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THE SUITABILITY OF SPECTACLE FRAMES...FOR THE ARCHITECTURAL CRITIC IN THE AGE OF NEW MEDIA

THE SUITABILITY OF SPECTACLE FRAMES...FOR THE ARCHITECTURAL CRITIC IN THE AGE OF NEW MEDIA

The advent of New Media in a vastly satellite-based society has given the scope for a Collective. But such is the scale of its vastness today that only the anonymity of its component individuals can make for an identity as a Collective Whole. The result... is an objectified knowledge base not viable of its subjective authenticity.

Today, the increasing number of objectified works of architecture and likewise their representations are alienating the perceptive subject and thus the inherent critic as well in respect, from the object. The plight of this phenomenon has spread a ‘Cataract’ of uncertainty in our opinion making.

The thin film of obscurity over our perceptive capacity needs a set of Suitable Spectacle Frames of our own accord, with its suitability judged of course, not by the eyesight but by the insight. The choice maybe made by the virtue of how one wants to see and not necessarily by what a Collective says it can see.

Therefore, we may not deny that, how we criticise is only as important as what is being criticised. Then, one may choose his spectacle frames by a make that is duly suitable to him.

Suitability of spectacle frames on the human face

Spectacle frames like other clothing and accessories are tools of reflecting upon oneself more than anyone else around. It is how you feel about yourself and what you want to project yourself as. Suitability is a very subjective question which stems from the notion of what is familiar. With time, even the unfamiliar becomes more familiar, more suitable.

The Glasgow School of Art extention

This is a building, that doesn’t exist in reality yet, not even in the finality of a plan (at least a publicized one) but through a couple of 3D renders, a section and a few model pictures. May be too little for someone to make sound judgments by appropriation, but it is unlikely that it was merely an advertisement exercise. The school really wanted a new art school building. And Steven Holl delivered just that. An interesting introverted building, that on deeper digging, could easily be anywhere in the world. This is an extension per se, but it actually is a new building across the block. Still, the challenge in the project was not the art school but the response to Macintosh that Holl doesn’t really prove through his visuals in the media at least. The connections that he did attempt to make with Mac, for example the use of daylighting, etc. to me, seem too weak to notice; the sections do not appear interpreted. The fine tuning from a conceptual idea to an actual built work seems to have been overlooked. May it has all been figured out in the heads of the firm and gone on their drawing board, but the world audience has clearly been deprived of the information.

A Critique of my own work

The Delhi Supertel, A critique

Architecture with intentions of uplifting a neighbourhood always finds its key followers in both money minting developers and the architecture fraternity, for their own reasons. Built over the ruins of one of Delhi’s first state owned co-operative store, the Super Bazaar, this projects realizes the social potential of its location in the neighbourhood of Connaught Place and cashes in on the possibilities of commerce that it can generate. Architecture for everyone’s good. This building is a confident stroke of an experiment, boldly seeking attention at the top of its voice, maybe not the usual thing to do for a private building in Delhi.

The main hotel block is neatly stacked up to form a 13 storey background block, seemingly seeking attention on the last leg of the drive on the outer ring road before the real multi-storey lane, the Barakhamba Road.  The hotel block appears to be in hangover of the 1960s high modernist wave of buildings in Delhi, exploring concrete and the forms it can yield. Almost resembling the NDMC building by  PN Mathur, the curve of the front block appears to be getting completed only once you look at the building from the side.  And only then the intention of respect to Connaught Place across the road is suddenly revealed. The colonnade facade of the exhibition block almost ‘looks up’ to across the outer circle Connaught colonnade.

Most of the ground floor is open to public access, with the central focal point being a open to sky courtyard with public functions enclosing it. The range of stepped seating spaces all around it dotted with shaded trees make this place come alive with people every evening. The sequence of buffers from the outer circle, the pavement with subway entries, the row of big trees, the shaded colonnade extending out of the public art gallery and the gallery blocks with a demarcated entrance into the courtyard, all contribute to an effective transition between two open spaces, the interior far more comfortable than the external street. This treatment of the edge, distinct but very very easy, a feature one hardly sees in most public buildings in Delhi.

This is a luxury hotel that takes the city, and serves it on a plate for a guest to feast their eyes on. An inkling of what seems to be the typical Colonial mindset of viewing all the action from a distance, a protected position, the hotel offers to the guest the best opportunity to view the public access ground floor open space and the choice to engage with it at will. However, this connection of the guest and the public courtyard has turned out fairly weak, with only some visual linkage drawn from the more public restaurant, grill and swimming pool areas, while most of the rooms hardly seem to establish any connection.

