Anarchytect

the house in the stairwell / the workshop in the mansion

2011-12-14T14:07:00.000+05:30

in the lobby below the stair is a home. a family that has lived in artificial light forever- in the stairwell complete with a roof inside the roof of the atrium.

above is a lovely high ceilinged room with arches overlooking the street within which muslim men sit and embroider fabric. delicately.

is the air conditioning for them- or for their work?

chennai

2011-12-12T14:34:00.001+05:30

the perpetual suburb of chennai. a series of cloistered inward looking neighbourhoods- some with old temples, others from the 60s- housing colonies with wide tree lined avenues. urbanity is the thick dense areas around the temples, older villages transformed; or the colonial georgetown and the 'broadway' or the esplanade with the high court and the horrific black and gold new tamil nadu assembly. the beaches of marina and ellis are sleepy flat white gold. within this is tamilian melodrama- a life lived on another plane. the mall is a set for a sivaji ganeshan film and though the cutouts were missing every person lived a performed martyrdom i recognize in my father- and unfortunately even in myself.

our study was set in the fishing village of sriniwasapruam on the southern tip of marina beach in the shadow of the lighthouse and surrounded by crumbling socail housing built by the state. as far as locations go it cant get any better and naturally hotels want the land. the thin promontory of land has a grid of housing buitl by the state in the 1960s- decrepti and crumbling. the spane in between the buildings has been encroached upon and the boundary of the buildings is fuzzy at best.

nanjing

2011-11-12T09:18:00.001+05:30

instead of travelling with everyone else to beijing, i decided instead to see a new city. chose nanjing - the older capital of the country during the taiping revolution and the nationalist government. i had three days there, and as i am prone to doing, i decided to walk everywhere- cutting transects of sorts. i was living in the northern edge of the city- right near the railway station overlooking the warehouses and malls on the road that led to the docks on the yangtze.

day 1- red; day 2- yellow; day 3- purple

day 1 was the west to east walk. the first time i saw the massive grey stone wall of the city. then past the lake that feels like it is within the city walls but it actually part of the moat that surrounds the city. three islands in the lake house temples, and shrines reached by causeways. across the lake, on the other side, i climbed the city wall and looked out over the city. it is nowhere as slick as shanghai or scrubbed clean like hangzhou or suzhou. the frayed edges still show. the purple mountain and its observatory are reached by a cable car that flies over leaves turning red in autumn. from the top the city views are spectacular. then i began the long descent through the forest tracing paths towards the sun yat sen mausoleum- a massive monument approached by a ceremonial axis- pretty much the diagram for all institutions of power around the world - and somehow more so in china. the ming tomb in the same area also follows a similar diagram but the spaces along the axis are far more refined- a journey of shifting eyelevels, geometries and scales. the park has a ceremonial walk lined with elephants, camels, lions and unicorns. the walk back took me back to the wall and through it into the inner city past the museum- which was undergoing some massive restructuring.

day 2 was north to south. a rather long walk from the north tip to the southern tip of the main city past the bus station and the malls to the north, and through the throbbing commercial heart with the high rises and the shopping centres, to the palace which is now a museum of the taiping revolution. later further south is the main gate to the city where three layers of stone protect courtyards with bonsai gardens and even a film shoot that was on. there are slums directly outside the city walls waiting for redevelopment. if you walk past them and over the railway line and below the flyover you get to the martyrs memorial park complete with the internationale carved in stone and a communist museum with a red room and all in mandarin. on the way back, a detour took me through a new old housing area along the canal directly to the Confucius temple with its knick knack shops and mcdonalds.

day 3 was a north west to south east transect and a trip to the japanese war memorial in the south west. along the railway line are large complexes selling building materials. the yuejiang tower is splendid in the morning mist at the north western edge overlooking the whole city and the yangtze. further west are the docks closed off from the city with markets and warehouses. the walk back follows the path of sun yat sen and has a few of the older nationalist buildings. a monument is along the way. hunan road is alive with shopping. later another temple on the eastern side. the japanese war memorial is stark black against a suburban landscape.

