Intimacy & Practice: Exploring Context through a Culture of Play

intimacy and practice: exploring context through the culture of play Lecture by Shubhra Raje Š 2018 shubhra raje_built environments

One dark night, a woman was searching intently for something. A passerby asked her, “have you lost something?” “yes, I have lost my keys. I’ve been searching for them everywhere” “where did you think you lost them?”

“I don’t know...inside the house, maybe?” “then why are you looking for them out here, in the street?” “because it is dark in there. I don’t have any lamps, and I can see much better here, under the lights.”

Most of architecture - its conception, comprehension, documentation and dissemination - is conducted in well-lit spaces where architecture has been (to recall Le Corbusier), “the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light”.

And in these, we have found many precious things.

But moving away from the primacy of vision, and the compulsion of visibility that we, as architects, subject ourselves to; and moving into the proverbial “indoors” of the work of architecture and its practice; into the expressive culture of the intimate, the fragile, the hidde and the ephemeral...what might we find?

There is a sustained allusion here: that the work of architecture be returned to the stuff of life, rather than it be an autonomous art form, a visual art form. Not all elements, or even all of the structures of everyday life, are always evident. They become part of our “habitus”, as conceptualized by Pierre Bordiue as part of the experience of lived practices. I am interested in the conditions that momentarily reveal the facade, so to speak, of these structures and the documentation (and the occasional disappearance) of context understood as lived practices.

Many of you might be familiar with the Carazas Test.For those of youwho aren’t, the test investigates the relationship between earth, water and air; and is expressed through a diversity of form, consistency and texture of the resulting material.

My first experience with performing the test was in a workshop on earthen architecture in Austria. It made quite an impression on me: As a group, it seemed we were unconsciously predisposed to one outcome which led to the inevitable comparisons of each others’ samples, even though each sample was unique in terms of the type of soil, quantity of water and degree of compaction. Tellingly, the perfect samples were deemed the ones which held their shape (form) with the greatest degree of precision... ...because we were all fixated on this as a mould (generator of form), and not as a measure.

This tendency of homogenizing outcomes through an innate need for formal benchmarking was despite the fact that the ignoble looking slurry is what you would need for plastering, a viscous goop would be more workable in the summer, and so on. It seems that our prepondenrence for ubiquity and notions of perfection are what makes us forget to truly celebrate diversity for what it is - an expression of context.

Further, in many cases, the end result is presented as though it is inevitable; the work of architecture becomes a reduction to an “aha” moment of inspiration. All live-ness is evened out, flattened, and a formal distancing is established.

I would like to point out here that this is not a critique of the outcome (Fallingwater in this cae) but how we think about and present the practice of architecture...the mythology of “that” (the sketch) to “that” (the image of the outcome...is there even a difference anymore?).

The ideation materialized, and the documentation as evidence of that materialization.

Critical practice, including its documentation, must deal with the specificity and inclusivity of context, and how to make it relevant to the design process. My work tries to make the method and experience of the live-ness of context knowable. Certain conditions we encounter as architects in our practice of architecture call into question how to record, when to records, and indeed what can be recorded in order to allow context to emerge. I hope to present such conditions and look at the documentation of these as an opportunity for interrogation of the practice of architecture, rather than as transparent windows onto the works of architecture.

“the stuff of life”

So, to begin with, there is the condition of meeting.

How does on e document a meeting?

“your humanity is not strange to me”

Climate, site configuration, the cycles of the sun and paths of the wind. By-laws, codes and cultural narratives. It seems as if the complexity of discourse has assumed that a landscape cannot be known unless all the informational elements and narratives have been incorporated... ... leaving unrecognized the predominant encounter with it... ...that of the interaction of the physical body within the landscape. These interactions are the beginnings of familiarity, in that they need our presence.

Jan 01, 2018

A mode of engagement that allows us to begin, not with a literate reading of the place but with the physical acquity and specificity that accompanies inserting oneself into an environment.

Jan 27, 2017 Through one’s body one explores the built environment not only with one’s eyes, but up close, making the work deeply personal.

Feb 12, 2017

Two examples: One, a precursor to design. The slide is from the 2017 Archiprix workshop, a workshop with international students who were visiting the city of Ahmedabad for the first time. Here the inhabitation was through the practice of play (no cameras, recorders, sketchbooks or measuretapes were involved); play here refers to very material games played by the participants (adaptations of forms they were familiar with) as a stimulus to experiencing the city and not as an observed strategy. The challenges and risks for the participants experiencing the city for the first time were the pure apprehensions of inserting themselves into their context.

“the human train” Feb 12, 2017

The experiences were brought back to the workshop venue through oral tellings (responses to questions*) in their native languages, which were then self-translated into English. This being a workshop with architecture students, the conclusion was in the form of the participants housing their tellings within an environments (installations) that evoked the significant qualities of their tellings.