With all the rooms facing the sprawling Central Park at Connaught Place, west facing however, it clearly is a bargain that the architect makes negotiating with the site’s strengths and weaknesses where every guest can sense his intention, but really wishes for better heat gain and glare mitigation.  The room corridors on the east side have full glazing, giving guests sweeping views of nothing but a drab grey concrete office building, almost compelling them to wonder why buildings just need to have back edges, that have a responsibility to connect their surroundings. Maybe something that seemed to work in plan but never looked at in section. 

critique of one's own work

The Spire-tec tower-
On the site at greater Noida where the Spire-tec tower is proposed to be built, stands an atrocity clad in white. This may as well be the perfect architectural example of the idiom, beauty is only skin deep.
The brief asked for a scheme that will unite the urban fabric with the rural textile in a manner so radical that it will become the centre of all happenings in future greater Noida. But all we get is white drapes and glazing plopped in the middle nowhere.
Spire-tec is an incongruent juxtaposition of the fluid and the rigid. (If the two were intended to be juxtaposed).An architecture so overly biased toward the visual stimulus, all the the others go un-noticed. The efficiency of the scheme takes a back seat.
The Overpowering scale, which might be a deliberation, shrinks the user into a mere ant in front of its anthill. An image of corporate power rather than that of the city centre. Exclusivity is clearly spelt out with semiotics. The white although gripping at first may tend to be a problem later on, not only for its maintenance but also as perceived by its users.
The use of voids on the surfaces is appropriate but this only textbook method design, nothing path breaking as it is advertised to be.
The architect has been elaborate in the translation of his vision, sparing no penny in the purse of the client. Very little has been achieved with a lot of effort.
Excessively utopian to survive reality, the building stands gleaming with its coat of white nearing completion. The architectural community must be flummoxed by the jury’s decision to erect this particular scheme.

Hotel Design Self- Critique

To be asked to impartially critique one’s own design is almost like asking a person to dissect his own baby for what it’s worth-a task that requires one to first fall out of love with one’s own creation.

Nevertheless, an attempt is in order.

For their 6^th semester, the third year class of SPA was assigned the task of designing a hotel in one of 3 given locations, with each site presenting its own challenges. Amri Chadha chose to design in the diplomatically sensitive Chanakyapuri, allegedly intrigued by its sensitivity and ‘international’ opportunities. In designing a business hotel, she addressed the socio-economic context well, and by way of landscaping and cultural elements, has created an engaging public space to boot.

The real question arises when one weighs her design against her claim of it alluding to the associative memory of the magnificent Chanakya cinema, the demolition of which created a hole in the heart of what used to be Chanakyapuri’s cultural identity.

Her design stands as an icon of the modern, almost clinical approach to architecture, appealing in the cleanliness of its form, free of the frills of the excessive. In the huge open area, the massive looped concrete tube demands to be looked at; even as a passerby in a vehicle, the view is visually engaging.

Very singular and modern on the outside, it has surprisingly traditional fundamentals: the concrete tube loops over itself to form a courtyard, a quirky, perhaps cheeky way of addressing the overall context of the city of Delhi, nevermind the hotel’s location in the midst of gated and walled embassies. In this also, the design trumps its typology: the absence of a boundary wall suddenly opens up the building to its surroundings.

The courtyard lets the steam out of what could have been a very solid, opaque mass, sitting in the center of the huge plot. Inside, the rolling streams of water down two courtyard faces also addresses the climate and the potential heat island effect of the building.

Whether or not this strategy will turn to bite the designer in her tail as winter approaches, only time will tell.

Despite the fact that the building has a profile and a view from all sides, the privacy of hotel guests is not compromised, as long wooden horizontal louvers run along the tube as it loops. However, the lack of availability of natural light within the rooms can be seen as a glitch.

The proportions of the building speak well of the aesthetic sensitivity of the young designer. The welcoming, enveloping lobby and sheer lack of definition within the public areas of the hotel are a refreshing change from the ostentatious, often over the top lobbies one gets used to. This is hardly a hotel for those fishing for luxury, but those with a keen eye for design and cleanliness of space and mind.

The hotel courtyard has a winding underground, art gallery access to the very intriguing sunken trench (public space) that runs outside. This is an interesting, removed-from-the-average experience, so to speak. But, as it goes, this may be a wasted asset to a hotel that may not invite people who find their appeal in hotels that cater to the rich and relaxed.

The same is noticed in the hotel’s absence of sun-decks and swimming pools.

Almost Scandinavian-design in principle, Amri Chadha’s hotel design aesthetic can hardly be questioned, as can’t her bold use of façade treatment. With a public space wedged out of the side of the built, and a dugout trench that boldly cuts across the site, one realizes that her design derives it strength from sharp definition and fearless singularity of form.

But whether a design like hers can work in a larger context as varied as it is vague, remains the true bone of contention.