hangzhou; suzhou

2011-11-11T19:41:00.001+05:30

HANGZHOU

we also took two day trips outside shanghai to hangzhou and to suzhou. at hangzhou we went to the art college whose new building was a gorgeous and whacky version of chinese architecture meeting corbusier. the odd fact of it housing what might be the biggest bauhaus collection in the world is an anomaly that seems ordinary in china. later we had a lovely lunch at a 'village farm' and walked around the west lake and to the shopping street of the city.
me.

SUZHOU

we managed to get to suzou without a passport but were stopped on the way back. we had to be smuggled back into shanghai in a taxi. suzhou is a canal town with these famous chinese gardens. 'the humble administrator's garden' is where we spent almost all of our time.

shanghai

2011-11-11T18:37:00.001+05:30

third time in shanghai in less than a year. and this time with george, rupali and ten students from the third year doing a study on housing and rehabilitation processes. they followed the history of the family home of their chinese friends as they moved from neighbourhood to neighbourhood through generations. from the old shi ku men of the old town to the extended suburbs; from the slums to the old town to the workers housing of the 50s. each of the stories was a story of erasure- a perpetual movement upwards and away- outside the inner city as it instead becomes a hotbed of activities catering to international investment. these stories then were made into fold out narrative drawings that were reminiscent of chinese scrolls. i don't think there was a better way of seeing the city.

meanwhile, george, rupali and i, walked streets i had been to before and so many new ones. naturally a trip through the swanky tianzifang and xintiandi areas, along with the new hotels being built on the way. some of the old shikumen still lie untouched but are to become a museum for shikumen by displacing everyone who lives there. the irony is felt by no one.

shikumen

clothes mall

north of the suzhou

the bund

the suzhou

the bund

nanjing road

shanghai railway station

around baoshan road

shanghai university

a trip another day to the outskirts of the city went past relentless housing slabs and gardens- an american suburb redux- complete with a central park. the shanghai institute for international studies was disney lived.

of all the fascinating new things we did, the underground theatre of communist memorabilia films was perhaps the most exciting. salvaging old film that had been neglected from being destroyed in the post mao years, this man collected scraps of history and projected them in a room packed with posters, cups, trophies of the mao years.

communist memorabilia theater

mall dancing in the evening

final presentations

in and around the shanghai international studies university

kolkata

2011-11-11T10:36:00.001+05:30

a city under water disintegrates slowly and magnificently. you can only move against the heavy weight of history with difficulty. dust gathers everywhere and trees grow over the exquisite corpses littering the narrow streets. time gather in the folds of the city and softly lulls you into torpor. tamal said it has managed to make beautiful its own defeat. a victim of its own success in the 19th century it is now afraid of change and newness. perhaps they bring danger in the form of the unknown. or maybe it is the sweet water in the pukurs dotting the landscape or the long slow river delta. a hopelessness creeps in over your bones as you allow time to accumulate. when things fall apart you watch them fall apart in slow motion. the heroes of the city are dead and buried yet their ghost lives on; there is blaring rabindra sangeet over traffic signals- but his own house (now a museum) is a rundown badly organised museum where computer prints of photographs are mounted badly and askew on stained walls. further down the road in the old city another version of bengali anglophilia, the marble palace and its faded rubens in corpse like white neo classical splendour. the fatigue in the air is overbearing although a little less oppressive in the markets throbbing with pre diwali activity. even the swanky charles correa mall seemed more like a shopping centre. the walls have begin to crack and the paint is peeling. the pavement outside the writers building needs repair but sells fritz lang and tarkovsky to the intellectuals. the intellectuals gather in the double heighted coffee shop on college street and talk kafka and kant. the shops outside still sell 60s intellectual fodder alongside gre and toefl books or management tomes. within this stained and decrepit city victorian monuments rise like dreams. the maidans in the evening with horses and a burning sky. in the distance the vidyasagar setu crisp and sharp against the skyline. we lazed till darkness and then walked to park street with its institutions of bengali high society. we could do without the dry pastries at the overrated flury's but olypup had personality. kolkata seemed to be a soft easy self satisfied city. neighbourly and perhaps a little claustrophobic- if i was from there. kalighat, beyond the pandas vying for your attention and the grey slime of the river, had a market that made a spectacular photograph on my iphone; komartulli was alive with the half made bodies of multiple kalis in horrifying gestures; tangra- the chinatown was nowhere near as alive in the other cities where they exist. in the middle of warehouses on the periphery of the city, where leather used to be tanned, the houses are low rise clusters while the old warehouses now house the chinese restaurants in dark pink light.

