hadid's already-cemented stereotype: she's a diva, an artiste, a gestural dilettante detached from the gritty realities of construction.

This sketch is, of course, overwhelmingly sexist, and occasionally verges on racist: Hey, have you seen the "separated at birth"? Zaha Hadid is Ursula from the Little Mermaid! Not that they actually look at all alike, but, crazy woman with funny-colored skin, amirite?? Apocryphal stories abound: Zaha won't have stairs in her buildings because she once tripped while vainly wearing high heels to the job site. And note the ubiquitous, often unconsciously belittling familiarity: rarely do we hear it said that "Jim's" buildings failed at Oxford or that "Frank's" building is approaching a lawsuit, but always it is "Zaha." (It should be charitably allowed that perhaps the novelty of the name in an American context makes it simply work better as a short-hand: there are a lot of Peters, but few Zahas. And certainly Koolhaas is "Rem" as often as not.)

But really - we can imagine male architects being discussed in these terms, but never so consistently or with such self-satisfaction on the part of the speaker. And again, think of Stirling, whose leaky, overheating, tile-flinging buildings are (justly) celebrated for their formal boldness and slightly-ahead-of-their-time technical ambitions. The language here is often gendered, though more subtly, through the Randian-Brutalist filter of the architect as shaper of will into form. Stirling's buildings are bold, powerful, uncompromising, et cetera et cetera. Hadid's buildings are curvaceous and sensual - nevermind her angular, aggressive Deconstructivist work, or the updated, self-critiquing Brutalism of Cincinnati. And the distracted, flighty artiste seems not to have shown up for the immaculate, powdered-sugar concrete of Phaeno or its shuttered counterpart at BMW.

All this leads me into a bit of a bind personally, because I want to defend Hadid both from the sexist narrative, and the easy dismissal of the badly-built buildings that come in to support it from the hard-hat boys' club. The problem is, the Guangzhou Opera House is badly-built - in fact, quite a mess. And even had it been pristinely-executed, it's no Stirling library; despite its budget, the client's hopes, and the major site, it's a minor Hadid work. There are a few nice things happening: the emphatically non-monumental pile it presents to the square is a nice counterpoint to Rocco Yim's frontal, emphatically cantilevered museum-box (speaking of reinvented Brutalism), and the idea of breaking the program up into smaller volumes to create some urban connection between the volumes further sustains the impulse.

Hadid vs. Yim

The path between the two major volumes.

As well, when the details do pan out, the building's "eroded pebbles in a stream" form, metaphorically cheesiness aside, is striking, attractive, and takes full advantage of the strong tropical light. From far enough away, this is a damned good-looking building. The circulation zones between the skin and the theatre volumes are memorably weird, reminiscent of the MAXXI in Rome and perhaps more appropriate here, where they presumably serve to detach the visitor from the ordinary world and guide them into the fantasy of the operatic performance. And of course, there's the auditorium itself, where (if you set aside the blotchy, smeared-looking finish materials) the architect sets aside the temptation of irony to fully embrace the theatrics and glitz of the program. It's a beaut.

But, all those good feelings aside, it's hard to shake the sense that the theatre volumes and their enveloping skins are two entirely different entities. The space between them, though animated by the complexity of the skin and the drama of the stairs, feels left-over, and there's a lot of it. Of course theatres need spillover space for intermissions and cocktails, but it all feels a bit loose and improvised, when the other moves seem to promise a theatrical promenade, some kind of choreography with one space dancing into the next. Instead, it's a bit of meander, the switchbacks are abrupt, and the building seems almost apologetic about finally leading you to the theatres. It compares unfavorably with, say, UN Studio's admittedly smaller Agora Theatre where the formal gymnastics guide you inwards and upwards, and the language of the theatre space feels like a natural extension of the exterior, the lobby, and the detuned grand staircase.

As well, it'd be fair to say that the under-space beneath the building's plinth is underprogrammed and spatially underdeveloped. Phaeno, developed around the same time, shares this problem, although at least its undercrofting is more porous and admitting of the public, and offers a sculpted ground plane that, while a disaster in terms of drainage, supports a skateboard culture.

Above: Guangzhou Opera. Below: Phaeno.

So then, finally, there's the issue of construction. Our visiting guests Karla Trott and Bob Wandel were as eager as I am to put these things in proper perspective, but thankfully they had a lot more experience and expertise to bring to the table. Karla pointed out that, to be fair, we don't know enough of the behind-the-scenes saga to really know what happened here: many of the hideous errors visible in the buiding could be in a punch-list right now - Hadid could be on the phone with the contractors this very second - withholding payments, threatening lawsuits - who knows?

Bob took a somewhat more critical, but still reasoned stance, riffing on a comment Meng Yan of Urbanus had made the previous day about the "balance" an architect has to strike. To Bob, the story went like this: Hadid was asked to do an opera house in Guangzhou and had in mind a certain idea, which cost a certain amount of money and would take a certain amount of time to complete. Somehow, the balance of those things got out of whack: the architect did not adjust her design to address the lack of funds to realize it as-envisioned, or ran out of time to incorporate sprinkler pipes and gutters in the design so they wouldn't end up tacked-on later. "Certainly, she had the talent to do it, but evidently she ran out of time. Alternately, the budget wasn't adhered to, and the contractor had to come up with something to fix that." As Bob saw it, it is indeed the architect's responsibility to prevent this balance from being lost: look at the budget and the time, and make adjustments. But, he cautioned, echoing Karla, we don't know the whole story.

There may even be other chapters to this thing we can't imagine. Perhaps Hadid did attempt to dial the design back in response to the emerging difficulties, but the client insisted on keeping the concept with which they'd fallen in love: "No, no, it'll be find - I know a guy Steve who can do great curved tiles!" Perhaps - and this is a big one - the fire during building construction set everything behind, wasted precious time and chopped into the budget with a vengeance. That, in fact, seems the likely explanation for many of the observable problems, and maybe even the direct inspiration for the tacked-on and goofball sprinkler devices (did the client or the local regulatory agencies up their expectations of fire-proofing?).

Other compromises are harder to explain in terms of a budget reduced late in the game. Crucially, the skinning system of curved triangular tiles seems like it would have been a bad idea from the word go. Hadid's office, far from Guangzhou and apparently lacking the kind of strong local head that Steven Holl had in Li Hu, seems to have gone with a cladding system doomed to fail in the China of the mid-2000s. The country's construction industry is rapidly developing, aided no doubt by the experience of working on these ambitious projects. An architect beginning a project in 2012 might more reasonably expect to get the precision-tolerances and quality of manufacture to make these kinds of things work out a little better. But frankly, the entire tiling enterprise itself seems like a compromise: the design of their layout is slipshod with numerous awkward joints in obvious places. The big mistake here is in the tesselation strategy, not the material quality of the tiles or their attachment to the surface.

One suspects, then, that at some stage this was intended to be a concrete building on the Phaeno model, and that this somehow went awry. Maybe the requisite quantities of reinforcing steel, or the complexity of the formwork, would have been a budget-buster. Maybe the self-compacting superfluid concrete of Phaeno simply wasn't available in China. Maybe the local building code is too conservative, and would have required so much steel or so much coverage as to distort the form or close off the generous fenestration. Maybe the client wanted more metaphor or more luxurious materials, and so the Chinese-sourced stone came in. Once again, we just don't know.

Ultimately, the architect has to make the tough decision: err on the side of caution and dial down design expectations? Optimistically trust the client's assurances that it'll all work out fine? Or, at considerable cost, politely walk away from the project? It's easy for us to criticize the finished building - not so easily to say how exactly we would have fixed everything. If Guangzhou does do the kind of damage to Hadid's reputation that the Red Trilogy did to Stirling's, it would be understandable, but not necessarily fair.

If all that wasn't enough for you, consider flipping through my Zaha Hadid set or the rest of the photos from our afternoon in Guangzhou, over on Flickr. Or take a look at Evan's pithy summary of Guangzhou, including a comparison of the Hadid and Yim buildings in terms of construction and technique.

Gathered Like A Miracle (Shenzhen, Part 2)

2012-02-07T21:32:00.000-08:00

This is the second half of a two-part look at Shenzhen; for the historical backdrop and the canonical narratives, see part one.

So, if you read between the lines of the last post, it probably comes as no surprise that I do not come down on the side of the hype machine. Shenzhen is not what you expect it to be; that's not to say that it never was, but if so, something seems to have changed since the flurry of 1990's interest in the Pearl River Delta. In any case, the Shenzhen we found in 2011 was not an unplanned mishmash driven solely by the whims and unfettered desires of private capital's excesses. The excesses of private capital were certainly there to be seen, but - to borrow a phrase - This Is China. Indeed, after a bit of reflection, the hype seems odd: the Special Economic Zones were set up to be relatively deregulated markets, in comparison to one of the most regulated command economies in the world. Why should we expect to find chaos here?

What we actually found was... quite pleasant. Shockingly pleasant. So pleasant you have to remind yourself that there's a dark underside to all this, a no-doubt ill-treated workforce keeping it all so bright, clean, green and shiny. The roadscape of Shennan Boulevard, the major east-west corridor, looks like some fantasy version of what LA was always supposed to be: breezy, extensively planted, cars cruising along at high speed, separate and well-trafficked bicycle and pedestrian lanes. Where were the traffic jams? Where were the interruptions brought by stubbornly individualistic landlords? Where was the mad China of architheoretical fame?

This is nobody's idea of an emergent, spontaneous streetscape - there is some serious planning going into creating that, not to mention maintaining it! Now, one might answer all this by saying, "Okay, sure, Albacore - if that is your real name - but this emphasis on the connective tissue of Shennan Boulevard is to some extent a late development!" Well, dear reader, that may be fair to say. It was in 1996 that the city, perhaps trying to make sense out of its spectacular growth, adopted at Comprehensive Plan, which attempted to concentrate future development in pre-existing nodes, and thus restated the significance of the city's fundamental east-west axis. Maybe things were a real mess before then; on the other hand, if you go back to the population statistics, you can see that, as of 1996, Shenzhen had maybe 40% of its current population. It had certainly grown like crazy in the decade before the Comprehensive Plan - but its real spurt lay ahead of it at that point. Far more people know this Shenzhen than ever knew the ... whatever was there before.

What does Shenzhen look like outside of the big, masterplanned setpieces? Here's a couple of views of streetscape in the Luohu district. Remember, this is the instant city, the spontaneously generated world that's existed for less than thirty years. Brace yourself for dirt, sweat, chaos and noise! Look out for the jarring discontinuities brought on by every-man-for-himself capitalism!

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

I mentioned the 1996 Comprehensive Plan. Probably its major impact on the structure of Shenzhen was the specification of a new civic center district, to be designed following another competition (won in 1999 by the American firm Lee/Timchula). This new center, Futian, is an axial string of skyscrapers along a monumentally-scaled linear park. It's not subtle, but, once again, neither is it the petri-dish growth we came looking for. It actually seems quite Modernist, in the mode of Chandigarh or Brasilia, with a civic park "head" to a body of major roads and object-skyscrapers, with the Lianhuashan hill park forming a backdrop to the north. (Alternately, it's extremely traditional: historic Chinese urban-planning principles have always favored a site backing up to mountains on the north and opening towards the south.)

I wish I had better photos of Futian; this one, looking towards the garish Civic Center, makes things look more bleak and windswept than they are, since I'm actually standing on the roof terrace of the Cultural Center piece. The ground level is an extensive and rigorously planted park; if the scale in plan remains vast, it still compares favorably to, say, Tian'anmen...or to the uninspiring, Soviet-scaled nothingness that greets you when you emerge from the Hong Kong border-crossing station:

Shenzhen's dabbling in planned urban form hasn't ended with Futian, however. Most recently, there's the Qian'hai Waterfront project, won by James Corner Field Operations in 2010. Dealing with some 4,500 acres of reclaimed waterfront, and a massive program (housing for 1.5 million), the project promises a "Manhattan" for the Pearl River Delta. And while the designers speak about drawing from the "typical Shenzhen block," the layout actually looks a lot like traditional, gridded, European-style urbanism (complete with leafy boulevards), albeit enlivened by contemporary landscape-urbanist devices (stormwater-processing "water fingers"!). The trailer gives you a sense of how impossibly huge this thing is; if completed to specifications, it will be a landmark in the genre of green urbanism, and perhaps a model for other cities.

(You can also check out the details if you're up for navigating the Field Operations website.)

But it may not be so surprising to find the Chinese government embracing megalomaniacally-scaled planning with goals like "reclaim the equivalent of Lower Manhattan from the sea." However, at the opposite end of the spectrum, Shenzhen has for the last decade been experimenting with something quite different: local plazas and "culture parks." This is perhaps the clearest sop to the critics of the supercity: even if things are clean and green, a city driven entirely by speculative capitalism is going to end up having no public space whatsoever. Notable in this project is the work of the firm Urbanus, founded in 1999 by Chinese-born graduates of Miami University in Ohio. By 2006, with the support of a sympathetic city administrator, Urbanus had built six or seven neighborhood parks in Shenzhen - and I say "or seven," because it depends whether you count the one park that was built, then demolished, then replaced by another park commissioned by the city on the exact same site.

We had the chance to visit two of these Urbanus parks. True to the firm's name, the schemes are notable for their interest in connecting together important pieces of specific, local neighborhood tissue. Their Dafen Art Museum, for example, makes the most out of plugging pedestrian links into an urban village which specializes - and you cannot find a better Shenzhen business than this - in freshly-painted copies of Western masterpiece canvases, for the lucrative export business.

Or take the Jade Bamboo Park entry garden, jammed into something of a leftover site. Speculator-built apartments had all but cut the neighborhood off from the important, pre-existing hilltop park which was also one of the few substantial pieces of topography to survive being flattened out. The entry-park's lot was only vacant because of a technicality in the building code, which prevented the property owner from building anything profitable here. In a novel quid-pro-quo, he gave the land over to the city for the park; in exchange, the city built a parking garage for his adjacent properties, under the new park-to-be.

The park makes an event out of the 43-foot trip uphill, with a slightly snaking covered walkway. While the architects have complained about pressures to produce regularized, paved squares, in this case they embraced the odd trapezoidal site as well as the park context, in a series of irregular terraces stepping up from an understated "cultural plaza" near the bottom.

The walkway itself is quite interesting. It's self-evidently a riff on historic Chinese garden walkways - but it's not just an update of familiar motifs. Urbanus get the walkway to behave like the historic model: it's a device to make a simple journey more interesting, exaggerate the size of the garden plot, and control views. Note how it hugs the edge of the plot next to the shady property owner's crappy apartment buildings. Not only does this preserve most of the site as open garden, it also means that while you're traveling up the walkway, you can't see the apartments.

From the moment you leave the street, and on into the park proper at the top of the hill, the walkway keeps you within a garden-world, complete with some early twists and switchbacks to increase the sense of the journey and disconnect from the "real" world of Luohu (which, as seen above, isn't all that bad, but still).

(Meanwhile, material choices keep it from being a total retread of the typological garden walkway. The dappled light coming through the wooden slats is, maybe, distantly related to the kind of patterns that come through carved screen windows - but few classical Chinese gardens are going to put you on a metal grating looking down past your feet towards sun-lit plants twelve feet below.)

Elsewhere in Luohu, on a flat site with less dramatic context cues, Urbanus produce a plaza with rather different characteristics. This "Public Art Plaza" again incorporates an underground garage, and caps it with public program (art gallery, bookshop, cafe, studio, etc.) which, broken up into one building and two minor pavilions, joins a gridded grove of trees and some water features to frame a linear plaza. The language the architects use seems like contemporary boilerplate: "The flat surface of the site is remoulded, folded, fractured and warped to create a new urban geography" - but it's worth unpacking what some of that means in the context of Shenzhen.

"A new urban geography" - as opposed to what? The Public Art Plaza is big by the standards of local parks (some in our group said "too big"), but small by the standards of Futian (or Tian'anmen). And to the extent that it is big, the architects are going to great pains to make it smaller, breaking it up with the folded surface, with the big inclined plane over the parking, with the trees, with the water, with the little pavilions.

It's not just a spastic attempt to add interest; it's a recognition that Futian-type space simply can't provide the local community with a real sense of gathering around a unique node. In a city whose history runs back only thirty years, there's a need for distinctive places, both as landmarks and as the shared turf of medium-sized collectives. Wanting something "unique," of course, would justify almost any kind of weird whatnot here, but, given the range of possible choices, I think it's significant that Urbanus choose multiplicity over singularity. And it's a kind of multiplicity that would be tough to erase with a quick renovation. The sectional gymnastics might make this skateboard bait, but they also promote local variety within the plaza, something appropriate to a - dare I say it - democratic society.

The only thing holding it back is the apparently obligatory perimeter wall, presumably much appreciated by authority figures but not so good at tying the plaza in to its context.

(Incidentally, if you're feeling poetic, here's an exercise for credit: gin up a metaphorical significance to the way the palm trees emerge out of the dingy, utilitarian and state-approved parking garage, through the new ground of the public park and towards the uncharted reaches of the clear blue sky...)

Even if Urbanus wouldn't take it that far, it's worth imagining how annoyed Mao would have been by a plaza like this. No space for assembling the masses, no good place to stand and address them, and no good spot for the individual to be humiliated and beaten down by the collective. Meanwhile, to the extent that buildings show up to frame the edges, they're hardly monumental: leaning and slumping, they vanish before your eyes. Like Scharoun's postwar projects in Berlin, Urbanus's plazas in Shenzhen - a city born specifically out of the return to normalcy after the Cultural Revolution - defy the possibility of being used to perform fascism. A new urban geography, indeed.

Don't miss Evan's post, with a slightly different take as well as some coverage of Urbanus's equally interesting OCT Loft renovation...

Full set of images here.

City After City Rose Up Like Fairy Tales (Shenzhen, Part 1)

2012-02-05T18:15:00.000-08:00

This is the first half of a two-part look at Shenzhen. This is the text-heavy background info; I might try and gussy it up with some maps or something tomorrow. Coming soon, the photo-rich look at Shenzhen as we found it...

Shenzhen is everything I was looking forward to, traveling to China in 2011 - and also everything that took me by surprise. The hype, repeated around the globe in a thousand formulations, is considerable and not entirely off base: Shenzhen is arguably the most rapidly-urbanized site in the history of the planet, having gone from an administrative grouping of some 30,000 fishers and farmers, to a gleaming city of ten million people in less than a generation. A massive urban agglomeration has basically sprung up from nothing, since the moment in 1979 when, as a later hit song put it, "an old man drew a circle on the southern coast of China." To make sense of Shenzhen, it's necessary to pause here and go over what that means; my apologies to those of you for whom this is old, familiar material.

The "old man" was Deng Xiaoping. During his long career, Deng had alternately occupied the roles of Mao's trusted lieutenant and his rejected ex-comrade - - - holding the reins of power one year, exiled to tractor factories in the boonies the next, then back again. As the dust of the Cultural Revolution period settled in the late 1970s, the 75-year-old Deng finally consolidated a position of power in Beijing, and began to fully implement the liberalizing economic policy he'd been kicking around intermittently since the 1950s. Within certain delimited areas - Special Economic Zones - the credit supply was loosened, foreign investment was encouraged, private land ownership (or private long-term-leasing) of land was permitted, and for-profit business became viable. Meanwhile, state demands on farming were eased (enabling farmers to amass surpluses and send their children away to the factories). The scheme paid off big: the first Special Economic Zone - the "circle" the old man drew in the South - was our meteoric Shenzhen.

Deng's official image is of a non-ideological pragmatist concerned with Getting Things Done; he expressed himself early on with an old proverb proclaiming "It doesn't matter whether it is a yellow cat or a black cat. A cat that catches mice is a good cat." The timing was appropriate; China had just been convulsed by a decade of partisan strife, with various factions asserting their superior grasp of Chairman Mao Thinking, and greater commitment to smashing Rightist running-dogs. The cost in lives, property, Chinese heritage, and opportunity (higher education had basically halted) was staggering. China, it seems, was ready for a results guy. Notwithstanding Deng's earlier involvement in Anti-Rightist purges, and his ongoing suppression of democracy (infamously in the 1989 Tian'anmen Square Massacre), his stock remains extremely high in China, and no wonder: no leader in human history can take more direct credit for the improvement of quality of life. Tens, or even hundreds of millions of Chinese, now living a comfortable, middle-class lifestlye (even by Western standards), have Deng to thank for unleashing the forces that would lift them out of poverty.

Millions more, of course, remain shut out. China's booming growth has not impacted everyone equally, and so for the first time since 1949, income inequality began to grow rapidly. China now has the most new millionaires of any country, but it also now has an enormous floating population of badly-treated migrant workers (particularly in the construction industry) and sweatshop workers (conditions may vary) - in addition to the rural poor (still in dire straits) and those crippled by murderously toxic industrial pollutants. Today's China is not without its problems; my point here isn't to establish whether or not it's all been "worth it," but rather to establish that the Chinese population, as a whole, is pretty pleased with the way Deng has swung things.

So - Shenzhen. The area Deng selected for the first Special Economic Zone (SEZ) was carefully selected. It was not an established center, although it had enjoyed some significance as a salt-production area in ancient times, and a trade stop and naval defense point en route to Guangzhou in the middle ages. But it never recovered from a forced evacuation in 1661 (part of an imperial edict to quash opposition to the new Qing Dynasty); Guangzhou, the only port open to foreign trade, grabbed up all the business in the area, and Shenzhen became a backwater.

But a backwater was just what Deng needed: if the SEZ experiment failed, there would be fewer witnesses, and if it got out of control and threatened the established order, it could be shut down and the clock reset. As an ancient proverb of the Chinese periphery observes, Heaven is high and the Emperor is far away. Closer at hand: the enviable success of Hong Kong and the growing labor surplus of the Pearl River Delta's agricultural expanse. Looking to Hong Kong as well as the other "Asian Tiger" economies, Deng hoped to channel China's resources into a light-industrial, consumer-product manufacturing sector that would supply the world's Wal-Marts.

Light industrial development lines the highways of southern China; my friend Alex, a Hong Kong native, reported that in his childhood in the 1980s, this territory was largely rice paddies and fish ponds.

So, in 1979, the collection of villages in the area was consolidated into a single administrative entity, and in 1980 it became the first SEZ.
With the advent of Deng's reforms, plus basic investments in railroads and infrastructure, Shenzhen began its rise, which is perhaps best charted by the (admittedly "official") population statistics. The rising population also meant a total transformation of the landscape, by several processes. Factories opened, attracting job-seeking migrants from the hinterland. The local small-holders capitalized on the new demand for housing, renting out rooms to the new arrivals. Soon they had enough cash saved up to knock down their houses and replace them with bigger houses, renting out more rooms. The process repeated itself as development snowballed; land prices rose, and the onetime farmers either sold out to foreign investors or became career landlords in their own right. (While all land in China is owned by the state, it had become possible to purchase long-term leases, the buying and selling of which approximates a real estate market.) Former villages, swallowed in the tide of urbanization, maintained their footprints but grew vertically and densified. Shenzhen contains over two hundred such villages, housing more than two million people.

Meanwhile, the once-hilly land began to flatten out (the hills being a convenient source of fill material) with buildings going up (and down) faster than permits could even be issued, and arguably faster than anyone could master-plan any of it. Growth only accelerated as neighboring cities were added to the SEZ program: Zhuhai in 1980, Guangzhou in 1984, and the whole of the Pearl River Delta in 1985. Shenzhen's transformation had become the engine of similarly dramatic changes in the whole region, increasingly an interconnected megalopolis that now includes Hong Kong and Macau. The PRD of a whole, with .4% of China's land area, now accounts for 1/3 of its trade value and 9% of its GDP.

Fresh growth on the outskirts of Guangzhou, the other major center of the Pearl River Delta.

By the 1990s, Shenzhen had become an enormous, growing, and seemingly permanent construction site. As the city is sandwiched between the waterfront to the south and a chain of mountains to the north, this development has been largely an east-west, linear band, with two centers: western Shekou (closest to Hong Kong by sea) and eastern Luohu (closest to Hong Kong by land). While this growth was carefully planned for in economic targets and methods, its physical condition - at least according to the standard narrative - has been fundamentally unplanned.

Architectural theorists and critics, notably Rem Koolhaas, have made a point of salivating over the supposedly direct conversion of raw economic and social forces into built reality, by "pure," laissez-faire processes, yielding, supposedly, a zany, anything-goes metropolis of unlikely juxtapositions and continuous transformation. (It probably helped Koolhaas that he was talking about a famously authoritarian, over-controlled country; somehow it seems like drooling over laissez-faire would not play as well to his audience if he were rhapsodizing about, say, England under Thatcher, or the Netherlands since the economic downturn.) Whatever the downside costs of the "new China," the growth of Shenzhen seduces the imagination by the inarguable absurdity of its scale and speed.

The Pearl River Delta class photo: Shiny new apartments (back row), concrete matrix, soon to be shiny new apartments (middle row), smallholder garden plots, soon to be concrete matrix (front row).

So - - - that's most of what I knew about Shenzhen going over to China. In the next post, I'm going to try and document the tiny glimpse of Shenzhen that we got in our actual one-day visit. Is it indeed the un-planned, chaotic wonderland of the new developing world? FIND OUT!

Guangdong Tower Defense (Kaiping Diaolou)

2012-02-03T20:59:00.000-08:00

As far as our super-short, high-efficiency China tourism was concerned, Kaiping was a bit of a detour. It's a couple hours out of Shenzhen, in the direction of no other cities we'd heard of. Uh oh! But Kaiping is almost certainly worth it; the city itself has no major points of interest, but it's a solid base from which to very quickly reach several villages and/or "clusters" of diaolou (tower-houses) and other interesting urbitechtural forms which are characteristic of Guangdong Province. They may appear at first glance to be some curious vernacular, perhaps a centuries-old way of building or, for lack of a better phrase, an ancient Chinese secret.

