It is 1971. I have returned to Ahmedabad. I search down a muddy lane for Varkey, amongst a chorus of monsoon’s croaking frogs, for a small cottage in Azad Society where Varkey lives with his brother Thomas and the Kanade brothers. I look between the tall grasses down a long katccha path ahead. I see the warm yellow light in a room. Through the darkness I see people sitting in a circle talking and laughing. They all work for Doshi now: Varkey, Shankar and Navnath. I need not guess the topic of their debate; it is ARCHITECTURE, and I enter the room of friendship, and join in the fellowship of laughter. It is the laughter of camaraderie around shared values and evolving ideas. There are issues demanding insight. We have all left our bodies on the door hooks with old clothes, and drifted off into our secret world of true believers. The room is beautiful. Life is beautiful.
It is 1973 and Varkey has been to Jaisalmer. He comes into my room, now an airy large studio next to Gujarat College. In that space, filled with his positive energy, he shows me his sketches of a room in Jaisalmer. A few lines turn a flat white sheet of paper into a 3D view of an amazing place. In the middle of that static medieval room there is a static column! Varkey explains how as one walks around the room, the column stays in one place, filling the walls behind it with kinetic energy; the walls are moving, turning and twisting as one moves. The room is beautiful, and my studio room fills with positive energy. I am inspired.
In that beautiful room of Varkey’s imagination I find a person; it is I! I am walking and moving, and my mind becomes a place! There is a model of my design of Alliance Française where Keshuvbhai Mistry is working, and I ask him to craft a round column and place it magically in the middle of the main hall of the model. As he does so, Varkey and I smile the bright smile of discovery and realization! A static room has been filled with the energy of moving kinetic space! The room is beautiful! Life is beautiful!
In that beautiful room of Varkey’s imagination I find a person; it is I!
I am walking and moving, and my mind becomes a place!
It is 1983 and Varkey has a wife, Alice, and an apartment and a car! He is teaching at the University of Nairobi. Varkey is standing at the door with the interior light surrounding his shadowy silhouette in a saintly glow. I enter the living room, and Varkey switches on the fan. It is evening time and the sun is settling down through the ancient Jacaranda trees full of light purple flowers gathering illumination. Varkey smiles, the wise old man looking out of the young boyish face. We are laughing; he pours red French wine, and the room that was in faded light comes alive around a few candles on the table. Our mental energy leaves our bodies behind. Place making, low cost housing, the growth of slums in Nairobi, and the city’s beauty, all absorb us in thought, and the room flows over with ideas that drift out of the windows into a night air full of singing birds. The room is vibrant and full of energy! The room is beautiful!
It is Ahmedabad in the 1990’s and I enter a room full of students awaiting their jury. They are laughing nervously, awkwardly twitching and smiling! There are nine chairs in a row for nine wise men to sit and nitpick on the victims. There are chairs for Doshi, Raje, myself, Varkey, Kulbhushan Jain, Miki Desai, Chhaya, Muktiraj Chauhan and Kiran Pandya…all ageing relics from the school of architecture in the late sixties and early seventies; Creatures from an antique land where Kahn actually walked and talked. These were true disciples who had shared wine with and accidentally nudged the bodies of the modern apostles! They sat down and began their inquiry. As the jury proceeds, the rational triumphs over the iconic. Logic and order are the rules of the debate. The tyranny of the avant-garde is plundered like David slaying Goliath! Varkey fills the room with his love of students, spending more time elucidating the possibilities of the bad designs than the brilliance of the good ones! After all Varkey was a “people person”, and architecture was just a vessel carrying the human spirit towards epiphany, enlightenment and self-discovery. The room is filled with laughter, love and beauty! Life is beautiful!
It is mid-September 2001, and the final jury of Dhananjay’s thesis is quickly called to order. I, Dhananjay’s guide, Vivek Khadpekar the External Examiner, and Varkey the Internal Examiner all listen intently. The inquisition has begun. The topic spans the realms of architecture, planning, urban design and street people! Under the wrong hands it was a sure failure. Varkey grabs the moment, catches the core ideas and begins where the candidate must have started. His mind grabs the subject, the analysis and the findings like a super computer! The room awakes to his questions and to his insights. All are lost in debate! The room is alive with possibilities and shared conclusions. We are all lost in the world of ideas, considered thought and articulate reasoning. The room is beautiful! Life is beautiful!
It is October 2001 and the towers have fallen. I am sitting quietly in a room, on a hillock in Tuscany. I am looking out over the vast olive orchards and vineyards that are the ancient lands of my hosts, Rebecca Szabo and Vieri Salvadori. It is beautiful. The sun is setting, turning the landscape into multiple stage sets, turning my mind this way and that in amazement. I pause under the spell of the valley’s mystery before turning on the computer. I get an e-mail that Varkey is no more, and I understand the meaning of emptiness!
Pity us…..
In the beautiful room…..
In its glow…..
So Briefly.