Feb 12, 2017 The second, a precursor to construction. Often times, construction sites become places of meeting the building culture of a region - not some romanticized, or purely tectonic, notion of “regionalism” though - because both craft and labour is a fluid context in our age of transience.

So for each set of drawings and specifications, we have often found the need for a tactile and material translation; we look at this as an opportunity for knowledge to be embodied as a lived experience. We involve our clients, contractors, consultants and crew in on-site workshops as ways to experience specifications.

Numbers, like drawings and other visuals, are abstract and reviving a “feel” - a body memory - for materials becomes helpful. It is also an acknowledgement of bodies within the heirarchy of a construction site.

Feb 12, 2014

More and more of architecture seems to be represented at the razor-thin threshold of under sonstruction and building occupation.

“under construction” To take the term “under construction” literally, buildings under construction reveal where they are built; that is,how a region most commonly works and builds. More than any formal or aesthetic appropriation of details, motifs or styles, the peculiarites of ways in which a construction society operates, measures and monitors itself reveals the building culture of a place.

Not merely how it has always been, but also the slow shifts and exchanges...

May 16, 2014 | Jul 14, 2014 ...and how play. In a in that to instead of

Feb 20, 2015

it finds its release - its culture of unique way, play has materiality, realize itself play must be enacted thought about.

This is at a conservation site in Abydos, Egypt.

The steeel scaffolding is a relatively recent import with its systems of assembly incorporated within a region of masonry by a select crew (archaeological and conservation sites can be highly demarcated and specialized).

Feb 22, 2012 The season of 2012 ended with the crew responsible for assembling and dismantling the scaffolding erecting a giant structure made up of all of the scaffolding used in the various locations on the project site. The challee they gave themselves seemed to be to go as tall as possible without a collapse. This was not required, and the act was free of the service to the actual conservation work. Instead, it was a celebration of the growing skill and confidence.

An installation!

Mar 24, 2012

The happy consequence was this grand aerial shot, precious in a pre-drone era.

Mar 24, 2012 Or, the occasional flourish of the migrant plaster crew on a school construction site in NW Orissa...it is significant that in both cases, the players themselves know that play by its very nature is transient, and its practice occupies liminal spaces. The in-betweens. In its potential to transcend need, play reveals the possible and also what already stands as a structure or context. Play is sensed as an equalizer which momentarily removes the construction site’s natural divisions, creating ephemeral common grounds.

Feb 20 - Mar 24, 2015

The expectations of what looks and constitutes “finished” and questions of which technology and products constitute relevance in a particular situation or geography...whether time decays from day one, or whether materials are enriched by time.

“underconstruction?”

For example, a glossy finish on an office table made of wood (a noble material). Often the glossiness doesn’t give the opportunity for scratches to gain value.

Jan 15, 2018

Aug 18, 2014

Jan 02, 2018 Dec 16, 2014 Dec 01, 2017

Or, there is the tyranny of our expectations with a material.

Here, the locally sourced, natural and untreated wood - on floors, walls, ceilings, doors, sills, tables, chairs... - used in the “reformation” of an old boarding house into an agricultural vocational training building in Altmunster, Austria. It was also the base for the workshop on earthen materials and architecture I had mentioned earlier.

Unfinished made to behave as though it were glossy - installed not to age. The aesthetic or technical criteria are the ones, it seems, with which we evoke architecture instead of imagining them as resonant settings for situations of lived life. The building and its sustainable sourced materials became completely intolerant to any form of decay and detritus; the ideal condition being that the building continues to look as though it was new instead of it being about the ability of the built to let time reflect in things and of how far we can stretch the sense of it still being made, in a continuous present.

Under-construction is also a condition that extends to the culture around maintenance.

“under[constant]construction”

A construction and collection of memories, from the everyday rituals of taking care and tinkering to weekend DIYs and [annual] cycles of renewal.

Each of these conditions, part of the architectural project, are an opportunity for complexities in context to emerge, rather than attempting to freeze their fluidities in so far as accepted modes and moments of documentation.

This brings us to the issue of what can be documented, and what of disappearance, given that one of the most recurring definitions of live-ness is that it is fundamentally ephemeral.

“but is it the same ship?”

There is a condition within the practice of architecture that toys with our need for making visible the purity of our ideas and efforts. It is the renovation project.

In most cases the work dissolves or integrates in the way a transplanted organ must; both parties, the host and the transplant are at play here. In the integration, there is the disappearance of the architectural gesture...

Jun 16, 2015

...revealed in the subsequent gesture of the reconstituted whole. Clearly, I am not speaking of the glamorous “interiors project” here, but one where you get asked, “so what did you do exactly?”, or worse, “but is it even architecture?”.