Well, you know how it goes with ancient Chinese secrets. The diaolou are reinforced-concrete buildings of the late-19th and early-20th century. If you're not convinced, check out the furnishings, and the all-concrete stairs:

I'll let Evan quickly sum up the basic points here:

I don’t have a lot to say about the Kaiping Dialou tower houses: my knowledge is limited to what I’ve read on Wikipedia and gleaned from the UNESCO World Heritage list description: In short, this unique typology developed when Chinese emigrants from Guangdong province (economically-depressed at the time – late Qing dynasty) found work in the United States, Canada, or even South America (working in gold mines, or on the railroads, for instance), and returned home incredibly wealthy, compared to those who had remained behind…

These houses, thus, had to serve dual roles: to project an image of luxury, with newfound wealth and culture represented by ostentatious ornament with a distinct western influence, and to protect that wealth from marauding bandits (apparently a big problem at the time).

This tidy narrative, restated in most of the online coverage of the diaolou has at least one enormous plot hole: with Macau and Guangzhou maybe a hundred miles away, why would you need to go all the way to America to get examples of Western architecture? It's not impossible that some of the (badly abused) Chinese immigrant laborers brought their sketchbooks and charcoal pencils with them, and stumbled upon some scattered examples of Classicism while laying track in Nevada. It's maybe even likely, given the huge numbers of Chinese that did go abroad in this period, that some of them were sufficiently educated and/or interested, to take down extensive notes in more architecturally rich parts of the US (San Fransisco, maybe). It would have only taken a few of these people to come back and start building to start some kind of trend and inspire imitators. And who am I to doubt the official UNESCO narrative?

But, as Evan suggests on Flickr, that official narrative probably comes at least in part from Chinese state literature. You'd expect propaganda to downplay foreign influence, but, Evan argues, it's part of the Chinese national image that China is the center of the world and thus the receiver of all manner of cultural tribute. (Americans can probably relate to this form of national identity, actually.) So maybe we're getting a skewed version of the story - or maybe the UNESCO and Chinese authorities are good historians and I'm just speculating wildly. But it just seems like there are sources closer to hand for this stuff.

Let's set aside the question of origins, though. Frankly, while the Western detailing does give these things an interesting, probably unique hybrid ornamental program, it's not really the most interesting thing about the buildings. For the rest of this post I just want to consider the diaolou typologically. Let's start with the "protection" theme.

Another thing Evan points out is that, if you really want to protect yourself from marauding bandits, there are certainly other Chinese residential typologies that will do the job. A freestanding tower certainly offers an intimidation factor, but it seems relatively easy to conquer and/or set on fire, depending what sort of banditry you favor. Indeed, at least some of the visual and metaphorical appeal of the diaolou for a tourist is how bizarrely out of place they seem, punctuating a flat landscape with isolated buildings, like rock formations orphaned in a plain by erosion and glaciation. They seem like a really weird idea.

However, it's worth noting that the towers don't operate in isolation. They were the houses of rich men, but not remote country villas; rather, they tower over a town, and the town has other defensive resources. For one thing, there are also actual watch towers, although the residential towers certainly could serve this role - see this breakdown of different tower types.

Meanwhile, the townscape is of a form that lends itself to going under siege: it's tightly-gridded, with narrow streets, little exposure to the outer edge, and, basically, lots of wall. This kind of planning is traditional, but it's interesting to find it here realized, like the diaolou, in reinforced concrete. It also plays up what's novel about the diaolou: they're vertical in a world of horizontal building, with the attendant potential for exposure on multiple facades, not to mention cross-breezes to alleviate the humidity.

By the way - as you may have noticed, the landscape here, while agricultural, has its share of trees. We're in a subtropical climate - so another advantage offered by the towers is the opportunity to see (and be seen!) over the treeline. That's a defensive boon that the courtyard dwellings can't offer.

(This is well demonstrated by the fact that today, as the area incurs its share of new-built whatnot, the diaolou can still compete on the skyline.)

Another thing: the "freestanding" diaolou often aren't. Or at least, they tend to have a more horizontal base level, incorporating service spaces as well as an entry courtyard. But even when they do stand completely free, they still seem open to the possibility of coagulating in a larger order. I say this because they have a very consistent orientation: the southern exposure is the one that really opens up for entry (and ground-floor businesses). The top-level loggias are also south-facing.

The cold concrete stair is flexed to the north edge of the house, and the other walls endure only mild window-punching. Since the floor plans aren't too deep, it's easy to imagine closing up the relatively closed east and west facades, and turning this thing into an urban row typology.

But perhaps I just say that because, in fact, you can find such an urban row typology, of basically the same date, just down the road:

This concrete, double-height stoa in the village of Chikan is a 20th-century elaboration of traditional Chinese forms which are wooden and single-height, but basically do the same thing. And it's basically a series of diaolou, at least in the concern with verticality, frontality, and the "look at me!" individuation of each individual facade, even though in fact the whole thing is really one building. When we get to Guangzhou we'll see a more bare-bones version of the concrete type, notably across a canal from the foreign concession in Shamian Island (another likely source of Western motifs in Guangdong province).

So, is Chikan a concatenation of diaolou, or are the diaolou orphaned bits of Chikan, whisked away by tornado and dropped unceremoniously in a farmer's field? Either way, Chikan is well worth the stop, especially if you catch it first thing in the morning when it's glowing with the sunrise. It doesn't take long to take in the riverfront stoa and the next layer back, which consists of more ordinary row dwellings in the now-familiar stil diaolou.

To wrap it up: let me say that I am not sure why exactly groups of diaolou are invariably referred to as "clusters," but I like it, because "Diaolou Cluster," in my bungled, Georgian Chinese pronunciation, comes out a lot like "Goo Goo Cluster."

Full set of images here, including lots of Pretty Pictures of flowers, brick walls raked by sunlight, and sesame-seed snack foods.

Vanke Center - Steven Holl Architects, 2006-2009

2012-01-23T19:31:00.000-08:00

This suburban campus, combining offices for the Vanke and SOHO property development groups with a conference center and hotel, is a “horizontal skyscraper” as long as the Empire State Building is tall. It steps up as much as 50 meters along its length, ostensibly to allow views through to the lake and the ocean bay beyond. A hybrid of concrete frame and cable-stayed bridge structure supports the terminal cantilever, while the free-form landscape conceals the subterranean conference center and spa. Various "green" features (geothermal cooling, locally sourced materials, green roof, operable shading screens, etc.) earned a LEED Platinum rating. The building also features a heavy dose of Hollian narrative: it’s like something "once floatng on a higher sea; that sea has now subsided, leaving [it] propped up high on glass and white coral-like legs."

Vanke is a good thirty-minute drive out of Shenzhen proper, but certainly worth the trip for the architecturally-minded. We got extremely lucky: Chen had arranged a visit and tour, which probably would have been just fine, but we showed up just in time to join up with a guided walk-through by Li Hu - credited along with Holl as design architect for the building, and partner-in-charge. He was kind enough to let us join his contingent from the HK/SZ Architecture Biennale, and give us a really close insight into the making of this building.

I have never been the world's biggest Steven Holl fan... but boy is this a nice building. Granted, I don't entirely buy the narrative: the "view" preserved under the building is basically just of the building's own landscape, and for people in the complex it just preserves a fairly uninspiring view of the surrounding suburban whatnotscape.

And the less said about this shaggy-dog "coral" story, the better. But this is a really well-built, distinctive, pleasant building that does a wonderful job of breaking an enormous program down into something manageable. At the same time, it's surprisingly spatial even just on the exterior - the views through of the building itself are layered and complex. Holl's sensibility can be plausibly described as a reinvented Corbusian approach - the elements have all been regenerated but the compositional instincts are there.

One key to the building's success is its landscape, which ironically was actually a last-minute substitution. The original concept had called for some kind of variety pack of "sea-scribble gardens." According to Li Hu, as the building approached completion, it was clear that this wasn't going to work out financially, and they came up with this native-grass dunescape stuff.

But the plantings and the hills act as visual screens, almost ha-ha like: you have no idea that this landscape is broken up with huge light wells (serving the vast amount of program that was buried underground), until you're right on top of them!

These light wells are really nicely-detailed, by the way - check out how thin the top lip is here:

"Nicely-detailed" speaks to a lot of things about this building, which really looks great from just about every angle. Granted, it's still pretty new, but we saw other buildings in China by big foreign starchitects that seemed not half so carefully-built. Holl seems to have been able to roll with the practical facts of building (with a still-developing Chinese construction sector), as well as the realities of budgetary adjustment, and deliver something elegant and attractive.

The skin's another winner; aside from delivering the LEED points, it casts lovely shadows, diffuses the sunlight wonderfully (no doubt welcome in the tropical summers here), and visually softens up the exterior surfaces. The concave section of the louvers suggests the "bamboo" concrete patterning in the Sifang Art Museum, well into development when this project began; it'd be interesting to know if the office made any connection there.

Some mysteries remain - like the substantial quantity of unprogrammed lobby/circulation space, both in the offices and in the conference center. And is the inclined green roof really meant to come this close to the ground (and no closer), or is this still a work in progress?

Overall, though, an unexpected thumbs up. Maybe there's a reason this guy keeps ending up on Pritzker betting shortlists...

Full set of photos can be found in my Steven Holl set on Flickr. Here's a few more choice items:

Bit of wall surface on the interior.

Emma doing her "scale figure" thing.

A contemplative Patrick wanders the dunescape.

Oh - and the building comes with little... racing blocks. Sweet.

Even Better Than The Real Thing (The Venetian Macao)

2012-01-22T20:08:00.001-08:00

I don't actually have any particularly original thoughts about this building, but I think it deserves the multi-photo blog treatment - so, take this! Evan gives it a more robust go here, although I maintain that the old city ain't so bad as he paints it.

But yeah, this thing! Basically, if the Venetian in Vegas asks, "What if Venice could fit inside a single building," the Venetian in Macao asks, "Okay, but what if that building were bigger?" As Wikipedia dryly puts it, this is,

[...]the sixth-largest building in the world by area and the largest casino in the world. It is also home to the second largest Venice in the world, the first being the city of Venice, Italy and the third being The Venetian in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Emphasis added.)

How can you argue with that? This is a building where you go upstairs to find the canal network! And by "upstairs," I mean "up a Baroque escalator."

So, let's just take a quick look at the highlights before I run out to karaoke:

Doge's Palace? Check.

Rialto Bridge, as driveway-canopy? Check.

I guess this is...Piazza San Marco? During a bout of acqua alta? Check.

They don't let you take photos on the massive, massive casino level (though Evan got one), but it's about what you'd expect - acres of tables and slot machines, super-massive ceiling beams to carry all the mechanical systems, yadda yadda. It seriously takes ten minutes to walk through this building even just plodding dead ahead trying to get to the back entrance.

Anyway, the real fun is upstairs, in the canal-mall. Here's a plan I grabbed off the web:

Annnnnd...here's some photos:

Full collection of images over on Flickr.

Escalevitation (Mid-Levels Escalators, 1987-1993)

2012-01-19T22:42:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Evan, the Central Mid-Levels Escalators were one of the things I was most looking forward to in Hong Kong, and they did not disappoint. So far our looks at Hong Kong's strangeness have really dealt with phenomena arising out of density, with topography coming in only peripherally. However, as you press inward from the north shore of Hong Kong Island and leave the flat, reclaimed ground, the streets get twisty, the grid breaks down, and somehow it seems you're always going uphill. Welcome to the Mid-Levels, the aptly-named hillside stretch that was first home to the colonial upper crust, who had the means and inclination to move uphill and escape the riff-raff (ie, the poor, the Chinese, the victims of British exploitation).

Today, while it's still upscale, the mansions are gone, replaced by high-rises. So the question is: how do all those people get down every day? Let alone back up? The locals are resourceful and were, it seems, doing all right (and getting their exercise) just shuffling up and down. But in 1987, even as the details of the handover were getting sorted out, the government decided that pedestrian traffic had gotten way out of hand, and that the choked sidewalks needed some sort of alleviation. This being Hong Kong, sky-ways and escalators are both established (and crucial) pieces of public and semi-public infrastructure; it couldn't have taken long to think of combining them: density and topography, addressed in one stroke. The Central Mid-Levels Escalators (CMLE) opened in 1993; Wikipedia reports a daily traffic of 55,000, double the initial expectation.

(By the way, the single-lane escalator switches direction after mid-morning, a money-saving appropriation of subway-station tactics.)

Despite the heavy traffic topside, apparently some argue that the whole thing was a waste of time and money. Practically speaking, they say, traffic hasn't really been alleviated - people just crowd into the escalators rather than onto the sidewalk. But now the sidewalk can breathe enough to take on program - shops and cafes, all that good stuff. Nowhere else in Hong Kong is Jackie's point about a hierarchy of pedestrian streets clearer - - - locals take the street, freeway traffic heads up to the escalators. Those on the ground also get an arguable benefit from the escalator overhead: shade, and the vague sense of traveling along a colonnade or allee.

As for the experience of going above... it's pretty cool. The views out are about what you'd expect from sky-bridges... except that with the ground plunging steeply down below, you often end up, in practical times, two or three full stories up, a much more spectacular way of gazing down at the city. As Evan points out, the tenants in adjacent buildings haven't missed the opportunity: shops showcase their choice wares in big windows on these upper stories, facing across the gap to the escalators. Of course, escalator riders can't reach across and buy anything, but their mechanical cruise makes them a captive audience, so why not?

Next to Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, the Escalators are the one must-see for architects in Hong Kong. And actually, HSBC and CMLE have a few things in common. Both have their origins in naked problem-solving, both rely on the repetition of specially-designed components, and both are notionally meant to serve some infrastructural role (though Foster's plaza, while nice, is a spinoff from the larger design idea). They were also both expensive; the CMLE, with a price-tag of $30 million USD might not come close to Foster's budget, but the CMLE did go over-budget by more than 200 percent - certainly enough to get critics mumbling that the whole project was an ill-conceived boondoggle.

A big difference: Foster's building is a meticulously-crafted jewel, whereas these things, whatever their spatial and urbanistic charm, seem to be made out of utterly generic 1980s mall-dreck, left out in the elements to turn gray and wither. It's like the attack of the bad subway entrance canopies. But wait. Turn that around: These things, whatever undistinguished whatnot they're made out of, are incredible in spatial and urbanistic terms.

Going a little further with that, I'd venture that Hong Kong, and particularly the Mid-Levels, could potentially be wielded against the counter-urbanistic arguments of Rem Koolhaas. In S/M/L/XL's "Whatever Happened to Urbanism?", Koolhaas argues that the ability to plan the city, in the face of explosive population growth around the planet, is basically gone and not coming back. Those who try to manage growth and make sense out of the city are fighting against the tide of history, "like chess players who lose to computers." Hong Kong isn't exactly the kind of city he's talking about (he has in mind horizontal sprawl-topias like Lagos and Karachi), but still: millions and millions and millions of people, building away! How could any government even sign all the permits, let alone read them?!

But what I think is interesting is that in another essay, Junkspace, Koolhaas basically calls upon architects to consider seriously the reality that 99% of the world is built out of generic, materially unsatisfying junk, virtually identical the world over and lacking in any of the traditionally high-rated architectural qualities. As usual, Koolhaas wants architects to accept that this is the way things are, and then use that reality as a springboard to work out the possibilities. One significant advantage of Junkspace, though: it's cheap and easy to replicate, in fact it sort of wants to do so.

So - compare the Escalators to more conventional, high-designed urbanistic solutions. While the escalators did cost some dough, redesigning the city to create a sequences of plazas and parks and what-have-you is basically impossible: it'd cost billions, and require a shared vision among countless stakeholders. Rather, Hong Kong swings for the low-brow detritus of infrastructure: the cheap, improvisational insertion into the city it's inherited. It helps that they have the surplus pedestrian density to keep the skyways from becoming dessicated ruins, of course! But what they get really ticks off a lot of the boxes for good urbanism: a series of experiences is choreographed in a way that overlaps with the needs of human beings and their memory-maps of the city as a place. And do you need plazas when the streets are so steep they can only be occupied by pedestrians, and in fact are, at all hours of the day?

In short: Whatever happened to urbanism? I dunno - but it turns out we can make it out of Junkspace anyway.

(We'll have the chance to revisit Koolhaas's claims - elsewhere in China, we'll get to see some super-explosive cities that don't seem to corroborate this theory. It's also interesting that for his examples, Koolhaas favors states with no resources or rampant corruption making it impossible to implement anything at all. China has its share of corruption, but autocratic governments have a way of being able to build whatever they want. But I digress.)

Full set of photos over on Flickr.

Langham Place (Jon Jerde Partnership, 2005)

2012-01-11T19:57:00.000-08:00

So, hey, here's Jon Jerde - not exactly a hot name around the KSA, but the guy knows what he's doing.

Here, he takes all the things malls always have, and spins them into cotton candy. Gotta have some levels, some escalators, okay, sure - - but make the thing really tall and you can cut away half the floors, leaving room for a nine-story atrium and a super-tall escalator which flies across the space, passes through a crack in the sheer mountain wall at one end, and then passes into a strange, Flintstonian world of much cozier dimensions.

As Evan pointed out, aside from turning shopping into a delirious roller-coaster ride, it's also good business: everyone is going to want to take this thing all the way to the top, and once they're up there, if they pass up the chance to head right back down, they're caught, like the "Climbing Villain" in an action movie climax. Drift away from the "easy" escalator back down and you're likely to just keep spiralling down those mini-levels, shopping away.

But what do I care - given how terrible malls can be, I'm happy to see someone make a real event out of the junk of the typology. It seems like a very Hong Kong thing to do, even if this is not a very Hong Kong type of mall. (It does plug into the subway network below, but Mong Kok isn't a land of sky-bridges like Wan Chai or Central, so there's not a lot else for it to connect to - the ground plane stays relatively "thin.")

My leftie side wants to hate this for its crassness, its glitz, its cynical manipulation... but just in terms of design, I gotta say, there's some clever things going on here.

Full batch of photos starts here.

Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Company Building - Foster & Partners, 1979-1986

2012-01-07T11:18:00.000-08:00

Arguably Foster's masterpiece, and certainly Hong Kong's, the HSBC building is still perhaps the clearest fulfillment of the promises of High-Tech: that Modernism was not out of steam, that the interrogation of structure and systems that notionally began in the 1920s had yet endless ground to cover. This impulse, most clearly laid out by Reyner Banham in Theory & Design and The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, gathered steam in the wake of Archigram and Pompidou, but it perhaps needed Foster (and a blank-check budget) to find its full flower. Jackie, who was skimming the orbit of AD and the Pomo kings, recalls it as a defiant statement against the jokey language-games and client-pleasing Classicism of the period. Thirty years on from its conception, HSBC still looks like a spaceship just landed from a much more advanced planet.

That's because its form is not derived from stylistic riffing on futurosity (which tends to date very quickly) but an actual response to a number of desiderata, pushed through the mill of "well, what if we..." experimentation. It helps to put yourself back in the mindset of the late 1970's. As Jane Murphy recounts in her construction classes at Ohio State, if you were an architect at the time and got a job to do a corporate office building, you sort of knew the drill: core in the middle, nice offices on the perimeter for the executives, cubicle farm in between. Bada-bing, bada-boom.

This building, on the heels of the Willis-Faber-Dumas building, was a shot across the bow for that entire way of thinking. What if everybody in the office could get natural light and a great view? What if you shove the circulation and all the systems to the edges and let the middle enjoy both flexibility and a spectacular atrium? What if the design of a tower could anticipate the need for keeping the curtain wall clean? What if you detailed those access walkways in such a way that they also acted as sun-shades?

Out of these questions, and a few specificites of timeline, budget, typhoon wind-loading, and zoning code (the last yielding the stepped composition of the three narrow tower-masses), comes the form of the building, and its most dramatic elements: the huge trusses (or "coat-hangers") from which hang floor plates. They also break down the scale of the building to something more urbane (though it isn't super-tall) and in harmony with the historic bank building next door...all without the use of any element whose purpose is solely decorative. It's a beaut; or, as Leonard Bachman puts it,

This bank is nothing less than a new prototype, an example of how to design and construct a building. Nothing about the design of HSBC was taken as a given of standard practice. None of its components were chosen from a catalog. [...] It is worrisome in some regard that it took a billion-dollar bank building on a half-billion-dollar site to realize this advanced project, but perhaps that is the cost of such an invention.

Full set of photos starts here.

Extremely Steep and Incredibly Full: Byte Rollover Urbanism in Hong Kong

2012-01-05T20:39:00.001-08:00

Hong Kong is a tough city of which to make sense, but I'm going to try and get across my impressions. Since no individual photo can really convey it all, I'm going to break out my much-neglected blog and see what we can do here. These are the still-fresh recollections of a first-time visitor, so apologies if any of this seems a little too purple and undercooked.

Out of density, topography and the rubbish of curtain walls and slapped-together concrete nothingness, Hong Kong generates an experientially rich urbanism of interpenetrating section, where every trip across town becomes a Piranesian expedition woven under, over, through and sometimes around the “real” surface (usually fake). Crystal-clear to locals, who walk around with mental maps showing every mall, subway station, and ferry terminal, Hong Kong circulation would baffle an outsider without a guide. Directions from A to B suggest a variant of Bill Cosby’s old “Street Football” routine:

Okay, Cosby - you make a left at the light, go into the King Savings Mall, head up the ‘B’ escalator, make a right at the Starbucks, go out the exit there, cross the sky-bridge, come down half a level , walk along the outer verandah of the Wizard Wonder Mall, turn left when you see the giant Santa Claus, go straight down the escalator and then you’ll be in the subway. ...I’ll fake it to ya.

It is, obviously, fabulous. Two questions: how’d it get this way? And how can it possibly work? In this post, I'll try to sketch out the big points of the whole story.

The conditions of Hong Kong are first and foremost the product of topography and history, which have combined to produce an incredible density (today much lower than it once was!). Hilly and unforgiving, the island was described as a “bare, barren rock” when the British claimed it by force in 1841. They were still happy to have it, as a trading post and business center with access to (and, if need be, control over) the mouth of the Pearl River – and with a deep-water port that could handle international trade to Europe, India, and, closer at hand, the other South China Sea notables. But it definitely presented a development challenge, and indeed it was scarcely a decade after the colony was established that the British began land-reclamation efforts, a process which continues to this day.

What they had not bargained for was that a chunk of Chinese land secured by the naval superiority of the British Empire would be incredibly attractive to the people of mainland China. Beginning early on, those seeking economic opportunity, as well as those fleeing chaos and violence elsewhere, surged into the colony. The population growth of Hong Kong (plus Kowloon and the New Territories, adjacent mainland areas added to the colony later on) can almost be tracked directly against the desperation of China generally. Beginning from a population of 15,000 in 1841, the colony was swelled by refugees from the Taiping Rebellion in the 1850s and 1860s (bringing it up to 125,000), from the Boxer Rebellion and the Revolution of 1911 (up to 457,000), and of course from World War II, although actually population dropped somewhat by the end of the Japanese occupation. The Communist takeover the mainland sent many more running; by 1950 the population was over two million; today, it’s over seven million.

This string of numbers only tells part of the story. The history of Hong Kong is really about the collision of those numbers with the facts of the topography. Where on that “bare, barren rock” would all those people live? As discussed in Hong Kong Architecture: The Aesthetics of Density, the land reclamation certainly couldn’t keep up, and during the Victorian era, Hong Kong was characterized by a sharp divide between the elegant colonial buildings, and the staggeringly dense, crowded and unsanitary slum city in which the working-class Chinese majority had to live. The British slum-lord class was happy to see things remain as they were, and their principal response to the problems of the slums was to run away from them, by moving uphill into stately mansions in the Mid-Levels. Despite occasional shaming reports on the deplorable conditions, and half-hearted attempts at reform, the colonial government did very little to alleviate any of these problems until a comprehensive social housing program emerged in the 1950s and 1960s.

So, short version, Hong Kong’s got a lot of people in a relatively small area. Okay, so what’s that got to do with the urban form? Well, to answer that I’d like to take a moment and bring you up to speed on obscure video-game programming trivia from the 1970s, specifically the concept of byte rollover.

The basic concept should be familiar from the days of the Y2K Bug scare: old video games were designed with certain strings of numbers (the score, what level you had reached) which were only designed to go so high, and weird stuff would happen if you surpassed that number. Pac-Man, for example, recorded the current level as a three-digit number, linked to a single byte of storage that can record up to the number 256 (i.e., two to the eighth power ). Completing level 256 thus means you have crossed the limits of an eight-bit processor, so rather than taking you to level 257, the machine laps itself and finds itself back at zero. Unfortunately, the programmers didn’t make a Level Zero, so Pac-Man arrives in a frightening world, familiar in its vocabulary but with none of the ordinary rules applying.

(See images at Digital Press)

To borrow from Cosby again, “I told you that story so I can tell you this one.” The moral of all that is: push a number, or a statistical fact, far enough, and you can rewrite the rules that govern the surrounding system It's an appropriate axiom for a city where "Level Zero" itself is usually a construct, and Hong Kong, even moreso than other superpopulous Chinese cities we visited, demonstrates what I’d call a kind of urban byte rollover. With incredible density (on, again, unforgiving territory), all kinds of things that we’d expect would destroy street-level pedestrian urbanism…don’t. The rules are backwards: the city actually requires the accoutrements of discredited Modernist planning in order to function at all.

Urban freeways like Gloucester Road were the kiss of death to countless American cities; here, they do what was promised all along, separate the high-speed vehicular traffic and let the pedestrian enjoy light, air, and a visual reprieve from the "urban canyon." Same deal with elevated sky-ways and bridges, familiar from many struggling Midwestern downtowns - in a place with this many people, it's not possible for them to evacuate the street of life; they actually just take the pressure off and make the street pleasant. (A more dramatic example can be found in the street-escalators of the Mid-Levels - but we'll cross that sky-bridge when we come to it.)