The beautiful room is empty!
Pity us...
In the beautiful room...
In its glow...
So Briefly.
The beautiful room is empty!
Meanings
Letter
The Ordering Project
Orderly by Nature
Bringing things into order, finding patterns generic to things, and making templates into which things can be ‘ordered’ are the unique feats of the human brain, driving our strongest emotional compulsions. It helps us to understand and give meaning to complex phenomena and events. Human curiosity seeks the structure of things and their innate patterns.
Animals react to immediate stimuli and instinctively behave in ways that ‘make sense’ in assuring survival. Their curiosity is catalyzed by events happening right in front of them, while humans can create unseen scenarios. Humans are unique in their ability to ask questions about the past and future appyling ‘fitness criteria’ and evaluations to generate new, alternative patterns. We are uniquely able to respond in a manner that brings complexities into our own desired scenarios, be it a battle plan, the making of a city or building a house.[1] Imagination and imagery involve manipulating sets of orders that create new patterns and situations. The Greeks, in their search for balance and harmony, analyzed order in its explicit geometrical sense as well as its cosmic, political and social reality.[2] Tongue in cheek, Plato advised young students of order to,
“Take in all the scattered particles of an idea, so that every one understands what is being considered, and then separate all of the little particles of the idea into ‘like parts,’ dividing them at their joints as nature directs, not breaking any limb into broken pieces as a bad butcher does.” [3]
Collective Order
Ordering is not something we do individually. It is something humanity does collectively, with an unconscious desire to find the inherent fabric of things, to label them, and to control the relations between them. Social systems have emerged around the communal processes of managing common resources, creating public assets and forging new ‘stories’ for our lives to follow. Societies have evolved institutions that order collective decision-making, public policy, ‘the social contract’ and group action. These institutions transform norms into standards, codes and laws, with incentives for conforming to them and penalties for deviating from them.
The mores and norms of social behavior, right up to the post-industrial age in which we live, have all functioned within something I would like to
call the ‘ordering project’. All knowledge systems are founded on some code of order, some system of labeling and placing each thing or idea, in a designated relationship with all other things. The concept of time was amongst the first epic ideas of ordering, enabling conceptualization of the cycle of life, imagining death as terminal, or just a transition, creating the afterworld and reincarnation. Sundials, clocks, seasons, festivals and calendars ordered the narratives of life into measures of time.
Early concerns with time and the earth’s dimensions and dynamics demanded an understanding of ‘measure’ leading to concepts of incremental lengths and heights, distances, scale, proportion and later harmony. Measuring turned sound into music, gossip into poetry, and graffiti into painting. Building became architecture. All of these measured systems sponsored ever more abstract meanings.
Animistic knowledge systems assigned meanings to mountains, rivers and lakes and wove these attributed spiritual qualities into folklore, investing these inanimate objects with divinity, emotions, magical powers and auras.
The Order of Meaning
As these animistic patterns developed they took on semiotic meanings through devices such as hieroglyphics and pictography, evolving into written scripts, or oral traditions in which aphorisms were memorized and passed down from teacher to student; from generation to generation. The great Tibetan civilization devised sophisticated mnemonics to store and explain complexities, establishing a highly evolved emblematic knowledge system, embedded on thangkas, within mandalas and through complex forms of iconography. These images were embodiments of ideas, not idealizations of events or of people.
Temples, or lhakhangs, were ordered as ‘body supports’ for meditation, while stupas were classified as ‘mental supports’. By the fifteenth century there were texts on iconometry and manuals offering iconometric lineaments, including definitions of iconographic parts and proportions.[4] Standardized motifs, acting as descriptive invocations, heralded various deities and historical figures as precise definers.[5] This graphic ordering system is easily shared within homogeneous cultural groups and is comprehended by each individual up to their level of knowledge.
The Vedic oral tradition sets out another ordering system of rote learning, employing aphorisms with embedded lessons or truths. The entire grammar of Classical Sanskrit was codified in the Ashtadhyayi by Panini (an approximate contemporary of Plato) in an unwritten set of several thousand aphorisms, incanted, memorized and passed on from generation to generation of Brahmin scholars.[6] This esoteric and elite oral tradition offers yet another meaning system, and demands unique mental gymnastics. It assumes specialized scholars and priests who will hold, interpret and pass on an arcane knowledge system, making it accessible to the common man only through the medium of explicit stories or in the form of visible idols.