howrah

behala

kombartulli

marble palace and thakur bari

kalighat

city center mall

tangra

victoria memorial and the maidans

panchmura

2011-11-11T09:41:00.001+05:30

panchmura was the site for the study trip this year. a potters colony that is removed to the edge of the village found around 30 kms away from the town of bishnupur, it is famous for the terracotta work and especially the bankura horses found in arts and crafts of india shops around the country. still, that hasn't really translated into large scale financial gains for the community. still living pretty much like they did years back they continue to churn out the same objects that have been making for years. it is as if modernity has, instead of transforming their practice, has instead been instrumental in keeping them and their art fixed and still. on the other hand, there is a deep politicization of everyday life with political symbols on the walls of almost every house- even deep into the fabric of the village. we kept wondering about this strange skewed modernism. on the one hand the level of education and awareness was very high, and on the other it seemed as if earlier existing feudal systems had gotten even more entrenched. young men accosted us at different points and asked for donations to different events. highway robbery and blackmail. meanwhile, the village itself was a perpetually shifting landscape of brown burnt soil. pits were dug and filled, mud turned itself into terracotta periodically spitting out those damn bankura horses once in a while.

village procession

textile cooperative

tagore tiles

bishnupur

2011-11-11T09:22:00.001+05:30

here are exquisite temples in terracotta that lie on the edge of the city. with heavy bulging bases, they rise in the most unusual way into the sky. while a few of them are still used, most of them lie empty surrounded by the fences that the asi loves to place around buildings. the bada and the chota darwaza emphasize the emptiness that now exists in the city that once was. meanwhile, in the real city our route to panchmura took us past markets, homes and a line up of institutions that looked underutilized- a music school and a home for juvenile offenders.

New mall at Mindspace

2011-10-02T18:27:00.001+05:30

The brand new monster on Link Road with a ramp that leads directly up to a podium with four atriums surrounded by fancy clothes shops. On the top floor is a damn rollercoaster. Not nearly as spectacular as Oberoi on the highway: this one is merely gigantic.

crawford market morning walk

2011-09-30T05:55:00.001+05:30

early for a jury at jj, i took a walk into and through crawford market in the morning light- past the meat market into the courtyard with the fountain surrounded by men louning around waiting for the day to begin. into nagdevi street an exquisite mosque is dwarfed by an enormous new high rise with cobwebs framing it from the street below. below the jj flyover on mohammedali road people sleep on the pavements as the street was beginning to come alive.

conclaves on the city

2011-09-29T18:09:00.004+05:30

the first at sahyadri on malabar hill. my first time there inside the pleasure garden of the pwerful overlooking marine drive. under discussion was the rajiv awas yojana- the central government's new plan for urban poverty. the room was full of politicians (including the chief minister), bureaucrats (current and past), mayors from around the state, ngo workers and academic institutions. the plan offers 50% subsidy to plans for urban housing provisions and leaves a lot open-ended (at least so far). have to see how this turns out.

later, an unsolicited conclave of us architects met at the udri- this time to discuss 'urban form' and trying to influence the preparation of the development plan from the outside.