Maybe the most bizarre example of the byte-rollover effect is the urban malls; these kinds of shopping centers are not unique to Hong Kong or to China, but they work particularly well here. Unlike the closed, discrete, and tightly policed mall-worlds I saw in India (where riff-raff are carefully screened from entry), or the familiar freestanding object-mall (with requisite sea of parking), the Hong Kong mall is actually a crucial piece of the urban fabric. The typical mall has no architectural, spatial, or material qualities whatsoever, but who cares - the urbanism's strong.

There seems to be a symbiotic relationship between the city and the mall operator. Elsewhere in China, I saw malls where each floor was ranked out by quality of goods: things you actually want on the ground floor, and increasingly obscure, cheap, and specialty-market goods above, where people are less likely to just pass through. Hong Kong is different, because hey, there are people up there! So long as you're building your mall up to the maximum allowable height for zero-set-back-retail (roughly three stories), why not plug into that network of sky-bridges?

Meanwhile, for the pedestrian, the mall is a free good: I need to get down, and malls have escalators. (Oh, and why not stop for some KFC?) Besides, the traditional urban block, with ground floor shops ringing a perimeter beneath housing, simply could not provide enough retail for this many people in such close conditions. And so, without shopping malls, pedestrian urbanism would be impossible. Byte rollover, people: the numbers have pushed us into an infrastructural Twilight Zone where everything you know about urban design is wrong. And boy, is it great.

Full set of photos here.

See also: Evan's overview post on Hong Kong.

Books: Purism A-Go-Go!

2010-05-23T07:29:00.000-07:00

A couple of recent reads dealing with similar subject matter...

L'Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925 is a 2001 exhibition catalog, edited with a lead essay by Carol S. Eliel and also including essays by Françoise Ducros and Tag Gronberg. The subject, as the title suggests, is Purism, the machine-glorifying branch or critique of Cubism founded by Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, soon to become the architectural giant Le Corbusier. Their production has been somewhat overshadowed by Corbu's later achievements, but these essays try to take it on its own terms and make sense of the "movement," such as it was.

It's excellent stuff. Eliel's essay gets the job of introducing the reader/visitor to the material, establishing the chronology, and providing some tools for understanding the canvases. (Spot the implied column capital that doubles as a machined part!) She also clarifies the role played by prolific painter Fernand Léger, for me a longtime "favorite painter about whom I know nothing" figure. It's all well-illustrated and quite clear, and the personalities of the figures come into focus, at least a little bit, insofar as they influence the intense but brief friendship between the principals. This is a strong, clear piece, I learned a lot, and I'll probably end up using it at some point as a classroom reading.

Françoise Ducros is, according to the back flap, "the world's leading expert on Amédée Ozenfant." She naturally gets the job of putting the spotlight on Ozenfant, who, of the heroic duo, was clearly the more serious and accomplished painter. That I previously thought of him as Corbu's second banana is understandable given my architectural education - - - I imagine art students think of Corbu as at best a blip on the radar! So this was also a really interesting read although it necessarily retreads a lot of the chronological ground from the Eliel. You get more of Ozenfant's evolution as a painter - where he was coming from, who he admired, where he went after the split with Corbu. But even if you only care about Corbu, there's some choice moments in here that help clarify their relationship; Jeanneret's distinctive high-handed manner was apparently already in full swing by 1923.

After all that biography and art criticism, we get Tag Gronberg's essay on the 1925 Esprit Nouveau pavilion. This is a really interesting piece; Gronberg puts the pavilion into the context not only of the Arts Décoratifs exhibition, but of interwar Paris generally. The argument is that Corbusier's critique of the expo/city is, like Loos's critique of Art Nouveau, fundamentally gendered, and can't be separated from the changing social status of women. The exhibition, after all, catered to the fashionable, well-off, socially adept women who were the subject of complexes mixtures of admiration and scorn. The concept of "Modernity" was closely linked to the new woman - who was simultaneously seen as the deviant, dissipating betrayer of all that had been fought for in the trenches. The products on sale at the exhibition were part of "a revamp of the persona of the female consumer," and it's in this context that Gronberg situates Corbusier's pavilion as a Loosian, masculine alternative.

As a bonus, you get the original 1918 "After Cubism" text by Ozenfant & Jeanneret, a nice primary source, although a bit of a slog after having essentially gotten the recap version in the Eliel essay.

Overall, a satisfying and informative read.

The Villas of Le Corbusier: 1920-1930, by Tim Benton, is an exhaustively researched 1987 study of, well, the 1920s villas of Le Corbusier. There is tons and tons of great material here, but I have to say right up front: despite its wide-open title, this is not an introductory text to these houses. Benton is writing for an audience that already knows most of these houses in their finished form well, and will therefore be ready to jump right into the backstories and the numerous "roads not taken." For a 1987 architectural audience this was probably a little more viable than it is for me; I know a few of these houses pretty well, but have never looked closely at most of them, and I often found myself drifting past discussions of details that just didn't come into focus for me.

But the real problem here is editorial. This is one of those books where the images are just scattered around the chapter at random, and the text gives very few "see figure..." type indicators. Benton almost exclusively cites using only the Fondation Le Corbusier drawing numbers ("FLC 15135"), giving you no clue whether the drawing he cites is in his book or not. You'll flip back and forth like mad hunting for those elusive FLC numbers. Sometimes you find the drawing you need far away, in one of the two chunks of color reprints. It's just a mess, and it constantly yanks you out of the text, which is a problem when you're already just barely hanging on to these unfamiliar buildings.

The content itself is great stuff. Benton has a "follow the money" approach which I also enjoyed in his essay on Catalan Modernisme (a seminar pick last quarter); here it's sometimes a little tedious, as we get periodic updates on when each villa's plans were sent to the contractors, but not always a sense of why we should care. A lot of times, Benton seems to be hashing out mysteries of interest to a select few - - This contractor submission proves conclusively that FLC 294921 was completed, at the latest, on September 15 1925!. But it gets really interesting when he shows how the money stuff plays into the design. The most striking example is for Villa Savoye, where, after the original scheme was rejected on budgetary grounds, an assortment of alternate versions emerges. These schemes, very helpfully redrawn by Benton, show this incredibly familiar house put through increasingly bizarre contortions; one, an awkward ABA arrangement, is virtually unrecognizable as the same house. A real treat for fans, this - it's like listening to the weird early takes on the Beatles Anthology volumes.

All of this makes me a little nostalgic for my DDIR days, and reminds us of how even the legendary Corbu had to walk into the office, roll up his sleeves, and find a way to save the idea of the house while chopping a third of the budget. Even when he totally loses me on the unfamiliar and irksomely-illustrated projects, Benton does a great job of conveying this ambience. Even as Corbu was publishing his manifestos and tying each project down to grand ambitions, he was also stalling for time, wrangling with contractors, trying to upsell the client on nicer window-glass, and resignedly turning back to the drawing board as things went awry, bankers backed out, neighbors demanded concessions, et cetera et cetera.

Bottom line, a worthy book for Corbu fans, and, like some of the architect's own leaky houses, desperately crying out for a re-design. Get the images right alongside the text that cites them, and start each chapter with a brief introduction to the once-famous features of the house, and you'd have something an energetic ARCH 601 student could really dig into.

Philip Langdon - Orange Roofs, Golden Arches: The Architecture of American Chain Restaurants

2010-04-08T15:11:00.000-07:00

Charming, quick read on the evolution of fast-food architecture (with some latitude for the definition of "fast food"). Now sadly rather out of date (it's from 1986), it's nonetheless entertaining and informative, with lots of fascinating origin stories for now-familiar motifs, and intriguing forgotten lore on chains that no longer exist. Best when he sticks to the relationship between restaurateur profit motives and the architecture they favored, Langdon does periodically trip himself up trying to make sweeping Zeitgeist arguments about how the emergence of earth-toned buildings in the 70s was the product of the environmental movement and a speech by Lady Bird Johnson. But there's lots of great stuff here, and great pictures to go with. Nice book.

Paul Overy - Light, Air, and Openness: Modern Architecture Between the Wars

2010-04-03T19:09:00.000-07:00

A sprawling, often fascinating visit to the world of 1920s and 30s architectural modernism, with an emphasis on themes of "hygiene" as it was understood at that time - the confluence of light, air, water, and cleanliness. These were elaborated literally as well as symbolically - so the buildings were supposed to actually be more hygienic to live in, but also to represent a new possible reality, a better and cleaner world that would replace the "old coach full of tuberculosis," in Le Corbusier's memorable phrase. Of course, since it's the '20s, talk of "hygiene" runs quickly into frankly racist material, and Overy does a nice job of documenting that stuff as well.

The only problem with the book is that it's a bit too sprawling. There are certain sections which, however fascinating, seem to wander far from the issues at hand; for example, we get a very interesting history of the Penguin Pool at the London Zoon, but it's not so clear that this really has much to do with the issue of human hygiene. A section on the Vienna Werkbundsiedlung, while chock full of good info on this project, doesn't reveal anything unique enough to justify its presence in a book that's already given extensive space to the Weissenhofsiedlung, the Neue Frankfurt, and Oud's housing projects in the Netherlands. As well, there are several places where buildings discussed in a previous chapter show up again without much being added - I personally would have appreciated a more vicious pruning of these things. Basically, it just feels like, having dug up all this really solid info, Overy couldn't bear to chop it out of the book. The extensive (though thoroughly worthwhile) end-notes also seem to support this take.

I used a couple of chapters of this as readings for the class last quarter, and I think for the general architectural reader that would probably be enough to sort of get the idea and the major issues at play, without feeling weighed down by the extent of the report. But the full length book is totally worth the read if you are particularly interested in modernist theory/ideology, or early-20th-century social practices beyond architecture.

David Pinkney - Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (1958)

2010-03-19T07:28:00.000-07:00

Ahem!

We're back!

I write to you now from Columbus OH, returned some months ago to pick up a part-time teaching gig and otherwise occupy myself (restaurant work) while picking up the pieces of my finances and developing a master plan for the coming years. In due time I expect to be blogging away about architecture visits as before, or at least linking to key Flickr posts. The coverage of Indian life will, naturally, be a bit thin given as I am no longer in India...but whenever I get to those photos, we'll check in.

In the meantime, I do like having a space open to discuss recent readings and things of that nature. The last few months have involved a lot of short-form reading as, week by week, I banged together the syllabus for the course at the KSA. This was time-consuming but extremely fulfilling: I got to attentively re-read material I first encountered in my distant architectural infancy (read: 2007), and plow through all kinds of stuff I'd never read before, in search of readings suitable to the topics covered in seminar. Reading things closely enough to teach them is a really different prospect than brushing through them on no sleep in between studio sessions as a student. In fact, one of the things I really disliked about my grad school experience was that I always felt I was short-changing reading and writing (for which I have a real passion if not a knack) in order to devote time to design (which I like in the abstract, but haven't really found a praxis for).

Long story short, I've been reading tons of essays, excerpts, and journal articles, with attendant underlining and marginalia. Now that the class is wrapped up, I'm back to longer-form stuff. Hooray!

First on the docket was Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris, a thoroughly-researched and quite interesting primer on the urban efforts of the titular Emperor and his bullheaded deputy, Baron Haussmann. Haussmann was a career bureaucrat and civil-engineer type with artistic aspirations, and the new Emperor plucked him from the provinces to execute a grandiose scheme of transformation for the increasingly crowded, chaotic, and disease-ridden city center. The book is a detailed account of both what Haussmann did and how he did it (in terms of politics and financing), as well as an apologia for the entire project, which has been criticized as either an aesthetic project distant from any social agenda, or a socially reactionary project to develop riot-proof streets under the aegis of aesthetic generosity.

At the time, as well, it was criticized as a financial boondoggle, the product of an Imperial regime that placed itself above criticism. The chapter covering Haussmann's eventual downfall, over the issue of his maze-like accounting practices, is, inevitably, a bit tough to follow, but it's fascinating in how it suggests the strange political animal that was the Second Empire.

I had previously imagined the accomplishments of Haussmann as being enabled basically by imperial fiat; thus, they represent a tempting dark side for designers, who may secretly crave the liberating will to power of an autocracy to enable their grand visions. In fact, while Haussmann's activities and accounts were effectively cloaked by the Emperor's patronage, the mechanisms used had to basically pass muster through a legal and parliamentary system not so different from things one might encounter today. Haussmann was, it seemed, regularly wrangling with the legislature, with financial institutions, and with property owners to try and make his schemes happen, and several of them were actually stopped in their tracks by recalcitrance from one or several of these parties. His "fantastic accounts" emerged basically in response to these conditions, and the impossibility of rebuilding the city without floating enormous debt despite a conservative fiscal climate.

The book will be most interesting to people who really know present-day Paris. Pinkney sort of trades on the assumption that you do know the modern (1950s) city, and can be suitably shocked that the Rue de Whatever was once a choked cul-de-sac, et cetera. I sort of glossed a lot of that stuff as "name of French street that I don't know," but even so, I learned a lot, and the prose is brisk and often entertaining. The big downside is that, in his efforts to balance out decades of criticism, he maybe gives too positive a spin on the whole affair, particularly concerning the issue of political repression. He's an even-handed commentator, though, and he gives fair space to the other side. Overall, though, this is a brilliantly-edited data-mining operation: the guy clearly spent months poring over newspapers, diaries, memoirs, and parliamentary minutes from the 1860s, and managed to put together a very coherent and informative text. The one thing I really longed for was more in the way of biography or personality; neither Napoleon III nor Haussmann really comes into focus as a human being here, but ultimately this is a book about the project and not the men.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in Paris, urbanism, or the Second Empire.

Ahmedablog 06 - Mill Owners' Association Building (Le Corbusier, 1951)

2009-11-18T01:36:00.000-08:00

(For full set of photos, start here.)

Tomorrow's an early start to go visit a site in suburban Bangalore, so I'll have to hold off on any involved, penetrating analysis. That's okay, though - it's only the Mill Owners' Building, one of the biggest and most glaring unchecked boxes on my worldwide Hunt For Le Corbusier! What could I possibly say?

In all seriousness, I may be better off waiting on this one anyway, since I seem to have failed to get prints of many of the things I wanted to talk about. So we'll dig into the details eventually, but for now I'm really just showing off or something: I've been to the Mill Owners' Building! In fact, here I am in the Mill Owners' Building!

Full image here.

That's in the main auditorium/lecture hall space, which is, well...I mean, look at it! A curving, tilted, sculptural swoosh rendered in luxurious (though faded) teak - we have come a long long way from the immaterial Corbu of the white-box villas, and even from the precise, tightly-wound beton brut of the Unite (and later, La Tourette, et cetera). This is Corbu in his late-career renewal of instinctive figural expression. The little noodles and curvoids that had always shown up in free plan have become aggressively sculptural without getting heavy - check out how this thing meets the floor! Is it just my eyes and the resolution of this photo, or is this detailed to look like it's floating? I wish I'd been paying closer attention when I was there - why bother going, right? - but I was a little distracted; on entering this room I ran into a contingent of friendly Corbusier fans based out of La-Chaux-de-Fonds. As they put it in the Mill Owners' guestbook, they are stewards of Corbusier's first houses and came to India to see his last ones. Neat, huh?

I mentioned the way the auditorium-volume seems reminiscent of planning devices that had been present all along, and there's something similar going on with the way the entire building is conceived. There's a drawing from the 20s entitled "The Four Compositions" (which I discovered in Ken Frampton's book on Corb); here the architect teases out some basic ways of approaching a project. The first two are opposites: a perfect geometric volume imposed by fiat (Villa Stein), and an irregular clumped composition of the Arts-and-Crafts variety (Villa La Roche-Jeanneret).

The second pair are attempts at synthesizing these using what Corbusier already assumed about the future of architecture based on the Dom-i-no House. Clearly he wanted both the Classical perfection of the cubic volume and the dynamic asymmetry and promenade possible in the Arts-and-Crafts plan, and he was assuming a world of stacked floor plates, with the action happening in plan. One of the last two drawings turned out to be the worldwide smash hit single: the massing is a white cube, but behind its free facade the plan explores the meandering adventures of the Arts-and-Crafts plan. In other words, the Villa Savoye.

Full image here.

The other way forward - the road less travelled - shows the same stacked floor plates and variegated plan, but does not package them all together in the white envelope; the totalizing cube is implied by the edges of the floor slabs, but the undulations of the plan remain on display from the outside. Frampton connects this drawing with the unbuilt Villa Baizeau in Carthage, and I would argue that it comes back with a vengeance some three decades later in this building, as well as the later Compare the photo above with these student renderings by one Jeremy Dingy.

(I am not the first to make this connection, of course - Deborah Gans puts forth the same argument in her Le Corbusier Guide. Actually, for all I can remember, Frampton may say the same exact thing, but it's been a few years since I read that book and it's a miracle my brain came up with "Villa Baizeau in Carthage.")

Arguably, this is really the Fifth Composition; the levels aren't just trays of exposed treats, because the brise-soleil screen is pulled across everything. In its full-coverage, it re-establishes the clear geometric volume (like the white-box facade), but in its openness it reveals, for example, a difference between the rooms to the right in the above photo and the round volumes set back a bit, on the left. (Those are freestanding bathroom pavilions, by the way.)

And here - unlike in the early projects - the section within the open frame is up for grabs. The floor where we find the auditorium is on is double-high, but not for its entire area; one of the interior objects is a staircase-plus-platform that gives an overlook of the rest of the ensemble. The bathroom pods, meanwhile, keep themselves down as demure single-heighters. From the mezzanine vantage, with all these sculptural pieces hanging around in the big, green brise-soleil display case, it's as close as Corbusier ever gets to Raumplan, volumes suspended not merely in a free plan but in free vertical space.

It's not a coincidence that the first project to ply these waters was in Carthage; in a Mediterranean climate it would be just cruel to seal up the whole building inside a white box. Gujarat, as I may have mentioned once or twice, is punishingly, hellishly hot, but you do get breezes coming off the river, and anyway the last thing you'd want to do is sit inside a sealed chamber and let the temperature rise.

There's tons more to say about this building - tons! - but I've already gone on way longer than planned. This is a good place to stop anyway, because this theme - of European architectural ideas that found a better home in the Indian climate - will play heavily in the next entry.

Ahmedablog 05 - Husain-Doshi Gufa (1992-1995)

2009-11-15T19:06:00.000-08:00

So finally...there's this thing. The Husain-Doshi Gufa, a sort of studio/gallery/headquarters/shrine for legendary Indian painter M. F. Husain. This is located a few feet from the CEPT campus and a block away from the Indology building, so you can really get a great Doshi sampler in an afternoon if you're so inclined. This one, it should be admitted up front, is a bit of a one-off; while I'll argue that it has some resonance with other works, it would be a mistake to think that post-1990, the architect's work has been dominated by kooky-columned caverns capped by stalk-eyed blobbo-domes in mosaic tile. Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing - but the trend has been towards further development of the things I was rambling about at Gandhi Labor (45-degree site plan, sequences of courtyards, humbler materials) at various scales. (More recently there have been some decidedly funky geometries showing up, but this may be due to the increasing influence of younger project heads.)

Anyway though, the Gufa - [i]more like Goofy, amirite??[/i] - is a nice little thing, vaguely programmed on the inside but supporting a small cafe, whose main amenity is the view of the tile-mound playground. You go to the cafe, drink a coffee shake, and then climb around the roof for a while (it's quite slippery) before going downstairs. There you take photos of your friends jumping around on the little cylinder-masses (a la Mill Owner's Building), marvel at the ersatz cave paintings on the walls, and then come back out. I guess there might be events or shows here from time to time, but this is how it was when I visited.

(The black stripe on the roof, by the way, was originally painted on by Husain, in a confident swoop of inspiration as the building was nearly completed. Doshi's team then removed the painted-upon tiles and replaced them with black tiles, permanently incorporating the painted gesture into the building.)

The first and most obvious reference point here is Gaudí's crypt for the Santa Coloma Chapel, and given the previous discussion of mosaic tile it's not so surprising that Gaudí would re-enter the picture at this point. In fact, it's really hard to get past this: we're in cover-band territory, and the swap of exquisite Catalan brickwork for concrete is basically like doing the iconic guitar solo on harmonica instead. That's okay, though; I've always felt like architects should be encouraged to do "cover versions" - if it was a good building once, why not do it again? Or do only people in Catalonia deserve easy access to Gaudí?

Anyway, there are a couple of other things going on here. The tubular stalk-eyes, for one: where do those come from? They remind me of nothing so much as Peter Cook's Kunsthaus in Graz, and by extension, the groovy 60s scene that produced Cook as well as Yellow Submarine and Ant Farm's House of the Century, which the Gufa weirdly resembles (the white color helps). I don't know what that adds up to, but it's a funky move for an architect educated in the 50s to make in the late 80s. Some might ascribe that to the "old-timer trying to stay hip with the kids" phenomenon, but the date of the Gufa seems a little early for someone to jump on the blobular bandwagon - even Gehry's built work had yet to acquire this kind of organic geometry.

Of course, the influence of Husain could be the answer to everything, but I'd also suggest that the "cave" had already been present in Doshi's work, just in a more traditionally architecturalized condition. Sangath is the clearest example - the studio bar is slipped most of the way underground, with the vault popping up to admit light. Underground space with curved ceiling - let that idea bounce around long enough and you're going to end up back at Santa Coloma; I suspect this is what happened with Doshi.

The other curious development here is meta-architectural and resides entirely in Doshi's own written description of the project. Here, for the first time (at least as far as Steele's publication would suggest), Doshi indulges in a long, pseudo-mythical origin story for the building. It's kind of interesting, but a bit heavy-handed in a "Field of Dreams" way. We pick up after eight paragraphs that lead us to Doshi picking up a strange, vibrating stick:

[…] …I was quiet and getting dark. I was sitting down on this lonely spot with the branch in my hands. Then after about a minute, I felt a powerful pull from deep within the earth, a sensation I had never ever experienced before. Taking this as a sign of something very unusual about to happen, I closed my eyes. Immediately, there appeared a body of a large tortoise-like form. Unlike the normal tortoise, this was long and had two large mouths facing each other at the opposite ends. They were interconnected with many shells of different shapes and sizes.

[Several paragraphs and eight years pass. Doshi gets the commission for the Gufa and selects the site. Then he falls asleep and dreams of the turtle – the Kurma, avatar of Lord Vishnu. This time Kurma is conversational, quizzing Doshi about Corbusier and the definition of architecture “in its deepest sense.” Kurma specifically brings up Ronchamp, and Doshi has a revelation.]

I immediately realized that in true architecture one must experience joys and celebrations. It must affect our inner self. It cannot be distinguished separately either as modulation of light or surfaces or supporting system. On the contrary, a good design merges floors, walls, ceilings into one contiguous whole and creates an organic space almost like a living being….

This keeps going for several more pages, as Kurma provides a holographic slideshow of precedents and formal partí, and then Doshi’s wife wakes him up. The building gets built, the snakey stripe gets rendered, and just as it is completed, the workers declare that prana (the breath of life) has entered the building – and “precisely at that moment it rained, even though out of season.”

So, wow. This development is not a one-off - the Delhi fashion institute and the Mumbai Diamond Bourse both get these elaborate narratives, and they grow less revealing and more mythic each time. The Mumbai text is so detail-ridden it approximates false advertising - supposedly, while digging the foundations of an early, vaguely unsatisfying version of the building, they discovered the ruins of an ancient diamond bazaar ("The foreman woke me in the middle of the night, at first so excited I couldn't understand him...") whose complex, courtyarded configuration ended up inspiring the final building, etc. etc.

What is the deal? I love overblown narrative in service of architecture, but this is a bit much. Again, though, I think the answer lies in the times. In the wake of Rossi (and probably others that I'm shortchanging out of ignorance), it seems there was a renewed fascination with pseudo-mythical ur-buildings that undergirded the physical reality. These typologies were kind of like Platonic ideals, which could be called forth and recombined while still tapping into the eternal and unchanging - the city, collectively, could tap into The City. This is a bit of a gloss of Rossi - I should reread this stuff soon - but there are a few ways to take this. One is the path Rossi himself took in his built work: lots of cubes and pediments and punch windows, stripped of all specificity (and thus the transience of "style") in order to tap into the Real of the types.

Another approach is to ditch the formal typologies, but retain the quasi-mystical idea that the newly-designed building taps into this ghost-world of real or imaginary buildings of times gone by, and gains authenticity and Realness by so doing. Hence the revival of imaginary histories for buildings, some two centuries after John Soane pioneered the genre in order to explain his own house. It is, in one sense, a self-contradictory strategy: to emphasize how much this building really belongs where it is, I'm going to spin an obviously fictitious yarn. I'm charmed by the approach, but I think a given architect can really only get away with it once or twice, and that only if they have enough chutzpah and storytelling talent. If you're doing it on every project, it's cloying and schticky.

That's an unfortunate note upon which to conclude our Doshi tour; let me say again that I really admire his work overall, and from what I've seen would put him in the top tier of his generation, internationally. Part of the fun of really exploring any artist's work is discovering the funny side projects and creative cul-de-sacs that don't make it into the canonical list of masterworks. So just as I've come to love Paul McCartney's forays into new-wavey sprechstimme ("Temporary Secretary") and songs about Marvel Comics supervillains framing their opponents as bank robbers ("Magneto & Titanium Man"), I kind of accept Doshi's recent penchant for hokey fables to explain his buildings. The career as a whole is just too good to dismiss over a little bit of cheese.

Ahmedablog 04 - Sangath (1979-1981) & Gandhi Labor Institute (1980-1984)

2009-11-12T19:17:00.000-08:00

Doshi's office, Sangath (seen above) and the nearby Gandhi Labor Institute (all other photos) zip us forward in time another decade and show him exploring some different themes. Obviously, the vault is now a big deal; not sure whether that's more easily traced to Kahn (Kimball Art Museum), Corbusier (Sarabhai & Jaoul houses), local Islamic architecture (e.g. Sarkhej Roza or Sidi Sayed Mosque, photos coming soon) or some sort of breeze-inducing thermal performance logic. It doesn't exactly matter, though, because the synthesis is distinctive on its own terms - I suspect if you polled Indian architects, this is kind of what the generic "Doshi building" in their heads might look like.