In the twentieth century traditional folkways and patterns of behavior soon became mechanical and monotonous. ‘Bird’, the counterculture hero in Kenzaburo Oe’s narrative, A Personal Matter, saw life as a trap. He found escape in travels that were never realized, visiting gay bars never picking up other men, and imagining a fantasy adventure in Africa.[7]
Spatial Order
Architecture and art, operating within these great syntactic traditions, involve their own unwritten systems of ordering and manipulating spatial ideas in graphic languages. There are patterns, prototypes, thematic concepts and design processes giving structure to the development of order in design problems and solutions. Design emerges as yet another means of seeking order, employing its own performance standards as a criterion for evaluating appropriateness.[8]
The Order of Science
The European empirical system of knowledge is centered on the ‘proof of truth’ through controlled experiments. A good experiment has a clear hypothesis to be tested and a replicable method of testing. The steps involved in arriving at an ‘empirical truth’ involve labeling the elements of ‘matter’, determining their dimensions and weights, measuring their interactions and defining their causality as a proof of their existence. Rather than depending on images or memories with embedded meaning systems, science is based on an ordering system of ‘empirical hypothesis’ that confirms truth through testing. Science poses to be objective and measurable, devoid of subjective meaning. These observed orders are ultimately transformed into mathematical formulae that simulate real phenomena. They can be digitally stored and uploaded into virtual reality in the form of sounds, images or even simulated nuclear explosions.[9] Emblematic, oral and empirical ordering systems can be proposed as posited benchmarks around which further varieties of ordering systems could theoretically operate. Thus, the ‘ordering project’ has claimed humanity’s imagination since the dawn of time itself.
Diversity within Order
There are as many knowledge and meaning systems as there are tribes, and each of us has roots in some aboriginal system of meaning for which each sign and symbol have an etiology of evolution up to the present moment. Some agarbatti is circled over the image of Goddess Laxmi for good luck in a business deal, while tikkas are adorned as one passes through a day’s ordered phases. Urbanization and globalization are making us all cultural mongrels; marriages of choice, media influences and work cultures overlie our tribal influences. Hybrid cultures characterize the most educated and specialized households at the top of the earning pyramid, while homogeneous, traditional societies compose the mass at the bottom. Economic and social systems have divided and nucleated us over the past two centuries wherein every micro-region hosts a dual society interacting through ordering systems in much the same way as imperialism acted across the globe on indigenous societies. The sociometry of an urban hutment is analogous to that of a metropolitan region, or of a nation.
Ordering as Closure
With such diverse conceptual mechanisms and skills, almost all societies ironically came back to a common set of concerns in an interesting ‘closure of the human condition’, often expressed through rites of passage, or ordering samskara of specific types. Birth, naming, attaining puberty, marriage, and death are all part of a pre-ordered life cycle in all societies. There are analogous ordered ‘markers’ in the form of rituals and celebrations that persist through all cultures. Signifiers, be they birthday cakes, sacred threads or circumcisions, mark out time and life into some meaningful order of phases in a predictive narrative of events. Order posits one’s life into a prescriptive story, which is inescapable, with the transcendental euphoria of art being the only possible escape. Otherwise, life is a trap![10]
Evolved societies used their ordering systems to philosophize about the ‘meaning of life’ and ask the question: ‘Why are we here?’ All societies have pondered over the meaning of death and the nature of the soul. All texts, symbols, benchmarks, signs and numbers accordingly take on both implicit and explicit meanings, developing into ‘narratives’ in which we become unwilling actors, with pre-assigned roles. Everything therefore has a name, material reality and immaterial ’significance’ carried along with it, allowing for intertextuality and nuances of meaning, adding richness to life and essence to art and architecture.
Order posits one’s life into a prescriptive story, which is inescapable, with the transcendental euphoria of art being the only possible escape. Otherwise, life is a trap!
Artist as Anarchist
Over the past century sculptors and painters used collages, combines and assemblages, often in absurdist contrast, to manipulate intertextual meanings and even to challenge the common wisdom considered an essential underpinning to governance, law, stable societies and order.[11] Unlike the Romantic and Impressionistic artists of the nineteenth century, Modernist painters were looking ‘behind the order’ to expose realities, just as Marx called for objective reality to rule over popular, yet camouflaging, artistic romanticism.[12] A wave of counter-culture art forms were catalyzed by the pioneering experiments in collage by
Georges Braque, with Pablo Picasso, further exploiting these concepts as revolutionary new orders. [13]
Collage, and later assemblage, essentially take fragments of things and stick them over other materials or images to discover new opaque and esoteric orders. In the process, signifiers get cluttered within the textual patterns. Small cuts of newsprint could actually be photos of inhuman acts by ‘civilized’ governments, exposing their inhumanity, and thus covertly questioning the ethics of the state. Robert Rauschenberg used mixed media of painting, collage, film negatives, pieces of this and that, pulling them together into complex combines mirroring contemporary life, while creating his own space in the trap of life. [14]
The Eagles’ epic song, Hotel California, has been accused of harboring subliminal messages in praise of Satan embedded within its text as a kind of counter-cultural collage in music. Jim Morrison challenged societal order through his lyrics and stage antics, attracting an arrest warrant in Miami for exposing his genitals, just weeks before dying of a drug overdose in Paris at age twenty-seven. His counter-culture myth, signified by his songs and antisocial behavior, emerged as a spiritual cult, making his grave in Paris a pilgrimage destination to this day.
Letters To A Young Architect Page 25