Fort Modernism

2011-09-25T19:00:00.001+05:30

These two almost face each other just off DN Road. One- a decrepit old shell; and the other the sleek modernism of New Excelsior. Green glass and White marble cladding.

We were in town for the readings from Christopher benningers new "letters to a young architect." There is always something nice about serious committed modernism and it's romantic humanism.

Dinner at C22

2011-09-17T12:19:00.001+05:30

Rohan Shivkumar shared an Instagram photo with you

2011-09-10T07:17:00.001+05:30

Hi there,

Rohan Shivkumar just shared an Instagram photo with you:

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(taken at Churchgate Station: the new avatar)

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first year introductory workshop: control machines

2011-08-31T07:26:00.001+05:30

mukul birthday panoramas

2011-08-30T09:29:00.000+05:30

dahi handi at devipada

2011-08-22T15:43:00.002+05:30

the pleasure of riding wild in an open back truck with your friends screaming and shouting to drumbeats; the cloudy sky, the intermittent rain, the mud caked on your t-shirt and shorts- a uniform in red, yellow, white and of course saffron. testosterone reeking in the air as the women wait on the truck waiting for the men to return. the men meanwhile form a mad throng of people- a sea from where human pyramids rise and fall in competition. winners are announced over the blaring microphone. and gifts of money by local goons and politicians are passed around. meanwhile, the big prize hangs high above with a garland and an indian flag, hung from a crane.

the ground is the leftover of a slum that was moved onto the rehab building that forms the backdrop for the pyramids; the sale component will take the place of the ground. its image stands tall against the silver boundary wall on the highway.'ambrosia' it is to be called. not 'dahi' for the govindas.

plot park: pasta lane, colaba

2011-08-12T06:27:00.000+05:30

on a long, thin plot among the warehouses and factory sheds of the pasta lane near sassoon dock- a plot once being used by kailash parvat restaurant as their kitchen reverts back to being a children's park.

strand cinema: before and after

2011-08-12T06:24:00.001+05:30

the once lovely strand cinema in colaba transforms into curtain wall anonymity. i remember the whimsical front facade with its circular openings. i stole a 'before' photo from the net.

meeting friends at the airport

2011-08-12T06:19:00.001+05:30

laurie, venu, nalin, roshan, kiran and lauries mother, on their way back to knoxville with the monstrous new airport being constructed in the background.

london burns

2011-08-10T12:33:00.000+05:30

every minute updates are sent from around the city about burning and looting. twitter.

violence erupts in so many of the place-names we memorised and walked through in a city that seemed to my naive tourist eyes to be an agreeable multicultural mix of people.

'too good to be true', i thought to myself.

was i somehow denying the real meaning of the surveillance cameras at every street corner watching every single move that anyone makes- in case...

these turned out to be ludicrously ineffective when all it took for them to be defunct was a mask made out of a piece of cloth.

young men rebel- as they will / should?

i do not know enough to comment.

movie checklist

2011-08-02T08:54:00.001+05:30

a movie checklist of the past few days. and yes, there are many. beginning with the anime: hayao miyazaki's two films. the first 'lupin 3: The Castle of Cagliostro' follows the adventures of the master thief and his sidekick as they save a princess from an evil relative in a gothic tower like fortress.' behind this fortress lies a treasure that turns out to be a half drowned roman city... in the second 'nausicaa: the valley of the wind' our heroine of the wind has a deep connection with the natural world. a call for harmony between man and nature that even sees the horrific as necessary for the survival of the earth. these being the insect world that has poisoned the atmosphere.

a third anime that i saw yesterday remixes some indian mythology and turns it into a mystical action adventure. 'rg veda' is the search by the five elemental spirits for the sixth to save the world from the domination of the evil warlord. all the characters have their own distinctive personalities and animation styles. 'ah my goddess' makes a teen romance of memory loss and racing between the gods and human beings. belldandy is a goddess from heaven in love with a mere mortal. some interstellar shenanigans and eventual resolution follow.