The vault's not the only new trick up his sleeve. Check out the materials deployed in Gandhi Labor, particularly for the exterior surface of the vault: white mosaic tile! (It's also used in Sangath but it's harder to see in the photo.) This is, I think, similar to Aalto's fondness for white-painted brick walls: it's a way to yield a Modernist surface (ie, "white stuff") while ditching a-material purity in exchange for something very material.

Mosaic tile has never had too much of a following post-Gaudi; it's too easily linked to the decorative, which was ushered out the door by Loos et al. By the time ornament was given a new lease on life by postmodernism, mosaic tile (in the West) was associated mainly with craft fairs, elementary school art class, and other activities rarely deemed hip and stimulating by academic architects. A hippie like Hundertwasser could cheerfully deploys it from exactly this un-hallowed ground, but nobody else goes near it. Basically its only role is in schemes to give architecture back to The People, ie, the kind of cultureless schlubs who enjoy craft fairs and elementary school art class.

This is the approach of Herman Hertzberger at LiMa in Berlin: the people get to claim ownership of the apartments' landscaped courtyard by bringing their own old plates, smashing them, and making their own tile mosaics. He manages not to come off as condescending only because a) the courtyard is pretty great and well-loved by the residents, and b) it's not a one-off gesture - much of his writing and building was really driven by thinking about how actual schlubby humans would end up using the architecture. (Incidentally, Hundertwasser's tiles are also, supposedly, the selections of the residents or construction workers - but I feel like he and Hertzberger are on subtly different pages here, as Hertzberger is fundamentally a late Modernist operating within the discipline of architecture, and Hundertwasser is a bearded lunatic self-consciously coming from outside as a critic of architecture's ambitions.)

Doshi's use of mosaic tile is none of the above. For him the white surface isn't just an aesthetic preference - it's a practical move, as it reflects the nightmarish Gujarati sunlight back into space. It's also in some sense indigenous, or at least not a obvious foreign importation like beton brut or Le Modulor; in a country as old and as young as India, techniques like mosaic tile have not yet acquired the pallor of "old-timeyness" or "quaintness" or "great rainy-day activity-ness." They're not so much "craft class" as they are actual crafts, and there is a huge, some would say frighteningly cheap, labor pool available to deploy them. Why not tap into that rather than beating your head against the wall waiting for really fabulous form-finished concrete to be viable?

(We will end up seeing some excellent concrete finishes in India, but they are decades younger than these two buildings. There is tons and tons of bad concrete here, same as everywhere else. As in the States, though, architects don't like to imagine their buildings looking like budget-engineered parking decks, and populate their bookcases with Ando monographs.)

Moving on at last from the roof.... the interiors don't seem to have changed so dramatically from previous work - we've even got a nice Modernist color palette: primaries, accented with white, black, and concrete gray. Even the trash cans and Gatorade tanks are in on the action, although I'm not sure if that was part of Doshi's intention. The fire extinguisher is a given. (Note: the cut-off image makes it hard to get my hilarious commentary here - see the full photo on Flickr. Sorry, Evan - I couldn't get that code to work, but I'm pretty hapless at such things.)

Sangath, for what it's worth, is more warmly-toned - lots of wood. Very cozy space, actually. (But no photos allowed.)

Something else going on in these buildings, especially Gandhi Labor, is a real shift in site plan. Indology, CEPT, the Bangalore IIM, and most of the intervening projects are all rigidly orthogonal organizations. (In the case of IIM that's pretty crucial - it's basically a gridded set of "streets" with the building plugged onto that network.) Here there's a shift to grouping several buildings around a courtyard at 45-degree angles to each other. The site plan sure looks Greek to me, with approaches that take you through one building and re-orient you to face the next building, etc.

I realize these particular photos are useless to convey this - maybe we can revisit this thread someday when I scan all my negatives. I'd try Google Earth imagery but unfortunately certain of the original planned buildings were never built, and so the courtyard is missing one of its edges and the idea doesn't come across so clearly. Anyway, this type of planning is characteristic of all of Doshi's later large-scale projects (at least those that I've studied!). Once again I'd like to try and put him in context and dialogue with those of his contemporaries who are better-known in the States - like, say, the brothers Krier. The rediscovery of the details and the urbanistic complexity of Greekish planning was in the water; Doshi may have been among the first to build these ideas in large-scale projects. I don't know if Doshi has often been discussed in the context of postmodernism, but it'd be interesting to consider him from that angle.

I'll flesh this idea out a little further in the next entry, which will be the last in this current Doshi roundup - but don't worry, it's a doozy!

Ahmedablog 03 - CEPT (1966-1968)

2009-11-10T19:18:00.000-08:00

So here's Doshi not too far along past the Indology building in time, but already taking some interesting turns. He's ditched the fiddly wall of concrete bits in favor of a "concrete skeleton, brick infill" palette that will ring alarms to anybody who's walked the earth since the 1960s: "institutional building." But CEPT - the Center For Environmental Planning and Technology - thankfully does not indicate Doshi lapsing into period cliche....although it may seem that way after you wander the campus for a while and discover several other Doshi buildings spanning several decades (including the rather nice Kanoria Arts Center), all in the same language.

It does get a bit same-y, but I guess you could also argue it gives the place a kind of coherence as a campus. This is something Doshi might have jawed with Kahn about when they were working together on the Ahmedabad IIM Campus (a stone's throw away from here). Kahn's campus is, by the way, also in the concrete-n-brick mode, albeit with much less emphasis given to the concrete.

Anyway, the concrete here is in about as lousy a condition as at Indology, but any shabbiness the building has kind of works: this is the softer side of Brutalism, the Hertzbergerian avenue that thought a rough-and-ready architecture would invite its occupants to add their own touches. Here I may be putting words in Doshi's mouth, but I don't think it's such a stretch: the occupation of the building by studenty human beings was on the architect's mind, and so he goes to considerable lengths to raise the whole volume up a story and provide what is basically "general-purpose hangout space" underneath.

This being an architecture school, this space has inevitably acquired some ping-pong tables, but obviously it's also a good place to hang up your old projects, paint murals, post flyers, and shoot the breeze between classes. Classes were out of session during my visit (Diwali holiday) but there were still a few stragglers playing ping-pong so I guess that's a good sign.

I'm not sure how this undercrofting quite escapes being parking-garage space; the actual built features down there are a little scanty. Certainly it helps that, dimensionally, it's just enough space to get you out of the brutal Gujarati sun, but not so much that it becomes oppressive. Also, of course, there's a park on one side, which is always going to help a little. (Both also serve the thermal requirements well - the building is basically intended as a giant passive breeze-sucking device.)

But really where this building makes its case is upstairs: check out this studio desk space! Brutal Gujarati sun or no, I would have killed for this my 3+ year in the studio section that Jeff S. dubbed "Echo Base" since its cold, white, windowless condition recalled the ice caves in The Empire Strikes Back. On the other hand, no Brennan's, so as architecture schools go it's a draw.

Ahmedablog 02 - Institute of Indology (1957-1962)

2009-11-09T19:17:00.000-08:00

OK! I developed twenty-one rolls of Hyderabad and Ahmedabad film, and from the index prints picked out a mighty handful of samples to scan and share with you, my adoring archi-fans. It's a rainy evening in Bangalore, so I'm going to try and knock through most of the photo editing. But our upload speed remains lousy so these blog entries will end up trickling out over a longer period. I know you awaited on tenterhooks, dear readers.

We've already encountered B.V. Doshi with his fabulous IIM campus in Bangalore, but this is a bit out of his normal stomping grounds: the majority of his major buildings are in Gujarat, and the lion's share of those are in Ahmedabad. Even if you tossed aside the Corb works and the historical stuff, an archi-tourist could keep busy for a few days just relishing the Doshi experience.

Which is what we'll be doing in this blog for the next few entries. Doshi is a prime candidate for this year's Pritzker Prize (based on general life-achievement criteria, not for his recent work in particular) and I hope to root him on from the sidelines through blogging.

The Institue For Indology building in Ahmedabad was one of Doshi's first public buildings as a solo artist outside of Corb's office. At this stage Doshi is deep in the shadow of his previous employer, although some individual developments are already starting to surface - mainly in the idea to store the collection of Indological documents in an open-to-outside-air basement, preserving the climatic conditions under which they'd previously been kept. There are also some ideas about the site section being intended to draw breezes up and over the central plaza; I'm not sure how successful all of this ended up being, but it does suggest priorities slightly displaced from those of the old boss. Also, the peripheral ambulatory/shade zone is typologically Indian, and for good reason of thermal comfort, as any of my Georgian friends who've spent time on a good deep porch in the Summer can probably understand. It can also be thought of, here, as a kind of thickening of the brise-soleil into occupiable space (as opposed to the bold thickening of the sun-breakers' actual mass in Corbusier's own Indian buildings). But at that point we're chasing ourselves in circles - wasn't the brise-soleil itself in some sense inspired by these kinds of interstitial spaces sheltered behind screens

The composition, meanwhile, is quite familiar - this is a near cousin to the elevation of the unbuilt Governor's Mansion for Chandigarh. Of course, since Doshi was in the office for that project, it's again hard to say where exactly the idea originated... but still, check out the brutal exposed concrete (weathering horribly in this climate) and the complex but abstract articulation that breaks the composition down, into what I suspect are Modulor-sized units.

Steele, if I remember correctly, suggests that Doshi took a hard look at these early projects, particularly in terms of performance under the climate, and began modulating his work in response. This seems basically correct to me; with the next entry we'll already see some significant shifts, and we can pretty much lay off of the Corbu comparisons as well, as Doshi comes into his own with some very strong work.

(The other major "early" piece in Ahmedabad is Premabhai Hall, which I got a couple exteriors of but no more; anyway I apparently didn't get any prints of that so we'll just have to move on.)

oh-oh seven.... ocean's eleven.

2009-10-31T04:13:00.000-07:00

Our walk home from work!

This post is inspired by looking out just now and seeing a couple of kids (somewhere between ages 5 and 10) running around with a ball in the alleyway; they had set up a line of fist-sized rocks across the right-of-way, presumably delineating the goal or the foul line or something, but had already abandoned it so that it was serving mainly as a test of vehicular attentiveness: some auto, bicycle, and moped drivers noted the rocks and wove in between them, while others just bounced right over them, perhaps risking life and limb. This charmed me enough that I've finally gotten around to editing an email I sent dear Ann some time ago. With no further ado:

***

So just now I went out on the terrace, originally just to put back out some laundry that I'd taken off the lines when it looked like it was about to start raining. I ended up spending forty minutes or so leaned on the corner balcony and just watching the activity go by on the streets. This is a kind of street activity that I think is very hard to document. Maybe it's the same as the way the physical fabric of cities is very difficult to capture in still photography (hence me always wishing I were a cinematographer when i find myself in an unfamiliar city): the distinctive appeal of the rhythms of this neighborhood isn't that there's so much activity at once, or so much difference packed into a single still frame; it's how much change takes place over a few minutes of watching.

In any given moment at this time of day (let's say 6:30 PM), there are maybe fifteen people in my field of vision - more, if I turn to look down the long direction of the street (where my vision is less obscured by trees). So it's not the crowded, chockablock world of market stalls and shoving shoulders that I've seen elsewhere. Of the fifteen, five to six are individual pedestrians ambling up or down the main street, or just stepping on from a side street. Nobody seems visibly in a hurry. The rest are involved in any number of different activites; here's a short list I made standing up there of a few things i saw:

* one middle aged and one older guy, talking at length, standing under the awning of the welfare office across the street

* group of Tibetan teenagers (or early 20s-ers), getting ready to go out. Some of the guys are taking a while, so three of the girls climb on a motorcycle by the door and have one of the other guys take their picture.

* three food carts set up within a one-block area. Two are fruits and vegetables (different mix on each one though), one is brown stuff (potatoes? nuts? ginger? can't see from here). Just as I'm leaving to come back inside, some other guy is rolling in a fourth cart.

* motorcycles in motion everywhere. Moped and motorcycle ownership is much more common than automobile ownership here, and every major street looks like a bike gang convention is in town - when the traffic starts moving it's just a swarm of them. But on our street, the two-wheeler motion is much slower and more miscellaneous; actually, it's the stopping and starting at corners to wait for other things to pass that somehow gives the bassline rhythm to this whole scene's animation. The other day, some rather dressed-up camels came through, with bells on so they jangled in rhythm with their steps. This was the first time I'd seen them outside of a zoo, so they're not common, but for the motorcycle people, it was just another thing they had to stop for at the corner.

* gangs of little kids jumping around, dancing in circles in each other's arms, dragging and following each other around, looking for action, climbing on motorcycles... Some parent-age women in traditional garb and one man in a button-up shirt are sitting near them at the doorstep. In general little kids here are incredibly warm and animated and always doing something outdoors - riding bikes, dancing in groups, walking down the street with their arms over each other's shoulders. And waving and saying "Hello!!" to white people like myself, and naturally asking for their picture to be taken (posed with a soccer ball or with their friends) if they see me with the camera.

(Note 1: Somewhat different is the case of Sugera, our landlord's four-year-old, who I don't see outside much, and who according to Hillary (who is often roped into long discourse with her) has an extremely elaborate internal life. Every encounter involves some form of imaginative play: dressing up as Superman, making her own mobile phone out of wadded-up fabric and carrying on five-minute imaginary conversations with Hillary's friends, etc.

(Note 2: I was not a really outdoorsy kid but i think it was just for lack of opportunity - there were only a few other kids in the neighborhood, some of them not even close to my age, and I always daydreamed about a more vibrant society of outdoor playmates, like I'd seen in books and movies. I have a few specific and vivid memories of outdoor games (hide and seek, exploring the woods over the fence, wrestling in the Weibels' front yard, etc)....I did enjoy all of it but it wasn't consistently practiced on my little cul-de-sac, and my childhood was a lot more like Sugera's really. Anyway, I feel some kind of connection to all this youthful energy, that I think is distinct from bad western "oh those charming, simple lil' third world kids!" The kids are just as much scoundrels as they are adorable, I freely admit.)

* groups of three or so women in strict black Muslim garments that I forget the correct terminology for - are these burqas? or chadors? Their faces are not veiled, but their hair, ears, and mouths cannot be seen.

* the roosters across the street, engaged in some kind of squabble for dominance. More recently, portions of their habitat were disturbed by guys hurling shovelfuls of dirt from a truck. We suspect this is a harbinger of some future road-improvement project, but right now it's just a mountain of dirt partially burying the shanties on which the roosters nest.

* a car or auto-rickshaw passing through every minute or two, with much honking, and/or backing up to the tunes mentioned in a previous entry. (Despite earlier reports, there really is one dominant backing-up ringtone, although I have heard slight variations on it, including a slow, weirdly dirge-like rendition which would be suitable if it were a hearse in reverse.) (Future band name.)

* people carrying stuff on their heads - big wrapped parcel of indeterminable shape and contents, or the trusty "bucket laden with goods." Sometimes these are totally resting on just the head - like on TV! I also saw a little boy and girl involved in procuring some kind of big white cardboard or posterboard or something like that, struggling to find a non-awkward way of carrying a flat piece of material bigger than their entire bodies.

I was outside for maybe forty minutes as I said, but I was making notes on pen and paper for maybe five of those, max. It's just a lively, vibrant street, maybe the sort that the less posh-sounding new urbanist fantasies want to get back into american cities. Two things the above description misses are sounds and smells though, which is another reason I wish Ann were here; I think she'd have a better knack for capturing the subtle mix of vrooming engines, nearby horns, far-off horns, Muslim prayer/singing, pre-recorded Hindu Temple Music from loudspeakers, braying goats, kids saying "hi!", vendors shrieking the type of vendor that they are in Kannada so that people nearby will know that the paper guy/fruit guy/colorful plastic bucket woman is approaching, people warming up their drums for tonight's parade, random explosions as people use up unspent Diwali fireworks....

Plus, smells! Cooking smells coming up from somewhere nearby, animal smells, traces of diesel exhaust, dust, rain (so much for putting the laundry back up), meats from street salesmen a couple blocks away....and so on and so on.

So that is what life here is like when I am consciously trying to live here and be aware of it, as opposed to burrowing through books, movies, internet boards, and other things I have been digesting. To be fair to myself, those activities are much to the satisfaction of a brain that in the last three years has scarcely been able to pleasure-read for more than twenty minutes without starting to nod off to sleep involuntarily.

(This isn't just to wag a finger at the grad school years - more me trying to offer some explanation of why a person would go all the way to India and spend half the day immersed in things that, hypothetically, would be just as available in the States. It's just where my head's at.)

But the street stuff is really great.

Auntie from downstairs buying groceries from Raj, Hillary's favorite vegetable cart guy and the only one we really trust.

The aforementioned camel crossing.

to the trees!

2009-10-23T20:29:00.000-07:00

One thing about which I can make no complaint at all is the foliage. This is a particularly vast and glorious rain tree (shot taken in the Gavipuram area of Bangalore, during an educational neighborhood walking tour put on by Bangalore City Project) - but this basic kind of thing pops up everywhere that the streets are wide enough to accommodate them. Just glorious.

(BTW - that vehicle at the base is an auto-rickshaw, that species of transport previously discussed here.)

(Also, the Blogspot crop kills this one - see original photo here for the proper effect.)

This is along the edge of Cubbon Park, one of the two major in-town parks of Bangalore (along with Lal Bagh). Cubbon Park is the less formal, more "English" of the two and thus, I guess, lends itself to more picturesque contortions. Faboo!

This is a nice freestanding banyan on farmland that we wandered onto outside of Kushalnagar. For scale, please understand that the low-lying stuff in the foreground is not stubbly grass but the tops of corn. I just love the presence of these things, and the weird, ancient-seeming tangle of viney rootiness.

Short entry I know, but hopefully you like the pictures. More to come soon hopefully. "Ahmedablog" will return once I get my trip photos developed, probably early next month...

Ahmedablog 1

2009-10-15T03:25:00.000-07:00

Ahmedabad is hot and dry, and the auto drivers here are all cheats adept at feigning anger and indignation at your unwillingness to pay five to six times what the ride should actually cost. On the plus side there is a real gold mine of first-rate vintage modernism with some interesting variations and twists, about which more later. This will probably be the only Ahmedablog actually typed in Ahmedabad, as internet is hard to come by. Hi to everybody. I am alive and OK. Waffling back and forth on how long I really want to stay in this country...but this seems to mostly be keyed to how recently I've consumed food or caffeine. For example, yesterday ended up with me incredibly wrung-out and exhausted with the whole country based on some hours of battling the auto drivers and shlepping through the sun across the (fantabulously interesting) IIM campus. But then I had some malai kofta (thinking of Lotus, although I might just be hallucinating the notion that she liked that dish), roti and a coffee, and suddenly everything seemed just fine in the world.

The other thing to mull on is that I lost my mother one year ago yesterday. That seems alternately like way too long a time, and too short; my last phone call with her seems lifetimes away in terms of everything that's happened since, and yet so much else remains fresh and unclouded: the sound of her voice rings clear in my mind and so does the closeness of her hugs.

None of these words really comes close to the point of what I'm talking about, but you know how it is. If she were still alive she would, I think, get an incredible kick out of the notion of me being in India, in between spells of worrying that I'd die of cholera or nuclear war or something. Probably she'd echo Hillary's parents in their hope that I'd soon get over this and find "a less ridiculous country" in which to live. I wish she was around for me to share these daily stories with, but I don't think she'd ever want me moping around in the middle of a holiday adventure. I can also picture her making fun of me in a whiny mood as a kid: "I'm booooooored, there's nothing to dooooooo." On that note, maybe, it's time to get up and start marching around all the architecture again. There really is some great stuff here.

Edited to add:

And then, shortly after I wrote this, something kind of clicked... I had been thinking on and off about my inexplicable wandering ways, and the sort of irrational satisfaction I take in picking up hard-to-find architecture. Was it that I was born a tourist and needed architecture as the hook on which to hang this impulse? I'd been turning it over and over in my head, and then thinking about my mother crystallized it: I wasn't born a tourist, I was born a collector, and the hope of getting inside the Sarabhai House (mission accomplished!) is the same as the hope that I would send my mother out with in advance of Saturday morning yard sales: Find Herman Munster!

This was in reference to a pull-string talking Herman Munster doll, known from my mother's collection of toy-collector guidebooks to be extremely rare and valuable. Neither of us were particular fans of the Munsters, but we did share a running joke about the stupidity of pull-string talking dolls, and more importantly it was an officially unlikely treasure, a jewel to pick out of the rubbish and bring home. The same applies to her occasional big scores in the fields of jewelry or dolls, which I hadn't the slightest interest in as objects - but I could relish the satisfaction she had in bringing them home, recreating the moment of shock and surprise when she saw these "mother lodes" hiding in the midst of ordinary costume jewelry.

I think all this has underwritten a lot of my pursuits in life, the most directly analogous being my own yard-sale trawling (of course) and record-rummaging, that endless pacing through the same boxes of the same records, with no particular target in mind but always the lurking possibility that something fabulous and unexpected could loom behind the next copy of that one Rod Stewart record with the old-timey cover. And then, of course, you have traveling the world in search of works of architecture, things of virtually no interest to any but a very tiny audience, probably no bigger than the audience that reads toy-collector guidebooks. Adding them to my collection is almost as enjoyable as being at the buildings, and while that's maybe a little weird it makes me happy, and that's fine enough for me.

Note by the way that I can't recall my mother pushing this collector impulse on me; in fact, she tended to mostly steer clear of the things I did collect as a kid (comics, trading cards). The collecting impulse was something we were delighted to discover we shared, sort of like our appreciation for grape soda; she was much more involved in helping me grow as a creator of things rather than a collector. And of course as a reader, which is why you end up having to read these long wordy blogs from me today.

Inglourious Basterds

2009-10-10T01:40:00.000-07:00

NOTE: The following contains severe and extreme spoilers for Inglourious Basterds - if you haven't seen the movie but plan on doing so (and I recommend it!), do not read further or the film will be utterly ruined for you. You have been warned!

Also, it's really, really long. What happened??!

***

With the paired set of Kill Bill films, Quentin Tarantino apparently reached a kind of climax or endgame in the brilliant line of genre-fusions that was already perfected in Pulp Fiction the better part of a decade earlier. The freewheeling celebration of low-rent genres was as delicious and exuberant as it could get, with Uma Thurman punching, shooting, and slashing her way from samurai warfare to the Wild West, each time finding the genre matured, worn-out, old and tired before she got there: the blaxploitation knife-master is raising a kid, the cowboy is mopping floors at a strip club, the anime-born yakuza queen is hosting tedious dinners with fops and wannabes to consoldiate her empire, and Mr. Kung Fu himself is making sandwiches and watching old movies with his ill-gotten daughter. Thurman and Tarantino together relish all of them, dance through the familiar thrills, and then lay them to rest.

And at first glance, Inglourious Basterds appears poised to take a similar cruise through another great and devalued B-movie genre, the World War Two picture. And we do get it, after a fashion; Tarantino is Tarantino and he clearly takes great joy in inflating and conflating the cliches of the genre almost to their breaking point. Brad Pitt's amped-up, smoothed-out drill sergeant has all the hard-boiled guts and glory of Lee Marvin commingled with the aw-shucks Americanism of Tom Hanks. His opposite number, Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz) is one of the most memorable Movie Nazis of all time, clearly the equal of the grinning monster from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but cleaned-up, civilized, given the sophisticated veneer of a James Bond villain, anticipating all contingencies and gleefully explaining his plans to the heroes.

And, of course, there is the film's ending, which derives its strength from our familiarity with WW2 movies. The heroes, we know, may succeed in taking out an important Nazi officer's meeting, or an observation post, or the Guns of Navarone. It may or may not be a Pyrrhic victory, with the squad sacrificing themselves to make this one small difference in the course of the war. But they will never actually win the war for us - history tells us how that properly happened, and they will never, ever, ever kill Hitler. Even time-travel stories shy away from this; when the comic-book Fantastic Four found themselves face to face with the dictator, they actually stopped themselves from harming him, based on Back to the Future logic about screwing up the time-stream, et cetera.

Inglourious Basterds, then, strings us along for its full length on the assumption that the genre's basis will hold true, that the dual plots to blow up the Nazi-filled theater will somehow go slightly awry and that the leading Nazis will escape. When that turn of events, all of a sudden, fails to happen - when a couple of Jewish kids from Omaha or the Bronx (or someplace) get to pump Adolf Hitler's guts full of lead, there is an overwhelming sense of payoff - another brilliant genre double-cross from Tarantino! What a triumph, what a twist! James Bond and John McClane together couldn't cook up a better crowd-pleaser.

And yet...

And yet, if the goal is the final wish-fulfillment of the forever-forestalled destruction of the monstrous Nazis....why then, at the film's end, does Landa - the actual scheming, toe-curlingly sadistic and tension-raising villain....why does Landa walk away scot-free? Sure, he gets involuntarily tattooed by Sgt. Pitt, but we are denied even the gruesome satisfaction of seeing the gruesome scar, which we know has been inflicted on plenty of other, lesser Nazi scumbags. This is the grand finale of the film, the capstone of the whole experience; Pitt even closes the whole show by declaring the knife-job to possibly be "my masterpiece." And yet the Nazi basterd gets away, gets his connived medal and house in Nantucket. Why don't Pitt and Tarantino blow him away?

