Letter from B.V. Doshi

(Letter from architect B.V. Doshi towards end of internship at Sangath 2016) I got this letter from Doshi two days after my birthday, it was indeed a special present. 

To

Dear 

Prashant

Perseverance 

and 

Belief and Faith 

are essential elements 

to 

achieve goals

Do

Pursue them 

Best luck

Doshi

May

30

2016

 

Unopened Books & On Reading

Over the past five years, I’ve developed a quiet habit: collecting books not just to read, but to keep — almost like keepsakes. Each one finds its way to me in a unique, meaningful manner. Some come from artists whose work has recently captured my attention. Others are written by architects or former professors whose thoughts I admire and whose writing resonates with me. There are books I pick up because they explore themes I care about — ideas that feel timely, urgent, or deeply personal.

And yet, many of these books remain unopened. Some I’ve read before and know well; others I haven’t touched at all. But I love that they remain sealed, waiting. I imagine that when I finally open them, I might think differently — read them differently. It’s as if I’m waiting for a particular kind of moment. Like an idea that sparks into the mind and then becomes poetry, I think there is also a specific moment when that poetry sparks into my mind.

Until then, I wait — for the right moment to open these books, and for the quiet surprise they hold inside.

Ad hoc Architecture

“Adhocism” is a term coined by Charles Jencks and first used by him in architectural criticism in 1968. It can also be applied to many human endeavours, denoting a principal of action having speed or economy and purpose or utility. Basically it involves using an available system or dealing with an existing situation in a new way to solve a problem quickly and efficiently. It is a method of creation relying particularly on resources which are already at hand. Incidentally, the word adhocism has the property of itself being ad hoc. An initially clumsy parasynthesis like “one-upmanship” or “feedback”, it forces recognition of its own birth and history.

- Foreword,  Adhocism – The case of for Improvisation by Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver

Paris 

Delft

Vitra Design Musuem (1989) - Frank Gehry

 Vitra Musuem could be understood in the articulation of ‘De-formation’ by Jeffrey Kipnis. He says, “Deformation emphasizes the role of a new aesthetic from. Deformation searches for blankness by extending Modernism's exploration of monolithic form. Deformation is less concerned about a given site, but pays more attention to the fold between internal and external spaces”

For Vitra Museum the form is not the result of a contextual engagement of the building-site but rather a weak and abstract relationship of various forms coming together as an aggregate. One can see a shift from the interest of point/line/plane/volume of modernist formalism to a discourse of curvilinear surfaces. As the smooth surfaces intersect they produce a coherent heterogeneity, both inside as well as outside.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe - Peter Eisenmann

The project with its different levels of plinths creates multiple grounds for the city, one below and one above. The Museum in the basement becomes the third ground and is invisible unless you get deep inside the plinths. As you navigate through the labyrinth the idea of datum is constantly altered. 

The conventional notion of a flat floor to a flat floor ceiling is challenged throughout the project. The blocks become a playground for the pedestrians as different roads from the city can cross through it. 

The bodily experience is interesting within the structure because of the irregularities of ground, vision and sounds.

De-layering Machines

Notes after reading, The Question Concerning Technology by Martin Heidegger

Techne, for Aristotle, meant doing something which nature alone could not accomplish, like an art or craft. For Heidegger it meant unmasking the truth, something ontological. The idea of technology should be addressed in its totality, ‘in its technological, social, semiotic and axiological avatars’(1).Machines have changed since Heidegger’s industrial times, the ontological consistency of this object is essentially composite. The technical object cannot be limited to its materiality. Do machines have more than the material structure? These machines are only effective, dependent on their technological, economic and political assemblage(2).

One cannot deny the presence of the ontogenetic (3)elements, construction, social relationships, knowledge, economic relations, interfaces which support these technologies onto which the technical object attaches itself. It is essential to recognize this mutative nature of the technologies within space and time.

Can technologies engage outside their own bodies? Technical machines are fit in the concept of autopoiesis and allopoiesis. Can there be an attempt to consider the agencements, a symbiotic exchange between both.  We use iPhone without the knowledge of how it comes into being.

We need to think why we have technologies and what we use them for, rather than just knowing their defined use value. Is there a possible escape from enframing? Can one experiment with aggregation and their compositional forms?

1. Guattari Felix, Rethinking Technologies, Machinic Heterogenesis- Looking at the complex totalities of machines

2.Assemblage – Dual Form – ‘Form of content’(matter) and ‘Form of expression’ (function)

3. Ontogenesis – The development of an individual organism or anatomical or behavioral feature from the earliest stage to maturity

Becoming Animals

We live in "multi-species" anthropology.

Do we understand the different voices around us? We hear them, but do we have capacities to know them?

What is the Idea of being for objects/animals other than Human beings? What are the different ways of being objects/animals suggest? Is there a way to understand these objects/animals? Do we have access to them? Is this access direct or mediated?

 “Each animal is a way of knowing the world” – Mark Bekoff

Speaking solely of animals now. How does one conceive the idea of ‘being’? Can one look at the idea of ‘being’ in the context of ecology? The notion that living beings contain different “ways of being”. All animals are inseparable from their collective formations (Packs,herds, groups) to which they belong to. Also, never a single animal shall be the lone example representative of that animal group. 

Animals only perceive things that have meaning for them. Moreover Animals construct meaning through actions, performances, sounds etc. According to Jakob von Uexküll, the animal has an Umwelt (environment), surrounding and enclosing it. Each animal has its own Umwelt, it is very much like the soap bubble and one soap bubble may enclose many others within it or be enclosed in other, larger bubbles. Unlike Leibniz's monads, these bubbles thrive on constant interaction within themselves. The umwelt is not something which is a priori, but rather produced by the animal through its constant functioning and interaction of its body, sensory and intuition within itself and the objects around it. The species evolve in relation to their environment and other species.

Does this hold true to different objects around us?

How does one think about non-anthropocentric ecology?