not quite anime, but one that makes the world animated. warsaw through mamuro oshii's live action 'avalon'. the ace player of the 'avalon game' is a woman who is in search of redemption within the world of the ruins that the game offers as an escape from the drab monotonous reality of trams and drab interiors. when she manages to reach the final level it turns out to be one in the contemporary city, finally out of the sepia tinted darkness of the earlier film like in 'the wizard of oz' perhaps.

two china films: the first was the beautiful new film by jia zhang ke 'i wish i knew'- a history of shanghai told through first person narratives of many who have lived through the traumatic history of the city. we connect from here to hong kong and taiwan where the stories continue. film clips also serve as evidence- but as does the city itself gorgeously photographed making sublime the incredible landscape of the city. the 'city of life and death' is nanjing during the japanese invasion of 1937. shot in black and white the film is a nonstop propaganda machine systematically documenting the horrors of rape and mass murder committed upon the Chinese by the invading forces. it is relentless and after a while a little tiresome.

some contemporary Hollywood thrillers- 'skyline' about an alien invasion that sucks the brains out of people. a skyscraper in downtown los Angeles serves as a prison from where there is no escape. in 'frozen' a chair lift on a ski resort is the prison and instead of evil aliens we have wolves who can tear your flesh apart. in both films the only survivors are the helpless women. and 'the crow' in which Brandon lee exchanges his soul for that of a crow to avenge the murder of him and his girlfriend. a city of dark shadows and high rises. the crow leaps over rooftops and crashes in through glass panes. the only thrill in 'honey' is jessica alba gyrating her hips to hip hop. the film otherwise is an ordinary rags to riches tale about a hi[p hop dancer making it big in the music video world. missy Elliot guests.

the disintegration of a marriage and of love forms the story of 'blue valentine', the story of a passive aggressive man who falls in love with a stronger woman. the films flashes forwards and back between the wooing and the disintegration of the marriage over one weekend in a sci-fi styled motel room. Ryan gosling makes his bid for an Oscar nomination. the minefield of dynamics with a family is the landscape of the film version of 'cat on a hot tin roof' with paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor. the dramatic action takes place mostly in the plantation house of the family. it is perhaps too much of a stretch, but that does not stop me from trying to make a connection between the architecture of the house and the emotional terrain of the play. the top floor is the place where the lies are told; on the ground is where the truth finally comes to light; and it is in the basement that finally the father and son reveal who they really are and come to some kind of reconciliation. 'picnic at hanging rock' is not afraid to take a basic story and turn it into something else entirely. ostensibly about the disappearance of a group of schoolgirls and their teacher on a valentine's day picnic, the film in delicate sunlight as girls in white skip over a stream and stare at rock muses over the nature of beauty and youth, adolescence and sexuality, class and friendship.

radical politics gets a Hollywood musical makeover in milos forman's 'hair'. groovy people in new york sing and dance in central park against vietnam and american imperialism. a newbie from oklahoma on his way to the war falls under their spell. some genuinely funny and touching moments (like the physical test scene where men and women lust after white boys and white girls, but largely little silly fun.

godard's 'weekend' screams out against consumer culture and the class divide and bad cinema by breaking all rules of convention. intertitles break up the narrative (?) and bodies pile up on multiple car crashes on a weekend drive. a road trip from some tripped out version of hell. a casual violence at every turn as husbands betray wives and vice versa and children kill off their parents.

the italian mobster film 'gomorrah' is set mostly in a monstrous apartment complex whose inner corridors, terraces and basements serve as locations for murder, and betrayal. starting off with the murder of mobsters in a spa, the film then follows four stories that spin off from the result of that killing condemning the innocent to a life and death of crime.

exquisitely drawn, the erotic anime 'the sensualist' makes a visual language of its own- referencing ukiyo-e with its flattened perspectives and delicate details. the symbolic fire/water/flower references might have been embarrassing if they were not so gorgeous to watch. the story involves the journey of a young man to sleep with a famous geisha and the help an older, more experienced 'sensualist' offers him.