The answer, I think, is that this is film is something a little more complicated and interesting than the genre romp it first appears to be. It's not without flaws (Mike Myers, anyone?) and internal contradictions, but it is a deliberately thorny film; like the caramel corn you scarf down through the opening scenes, it tastes delicious but sticks in the throat. The questions it provokes the viewer to ask aren't easily resolved within the world of the film and demand reflection beyond its celebratory chambers. They have to do not so much with Nazis, the Holocaust, or World War Two, but with the cultural purpose of the World War Two movie. The issue is raised by structuring the film around three fundamental pairs, each pitting a Nazi against the Allies, and each time struggling to make the Nazis as bad as we expect they should be. Each pair fills a crucial role in the filmic treatment of the war.

Pitt vs. Waltz - This is the obvious one, which bookends the film: each gets a long "dialogue" at the opening of the film (effectively a monologue), and their final confrontation ends it. Their role in the film's argument is that of film characters. They are both ranking soldiers, with larger bureaucratic and political forces enabling them, who take a disturbing relish in the execution of violence...and, in true Tarantino fashion, in the language that couches and surrounds that violence. They are both inducing terror on the other side, and both are aware of the power of their own images. (They both also seem ambivalent about this power: early on, Waltz teases his sobriquet of Jew Hunter out of his victim, but later disdains having any control of such nicknames. Similarly, while it's clear that Pitt and his Merry Men have gone to great lengths to capitalize on their titles, when Waltz makes his polite suggestion that one can hardly control such things, the Basterds demurr sheepishly.)

Morally speaking, they both cut hard deals with people on the other side - but the American breaks his word and the Nazi keeps his end of the bargain. Waltz is also weirdly, creepily likable in a way that the Raiders Nazi would never be. Col. Landa is a sadistic, strangulating monster - but, as mentioned, a sophisticated, cultured, multilingual charmer whose Italian runs circles around Pitt's introvertedly American "Bonn Jerno," and when the Nazi excitedly proclaims "I got a Bingo!" the laughter of the audience is oddly gentle. And, as Landa deviously reminds the characters, the destruction of the Nazi leadership is ultimately his move to make, and his pride to bear. The machine-gunning of Hitler by the Basterds, and the fire set by Emmanuelle and Marcel are satisfying but superfluous: it's Landa who leaves the dynamite in Hitler's booth.

Emmanuelle vs. Zoller - The two film viewers, each overlaid with an additional role: "Emmanuelle"/Shoshanna is the exhibitor and Zoller the star. Again, it's the Nazi who's oddly likable; we root for the success of Emmanuelle's mission of revenge (which borrows some cues from Kill Bill) but Zoller, until his last scene, is deliberately drawn as the nicest possible Nazi: a pimpley-faced kid, pleased with his success but awkwardly in over his head. He shys away from the filming of his own acts of violence, while Emmanuelle goes out of her way to make a film celebrating her executioner's triumph. As Emmanuelle/Shoshanna is a hybrid of the persecuted Jew and the French resister, one is reminded of the covertly-published Resistance novella, The Silence of the Sea, where again the audience is presented with the most likable, cultured, gentle Nazi imaginable - and is reminded that even this Nazi is an intruding, murdering interloper with whom no compromise, even everyday courtesy, is appropriate. These two, of course, finish each other off by pistol, though Zoller's bullets cannot stop Emmanuelle's scheme, only forestall her (and our) satisfaction in witnessing it carried out.

With both pairs, Tarantino forces us to confront the violence inherent in war and justify it. He gives us Nazis who are almost as enjoyable onscreen as the Americans - and enjoyment-value onscreen has, in the past, been enough for Tarantino to make heroes out of a great number of assassins and lowlifes. But, the answer readily comes, the pairs are not so ambiguous as all that, because the bad guys are goddamn Nazis, for crying out loud! Indeed, World War Two presents something rather different than the amoral world of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, where everyone is equally implicated in crime and murder and so any one character, by sheer emphasis of camera time, can become the protagonist.

Here we take sides based on historical fact: the Nazis were among the worst scum of the earth, no matter how charming and suave as individuals, and so the people who are fighting them are the good guys, no matter how hard-headed and cruel. This is, really, a fairly conservative (but, I think, justifiable) stance on war, and The War: sometimes good people have to roll up their sleeves and do normally unspeakable, Inglourious things, because they are up against pure evil and there is nothing else to be done. At least, we remind ourselves, the Americans are killing soldiers (like the eager young father and the pimple-faced movie star?) rather than cowering families hiding under floorboards.

Things could stand at that, but there is one more crucial, heavily-implied pairing in the film that forces us to take it at a meta-level as well; this is the film audience versus the filmed audience. For the climax of the film, of course, takes place in a movie theater. So just at the moment when we thrill to the impending resolution of our Nazi-killing film, the Nazis themselves, unaware of their imminent doom, are thrilling to the gun-blasts of their American-killing film. Tarantino lingers over long shots of Hitler chortling at scenes of Zoller's rifle cutting down man after man in the defense of Italy. Not long before and not long after, we will be cackling in our own satisfaction at Tarantino's own over-the-top celebration of the American side of things. The way Hitler relates to Goebbels's film is the same way we relate to Tarantino's.

This is not unintentional or superficial. Indeed, it's the only way to explain certain otherwise curious aspects of the film, mainly the inclusion of Goebbels as a character, and the Mike Myers scene. The former is unnecessary to the story, and the latter interrupts it severely by taking us away from the Continent for a long chat about the evolution of German cinema. In terms of genre convention, this scene is working to introduce the next crack specialist to join the Basterds; but rather than a master of disguise, demolitions, or something else useful in war, they get a film critic, who blows their cover and is promptly killed off, having served his one real role. That role is to explain that the artistic, ambitious, and politically progressive cinema of the Weimar Republic has been replaced, under Goebbels, by government-controlled propaganda films. These are the sort of film that Emmanuelle's theater is forced to exhibit in occupied Paris, and which Goebbels premieres on the night of the Allied triumph. These films are uncritical and obviously fascistic in their celebration of state violence - and, the Lieutenant explains, it does much better at the box office than the stuff of the 20s. Tarantino, and his own source material of profitable but value-neutral B-movies, are nodding guiltily in the background.

In lesser hands, the pairing would be a cheap and nihilistic move, a recasting of high-school Nazi allegory The Wave into lame they're just two sides of the same coin, mannn thinking that aims for cool indifference but serves as an apology for Nazism. The sharpness of Inglourious Basterds is that it always brings the two sides just close enough together to force you to ask and answer the questions yourselves. He pairs Allies and Nazis but he does not equate them - even with the nicest possible Nazis and meanest, most Basterdly Americans, he leaves you enough evidence to re-frame the argument for yourself. Landa may be a smooth talker but he uses his smooth talk to convince defenseless Jews that they are safe before machine-gunning them to death. Pitt sees to the scalping and tattooing of boy-soldiers, but he tells them straight-up what's going on, and ultimately the work of his Jewish revenge squad is to bring an end to the persecution. Zoller is seemingly a decent enough kid, but his persistent courtship turns to battery and, perhaps, intended rape.

Thus the only pairing Tarantino refuses to fully resolve is the one that puts himself opposite Goebbels. Perhaps he stay's Pitt's hand in the final scene to try and maintain the moral high ground, to present a "forgive and forget" sensibility as the small act of decency that separates him from the Nazis. After all the bloodshed and explosions this seems rather unlikely, and so the questions remain unresolved. They are questions almost as old as the genres Tarantino is rescripting: can there be a war movie that does not celebrate the violence of war? Can the heroism of soldiers, on film, be justified without reverting to "well, they're the ones on my side"? Are the zings and pings of filmed bullets, the swishes of katanas, and the righteous anger of Samuel L. Jackson, in some way inherently fascistic? By appeals to external value systems and small cues within the film's world, we can rescue the Allied cast of Inglourious Basterds and condemn its Nazis... but Tarantino leaves us precious little evidence with which to let himself off the hook.

Plus, I mean, Brad Pitt is just awesome in this movie.

Doshi Primer & IIM Bangalore

2009-10-02T06:21:00.000-07:00

Hillary thinks deep thoughts and provides a sense of scale. For the full-size, uncropped-by-blogspot image, click here.

I recently finished reading my boss's copy of James Steele's The Complete Architecture of Balkrishna Doshi: Rethinking Modernism For The Developing World, which gives a pretty decent overview of the work of this man and his rather interesting career. The "Complete" may refer more to how complete Doshi's architecture is, rather than how complete the book is in terms of project coverage... but there are tons of good drawings (printed at wonderfully huge sizes) and a lot of info that really helped me get situated, so hey, let's talk about the architect.

B.V. Doshi is one of the handful of still-living, still-practising veterans of Le Corbusier's office, and he's also, it would seem, the most influential architect in India, having disseminated his approach not merely through the example of his buildings, but also through his office, his Vastu Shilpa Foundation, and the architecture school CEPT in Ahmedabad, whose building he designed and whose curriculum (I'm told) he's had considerable sway over as a kind of "University Baron."

So those are the bona fides; what's the work like? Well, start from the photo above, which I snapped at the Doshi building here in Bangalore. (I shot two full rolls there; many more pictures to come, whenever I return to the States.) In his most distinctive and productive period, Doshi practiced something generally reminiscent of Corbusian high modernism or British Brutalism: exposed concrete, expansive sense of volumetrically-carved space, right angles, etc, etc. To Steele, Doshi's signature achievement is a kind of adaptation of the work of the Western Modern masters to the particular cultural and climatic pressures of India. This seems to be the canonical read of his work; I also recently watched this documentary/interview film, and it gives a lot of time to Indian precedents, breeze-catching, and so on.

Visiting something like the IIM building, I found some evident truth to this reading. I can't speak for the deep cultural connection, but certainly a building like this, which has to be 90% exterior space, makes sense here in a way that would be insane in the European cradle of Modernism. The closest specifically Corbusian reference point is probably not Corbu's Indian buildings, but the ambulatory of La Tourette. It's a weak connection, though, and, at least in this building, Doshi seems to me less like a wide-eyed Indian kid bringing all these newfangled European ideas back home, than a fully active participant in the continuing Modernist project of the 50s, 60s and 70s.

That is to say, this building looks less like Corbu than it looks like other followers of Corbu. In his attention to staging a series of scaled spaces for contact ranging from the one-on-one to the public event, Doshi certainly could have been looking at traditional Indian architecture - and in doing so he might have activated the thinking of a Herman Hertzberger.
Or consider this building's attention to interstitial space. While there are a couple of major interiors, which are in conscious dialogue with Kahn, the real energy here is devoted to the semi-covered walkways, developing them slightly in section but really spreading them out into the horizontal. (Really - this thing is huge.) By approaching an institutional program as a connective fabric more important than the things that get connected, Doshi seems to be right in line with Candilis, Josic, and Woods.

That being said, his building is considerably more successful than their Berlin Free University, which I got to explore more fully this Summer and which is kind of disappointing airport space. into which are plunked sectionally interesting courtyards. Doshi has an advantage in that his interstitial network can be continuously open to the courtyards, and in fact blur into them in places. This also opens up the section in terms of view - you're always able to see out past the space you're in, through a courtyard, maybe over the top of the next bit-o-building, etc. I was running around this thing for what seemed like an hour just relishing the experience (and getting pleasantly lost - it is a bit same-y)... that's something I can't say about most of the orthogonal-corridor-system buildings I've ever been in, from Briarlake Elementary to the UGA Journalism School.

None of the above should be taken to dismiss Doshi's fusion of European and Indian architecture; I just don't think it's the whole story, and in fact I think this kind of narrative has problematic pitfalls. From an Indian perspective it probably seems perfectly fine, but I think to Western ideas the architects who get this kind of story attached to them are marginalized. They end up as quaint novelties, Royales With Cheese - "look how these people have taken our thing and done this funny local variant of it!" Given that these people are often non-white, this narrative acquires a whiff of racism: the Indian, Japanese, Mexican, or Egyptian architect falls into the long line of Other-raced sidekicks to the White hero. This is deeply unfair to Doshi, who is much more than the Hadji to Corbu's Jonny Quest....and anyway, part of the promise of an "International Style" was that the new movement in architecture wasn't a provincial or nationalist style (a la the various Arts Nouveau or the reactionary Heimatstil), but a discourse the entire world would be contributing to.

At the same time, the limitations of a single International Style are precisely what Doshi's specifically Indian adaptations were aiming to overcome. IIM has been read by some as Doshi's "critique" of Kahn's own IIM building in Ahmedabad, an interpretation which Steele summarizes and thoughtfully complicates. This genial conversation with Kahn deserves more attention; Steele reports that Kahn was a great admirer of Doshi and would bring him up regularly to his students, who may, in turn, have passed this respect down to Jackie, and thus to yours truly - -

Me: So I got an email from Hillary - she says she's having dinner with Doshi this week.
Jackie: The Doshi?

(I'll have to revisit this topic after I finally make my way to Ahmedabad and see the Kahn building for myself. Something else to consider would be the impact on Doshi's thinking from Rossi-esque postmodernism - remind me to talk about that if I get to any of the more recent, weirder Doshi buildings.)

Setting everything else aside, I just want to say that the Bangalore IIM is a really, really cool building. It was a little short on humans (it being the weekend, and Summer), but it didn't feel dead or spooky. We were there through a sunny period, a rainy period, and then another sunny period, and while some of the open spaces were inevitably a little bleak with the giant dark clouds rolling in, it was a generally pleasant place to be and to explore. Again, I can think of few institutional buildings of this size that I can say that about. Whether that's down to its Indian-ness or its Team X-ness is a little bit academic, in the thick of exploration.

P.S. - As you can see, the Boss generously let me use the office scanner for a little while today, so I now have lots of fun images to base blogs upon. I'm also going to spend some time this weekend to spruce up older entries with appropriate illustration.... should have that done by Monday.

Virginia Woolf - Orlando

2009-09-27T07:08:00.000-07:00

Seven years on from the summer when I first plowed through the bulk of the Woolf canon, and with several re-reads of my favorites (Mrs. Dalloway, Between the Acts) behind me, there are still a few severe gaps in my knowledge of this woman I still consider among my favorite authors. I knocked out Night and Day by the pool at Deville, and chunks of the short stories here and there, but some of the big fish are still out there. Orlando was, if the authorities are to be trusted, the biggest of those gaps, save perhaps The Waves, but I found a 60 rs copy early in the month at Blossom and I sped through it over the last week or so - rather in the way Hillary and I blaze through our monthly Pizza Hut. In the wake of all anticipation, it's impossible to really savor a thing like this; you just chow down and hope that digestion is as satisfying as consumption.

And Orlando, I suspect uniquely among Woolf's books, invites this kind of breeziness. It's charming, quirky, fantastical, and in particular quite funny. One is convinced the author really enjoyed writing this one - not to say that it's underwritten in comparison to her more labored masterpieces, but just that it has a lightness of touch and a let-it-all-hang-out attitude that would have sunk Jacob's Room but might nonetheless have been welcome in The Years. Like the latter volume, Orlando is a cross-sectional narrative, here with a protagonist who lives for centuries while aging not a bit, thus observing and encountering English literature and society at various key points along the way. This isn't Forrest Gump, though: significantly, while Orlando crosses paths with queens and kings and even becomes an Ambassador at one point, to a tremendous degree the Big Events of history are pure background, of not the slightest interest to the author or her creation, in comparison with the accretion of informal history, the transformation from blowsy 18th century society to a repressive Victorian zeitgeist, and what that means for a woman of Orlando's poetic temperament. The most shocking feature of the 20th century, to Orlando, is the discovery of bookshops.

Crucially, Woolf treats the most fantastic elements in her narrative (Orlando's longevity and her magical shift in sex from male to female in the 17th century) with the greatest matter-of-factness; they're not problems in terms of physics but in terms of how the tactful biographer should approach such things. The issue of longevity is basically never raised in the narrative; nobody else seems surprised by it, and Orlando occasionally comes across personages from her past that must be under similar spells. This naturally inclines one to think of the novel as allegory, with Orlando being the avatar of the Spirit of English Poetry or the Fading English Gentry or something. I'm certain such interpretations exist, just as there must be countless analyses concerning gender here.

I'd be interested in reading either, but what saves the book is that it doesn't play like an allegory. While Orlando is often weirdly aloof, indistinct, and inconsistent, (s)he is always convincingly real as a person. In fact, these oddities of her character can more or less be understood as a consequence of her literary temperament - Orlando's world is always at a slight remove, seen through the lens of a reader and aspiring writer. At certain points this nearly endangers her life, but in general perhaps it sustains it.

What none of the above can capture, of course, is the smiling joy of Woolf's prose here. Knowing that the book was admiringly dedicated to a close friend, correspondent, and (many believe) lover makes it feel almost slight; a sort of cutesy, in-jokey mixtape. But knowing of the dark veil that hung over so much of her work, this becomes a refreshingly lively piece, which pauses only occasionally for breath, like it could have been written all at once, in order. And in making Orlando hirself a writer, Woolf is able to depict such rushes of creativity as well as the frustration of writer's block, the albatross of fame, the disappointment of finding literary heroes to have feet of clay, and the horror of writing something happily, then realizing it to be hackneyed doggerel. Orlando is thus one of Woolf's most sympathetically-observed protagonists, and this warmth, at a distance, helps soften the satirical passages, which in a different context might be too shrill. But consider for example the reception that awaits Orlando when she first returns to England as a woman, after what was believed to be her death in Turkey:

[She] was made aware of a succession of Bow Street runners and other grave emissaries from the Law Courts that she was a party to three major suits which had been preferred against her during her absence, as well as innumerable minor litigations, some arising out of, others depending on them. The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman, which amounts to much the same thing; (3) that she was an English Duke who had married one Rosina Pepita, a dancer; and had by her three sons, which sons now declaring that their father was deceased, claimed that all his property decsended to them.

If that sounds almost closer to Wodehouse than Woolf, consider also that this novel has characters with names like "Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine," or "The Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scandrop-Boom in the Roumanian Territory." Woolf, in other words, is taking advantage of her fantasy premise to indulge in a bit of plain old-fashioned silliness. This is to be taken cheek-to-jowl with some of her keenest observations into human behavior or tenderest appreciations of the soul of England, &c. In lesser hands that would make for a schizophrenic and probably obnoxious text, but Woolf was in her prime in the 1920s, and this is a fabulous foray, suitable for being loved as well as admired.

Mark Kurlansky - Salt: A World History

2009-09-20T06:08:00.000-07:00

A quick, fun, usually interesting book that delivers on its premise: you learn a bunch of interesting things about salt. Some of it's in the "how this minor thing SHAPED ALL OF HISTORY" vein, which is fine by me, since I'm a history buff and I love getting more backstory. On a certain level, of course, the saltiness of the salt is irrelevant to the history; it amounts to "this valuable commodity that was behind the success of Venice/Basque Country/Cape Cod/whatever" - if you don't need to know what the Venetians originally based their economy on, these sections don't add much to what you already know about Venetian history. But thankfully there's a ton of material here that's just kind of everyday economics: how business worked back then, what people were eating, how they lived, etc etc., which is good material no matter what. Finally, there's also good "I never knew that!" stuff every few pages, to keep you interested: So that's where ketchup comes from!

As a catalogue of miscellaneous interesting facts, it's entertaining and informative; hopefully I'll remember at least some of this stuff in the long run. As a "world history," it's sort of doomed by the constraints of its premise: we're going to cover salt where-ever it turns up, and if it turns out that ancient China and medieval Holland don't really have much to connect them beyond the presence of salt, well, so be it.

In other words, Kurlansky kind of jumps from one topic to another whenever he runs out of interesting anecdotes and fun facts about the topic he's been covering. It's not a bad way to organize a bathroom-reading history like this one, but it's not exactly a "rich and memorable tale" as the dust jacket promises - there's no narrative here, just a collection of little bits and pieces. That's not to say there could be one - just that it means that occasionally the book feels a bit adrift. I don't know that I'll be checking out its predecessor Cod - especially since a lot of cod-related material already made it into this book.

But the prose clips along nicely in a pop-journalist way, he keeps the fun facts coming, and generally, this is what it says on the tin. Good.

woah-oh, i'm an alien

2009-09-17T10:20:00.000-07:00

So this past weekend I went on a road trip with the three trainees from work. This was really good on a personal level; it got me out of the city for a day and just changed up the pace, plus there were lots of laughs (especially once we got stuck in traffic on the way back and gradually turned delirious) which was a good way to freshen up after a kind of dodgy work week. (This week has been much better, by the way - I hit on some Photoshopping techniques whose results both the Boss and I liked, so while I'm getting a little sick of adding green vines to the compound wall in each and every shot [there are like twenty renderings of this project] at least I feel invested in the finished product.)

Anyway though! So we went out to Bylakuppe, a Tibetan colony established in the 70s. Given this vintage, for an architourist like me there wasn't too much to get excited about in the various tourist shops and so on, but it was still cool to sit in for a few minutes of Buddhist monks chanting, banging on unfamiliar drums, and playing horns as long as two people are tall. Plus cheap Tibetan food - about half the price of the Tibetan places here in the city (which I frequent often). While I was there, I picked up my first, hopefully not last, dubious souvenir for Chelsea, and took pictures of the surprisingly numerous hand-painted AIDS awareness signs.

But the best really was the in-between travel. This is fairly harrowing; Indians seem to compensate for the impossibility of movement within the city by driving like maniacs as soon as they escape. I mean maniacs. And I love all three of these guys, but to American eyes this is just nightmarish driving. Really high speeds on pretty bad two-lane roads, but that's just the beginning. You never stay behind anybody, ever - you always speed up and pass them on the right. Or the left. Or whatever. Lots of startling, impromptu games of Chicken when you move out to pass a big long bus and discover, oh, look, there's another car coming in this lane that I'm using to pass. Do you give up, move back to the original lane, and wait a few seconds? Ha! Just floor it and hope there aren't any dips or speed bumps in the next stretch of highway.

Yes, there are speed bumps on the highways here, which is kind of insane, but given all the above, kind of understandable. There will also periodically be these police barriers, which are just a set of upright temporary metal fence things, arranged as a pair of offset "gates" so that you have to slow down in order to make the sideways weave through them. To people so seasoned in high-speed lane changes, this doesn't really present a major obstacle.

All this sort of to explain why, despite earlier discussion of the possibility of me learning to drive a stick shift, I quietly declined to take a turn at driving on this trip. Mooching, maybe, but I'd rather not risk the lives of everybody involved by trying to learn to drive like this, at least not on unfamiliar roads.

But! So! The real thing is the countryside. Most of what you see from the road is grain farming of some kind or another - lots of rice paddies, with their gridded embankments rising from the low watery plain, but also date palms, whatnot plants, and corn, incongruously situated on rolling hills rather than the vast flatness with which I ordinarily associate it. All of this is freckled with palm trees and when the sun was shining just so, it was spectacular, a really beautiful composition in green, blue, and gold. Then all of a sudden you're cruising through the major intersection of a village and hoping not to crash into a cow or an ambitious pedestrian. On the way back, the sun sank low and the earthbound world was mere silhouettes against the twilight; the palms merged with less distinctive profiles, and the most distinctive shapes remaining were the big long-distance electrical towers marching away in the distance. With Vik's iPod providing Green Day and Deep Purple, I suddenly could have been somewhere in the netherworlds of Atlanta, riding back from CompUSA and contemplating a Checker Burger.

(Actually, Hillary and I do a lot of the standard Survivor thing of daydreaming about beloved American food items, despite the monthly Pizza Hut infusion. She knows Checkers as Rally's, its Yankee alias, but hasn't got quite the lifelong affinity for it as I do. She's also a McDonald's rather than a Wendy's person - but these are small quibbles to have with a roommate.)

Speaking of Hillary, she was due to get back to town tonight but has been delayed, which is very disappointing, especially since I've been spending the last couple evenings cleaning the apartment so it'll be nice and shiny when she gets back. I even went and bought a broom. Indian brooms have long bristles but short handles, and this one comes up, in total, to about my hip bone. As the package declares, Perfect length suitable for Indian Women. - 'Say goodbye to back ache. Unfortunately, I am not an Indian Woman and so it is not such a joy to use; thankfully, it also boasts Recyclable virgin plastic handles. Safe for hands. - what a relief! The actual bristles are grass - Garo Hill Grass - Flexible and long lasting and very soft - sweeping feels more like tickling the floor, or petting a cat. The broom does seem to be effective, but it's hard to be sure because the broom manufacturers cleverly include, built in to the broom, some sample dirt to help you test out their product. I don't know if this is the dirt the grass grew in, or just gradually disintegrating grass, but it was a bit of a surprise when it showed up on my floor.

(All of this, though, beats the other popular Indian method of cleaning, which is just to hit things. For procedures akin to washing, the preferred approach is to take handfuls of water and throw them violently at the object in question. I haven't witnessed too much of either, but Hillary swears it's true. Hillary and I somewhat rely on each other to vent aspects of Indian custom, behavior and belief which strike us as bizarre, despite our recognition that this says more about us as outsiders than it does about anybody here. The other day the local English pop station [Radioooo Indigoo!] played "Englishman in New York" by Sting, which about sums it up.)

Malcolm Quantrill - Alvar Aalto: A Critical Study

2009-09-16T05:52:00.000-07:00

A disappointing and tedious book that I've been slogging through since before I left the States, chiefly out of some misplaced sense of obligation to Aalto. As well, there is the notional Operation Finland next summer (aka: "Finn-al Fantasy," "Addison Go-To-Helsinki," "The Right Time...To Suomi" etc), which will of course involve all kinds of research and preparation...but I figured I had to start somewhere, and this was at one of the Clintonville bookshops for not too much dough.

Unfortunately, this book suffers from two of the greatest sins of architectural books:

1) NOT ENOUGH PICTURES.* This is the kiss of death for a book like this, which mentions a new project every paragraph but gives maybe twenty-five images per chapter - and often not the images that go with what he's talking about. (If he goes on about the brilliant first floor, count on seeing the basement plan.)