in 'the angelic conversation', underlining the homoerotic content of Shakespeare's sonnets, derek jarman composes a music video for them. two men in slow hypnotic movement love one another, lose one another and long for one another. judi dench reads sonnets on the soundtrack.

shanghai notes

2011-07-26T16:34:00.001+05:30

a common frustration among us here in india is the perpetual annoyance at the speed at which china seems to have taken its most recent 'great leap forward' and the halting, staccato way in which change is occurring here. for some reason we claim to be in competition. after 5 days in shanghai (admittedly insufficient to understand the complexity of the city) i was not so sure that we needed to follow the 'china model' for development.

yet, at the first instance it is not very surprising when the mumbai shanghai comparison is made. if you walk in the city, as i had in the last trip a few months back, you come across lanes and streets overflowing with life- pretty much like mumbai. the history of the city, also has parallels with that of mumbai. after all, both of them were essentially products of colonialism. each is also the centre of 'westernisation' in its respective country. but to conflate this initial impression into a simplistic equivalence would be naive. both the cities have had very different forms of colonialism and are experiencing very different forces today. and these forces are acting upon populations that have experienced two very different modernities. these modernities have shaped the consciousness and sense of self of the populations. putting it in a base binary while the western enlightenment arrived here with notions of emancipation and democracy making its own schizophrenic modernism; in china it seems to have been that of efficiency and a rationalistic logic.

it was in the discussions with intellectuals- architects and philosophers that we first came up against the greatest cultural divide i have felt in the many exchanges that we have had with people from outside india. with the west, the battles to fight have been predictable (relatively) a new form of orientalism / colonialism, a newer version of the white man's burden, a liberal vision of a romantic return to a pre-industrial past, or the inability to use concepts and models relevant in the west to understand our situation.

in this week's conversations, on the other hand, language kept breaking down and revealed cracks wide chasms between our own (mis) understandings of concepts like freedom, equality, opportunity, practice and critique. it was as if we were speaking of the same things in completely different ways- or was it different things in similar ways?

the presumptions of our own positions was revealed in everything we said to one another. our own senses of agency and entitlement as practitioners was put strongly into relief. and it was hard, almost impossible, to keep making presumptive judgements out of our discussions. after all aren't we all programmed with ethical and moral value systems through our lives at levels that are subliminal, reaching deep into the recesses of our selves, making us who we are.

in china it seemed as if the system of indoctrination was extraordinarily successful in creating a strong sense of nationhood and loyalty; but also fear. as the body is made machine through daily exercises in schools, in the removal of the body-memory embedded in traditional ritual and family ties through the cultural revolution; the mind is numbed through a propaganda machinery that controls most of what you are allowed to think; and even manages to make release valves for frustrations in the space of art and research.

as a result, all of the major cities in china have a 'cultural district', generally an old factory compound that has been abandoned on the edge of the city -where artists are allowed to have warehouses and studio spaces for creative free expression. in shanghai it is called m 50 and in beijing district 798. the one in guangzhou has only recently been completed. after all what can be more harmless than the world of art. until it becomes dangerous. but then you know where it is to clamp down upon.

architecture meanwhile has a much more difficult task. as an essential part of building the new china ,as a profession and as a way of seeing, it is bound within a technocratic discourse. avant-garde theory from the west is reformatted and made a stylistic issue. parallel to this, theory plays its role in obfuscating local issues, blurring them with abstract concepts of universality. the 'deconstructive villas' on the outskirts of shanghai being perhaps the most obvious example.

the outskirts of shanghai is a landscape of enormous housing estates that plod endlessly on for acres and acres in between agricultural fields and some ancient canal villages now retrofitted to form tourism zones. most cities in china, we were told, are busy trying to make money - fast. and to do this, since all land belongs to the state, they are rapidly selling off agricultural fields to developers who then promptly build a high end residential colony. the older residents might want to complain- but really have no one they can speak to. their older place of livelihood passes into the hands of a real estate company and they are relocated to 'new socialist villages'- multi-storey apartment buildings where any chance of living of the land is impossible. unemployment is high and most young people leave the villages and move to the city.