I understand why this happens - it's hard to get image rights, reproduction of them costs money, etc.... but it really just kills the book dead. He compensates with lots of long, precise description...that amounts to being just about meaningless if you can't see the building. In places it's bad 601 history paper material, just aimless recitations of things that are true about the building.

2) Weird emphasis on obscure projects and minor works. On the one hand, this is refreshing and nice - always cool to see stuff I haven't seen before. Of course, I can't see it, because there aren't any bloody pictures! I get the feeling Quantrill had really fabulous access to the Aalto office staff and archives, and wanted to share the interesting, offbeat projects he'd unearthed....which is fine, but the urge to scoop the world seems to displace any attempt at really organizing and summarizing the information. In other words, "All facts, no themes." The book proceeds chronologically, with no sense of whether what's coming up is important or minor, just "1958 was another busy year for the office, with the following projects...." and so on. There is one section, on furniture, that's been cogently organized by its theme, and clearly spells out how the furniture ties into the larger body of work. Horrified at this mistake, Quantrill buries this section as an appendix, leaving the main body uncontaminated by clarity.

Would this book be better if I had a big Aalto Encylopedia open next to it, to look up the projects he alludes to? Maybe - but at that point, why wouldn't I just read the Aalto Encyclopedia instead? It's not like Quantrill brings thrilling prose to the table, or even much biographical detail beyond the project chronology.

A definite dud.

* - The worst offender in this category remains Kenneth Frampton's Critical History of Modern Architecture, which is organized like a textbook but is virtually impenetrable to the novice due to the scanty illustrations. I confess to eventually giving up on it in Jackie's class three years ago and focusing on Giedion; it was about a year later, according to my log, that I actually read Frampton cover to cover.

ups and downs

2009-09-11T06:56:00.000-07:00

So there are certain things, it must be admitted, that are just unspeakably annoying here, to a person with Western/American expectations and customs. Naturally none of this counts as evil or wrong, it's just different than I'm used to and, consequently, frustrating to the point of insanity sometimes. A few items:

* customer service, as we understand it and as I've practiced it professionally, does not exist. A particular problem is simple acknowledgement, which may have to do with eye-contact customs or something else that's just off my radar...but, basically, if you're approaching a counter (whether to buy something or ask something) there is nothing to be had in waiting patiently to be called on, looked at, acknowledged, etc. Just forget it. A half-dozen other people will come and go, getting served in turn, as the person behind the desk strenuously avoids looking anywhere near your general direction. Bad rock show etiquette takes over: you just have to shove your way to the front and begin talking to them whether they acknowledge you or not.
* in the same vein, people who sell you stuff are absolutely bent on selling you the most expensive thing they can. This is actually not very different from commission selling in the US, but since every salesman here is a small-businessperson trying to make the overhead, it's far more ubiquitous. Anyway it means that if you ask for a Coke in a glass bottle you're getting the plastic, if you want two samosas you're getting five, and if you're curious what's in a pot, they'll fill a bowl for you and ask for the money before you can explain you don't actually want some. The worst in this department is blank CDs; I went several blocks out of the way for these a couple weeks ago to find a stand that will actually sell you the cheap no-name ones as opposed to the Rs 50 ones.
* car horns are used constantly to a degree even New Yorkers would find bizarre. I can't remember if I've gone on about this before, but basically, everyone is constantly honking their horn. I mean constantly. CONSTANTLY. Like, let's say there's a red light and therefore the cars in front of you aren't moving. Time to honk your horn! Or let's say you're in a parking lot, and are delayed in leaving that parking lot for fifteen seconds because a car is pulling out of their space in front of you. Honk away! Obviously this behavior exists in the US - but it's remarked upon, disapproved, and in any case considered noteworthy. Here it's just a part of driving. The thing is that because it's so ubiquitous it's even less effective - and I've always found car horns one of the most imprecise and ineffective forms of communication ever devised.

(I maintain that cars need some sort of hot-key list of things to communicate to other cars by text message or other low-bandwidth medium. It would just be nice to be able to distinguish between "Hey, your car is leaking fluid," "Turn your lights on, dude!" and "You just cut me off, you jerk!" The spinoff benefits to others within earshot would of course be immeasurable.)

* punctuality is understood VERY differently here. Almost nobody ever does anything when they say they will. I mainly deal with this second-hand because I have a pretty limited social calendar; Hillary and the Boss, however, are daily being let down by people who say 4:00 and mean 4:30, or say 4:00 and just plain never arrive. Then you call them and they evasively cite traffic or "the rain, madame." The thing is that, as with the horns, this is SO common here that it can't be understood as rudeness the way it would in the US. That is - we're the ones, I suspect, whose behavior seems uncategorizable. I picture a group of employees at one of our contractors' sitting around like, "God, that guy is crazy. I told him 2:00 and I was there at 2:45 - pretty reasonable, right? But he just totally goes off on me! Americans are SO WEIRD."
* rickshaw taxi drivers, as I've previously discussed, are, as a population, disproportionately high in cheats, liars and exploiters when it comes to white people. Last night a ride home from Cunningham Road, which I eventually got for Rs 35, was quoted by one driver at Rs 100. Following the example set by Hillary, I laughed dismissively (like, "Come ON!") and walked away...

Actually though, that leads me to the inevitable "but" of this post. Y'see, the next driver I flagged down agreed to drive on the meter, got me home by as efficient a route as I could imagine, and actually talked the price DOWN, a feat possibly unprecedented in the history of all taxi service. I eventually got him to take the full 40 and shook his hand. Along the way he'd struck up an enthusiastic conversation, somewhat hindered by the language barrier and the traffic noise, hinging on the fact that I was the first American he'd had in his auto, and consequently he was excited to satisfy his curiousity about things he'd heard about Americans, like, do we all have guns? Why do our women walk around with so little clothing on? Did I like George Bush? How about cricket? Did I know Hindus have over 3 lakhs gods? Why did the economy fail? etc etc. He was a nice guy, certainly the best cabbie I've ever met in any country, and as the ride ended we were on the verge of a personal bond owing to the fact that we've both lost parents within the past year.

(A lakh = a hundred thousand. This is written 1,00,000, since after the first three numerals, you put commas every TWO numerals. Thankfully I don't tend to make purchases that exceed a few hundred at the outside....)

And, one more thing: just as I got home from all this customer service rigmarole, fully prepared to dash off an angry blog post, I was stopped in the stair by our landlord's mother (aka Auntie - all women older than you are called Auntie). She insisted I wait a moment, and returned bearing two veggie burgers and a pastry, wrapped, from what I think was a Ramadan-related event that happened this afternoon. She said she'd just been upstairs to give them to Hillary and I but nobody had been home. No landlord I've ever had in the States has ever made a point of giving me food and so I didn't have the heart to tell her that Hillary is in Sri Lanka for the week, renewing her visa and meditating away all of the above.

recent book roundup: jencks, updike, eco

2009-09-06T08:29:00.000-07:00

Charles Jencks - The Prince, The Architects, and New Wave Monarchy

A reasonable one-afternoon read from the reliably readable archi-journalist. This 1988 piece is really an extended essay on the row stirred up by Prince Charles's mid-80s diatribes against Modernist architecture (more specifically, British High-Tech and Brutalism). Jencks is interested in teasing out the implications and contradictions in what at first seems like a pretty basic, two-sided fight. The different camps get fleshed out, and there's an interesting but brief discussion of the different taste cultures that produce high architecture and Royal opinion. Unfortunately, Jencks is unable, without the data, to move the debate past its repeated stumbling block: the assumption by the opinion-makers of what "the people" want. Charles thinks the people want old-timey architecture; Jencks thinks they "probably" want some pluralistic mix of old and new.

This was particularly interesting to read after Doug's seminars this past year, where we looked with something like impartiality at both the reviled Brutalist buildings ("just fabulous") and the classicism they spawned in reaction ("pre-tty nice stuff"). While recognizing why the Barbican Centre is seen as monstrous and Quinlan Terry's Riverside is seen as kitschy, we were able to find lots to admire (and perhaps to steal) in both. Jencks isn't really interested in the buildings here, though - he's interested in the discourse about buildings, and this is an interesting book as far as that goes. His emphasis does lead him in some funny directions, though - one chapter is an attempt to justify the Prince's public character, and/or speculate on what his "new wave" monarchy will be like. This seems a rather irrelevant question in 2009, as Charles's reign, if it ever happens at all, is expected to be short and ineffectual. Oh well.

John Updike - Your Lover Just Called: Stories of Joan and Richard Maple

A collection of stories published irregularly over several decades, which chronicle the long and unhappy marriage of a prototypical Dream Couple - Ivy-league educated, economically comfortable, notionally in love but utterly miserable. They're extremely well-observed; I'm reminded of Middlemarch in terms of the ability to portray the frustrated silence between two people bound together for life but unable to really communicate. Updike isn't as sympathetic as Eliot, though, and all the stories basically feature Richard as the protagonist. So even when Richard's being an irredeemable creep (which is basically all the time), we still understand events from his perspective. This isn't a critique - Lolita for example is based on a similar approach - but after a while it gets exhausting here. Presumably it would have been a very different thing to read these once in a while over the space of twenty years.

Another thing that collecting the stories together does, though, is to strain the premise a bit. Each story tends to revolve around something particularly interesting happening, ie, a fight between the characters. That means we never see much of periods where they're getting along - do they ever get along? We're assured that they do, but Updike's unwilling to ever portray it with enough detail to make their reluctance to part really convincing. But he does brilliantly capture his lead's alienation, bad anger management, and ways of starting fights without explicitly meaning to. Good writing, recommended reading - but give it a break from time to time or it'll sort of wear out your soul and leave you paranoid and cranky.

Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose

This is the fourth novel I've read by Eco, and so I sort of knew what to expect... Eco is a linguist and medieval scholar before he's a novelist, and a great deal of the satisfaction of his books is the creation of extremely complete and historically accurate epistemological frameworks for his characters. They don't just wear the clothes of medieval monks, or eat the food of 16th century aristocrats - they think the world in the ways those people did. At times, of course, this is a bit exhausting - The Island of the Day Before, in my opinion, runs aground on too much detail with not enough plot. For the plot is the other half of the formula - and thankfully, in The Name of the Rose he has a good one: a murder mystery, with a winkingly-named Franciscan monk in the Sherlock Holmes role.

All of which is to say that if you have a limited tolerance for 14th-century monks arguing over whether or not Jesus laughed, or whether living in ascetic poverty is heretical or not, flee now, because there is no separating the plot mechanics from the monkish debate, the way William solves a mystery from the way he understand his universe. Meanwhile there's a third, 20th-century agenda, of exposing the constructedness and unreliability of all texts, from the set of clues the monk thinks he's assembling to the book itself. A fake scholarly preface goes to great lengths to assure us that the medieval manuscript we are supposedly reading is the victim of a 19th-century Gothic/Romantic translation, that the "original" of the manuscript hasn't been found or never existed, and that the language used in-text is more or less arbitrary. All a bit meta, but that's what you have to expect from Eco.

The bottom line, though, is that if you do go in for all the above nerdy stuff, this is a great read. The murder plot clips along well, the labyrinth/library is a great source of fascination, and the scholarly material, at least for me, was interesting and informative. I still slightly lean towards the oddball conspiracy-theory milieu of Foucault's Pendulum and the outright zany adventurism of Baudolino, but this is a great read. (How exactly it managed #1 bestseller status is beyond me though!)

ram on

2009-09-06T01:02:00.000-07:00

It's been Ramadan for...a while now; the main impact of this on our narrowly-defined univerese is that, across from the mosque up the street, some guys have set up an additional food-stand, which spends the day boiling things in enormous cauldrons and also sells delicious and cheap food into the evening. (Peak time is right around 6:30, when the daily fast ends - though they have some specials going at other hours of the day to keep up business.) Naturally, they're only here through the end of Ramadan, so we've largely switched over to them from our usual Muslim food source, the fry-house up by the corner. Cheapo Muslim food in this country is among the best cheapo food anywhere, probably surpassed only by cheapo pizza and Doner kebabs, neither of which is to be found locally.

Things you can get from one or the other of these sources:

* bag of fried meat - this comes in various forms, flavors, and textures. The best, from the corner guys, is succulent, melt-in-your-mouth goodness. The stand guys don't quite have this down, as their variant (possibly from a different animal? who knows?) is much fattier and tougher to chew.
* parota (sp?) - a chewy, flabby disc of bread. Weirdly satisfying despite the difficulty of actually pulling it apart with your teeth. Pairs well with bag-o-meat.
* mutton samosas - the stand guys' best offering. These are samosas stuffed with seasonings, peas and things, and MUTTON as opposed to the usual potatoes. Basically a little mutton-pot-pie, very hearty and satisfying - and weirdly English if you ignore the shape.
* coconut thing - dessert pastry around 7"-8" in diameter, made of flaky dough and STUFFED FULL of sweet, shaved coconut. Kept in the fridge, two of these covered my dessert needs for days, but oddly the stand guy pitched this as something meant to be cut into four pieces and eaten "very fast." Maybe this is to encourage repeat business, or maybe there's some important tradition of which I'm totally ignorant.
* shish-kebabs - called "shik" or "sheik" or for that matter "chic" here, which I assume to be related to the familiar "shish." This is basically familiar from "Mediterranean" restaurants in the states: meat is grilled on a skewer, then slid off the skewer and served. The stand guys' version of this is ground, seasoned and has a great chewy texture - the same stuff would make a fabulous hamburger patty.

Coincident with Ramadan, but presumably separate, is an ongoing series of events at the Mary shrine just up the block. Every evening a substantial crowd of saffron-gowned folks hangs out in plastic chairs just across the street from the shrine, and music, speeches, and children's intonations are blared from a loudspeaker. The surest sign, by the way, that a religious event (or Independence Day) is going on: someone sets up a loudspeaker. They love loudspeakers here. The louder the better. The most mystifying tendency to Hillary and I is the preference for pre-recorded festival crowds chanting things; the assembled crowd of actual festival participants listens respectively and silently to these simulacra of active participations. (On other occasions, of course, the participation is quite active - a couple of Ganesha parades have gone by the house, consisting of a flatbed truck w/ statue of the god, preceded by an expanding impromptu crowd of people banging on drums and dancing in circles. This is pretty great.)

Oh, but I was going to talk about the Mary shrine!

Presumably under the influence of the Hindu temples (which are beautiful concatenations of lurid color and fussy detail - they blow carnival rides out of the water), the Christian houses of worship have largely shed Western austerity in favor of multicolored Christmas lights, bright sporting-event lights generally, numerous color sculptures of the virgin, and, in the case of one temple on the main road, a large model of a 16th century galleon* set on the roof.

The intent of this isn't so clear to me; I've heard the expression "Jesus H. Christ on a raft!" but this is hardly a raft; maybe it has something to do with European missionaries going overseas (like, to India, I guess?). At the end of the evening service (which has been daily during this current Mary festival), children line up to get some kind of mush in a dish, which they seem excited about, so it's probably sweet and possibly Eucharist. At Heavenly Mother of the Boats (as I call it), this is attended by someone saying "Praise God, Hallelujah, Thank You Jesus" a couple of times over the loudspeaker, and the crowd breaks up from there.

Incidentally, I got some film developed this week, and hopefully soon I'll be able to use the scanner at work to grab a few "greatest hits" to share on here and on Flickr. Just a handful, though, mainly because I don't want to have to re-scan them later when I have access to my film scanner.

I have a lot of books and movies built up to talk about, but all that talk about food made me really hungry, so I'm going to go see if the stand guys are in operation. More later, maybe?

* - probably not technically a galleon, but it's been a while since I played Sid Meier's Pirates!

zoo station

2009-08-31T07:11:00.000-07:00

So, I now have a substantial backlog of minor cultural reportage that I've been meaning to summarize - apologies for all the book reviews, etc. I'm really very boring, still. But, let's talk about Bangalore street fauna!

The short version is that animals are just kind of underfoot everywhere. But they never seem particularly dangerous or even that aware of your presence; far more than even Hillary (who's been here for quite a while) they are used to the constant racket of diesel engines, car horns, religious singing at appointed times of day, and the other ingredients of the neighborhood's sonic melange. Basically the only danger they pose is in the form of droppings left behind, but the same sixth sense you use for this in the USA just gets developed a little further here and I'm pleased to report that there have been no incidents in this vein.

So, then -

Chickens: Not terribly common, except for the large colony immediately surrounding our building, particularly across the street to the east. I've complained about the rooster noises before - they haven't abated but my slumbering self is getting better each day at tuning them out. This and my free Air Berlin sleeping mask have really improved my mornings. The chickens just kind of roam around; I assume they must have something to do with the local chicken and egg businesses but I've never seen anyone actually grab one of these shanty chickens and haul them away to their doom.

Dogs: fairly ubiquitous, never collared, but definitely turf-oriented. Hillary says she has names for most of them, but the only one I know and could potentially recognize is Rooster Dog, who lives in the company of the roosters across the street and has come to kind of look like a rooster - certainly he has a more ruffled, feathery appearance than most dogs. I also like the name "Rooster Dog" because it reminds me of the sequence of dogs identified in "Atomic Dog" by George Clinton. If we encounter Harmonic Dog, Rhythmic Dog, or Clappin' Dog, I will let you know.

Goats: Also not out of place anywhere, but in my daily activities they're rarely seen outside of a two-block area just west of here. They have two major hangouts: an intersection of the minor street with an alley, where they chew up old corn husks, and a ruined building/vacant lot halfway down the next block. This is pretty spectacular; the ruin is a few feet above grade level and is littered with shards of concrete, as if the building was destroyed by a thunderbolt from Zeus or something. Add the motley troupe of goats prowling alertly and nobly through this miniature wasteland and you really have a fabulous tableau. The goats seem aware of this, as only the black ones meander through the destruction, for maximum contrast against the bright concrete. Every so often you'll see a goat tied up outside of a house; Hillary observes bitterly that their owners will dote on them endlessly in terms of personal or religious affection, but still not give them enough rope to be able to comfortable stretch their legs or scratch themselves.

Cows: These also have no particular territory, but as they're a bit out of place on the major roads, I encounter them a lot on the minor roads I use to get to work, one of which seems to be a major migration path. They operate like bulky, slow pedestrians - they seem to know where they're going, and are doing so quite independent of anybody nearby making them go there. Sometimes you'll see one or two of them hanging out with the goats on the corner. Hillary also says she recognizes several regularly-appearing cows. We saw longer-horned cows, or perhaps oxen, dragging carts full of whatnot down the street a few days ago, but that was the first time I'd seen those.

Cats: Far less numerous than dogs and tending to look much more "stray" but still cute. Almost universally gray with gray patches. There are some that hang around the terrace at work and are a bit of a nuisance, but they are probably taking care of lesser vermin without our asking so I don't mind.

Birds: As mentioned, we have the homing pigeon habitat on the roof - the landlord says this is to bring good will to the neighborhood, which is also their reason for keeping certain species of plant up there. The staircase on the way up has a succession of separate gates, which we keep closed to protect the pigeons from the cats. Huge crows, arguably ravens, are a more general presence. Dad's bird feeder, no matter its defences, would stand no chance against a coordinated assault. Sometimes in the evening, just before dusk, a good third of the sky will be full of swirling black outlines which Hillary argues are birds, though I still find bats a more appealing explanation. They flock in pointless circles and cast what I hope are good omens. As at home, every once in a while I'll see a hawk, and be more pleased and intrigued by this than can be reasonably explained.

Douglas Adams - The Salmon of Doubt

2009-08-30T07:34:00.000-07:00

Douglas Adams - The Salmon of Doubt

Douglas Adams was the author of the humorous sci-fi series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; this is an odds-and-sods collection put together after his unexpected death. I don't really have a huge problem with the act of raiding Adams's Macintosh for unpublished treats, nor the assembly of various unfinished drafts into a new, equally unfinished composite novel. I wouldn't want this done with my own computer, but perhaps Adams had an understanding with the close friends and collaborators who undertook this task - and anyway, aside from the Macintosh, this is a familiar story to which we owe a great many beloved works of literature.

If the Frankenstein chapters that comprise the last chunk of this collection - the stretch specifically titled "The Salmon of Doubt" - were more compelling, the reassembly might all be worthwhile. But it's a bit spotty. The story isn't done - there's a fax of a plot summary to give you a sense of some of the other bases it might have covered, but it barely feels like it's halfway through Act One when the credits roll. The various plot threads are only just beginning to have anything remotely to do with each other. In other words, this is the kind of thing you read if you just find Adams's (unfinished) prose entertaining by itself.

To be fair, he was never the kind of writer where the resolution of the plot was exactly the point - you were either won over by the tangents, digressions, and wit of the narrator, or not. I was; I read and enjoyed all five Hitchhiker books in my teens. Adams was a funny writer; a bit heavy on the "quirk" and exhausting at long stretches, but he earned his success on material that reads like Salmon of Doubt and there is an audience for it. The Hitchhiker books gave Adams a devoted following that he seems to have been warm towards but also unsure what to do with; his own interest in the series was evidently petered-out well before the final, awful volume (Mostly Harmless), and it's a bit misleading to market this volume, which has no new Hitchhiker material whatsoever, with the tagline "Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time." It does contain several chapters of what was begun as a Dirk Gently project but might have been intended for transformation into a new Hitchhiker piece. It seems like Adams fans might be counted on to purchase this volume no matter how it was billed; I guess they at least left off the little green guy with the thumb and the mouth.

Oh, and you also get the Hitchhiker's footnote "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe," which is basically a shockingly long setup for a lame Reagan joke. I'm sure it was killer material in 1986 but it feels a bit hokey now. That one and "The Salmon of Doubt" are for completists only - but the rest of the volume should be easily enjoyed by anybody who got a kick out of the Hitchhiker books.

The rest of the volume mops up an assortment of essays, interviews, and humorous newspaper columns, presumably the best of Adams's uncollected material. It also serves as an indirect advertisement for a lesser-known but interesting-sounding work called Last Chance To See, pointed up in several passages that reference Adams's passionate interest in endangered species issues.

A lot of this is good reading for a lazy Sunday afternoon, maybe not always as thought-provoking as it thinks it is, but when Adams lets go of the need to put a joke in every sentence, and just talks for a while, it clips along very nicely.

call on me, kaminey

2009-08-27T06:37:00.000-07:00

The night before last, Hillary and I went to see the current smash movie, Kaminey. Some Hindi movies, I'm told, are well-scattered with chunks of English dialogue, but it was pretty scarce here and so we were a bit lost. In fact, we kind of hilariously missed the point: the premise of this movie revolves around the intertwined destinies of identical twin brothers (one good, one bad).... but we totally missed the narration (and ad campaign) explaining this. So, instead we assumed we were watching a non-linear, Pulp Fiction-esque narrative about a single character, jumping forward and backward in time from this guy's decent, upstanding college days to his later life as a goateed gangster. The amazing thing is that this is almost sustainable; during the intermission, we argued at length about how exactly the sequence of events worked (presumably to the great amusement of those around us), and we had a working version except for a couple of glitches that couldn't yet be reconciled.

Thankfully (or not), the brothers finally encounter each other face-to-face, and so things started to click into place. The movie was maybe less compellingly bizarre in its normal format, but since we still couldn't understand any of the dialogue we invested ourselves in the stylish cinematography and the two big musical numbers - especially the juiced-up smash "Dhan Te Nan," which basically picks up on the shared lineage of "Stayin' Alive" and the 60s "Batman" theme song, with an extra dose of surf guitar. (The Bee Gees connection is made explicitly by the characters, who also reference the "Spider-Man" theme song. It's a fun movie.) The song's instrumental horn hook is so catchy that the characters start chanting along with it, yielding the title. Strongly recommended. Here's a clip - but, owing to our lousy internet, I have no way of confirming audio or video quality beyond the first four or five seconds. Enjoy?

My one complaint with the film is basically its failure to cheaply exploit the opportunities of the genre's cliches: this is a movie about identical twin brothers, and only once does anybody mistake one brother for the other! Moreover, at no point do the brothers agree to disguise themselves as each other to deliberately confuse their respective enemies. Huge missed opportunities, guys....or maybe I'm just projecting my shame at not actually knowing about the "twin" thing for the first hour and a half of the movie.

the crepes of sloth

2009-08-23T02:54:00.000-07:00

So, it's been over a week since the last entry, and while I don't have too much inspiration to write at the moment, I do want to stay in the habit, so I'll make some stab at something or other here. Let's see...

Hillary and I made one of the papers this week, by virtue of being white people at a fashionable event. Bangalore is not a high-powered socialite city (thankfully) so fashionable events are actually within the reach of our social calendar and network; in fact, we made it two this week: a new photo opening at Caperberry (yummy restaurant designed by the Boss, with H contributing), and a show of the Boss's past work, organized by a fashion figure of considerable reputation. As far as the papers were concerned, we couldn't quite edge out all the fab figures at the latter, but we just made it in for the Caperberry event. I look bizarrely tall in the photo, which I do hope to scan at some point. Anyway, both events were good fun, although my feet hurt after a while at the archi-show.

At said event, I finally met the famous Smaran, a KSA graduate who's established himself with two partners as one of the more exciting firms in town. He cordially invited me to re-present my exit review, now to his network of young archi-people in town.* I'm looking forward to this but also a little apprehensive, since I haven't really had time either to plug the holes identified by guest judge Sylvia Lavin, or to open the talk out to a wider audience less versed in Theory Minutia than KSA grad students and faculty. Basically I fear blank stares...hopefully the jokes and pop-culture material will carry me through, but sooner or later I do want to revisit the writing of this thing. Certainly I'm ready to incorporate some material from Giedion - but Banham I still need to reckon with.

* I'll be the fourth KSA student to do so, after him, Deepa, and Kysa. Hillary was an undergrad at KSA and didn't do an exit review, although I think she'd be great for it.

Recent films: Bridget Jones's Diary, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, North By Northwest, and California Split. All enjoyable although for rather different reasons. Unfortunately, after that Middlemarch tangent I don't really have much energy to go into that now. Also, I am still digesting a hearty batch of Lotus-Style Crepes, good food for a lazy Sunday but not so much for deep thinking (although Lotus managed just fine). The recipe is compelling for its simplicity:

1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup eggs (by convention, this is two eggs)

Four ingredients, in equal measure; so to make more, just increase everything equally. (You can also throw in a little dose of vanilla extract, but this is unavailable here, or just obscure and probably expensive.)

Mix it all up until batter-like, and pour into a wide, flat-bottomed, battered pan on medium-high heat. Cook till flippable, then flip and cook a little bit more and serve with toppings of choice. Back home that would be maple syrup, but we're far from maple country and so your backup is honey...but we went for orange marmalade, which turned out to be delicious. And while Indian granulated sugar doesn't dissolve as quickly or thoroughly as American, leaving the finished product with a just-slightly-gritty sweetness, they were basically as good as they've ever been. Thanks as always to Lotus.

George Eliot - Middlemarch

2009-08-23T01:01:00.000-07:00

This ended up longer than I planned, so I'm making it a separate entry on its own. General personal update to follow shortly....

I finished off George Eliot's Middlemarch yesterday, after three weeks of on-and-off progress. It's a long book, and while consistently interesting, it's not always gripping...though it does pick up momentum in the last third as the plots start to come to crisis. But it's not really a book to read for the plot, as the real hook here is the authoress's knack for character detail. The narration is quite chatty, and there's a bit more "tell" than "show," but it works here, as she teases out her small-town cast's petty vanities, badly-concealed pretensions, hopeless ambitions, and especially their optimistic illusions about romance. (I'm reminded very much of Spoon River Anthology.) Significantly, the only characters who wind up convincingly "happily ever after" are the ones who put off marriage as long as possible, learning how to compromise with each other on the way, rather than getting trapped in a drawing room with a husband or wife that they simply have no idea how to talk to when times get rough.

If you're not yet sure if you fancy a 700-page 19th-century novel centering on issues of who-will-marry-who and who's-going-to-inherit-the-land, here's a few snippets I dog-eared that should give you a sense of the tone as well as Eliot's handiness with characters. First, here's Lydgate, the arrogant new doctor in town, beginning to live beyond his means:

[He] would have despised any ostentation of expense; his profession had familiarized him with all grades of poverty, and he cared much for those who suffered hardships. He would have behaved perfectly at a table where the sauce was served in a jug with the handle off, and he would have remembered nothing about a grand dinner except that a man was there who talked well. But it had never occurred to him that he should live in any other way than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching.

And here, a bit earlier, is Rosamond Vincy, the girl he's going to be stuck with after a brief and lighthearted courtship. As she daydreams about the luxuries of married life,

Do you imagine that her rapid forecast and rumination concerning house-furniture and society were ever discernible in her conversation, even with her mamma? On the contrary, she would have expressed the prettiest surprise and disapprobation if she had heard that another young lady had been detected in that immodest prematureness - indeed, would probably have disbelieved in its possibility. For Rosamond never showed any unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private album for extracted verse, and perfect blonde loveliness, which made the irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date. Think no unfair evil of her, pray: she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or mercenary; in fact, she never thought of money except as something necessary which other people would always provide.

To borrow a phrase from Doug Graf, "It's like boyfriends and girlfriends, right? It happens, and everybody else can look at it and say, well, that's a bad idea." The above may seem particularly harsh on the character of this charming-but-unprepared woman, but one of the great strengths of this book is the way this lack of education gets contextualized; it's the inevitable product of a social system where Rosamond, as the daughter of a self-made bourgeois man, has been sculpted since birth to marry upwardly and bring the family into the gentry.

The novel is rather unforgiving to her, and she warrants comparison to Virginia Woolf's own R.V. - Rachel Vinrace of The Voyage Out, another lightweight female prepared for nothing in particular beyond wifeliness. Woolf was an Eliot fan, and it's interesting to note that Rachel is treated more sympathetically but ultimately with less mercy, as the novel bumps her off unexpectedly, leaving her to stand as a symbol for the tragedy of the Unfinished Woman just as Jacob's Room painstakingly demonstrates Jacob's incompleteness to make real the tragedy of the First World War. Eliot is willing to see Rosamond's useless, obnoxious personality through to the bitter end, and while she gets her own happy ending, she's punished from the reader's perspective by being made into a villainous, obstinate dream-crushing harpy.

If this characterization of the female seems a bit reactionary, note that Rosamond is balanced by two other young women at the center of the plot: the sensible, wry, working-class Mary Garth (who never gets as much page time, but ends up the best of all of them) and the idealistic but kind Dorothea, who suffers through a parallel bad marriage brought on by the cruel distance of her pedantic, wooden husband. Lydgate the doctor certainly teeters on the brink of being a rehash of Dorothea's husband; significantly, when Eliot began writing, the Dorothea and Lydgate plots belonged to entirely separate projects, which were only later fused to create this novel. They work well as mirrors to each other, and anyway it leaves Dorothea a free hand to be as naive as Rosamond but at least decently human.

She also works as a vent for the frustrations of women kept out of the professions; she's always idly drawing house plans as a hobby, and it's obvious to the reader from very early on that what she really ought to do is marry nobody and go become an architect. This option is so far from the realm of possibility in 1830 that it's not even discussed by the characters, and so Dorothea marches into not one but two ill-conceived marriages, and is shown in the epilogue to have been significant only through general decency to those immediately around her:

Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good fo the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

On the one hand, that's a testament to Eliot's insight, as a novelist and a woman, into the unheroic details and realities of everyday life. What other 19th-century novelist would bother making their protagonist someone who ends up as, basically, the nice wife of a moderately important man? This attention to the in-between people, more than anything, is what I imagine Woolf, with her favor for "modest, mouse-colored people," appreciated in Eliot.

At the same time, Dorothea's fate is an indictment of the status quo; from what we learn of Dorothea early on, it's clear that she is more than capable - with her cottage plans and schemes for Saint-Simonian workers' communities, of having "a great name on the earth."

I could keep going, but after a certain point, you have to have read this thing to get what I'm going on about, and I sort of doubt anyone is going to - again, 700 pages, marriage plots, people in carriages.... but, bottom line: Middlemarch is a good, solid, heavy book, with characters so thoroughly and memorably sculpted that I expect it to stay with me for a long time.

got it in the blood, the kid's american

2009-08-13T05:43:00.001-07:00

Last night we checked out karaoke at a bar called Opus, and it was pretty excellent, and/or a fascinating cultural experience. Every song anyone selected was an American hit, or at least American; there were a few country songs I didn't recognize but they must have charted to some extent. In fact it was more or less the lineup you would expect at any karaoke place in the States: "Hotel California" sung by a group of five or six people, "Baby One More Time," "Smoke On The Water" (huge hit with the crowd), some Sinatra, "American Pie" (okay, the Madonna version), and "We Didn't Start The Fire" sung by another group of five or six people, who, just as in the States, were evidently unfamiliar with anything besides the chorus. The best was the girl who sang "Zombie" by the Cranberries, hitting every yowl and ululation. My contributions were "99 Red Balloons" and "Man on the Moon," both well-received, mainly for a small dose of dancing on the Nena song.

Some unusual wrinkles here: the karaoke operation is run by a duo, to enable one to queue up songs while the other emcees. I like this, although you still end up feeling like you're interrupting the guy running things in order to submit your songs. There's no printed binder of songs - you have to walk up and ask for your song by name, and the guy control-Fs it on the computer. That's kind of a bummer - I always like stumbling by chance on random songs I would never think to sing until they're presented. The real upshot here is that people are much more hesitant to sing, possibly because drinking is slightly less prevalent here,* and consequently the emcees are sort of begging the crowd to sign up. This means you can sing basically whenever you want - I mean, I did two songs in the space of two hours, which is normally the time you'd spend waiting to sing once at any popular joint in Athens/Columbus.

One big minus: the setting is a rather pricey restaurant; the food's fine (we snacked on appetizers), but on top of the sense of obligation to eat something or other, you have to pay a cover charge of 110rs just to get in the door. But you have to add to that auto fees (including late-night markup and gratuitous detours), so it starts to be a pretty hefty night on the town, by the standards of our starving-artist budget. This all gives more impetus to Hillary's dreams of us buying a scooter....

This weekend I'm hoping to get out to IIM (building by Balkrishna "B.V." Doshi), for my first specifically architouristic stop since Bombay. Have been reading up on Doshi during lunch at the office, definitely looking forward to this. I've settled quickly into a routine here but I still want to be conscious of using the rare opportunity of being in a faraway place to actually see some stuff... sooner or later we need to start planning weekend trips out of town, too.

* Hillary says it's very common for people not to drink at all, which is a refreshing change for me.

mechanical animals

2009-08-12T07:17:00.000-07:00

Things are going really well at work. Today the boss told me that he appreciates the way I work - "you are just enough perfectionist, but you have a curiousity...it is good, I like it." So hey, that's cool. I've spent most of the last few days reacquainting myself with constructing elevations off of plans, etc., which is surprisingly satisfying (feels like I'm actually doing something architectural for money), and also solving stair problems, always the most fiendish of all a building's challenges. But the project, while fake (almost nothing in the office is currently generating a profit*), is definitely getting better for all this stair-and-elevation work, and the days go by pretty quickly. Along with the two trainees, Hillary and I have established a retinue of around five different reliable lunch places, which is enough for every day of the work week - and Hillary knows others as well to spice up the mix. That plus two coffee breaks makes for a pretty chopped-up day where you're never at the screen for too long at a go. There's still a draggy patch mid-afternoon, mainly just because of the heat, but our efforts to seed the CD player with better stuff from Hillary's laptop have given us an energy boost. P also generously secured us a boom-box, so I'm bringing in the tapes tomorrow to add to the mix.

* An upcoming exhibition of the boss's past work, sponsored by a local fashion kingpin, is expected to generate one or two potential jobs. Most of what I'd been doing in the visualization department was to try and win over clients who aren't exactly paying us, yet, but might, potentially.

Last night I finished off Mechanization Takes Command by Siegfried Giedion, and while I've been reading it on and off for something like a month and a half, I still haven't quite organized my thoughts on it. It's encyclopedic in scope and in organization, so while occasional references are made to knowledge acquired in early chapters, each section tends to be self-sufficient. This somewhat undermines the book; there are connections to be made and in fact he has a tendency of repeating himself which suggests these things were written independently and never thoroughly re-read as a piece to see if things could be trimmed here and there.

But it's hard to knock the exhaustiveness of the project; Giedion looks really, really closely at anything he can get his hands on, studying the furniture in the background of 16th-century engravings to figure out what kind of furniture people sat on, and reading, it seems, every single US patent ever filed. This thoroughness has the downside that if a chapter covers something you're not particularly interested in, the book will suddenly drag, despite the many illustrations. (It's also one of those books where the Figures are all just barely out of order, and every so often you'll be sent hunting through the book for an image hundreds of pages away.) My other major quibble would be the armchair Hegelian approach to breaking down history into broad, generalized periods - there's a lot of references to the character and temperament of the 18th and 19th centuries respectively, which just seems overbroad to the point of hopelessness.

But hey - this is a book from the 1940s by a guy who had maybe earned the right to be a little sweeping here and there. What you get is a ton of what Doug would call "good data" - painstakingly-unearthed facts about really interesting and previously-undiscussed stuff like: when did bathtubs come into general use? How about four-legged chairs? Wonderbread? Just a massive wallop of info in this thing. One thing that's really nice is that Giedion, despite being a real cheerleader for Modernism, occasionally drops all pretense and establishes himself as an out-and-out cranky old man, irritated that bread these days has lost all its flavor. These asides amount, across the length of the book, to a critique of the mechanizing process that otherwise amounts to the story's protagonist. They also kind of make up for the surprisingly dry and bloodless discussion of certain aspects of mechanization known to have disastrous human consequences - he quotes very briefly from The Jungle but otherwise his slaughterhouse chapter gives no sense of the destructive social forces unleashed by industrial capital. Maybe he figures that's all been better-covered elsewhere, and his focus is on the work process...but the critique is still disappointingly muted, even though it leaks out in vague hopes that man will learn to control mechanization in the coming years.

One other thing to note is that this is also just interesting as a period piece or time capsule in its own right; accomplished during the war years and published immediately after, it offers a fascinating window into the moment when refrigerators had become ubiquitous, but washing machines were still awkward and microwaves (or "infrared ovens") were a promising but futuristic concept. Probably the most striking passage in the book is the one where he wonders whether the food miracle of flash-freezing will lead to a world of TV dinners, or the return of home butchering, with homemakers bringing home large cuts of frozen meat to be cleavered in the modernist kitchen/dining/living zone. It can't have been very long before that issue got definitively settled, but it's interesting to imagine the moment when it would have been up for grabs.

Oh, and I watched Chinatown (Hillary was either bored or sleepy and gave up early) and really loved it. The plot twists keep piling up without feeling gratuitous, and I like that things keep thickening right up until the end - you get to care about the characters but you never have any idea where this is all going, which is the right ambience for a story about a detective who's "just trying to make an honest living" but, of course, comes to have a personal stake in figuring out this particular case. Recommended.

Finally, I should add: several rooftops away, a group of a half-dozen people of indeterminate race and age is dancing, silhouetted against the fading easten sky; they are wearing either fedoras or cowboy hats, and thus are either practicing "Beat It" or "Achy Breaky Heart." The routine is a little too simple to be either, and the one guy in the middle keeps turning around a half-beat too late, but this is the kind of free entertainment that comes with this apartment and more than justifies the rent in my book. Last night a group of maybe fifteen men, ranging in age from their teens to their sixties, were gathered in a loose group just across the corner from us, apparently trying to decide what to do about a large flagpole that's been lying around on the sidewalk over there for a while.

Whether it's theirs or not we have no idea, but a few of them undertook to raise the flagpole up in the middle of the street (causing an unprecedentedly justified barrage of car horns); they then put it back down and began tearing up the sidewalk for no apparent reason. They didn't have a shovel but instead a long stick; my theory is that Bangalore already has so many holes everywhere that nobody can make any money in the shovel business. Anyway, they made short work of a piece of curb on what, as Hillary observed, was the only pristine sidewalk in the whole neighborhood. They knocked over the curb piece and dug aimlessly in the rubble underneath before giving up. (I should add that when I say "they," I mean like two guys, with the rest of the group offering a lot of commentary on the proceedings.) Then the eldest of their group wandered across the street to join some of the spectators who had drifted off. After many more minutes of conversing in both camps, everybody walked away to the nearby Mary shrine, having thoughtfully filled in the hole and replaced the curbstone, but otherwise accomplished absolutely nothing visible to the naked eye.

My personal explanation for this is that they are seeking a buried treasure, and in the nature of such things, had to walk to a certain spot and then use the flagpole as an indicator of some location, ie, the shadow cast by a pole of x length at x hour on x day will point you in the direction of, etc. The disputes in the group (which were attended with lots of pointing in various directions), and their decline in energy and animation after a fruitless excavation, would also seem to support this reading.

samosa-less and cold as ice

2009-08-08T20:39:00.000-07:00

There are little window-shops everywhere you turn; they all sell slightly different combinations of things, and despite the lack of clear signage, the experienced observer can perceive the contents unique to "stationery store" (pens, computer mice, blank CDs at various arbitrary prices, post-its) versus "bakery" (potato buns, pinkish wedding cake that they won't sell you). Vegetable stands/carts are also plentiful, particularly on the walk home from work - also, at around 7:30 in the evening most weeknights, a half-dozen carts gather just down the block from the apartment, forming an impromptu market. Hillary really likes the form of shopping this all represents: I get this from this guy, that from this other guy... which I also find appealing, but the problem is that each guy in turn involves a fairly lengthy stop, given the combination of (a) language barrier (b) small talk (c) guilt trips about why you haven't come by recently and (d) waiting on like eight other people who showed up after you did, but who are bolder and less white.

I have nothing but time on my hands, so I'm trying to be patient and go with the flow on all this, but for any complex grocery list it's time to buckle down and go to Food World. Food World is a dedicated grocery store, with aisles and shelves and such, maybe a bit larger than your average US dollar store and well-stocked with anything you could possibly want for the home, except a boom box (search ongoing). Prices are higher, but the real issue is that I end up getting tricked into buying unnecessary junk food, so I have to either develop more resistance to cold Gatorade and bags of spicy snacks, or avoid Food World as much as possible. It's on the other side of an annoying-to-cross road, so that helps...

The other ongoing food/price ambition drives the search for the cheapest good samosa in town, or alternately the best cheap samosa in town. Samosas were the first Indian food I ever really got turned on to, thanks to Bombay Cafe and the proddings of...Lotus? Kelli? Who can say? Anyway, for those unfamiliar, samosas are little fried pyramids of flaky dough, stuffed with potatoes and whatnot (maybe peas, other veggies, spices). A couple of good samosas will keep you full for ages, but oddly they really seem to be considered as only a snack/appetizer - maybe nobody else likes them as much as I do?

(As I may have already mentioned, the cuisine here is really comfortable with potatoes as a primary food item - so they are constantly combined with other starches [bread, flaky dough] in ways that would be unusual in the US. I know some novelty sandwich places offer french fries as a thing you can put inside, but this is considered noteworthy and/or outrageous.)

Anyway, it seems that really excellent samosas can be had for around 10rs from either Caramel (the Western-style sandwich-and-cakes place with the 50rs combo lunch deal) and from a little shop-window on the way home from work, which actually has a sign, proclaiming that they sell "samosas and sweets." The only sweet I've tried so far is a sort of soft spiderweb of glassy honey-dough - kind of a funnel cake made of crystallized honey - with a name like "Challabi" or "Jella Bee," which I remember because it sounds sort of like a mangled version of "Jelly Bean." This is, of course, delicious. The samosas are even better though.

This week's Saturday movie was a recent-ish Russian-language treatment of Kafka's Metamorphosis, which, while padded a bit with dubious dream sequences, was about as faithful an adaptation as you could get without actually depicting the main character turned into a giant cockroach. The insect-ness is conveyed entirely through performance; the acter playing Gregor has a whole repertoire of hisses, head-jerks, finger-twitches, and especially full-body crawls, which together more or less make you understand that this is a person turned into a bug. The other characters react to him as if he indeed looked like a huge monstrous bug, but it kind of works even if the bug element is overlooked completely and he's just understood as having had some kind of nervous breakdown or mental collapse. In that case, the gradual distance and inhumanity shown by the family to the bug is even more poignant.

According to Hillary, Jeff (Kipnis) once proferred a reading of the story as an allegory of a closeted gay man, which makes sense (son turns from "person" to "horrifying secret the family locks away"). A similar reading can be applied where it's about being Jewish in the age of pogroms; Kafka's siblings and mother, years after his early death, were murdered in the Holocaust.

So between this and the Maupassant I've been getting a lot of inhuman cruelty in fiction....there's no film next week (it's the Indian Independence Day holiday) but after that we're supposed to watch a musical - of some kind. I am suspicious, but on my own time I'm plugging away on the Giedion (not much murder and depression there) and Middlemarch, which is so far proving quite charming.

we go where we like, we got overtime

2009-08-05T06:51:00.000-07:00

Auto-rickshaws, known by a scattering of other names, are ubiquitous three-wheeled vehicles basically deserving of the name "contraption": three-wheeled, canvas-topped, running on what seem to be lawnmower engines, they combine the spatial luxuries of golf carts with the diesel aroma of bumper boats. Every ride is a kind of thrilling adventure, and a great way to get up close and personal with the geography, since besides the canvas top there's not much separating the inside and outside. Naturally there aren't any seatbelts, so you just have to kind of roll with it. As a rule, it pays to be attentive to what the driver is doing; with foreigners (and apparently even with locals sometimes) they will drive in vast circles far from where you're trying to get. I'm by no means expert enough on the geography to direct one of these rolling con games anywhere, but thankfully I've always been in tow behind Hillary or someone else who knows what they're doing. Don't even bother late at night, though - they go up to time-and-a-half on fares, plus possible "sucker foreigner" price hike if you're not paying attention.

All of this sounds pretty negative, but actually I kind of like these things - they're optimized for weight and maneuverability and they are everywhere. Really, if you're on any street that deserves to be called one, there is at least one taxi within eyesight. They effectively take the place of a public transportation system, with more coverage than any metro could ever achieve, even if some of the other efficiencies fall by the wayside. It'd be really interesting to compare them to more official automotive-transit systems - like the Curitiba bus network that Amy and Kaveh presented upon. Hrm.

like a d-r-r-r-r-rummer chick

2009-08-03T08:58:00.000-07:00

Trucks here, when backing up, play one-channel midi tunes instead of that repeated single-beep "truck backing up" sound that we have. It's sort of nice, but it lacks the sense of no-nonsense industrial urgency that conveys "Get out of the way, a truck is backing up into you." Each truck seems to have its own tune, which leads me to hope that maybe eventually the drivers could download their favorite popular songs; I nominate "Back That Thing Up." As it is, it sounds more or less like the ice cream man is coming, so I keep getting my hopes up even though, as I suspect, there are no ice cream trucks in India. Consequently, I got tapped on the arm by a truck the other day - nothing serious though. Back on the subject of ice cream: when we first showed up in this neighborhood, Hillary said, "I'm so excited for all the great Tibetan food there'll be around here!"; I looked up and the first thing I saw was a hand-painted sign of an elderly New England grocer wielding a handful of creamsicles, labeled "UNCLE JOHN'S ICE CREAM."

I haven't yet tried out Uncle John's products, but to celebrate our mostly-complete shifting to the Tibetan neighborhood, Hillary and I have indulged in a couple of nights of Western-style debauchery, which for us means one night of junk food while watching a movie, and another night of scarfing down on Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut turned out to be a bit of a trap, owing to our foolish decision to order pepperoni. The culture down here is heavily vegetarian - lots of lunch places don't have a single meat item on the menu - and you pay a premium for getting meat when you do. This is probably a more appropriate calibration of prices to the actual value of meat (vis-a-vis amount of land and energy consumed by grazing cattle vs. grain), but it's definitely an adjustment. Anyway, Pizza Hut is a great illustration of this: the (chicken) pepperoni pizza is 485 rs for the Family Size - more than double the price of a similarly-sized cheese pizza (210 rs). With delivery fee and extra cheese, the bill came to 602 rs - probably the most expensive meal I've consumed in India.

(Eventually I'll talk about currency, currency conversions, and why currency conversions are a bad idea...but, moving on.)

The most entertaining aspect of getting Pizza Hut is the menu, mainly for this intriguing pizza variety: the Paneer El Rancho, which is described thusly:

Mexican Specialty Cajun Spiced Paneer, Black Olives, Corn, Capscium and Onion

Capsicum is green peppers, and paneer is a supposed cheese product that more closely resembles tofu and which is a common protein in the cuisine here...but for my money the sticking point here is "Mexican Specialty Cajun Spiced." Now that's a combination.

***

Our movie last night was Casablanca and it's good. I'm not the first person to say it, obviously, but I'll reiterate: good movie. Not as stuffy and slow and "old-timey movie"-ish as I was sort of expecting; the dialogue is really sharp, the cast is rock-solid, and it really does draw you in.

control alt shift

2009-08-02T04:52:00.000-07:00

We moved house, or "shifted," last night; with the help of P. and a friend of his, we got all the big stuff (including mattress) over to the new place, which is both enormous and generous with storage, so basically everything we have fits in the bedroom wardrobe and the kitchen cabinets. This leaves the "Hall," which is more or less the size of Natalie and Janet's old living room on Mell Street, ie, kind of big to have absolutely nothing in it. The funky shelving pieces, carved into the walls with an offset grid of dividers, make fine curio cabinets, especially with the sliding glass panels in front of them. I have begun curating a revolving show of miscellaneous objects within, with the rule that only one object can go on each shelf, and that none of them can be things that would suggest everyday usefulness: the first show includes my Kinder-Egg smart-car, a coil of wire from Hillary, my Super Mario 3 lunchbox, etc. In the longer term, though, we ought to find something to do with this room; it seems natural that it could be a hobby/hangout space, so I guess we need to get some hobbies going in addition to the ongoing read-a-thon.

The rumors of hot showers are half-true; there IS a hot-water heating device in the bathroom, and it WILL heat up water, but it only comes out of a spigot in the wall (suitable for filling up a bath-bucket, but not for showering), and it's VERY hot. Like, scalding. Further experiments are necessary. Anyway, we love the place, which gets nice and which hasn't electrocuted Hillary yet (a striking contrast to the old place).... That said, something has to be done about the screaming rooster that woke us up this morning (there are a lot of chickens in the area - more on Indian street fauna later).

Breakfast today was something that sounds like "cho-cho-bat" and which is served as two scoops of differently-flavored grain; a spicy one, which, as Hillary puts it, "tastes like everything else here," and a sweet one, which tastes remarkably like the way I like my cream-of-wheat, after it's cooled down and formed a jello-like suspension of wheat, butter, and sugar. There's an overtone of banana and/or mango in this one, but it's basically my perfect bowl of cream-of-wheat (or "cream-of-the-week"), in scoop form. For lunch I had chicken pieces with spicy skin with a side of plain roti (pretty common lunch fare for me). The roti at this place, absent any viable toppings, was a bit dull and rubbery; I should say for Athens readers that it is utterly identical to the Taco Stand's quesadilla material, ungrilled. But it did go well with a Thums Up.

Thums Up, by the way, is the Indian cola brand, which basically tastes like Pepsi. You can get Coke basically everywhere that Thums Up is sold, and I've even been given a Coke when asking for the other. A general note, when buying bottled soda from a shop, you want to ask for it in a plastic bottle unless you want to stand there and drink it, because they want the glass-bottle ones back for the deposit. Much better than Thums Up is the limey-lemony soda, Limca, which beats Sprite on all counts. (Sprite is also widely available.)