yet, this is not as easy as it may appear to be. every chinese resident is assigned a identity card which determines the geography of their residence and workplace. if you lived in a smaller village in some other district and happened to get a job in shanghai, you would have to give up your old identity card and obtain one in the city of shanghai (your 'unit') or your workplace helps you to get this id but the process is long tedious and like all bureaucracy is tiresome. having received the shanghai card you can now access some of the best services for education and health care. your existence in the city is thus dependent on the generosity of the 'unit'- an arm of the state. if it so happens that you happen to get fired out of the job that you held- you will have to revert back to the older card and will lose access to all the services the city has to offer. you have to go back. the state then controls your every movement through an intricate system of paperwork. we were told that there is file on every single person that tracks their trajectory. in this climate, how does one protest? and to whom?

the state exists as an invisible cloud hovering over every single aspect of the country. but it is impenetrable. the 'government' is a being- faceless and anonymous- more frightening because of this. its intricate machinations are invisible to the common man. for us, used to a porous government whose rifts are apparent and many, this form of control was unfathomable. the communist party is all powerful and has created all kinds of ways to propagate its own power. meanwhile, all other power centres have been systematically erased. religious institutions, especially chinese ones, have been destroyed; the ancestral system of worship, all but vanished, and with it traditional crafts. and this in a country so conscious of its own history. 'chineseness' then becomes a commodity of dragons, kung fu and tea ceremonies. history is image. meanwhile in a desperate urge to hold on to something 'real' a past is made anew- as style.

there is an essay to be written on style and history. an essay on conservation that deconstructs the categories of 'fake' and 'real'-. both as made. the 'real' as that which reeks of notions authenticity and grounded in some idea of place; while the fake as artifice- coming from 'elsewhere' and therefore inauthentic and shallow. the 'real' though is also very often from another place- the past. in that sense all style here is mannerism. pretence. the ’real' as much as the 'fake'. but i mean no judgement on this pretence. this is trying merely to be an analytical act where the real and the fake meet in fascinating ways describing our relationship with 'elsewhereness' and architecture as portal towards that place. in a country whose past has been 'erased'- this pretence is understandable. make believe identity is still identity felt- and in that framework : 'real'.

it was while walking the empty streets of 'thames town' in the suburbs of shanghai where we came up with these four categories of artifice. the 'real real', the 'fake real', the 'real fake' and the 'fake fake'. thames town we decided was in the third category- a collage of pieces of london and paris with red phone booths and old record shops. a church on a square where recently married chinese play-act a western christian wedding to replace a ritual long lost. this is an authentically forged copy. there is even a harry potter statue. more 'real fakes' can be found around the traditional yuyuan gardens in shanghai where it is now difficult to isolate the older temple from the malls, restaurants and shopping centres surrounding it as each is clad with the same details as the temple. it is a labyrinth of chineseness- red swooping roofs and grillwork.

meanwhile where traditional residential architecture has all been lost- demolished in the cultural revolution as symbols of the bourgeoisie. there is a desperate urge to revive the forms and processes of a bygone era in today's china by a few individuals. craftsmen are sought and given opportunities to recreate in traditional methods- the ancient. this is also artifice and can only be called a 'fake real'. a stab at recreation of a lost authentic identity. the 'fake fake' is the self conscious nudge-nudge wink-wink post-modern embrace of the surface as content. amusement parks-perhaps. in china, the difference between all of these is difficult to locate.

but where is the 'real real': the place where really china is said to lie. for many it lies in the villages that were once wiped clean by the cultural revolution. this 'authentic' construct of a china refuses to acknowledge years of communist rule, turning its back on its violences and displacements.