Recently finished books:

Redwall by Brian Jacques is the first in a popular series of juvenile fantasy/adventure novels that I used to sell by the bucketload at Chapter 11. It's charming and there are some moments of genuine suspense, but overall it's not so great. With the exception of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH I've never gone for "animals act like people" stories, and this does little to overcome the fundamental issue of the genre: why do they need to be animals? Very little in this book wouldn't work with regular human characters, and a lot of things would work better - there are some serious scalar issues that Jacques's description never bothers to clear up: how do dormice and badgers sit down to dinner at the same table? How can mice possibly go fishing without being yanked to their deaths at the first nibble? How big is the monastery around whose defense the entire plot revolves? What about the farmhouse? Is it animal-scaled or human-scaled? Are there humans in this world? The horse-drawn hay-cart from early scenes would suggest so, but then you'd think if there were people in this world they would notice these highly advanced animal civilizations that come up to knee-high.... it's just a lot of complications that the story doesn't need.

The story's kind of lame anyway; I was encouraged by the dust jacket, which promised the warm, friendly cliches of a humble apprentice seeking a magic sword to save his people - certainly, this kind of thing has been done very well in the past, probably best in Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books. But here the coming-of-age plot is totally shortchanged: our hero is kind of a loser at the beginning and then by, oh, page fifteen or so, is leading grown men - I'm sorry, mice - and demonstrating previously undisclosed talents in basically all required areas. He occasionally acts rude and imperious to people but they seem to take it just fine - there are no lessons learned or tough changes for the character to make; he's just unfailingly good from beginning to end. I can picture Matt Voss being driven crazy by this book....

The Dark Side is a collection of short stories by Guy de Maupassant, with the general theme of "creepiness." In this arena, Maupassant seems to have been in the shadow of Edgar Allen Poe - so some of the stories have vague supernatural leanings, but most lean on more realistic sources of anxiety: the cruelty of human to human, the innate spookiness of dark and empty places, and the fear of the unknown. This fear is often posited as the root cause of tragic insanity, and in some cases, it's worry over insanity that goes on to produce it. Maupassant himself succumbed to syphilitic insanity and died young, in an asylum; this knowledge lends a lot of extra pathos (and creepiness) to the stories of men struggling to keep their grip on reason. The only annoying thing here is the recurring tendency towards unecessary framing stories, so that rather than the cut-and-dry, spooky ring of finality (which many of the stories do have) you get instead a sudden shying-away from the intensity of fear to get some kindly doctor or soldier saying "And that's the way it all happened... as to the origin of that mysterious severed hand, your guess is as good as mine! More brandy?" It's noteworthy that one of the best stories in the volume, "The Horla," is included without framing story, but went through an earlier verison that did have one ("Ah yes, one of our most troubled patients. Let me tell you his story..."). Given Maupassant's biography, it's easy to forgive him wanting to place this material at slight remove, but he clearly knew what made better fiction, and when he follows those instincts the short stories here are really sparkling, with some very memorable images. I especially like the one about the guy who likes to go around night-walking in the peaceful, dark, empty streets of Paris...until one night that doesn't end, only growing darker, quieter and more empty. You probably don't need more than a few of the tales of brutish peasants killing each other for greed or vengeance, but they're all involving and none too long, so thumbs up to the lot. Recommended.

Saturday movies were La ronde and Partie de campagne, about which more later.

rock down to election avenue

2009-07-31T06:24:00.000-07:00

So one thing that's going on, at least in my own head, is an ongoing effort to catch up on movies generally. It's not that I go out of my way to not see all the touchstone films of history (although I will admit my contrarian streak is what keeps me from Tommy Boy et al) - it's more that I just don't think to see movies, and other people do, so that by the time people are raving about how I absolutely have to go see something, everybody's already seen it. And while I don't dislike seeing movies by myself - I did a bit of it when I first arrived in Columbus - it tends not to occur to me as something to do on a slow evening. In the Bygone Era, I would have always been up for a Vision Video 5-For-5 deal with Natalie, Matt, Val, Janet, etc., but those days are sadly past.....so the bottom line is I'm missing a lot of the canon, both of Beloved Cable Rerun Movies (Ghostbusters, Dirty Dancing, Top Gun) and Important, Good Films (The Shining, Citizen Kane).

I realized things had maybe gotten out of hand when one of my studio reviews nearly was completely derailed by a juror (good old Jimenez Lai) comparing one of my cartoon-renderings to the climactic scene of Fight Club...

Me: Huh? Really?
Jimenez: That, there, it's Fight Club, right?
Me: Oh! Um. I've never seen it, but...
Jimenez (and half the audience): You've never seen Fight Club!??!

So, anyway, the library here has a pretty scattered and miscellaneous selection of English movies, skewing generally more towards blockbusters and romantic comedies...but these do constitute some portion of my missing filmic education, so we'll see. Anyway, we watched Election the other night and I give it a solid thumbs up. I always get annoyed and uncomfortable with certain kinds of plots, like obviously doomed extramarital affairs, but this had enough other stuff going on to keep me involved. I really liked the extended conceit of Matthew Broderick as some sort of inverted Ferris Bueller, grown up and become a teacher and now subjected, sympathetically, to the kinds of torments that the Ferris Bueller's Day Off adults bore for our sadistic enjoyment...while the villain is in some lights the sort of precious, upwardly-mobile scum that young Ferris always hinted at. A sort of lunkheaded Cameron figure and his sister are the only really redeemable human beings, and notably it's only when they do what Broderick wants that their lives get more complicated rather than less...quietly turning the tables on the world where smooth-talking Ferris has all the answers.

If all that weren't enough, the last line is Teacher Broderick asking his class, "Anybody?" I'm making this sound like it's a major arc of the film, but aside from that telling line it never bends out of its way to make this comparison - it's just there, giving a little more meat to the picture.

Back to the more general theme of movies: Saturdays feature a regular movie night curated by this charmingly opinionated film nut, on the premises of another architecture firm. It seems like a nice way to meet people and also see more movies. Last week was Irma Vep, a French meta-film which seemed to me to be somewhere in the vein of Bottle Rocket or Fargo - that is, bumbling criminal movies. Here it's bumbling moviemakers, but without too many overt laughs; you just watch as they gradually grind themselves to pieces making what is, they sort of seem to know, a bad movie. Our host also explained that there were some other games being played: the ex-radical director beset by nervous breakdowns is played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, apparently best known for starring in several films of Truffaut as the director's alter-ego. I say "apparently" because one of the huge blind spots of my filmic upbringing is the French New Wave, so this is all rumor and hearsay as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps I can start rectifying that.... after Ghostbusters is out of the picture.

well hello mister man

2009-07-28T07:22:00.000-07:00

the typical day's routine, at least for now:

7:15 or so: wake up with hillary's alarm and commence to getting back to sleep. Hillary has to be at work at 8:30, being a senior adviser and so on, whereas I don't go in until 9:00.
7:45: my alarm goes off. I can't really jump in the shower or anything until H leaves, though, because I have to lock the door behind her.
8:10: Hillary leaves for work. I take a shower (entry on plumbing coming soon) and make a peanut butter or Nutella sandwich. If I'm running ahead of schedule I sit and eat this at the apartment or on the terrace outside with my book. (The current "home" book is Evan's copy of Mechanization Takes Command by Siegfried Giedion, as it is too bulky to carry around during the day.)
8:40: I leave for work, arriving sometime around 8:55, although I'm never really sure if I'm too early or too late. The boss wants people very precisely on time, so being early is kind of as bad as being late, but so far I haven't gotten any guff for it.
9:00-12:00: Morning shift at work; various tasks. At 10:30 or so I take my prescribed antibiotic/anti-malarial pill, but other than that this is all undifferentiated work-time.
12:00-1:00: Lunch at some nearby lunch counter or canteen. Hillary knows all the ones in the vicinity of work, though we've also had a few fancier things a little further away. The ideal food budget would be something like 100rs a day; we've been splurging a bit but this will have to end soon. Anyway, we tend to finish off food in time to be back in front of the office for a good half hour of reading before work resumes. The boss saw us outside the other day and declared that we "look[ed] like a couple of beggars." I would give change to beggars reading P. G. Wodehouse and the Tripods series of juvenile sci-fi, but I am a foreigner after all.
1:00-3:00: Afternoon shift. Probably the most sluggish part of the day, as we've just eaten a bunch of relatively heavy food, and the boss has likely chosen to either (a) re-start the last CD we listened to, producing a sort of time bubble effect, or (b) put on some horrible album of stupefying French dirges. However, we can look forward to...
3:00-3:15 or so: ...coffee break! This is apparently a well-established custom at the office, but has gained new impetus with the boss's discovery that he likes the "Nice Time" brand cookies that we bring back with us. These are crispy wedges with crystals of sugar all over them, extremely reminiscent of those butter/shortbread cookies that come in a round metal tin at Christmastime. We are a little concerned because this particular shop is running low on Nice Times; today we almost resorted to something called Tiger Chocolate (or Chocolate Tiger?), but a suitable package of Nice Times was found at the last second. (There is another cookie called "Good Days," but according to H, "Good Days are bad.") As for the coffee (or tea), there's no telling how much if any caffeine is actually taken in, but psychologically the break in the day is very effective, so the next hour and a half get used very efficiently.
3:15-5:00: Rest of the work day. The hanging 5:00 deadline encourages actually getting things accomplished and finalized rather than drifting into the world of open-ended procrastination so familiar from the last year of grad school. Also, the CD selection veers more towards Shakira, Jagged Little Pill, and the Lion King soundtrack, for better or for worse. We are out the door by 5:05, 5:10 if the boss is excited about showing us something.

From then on is open-ended free time, which by itsef has been worth this entire venture. Probably I could have gotten the same general structure of life with any job anyplace, but the absence of distractions (social and home-based) has brought about exactly the Renaissance I'd hoped for in terms of quiet reading time. Yesterday we sat in the park and read; some nights I sit on the terrace and read; today we walked through some fabulously gorgeous neighborhoods, then came home and read until it got too dark (there was a power cut going on)....it's a nice life. Eventually I will need to see more of the city, but little errands and expeditions have started to fill in my mental map of our immediate surroundings, and there have already been overtures in the direction of Doing Things and Meeting People. Will cover more of that later - I've got reading to do...

Anyway, the day winds up at the apartment, and in between eating our daily share of the chocolate I brought from Germany, we read books and check email. By 10:30 or 11:00 things are winding down, and we retire - me to the mattress, Hills to her squirrel's nest of mats and towels, and it all starts over again the next day! It's a nice little routine, honestly...of course a week is a little soon to be sure about anything like this, but hopefully this isn't just a honeymoon period with this whole Bangalore business.

now reading:
Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command
Guy de Maupassant, The Dark Side

where the sidewalk ends

2009-07-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

The Indian urban landscape is a little too vast and complex to try and nail in any one entry, so I'm going to try and tackle it, on and off, through various smaller things. The first issue at hand is sidewalks, which resemble Western sidewalks in that they are concrete things next to roads, elevated slightly and providing a kind of buffer between vehicular traffic and buildings/storefronts/etc. There are some important differences though; first, functionally, the buffer operates differently because you walk in the street here. Not just to cross the street (which you do with impunity where-ever you feel like it - crosswalks are rare and not well-observed anyway)*, but just to walk along it. This requires becoming comfortable with traffic zooming alongside you, but this is familiar anyway from the neighborhood streets (which don't have sidewalks at all), and anyway is often preferable to being on the sidewalks, which are scattered with trash and animal droppings, and also people stopped in your way, buying things from vendors or just hanging out.

So the street is a lot more convenient, but I kind of prefer the sidewalks, partly because I am still living out Western habits, but also because the sidewalks are physically challenging and thus interesting; there are some different varieties, but generally the sidewalk is designed as a long series of narrow concrete slabs (maybe one and a half feet wide?), perpendicular to the street, spanning over a dark and mysterious space, occasionally visible beneath when one of the slabs has gotten knocked out of whack or is just plain missing. They will also sometimes shift treacherously back and forth when stepped-upon, like see-saws, or bridges in video games that collapse as you race across them. I firmly believe that life is always more fun when you're clambering over something, so the sidewalks really do give you a lot of entertainment value. Because of all this, though, they're in the long run more tiring than the plain asphalt-on-grade of the streets, so I end up switching back and forth. (Also I am chicken and will sometimes hop up to the sidewalk from the street when a particularly fast-moving set of vehicles seems to be approaching. Hillary always just presses on undiminished.)

* - The other day we saw an extremely rare "red man/green man" walk/don't-walk sign. Both red and green man were lit and traffic was just cruising along. For all I know this dual light indicates some sort of "yellow" condition, but Hillary observed that it also perfectly encapsulates the business of crossing the street here.

2009-07-24T23:39:00.000-07:00

Harry Potter VI was really good, maybe the best one of the films so far - at least, tied with #3 in terms of getting what was filmable out of the book untrammeled by unfilmable but fan-beloved material. Tons of stuff gone, and even some brand-new scenes invented for the screenplay, but it doesn't feel fake or phony, and everyone's acting keeps getting better. Even the romance was actively entertaining rather than just plain annoying. I also like how Luna Lovegood (a real nuisance one-note character in the books) has been reinterpreted for the films; she's still a joke character, but without the narration reminding you that Harry and company make fun of her behind her back (so to speak), she actually seems plausible as this other, minor friend of Harry's, outside the usual troika.

The Slughorn plot was also really well-handled...he's a little less blowsy and jolly, more visibly pathetic, but I've long admired Rowling's gift for characters who aren't so much evil as they are enablers of evil through their own weaknesses, and that comes through really well here.

I also finished off Treasure Island, which was great entertainment - nothing much more to say about it at all, but it was fun. Hillary hated it, for reasons I haven't yet sussed out. Then this morning I polished off the last few pages of this book on Ant Farm (the 60s-70s American "underground architecture" gang) which was informative and entertaining. Gotta love embassies to the society of the dolphins, and inflatable trailers to enable us to all become "pneumatic nomads." Nice-sounding bunch of guys.

Oh, right, India! So, life maintains. Today is a laundry day, which means a couple of well-separated batches due to long drying times and not enough room either on the drying lines or the big bucket of soapy water in which we first soak everything. This is peace by my standards and it translates to reading, eating, napping, and typing this stuff. So the bottom line is that my first week in Bangalore (save the days of sickness) has shaped up pretty well. Work is actually good; it's just me and Hillary and the boss in the office, and with internet banned and no one else to get in the way, I am actually getting more work done per day than I have in the last year (barring isolated stretches, like writing the Bauhaus paper). Mostly what I've been on is cranking renderings out of Max and sticking entourage in them with Photoshop, but my photographer's blood is satisfied by this kind of task to a surprising degree - who knew I could actually enjoy trying to get wood-grain to look right? (Note, it still doesn't.) More satisfying are the weird Photoshop challenges that bring all my latent "funny Photoshop collage" skills to the fore: there should be a bed in this image and we don't have any images of beds in anything close to the right perspective...okay, go! It's fun.

Sooner or later I'll get back to real solid "life in India" stuff but the differences are both so enormous and so small that I just don't have the energy to cover them after such crucial matters as the Harry Potter movie have been properly addressed....

food!

2009-07-23T07:34:00.000-07:00

open dosa!

hillary, through a broker acquainted with a guy known through a local paint store operator, or something, found us a new place today! i don't particularly mind our existing hidey-hole but she's been here for a while and the landlords have sort of worn her down with their curfews and bulldog-frowning daughter, et cetera. i'll take some photos before we move out; it's an okay place, sort of the right size to have a couple of bleary, ill days in. it was also good for watching harry potter v in last night (in preparation for VI, tomorrow!). i have the mattress and hillary, the more eastern of us, has some mats aid out on the floor, and the bulkier of the two pillows. it's all fine, and there's a nice terrace outside for eating dinner, reading, or just feeling the wind blow through the surrounding buildings.

but, the new place is very promising! there are multiple distinct rooms, which is very novel and should provide for hours of hide-and-seek. the kitchen is its own distinct space and there is space to set up a little propane stove (you buy a little gas tank to go with it). there's also a western toilet (a sought-after amenity, which we are thankfully already blessed with here), and, the prize to beat all prizes, hot water?!? i'll believe it when i shower in it. anyway, the new place is about as far from work as this one is (under 20 minutes on foot) and you don't have to cross under the local flyover (indian term for overpass/elevated highway). up on the roof THERE is a panoramic view for miles and miles of bangalorean skyline (which is variegated and colorful), as well as a fabulous potted-plant garden, space for clothes-hanging, and the owner's habitat for raising and breeding homing pigeons. the only noteworthy clause in the rent is that you can't cook pork there, but that seems fair enough.

right, but, this entry is titled "food"...i just wanted to catalog a few things i've tried so far, to please my friends who think of me (with good reason) as squeamish and closed-minded when it comes to these things. i have been trying to take things as they come and say yes to stuff. for example, i rode on the back of a moped for the first time, which was harrowing at first but peaceful once i decided that if i was going to die, then it was fated from the moment i got on the scooter, so why worry now? same attitude with food products. here are a handful:

custard-apples: fruit with a hard, knobbly exterior, and insides of white goop which surrounds inedible seeds. hillary compares the goop to "apple pudding" and says that it's believed to cause a cooling effect when you're hot and sweaty. hmm. i find apple-ish goop much easier, texture-wise, than plain apples, although it's certainly a bit of a mess to get through one. i wish they were about half the size but didn't mind eating one.

tamarind: i knew these already by flavor from the mexican soda products, and the wonderful chutney at bombay cafe (rip). the actual fruit is a sort of string of four or five beads/seeds, surrounded by a stiff pulp, in turn held in place by a stringy root/skeleton, which is encased in an undulating husk vaguely reminiscent of a peanut's. you crack the husk, peel off the skeleton, and chew the pulp away from the seeds. it tastes like tamarind (shocker) and is, in consistency, something like a fruit roll-up. big thumbs up on these.

coconut: these probably need no introduction, but the presentation is memorable: the guy by the side of the road, sitting next to a firewood-stack of coconuts, hacks off the top and serves you the coconut with a little red straw, and you suck out the water like you're enjoying a capri-sun. you do this while standing there, because you want to finish it and hand it back to the guy, who reapplies his curved machete with several bold strokes to hack the thing into pieces, create a serving dish and spoon out of it, and yield a decent quantity of the coconut meat for you to eat. he's holding the coconut in the palm of his non-knife hand, so this is all fairly gutsy. unfortunately this was a miss for me; i'm sure both water and meat are nourishing, and i do feel i would be a stronger "survivor" contender for having this experience, but they tasted like vague, vegetabley nothingness. disappointing! maybe it depends how ripe they are or something.

tea: obviously we know all about tea. the lunch place near work serves a local popularity, which according to hillary is made from powder since all the real tea is shipped abroad for you americans. it's served in a two-shot glass, set inside a little metal cup/dish. because the tea is so hot, you pour it quickly back and forth between the glass and the dish to cool it down. my first try at this was a messy disaster, but today even hillary was impressed with my efficiency. the key is to pour fast. anyway, the tea is the color of hot chocolate, and very sweet, but with a distinctly indian flavor note. it's been ages since i tried bubble tea but i want to say it was a little closer to that flavor?

also: open-faced dosas (consistency of fluffy, air-pocket-filled pancakes, topped with a mountain of red spice - yum!), tiny bananas (perfect for me, as i like bananas but get sick of them before finishing a normal one), idlis (flavorless rice-flour wads, meant to be eaten with chutneys/sauces, but consumed by me as more or less nausea-proof food in the "saltine" vein during my bout with whatever-it-was).

i should really start photographing these things. i have taken exactly two pictures since reaching bangalore - i am more self-conscious about it here, oddly enough, since in one sense i have reached the end of my journey and am no longer an abject tourist. on the other hand, my skin by itself marks me as a tourist no matter where i'm living or how good i eventually get at crossing through the snarl of traffic, so i may as well just embrace it and resume my shutterbug ways.

currently reading: robert louis stevenson, treasure island

this could lead to excellence, or serious injury

2009-07-22T07:37:00.000-07:00

ok! in bangalore some days now but this is my first proper chance at the internet. sorry about that.

i have a lot of miscellaneous "cultural difference" stuff to report but we can get to that gradually. plus i just discovered that i am now instinctively trying to type quotation marks via Shift-2...which is how they do it in Europe but now how Hillary's laptop works. so there's a quirky cross-cultural exchange for you: i'm in india, out of habit typing like i'm in Europe, which in turn is how i typed when i was 8 and using a commodore 64.

anyway though, we'll get back to things like food, auto-rickshaws, soda products, and the further adventures of addison in bombay. for now the important thing is that i am alive and i've started work. the latter was in jeopardy for a bit (not really) as from the night i got here i was laid up with something in the general category of "traveler's tropical disease" - fever, aches, digestive issues, and general weakness. so i had a half-day my first day and completely off the second - not the most auspicious beginning i admit, especially because (ssh, don't tell) i don't know how to do architecture. the illness itself was a sucky drag but honestly, not as bad as other illnesses i've had in my life, like the great 2-Year Sinus Cold Of 2002-2004, or that one stomach bug i had when i was like 13, or of course appendicitis. it probably helps that i have been eating antibiotics every day anyway as prescribed for anti-malarial protection. as a bonus, in india you can just walk up to random shop windows and buy what would be prescription drugs in the states, no questions asked. (i only indulged in anti-nausea and tylenol-esque things, in case all that sounds really dangerous and worrisome.)

anyway thanks to all that, and the tireless caretaking of roomie hillary, i am doing much better, and had a full and, i think, productive day at work today. i still have not fully won over my boss, as, again, i have no idea what i'm doing, but he seemed to find me reasonably malleable on the issue of producing working sketch-renderings in 3dsmax, which is good, because i've never even attempted to do proper renders in max before. score? i think it also helped that i had raving positive things to say about scarpa's brion vega cemetery, which turned out to be the right things to say....

so again, much more to come later, but hillary is due to return soon with rented movies (we plan to bone up on harry potter V before going to see VI) and there's much to be done... cheers!

queen's necklace, continued

2009-07-17T23:27:00.000-07:00

(uncropped image)

at night from above (bar called 'dome' on the roof of a hotel on marine drive), the queen's necklace is no longer ethereal and distant but a dramatic arc of light, boulevard, and rocky shore zooming up and away, like corbusier's perspective drawing for algiers. faboo. tashan had taken me out with some of her buddies and it was basically like being out at home: nice people, inside jokes that weren't too impenetrable to laugh at, and eventually a club at which it was too loud to really hear anything. but i wasn't really bothered by that: something about being graduated and kicked loose of the earth that makes being a stranger in a crowd peaceful rather than alienating.

i did keep being struck by how much the english-speaking, soulja-boy-jamming crowd seemed peppered with strange indian versions of people from days gone by: oh, there's the indian becky freeman... indian that-girl-sam-from-we-versus-the-shark... indian wendy powell... i kept almost seeing indian beth, but it never materialized. i do think the actual beth would have had a lovely time though.

the most important thing generally is the presence or absence of a fan. air conditioning retains its distinct advantages but in this season, a fan by itself absolutely transforms a space. mainly ceiling fans, sometimes hanging on extremely long rods as they've been added into old vaulted british monumental buildings. so in the course of the day you go through many cycles of being kind of damp and sticky (mainly from atmospheric moisture, not sweat) and then being blown back to normal by fans.

to give this some context, yesterday the high was 86 in fahrenheit, and the humidity has generally been in in the mid-80% range. in atlanta: 83 in fahrenheit, but humidity down in the mid-50s. despite that difference i think there are clear comparisons to be made in terms of architectural strategies for dealing with these conditions: deep porches and verandas. these are more crucial in the hottest part of the year (which passed before i arrived), but here they do help as a buffer zone with the diagonal rainstorms.

kai made some reference to the city being a cross between new york and san francisco. new york i see: the hustle and bustle is thrilling but at the end of the day exhausting, and i know well the new york feeling of just wanting to take a shower after you've subwayed it from the lower west side to williamsburg. san francisco is an odder comparison, although kai explained that it was just in there for the excellent transit coverage...

queen's necklace

2009-07-16T10:42:00.001-07:00

along the long shore of bombay/mumbai there is stretch of coastal parkway called "marine drive," or "queen's necklace." from kai's balcony a few buildings obscure the view of it and it extends out of the frame to the right. at night, the queen's necklace is all lit up with street lamps and tiny firefly-flecks of cars. the water and the sky are both the same faded, underexposed purple color and so the necklace seems to exist as a pure line of light tracing the horizon against an undifferentiated, distant background - the far edge of a ring-shaped space station, or just some unfathomable graphic drawn through the field of vision. really fabulous.

first impressions bombay

2009-07-16T07:47:00.001-07:00

thicker air than one is used to, not exactly hotter or even always more humid, but more stuff in it. certainly more smells. not necessarily bad ones - food smells just drift and linger. groceries smell like vegetables. air conditioning is instantly and profoundly noticed not just for the temperature but for the sudden emptiness. i freely admit this is not entirely unpleasant, but i am still a very fresh tourist.

monsoon rain comes and goes in sheets and at funny angles; it makes all windows foggy, and rots away the surface of the city. buildings must be repainted regularly, and you see some that are halfway done, looking like shamboling ruins on the right hand side and brand new on the left. it's really fantastic actually. also everywhere are things that began as one thing and have gradually changed into another - like high-rises where some percentage of the balconies have been enclosed into rooms, but not in a consistent fashion. fantastic elevations... amazing revelations.

traffic is an unregulated, slow-motion swirl of cars into each other's notional lanes, more or less as you'd expect. at night this is really beautiful as all the different flashing lights paint gently oscillating shades of yellow and red across the pedestrians weaving their way through at funny angles. the honks never cease but from far enough upstairs it all becomes a kind of background noise, like the crashing of waves at the ocean.

the food is really good so far.

At right, Kai, my guide and agreeable host...pre-haircut.

mumbai street/market fabric