for others, the 'real real' china is in the shikumen- the older workers housing in shanghai. these chawl like housing forms tightly knit communities in the older city. migrants form the rest of of the country often manage to find housing and work here. today, there are only two futures that can be seen for this area. either they are demolished to make way for housing for the 'international community' that the city desperately wants to attract- or they are prettified and cleansed of all their inhabitants to make way for 'heritage areas' like xintiandi and tianzifang. here a small section of the older city has been cobble stoned and coffee shopped while surrounding it glass and steel skyscrapers rise. germans, americans, britishers walk these streets and drink in the bars listening to the 1930s jazz that shanghai has adopted as its music of the past. the chinese here are stockbrokers or waiters. this gentrification has been achieved with no perceptible violence. its all very efficient.

to the north, somewhere near what used to the be the jewish ghetto a shikumen was in the process of being relocated. this is achieved first by building a wall around the area to be cleared and tearing down a few buildings on the edge. after this, signs are painted in blood red that mark the houses to be torn down. banners around the area proclaim (or threaten) 'harmonious demolition is in the best interests of the local community'. after that, the garbage stops being collected- and then later the addresses on the front doors are erased so that no postal services can exist. once cornered the locals are then evicted to different parts on the outskirts of shanghai. it is also ascertained that these displaced are moved to different parts of the city so that they cannot collectivize to protest.

if this is not frightening enough, an incident in this neighbourhood shut me up for the next two hours. as we were photographing this story- a demolished wall with high rises rising out of it, we were stopped by a man who seemed to live in this neighbourhood. he asked us to stop photographing 'bad' things. " all countries have rich and poor people. do not show poor people. this area is going to go and become like that" pointing us to the high rises across the street. in him i felt a strange mixture of embarrassment, anger and national pride. he knew that what was happening was strange- but he also felt that it was a necessary evil- something that had to happen for china to progress. he saw himself as a cog within a much larger machine whose role was to play a small, insignificant role in the building of a nation. his role was to meekly accept the displacement.

agency and entitlement, in the way that we know it, did not seem to exist in consciousness of people in china. while we rambled on about talking to the state and negotiating with it for our rights, our chinese friends looked on bemusedly at our naivety and told us that deep in the heart of every chinese person is a core of fear. what we take for granted, they cannot.

meanwhile, on the surface the spectacle of the good life continues. television station beam relentless propaganda on the stories of entrepreneurship that have made a few billionaires, trickle down economics and the 'peaceful liberation of tibet' from feudal ties into a new world where the unique religious practices have not been disturbed. platitudes abound reminding me of the doordarshan of my childhood.

spectacles are mounted at unimaginable scales evoking chineseness. every city has its own unique 'event' as an engine for driving investment- the olympics at beijing, the asian games at guangzhou and the expo of shanghai. each of these makes districts of cleaned up tati like landscapes of glittering glass skyscrapers, pristine gardens with topiary and lots and lots of shopping of a scale unimaginable. star architects make nauseously vapid contributions to these spectacles. scales are overwhelming and building pulsate with light strobes in evening rituals. in these new districts the city is a festival of lights and choreographed bodies. megaprojects abound- the bund in shanghai was pedestrianised by digging the cars under the water; entire parts of the city were erased to make a parking lot for the expo. the bund is lit with messages that remix advertising, nationalism and sustainability seeing no contradiction in them. on the bund romantic dinners can be had overlooking these lights.

architects revert back to their role as the creators of the most fantastic prisons that subjugate the body into passive acceptance, participating in the process of submerging individuality into a great mass. you cant help but think of albert speer in the service of hitler.

this is a landscape of unbearable sweetness and beauty with a dark dark heart.

shanghai: tongji university

2011-07-26T11:21:00.001+05:30

conversations about shanghai and mumbai

shanghai: villages around jinze

2011-07-26T11:15:00.001+05:30

the extreme western edge of shanghai where agricultural lands are being abandoned to old people and migrants. as the village changes desperate attempts to capture a past in the form of opera stages are built.