Jul 01, 2015 But there is a proximity here, in that one has to deal with the complexities of an existing or found situation head-on. A renovation takes into account existing conditions, most often in a dire state, and with an economy of means (that may never find its way into lists and metrics of sustainable rating systems) reconstitute it into a form that works better, performs efficiently and makes the stitching of the old and the new as effortless as possible.

Jan 21, 2017

The previous set of slides were from the renvation of a youth arts organization (DAVA) in the urban peripheries of the Denver-Aurora metro region. The renovation of the existing facility made sense, given that it was important to remain in the neighborhood, and parts of the structure were in reasonable state.

Another example is one where we were rehabilitating a 5000 year old funerary structure in Abydos, Egypt.

Here, the goal has been to preserve the structure as a ruin, with new material limited to where necessary to stabilize existing wall such that the genesis of the structure and how it changes as histories are rubbed out and drawn over while traces of earlier versions (from early pharaohnic kingdoms, to coptic monks fleeing persecution north of the Mediterranean, to abandonement, to Arab raiders, pagan cults and scavanging early Egyptologists on quests to find glamorous tombs and remains...) continue to be clear.

Feb 02 - Mar 24, 2012

Mar 24, 2012 In documentation, what does one exclude?

“Proper” behaviour in the work of architecture is often expressed through our unquestioned reverance for silence. Its coupling with light institutes that a building’s qualities, and more importantly, its behaviour, is best revealed through shadows...subtle textural ones, deep volumetric ones...

“[mis]behaving”

...for light and shadow qualify space and form...

Nov 11, 2011 ...express materiality...

Jun 15, 2017 ...and mark (make visible) the passage of time...

Jun 15, 2017

Perhaps that is why there is an “in season” and an “off season”; a “right time” and a worng”, or at least an “unfortunate time” to document, and indeed comprehend, our built environment.

We hardly see moments of buildings in the monsoons, for example ...all damp and heaving under the moisture.

Jun 02, 2018

Or we feel cheated when an icon we have traveled to is under construction.

Jun 02, 2018 Jun 02, 2009 We try and edit out contexts we have become intolerant to, and treat them as the detritus of our times.

Jun 02, 2018 Jun 02, 2009 Aug 04, 2014 Joseph Brodsky writes, “the city of memory is empty, because for imagination it is easier to conjure architecture rather than human beings”. Architecture is meaningful only in the interaction and resonance with life - real, remembered or imagined...(as in this behaviour of the CEPT campus, as documented by a student in the monsoons of 2012).

Aug 20, 2012

Sept 09, 2015

Jan 31, 2018

Space, its meaning, is created by the interaction of the body and the ground...it is where you make contact with architecture in a foundational way; in the simplest and most intimate way...

...the pleasure, pain, comfort or revulsion... depending on what meets your feet.

“where did you leave your shoes?”

An architecture working from memory...that’s context! And what we have built now becomes part of that context and can no longer exist autonomously. The cycle begins again.

We design from what we remember. inventions do not exist in isolation (that a-ha moment). The connection between what we remember and our own present context...that is fertile ground. “meeting again”

I work alongside theatre-makers and storytellers to create conditions using the body to review, rethink and challenge our understanding of the built landscapes and the context of architecture. Working this way, using the body to both, record and examine, creates moments of being “held in place” yet at the same time loosens the embededness brought about by the familiarity of habit; a known place can be can be looked at anew, its physical characteristics and potentials revealed occasionally often disregarding representational ones.

A devised theatre workshop and performance situated in a building I designed (the youth arts organization, DAVA, mentioned earlier), where along with middle-school youth (the main users of the building) the building and spaces are a major part of the devising work and each situation in the “script” (little urban meditations around a theme) is informed by the built conditions.

The themes we work with for each such workshop of inhabitation and investigation is chosen to loosely scaffold the content of the devised plays, and is specific to the collaborating organization and the physical site. In the case of this workshop, at DAVA, the theme chosen was of “belonging”, creating an opportunity to investigate the vernacular inclusive for adolescent population discovering city structure for whom much of the experience within urban centres is one of disruption and dislocation.

The audience moves from location to location within the building. As they move, the production and the environment is constituted.

Another example is one situated in a community hospital’s pain management ward. Stories of pain and hope are set into corridors, hallways, exam rooms, and the architecture of the building itself becomes a creative partner to the participants. The audience experience, once again, is one of constituting and reconstituting the narrative as one moves between stories and locations.

Nov 27, 2017

Nov 27, 2017

May 21, 2017

A more scripted work (Antigone) located in the abandoned swimming pool of a local high school in Santa Fe, NM letting us, the audience, experience the spatiality of the pool, its topography, which otherwise gets hidden by water.

Apr 15, 2011

I encountered Tardieu through a lecture by Pallasma. A powerful provocation that has remained with me.

“let us assume a wall: what takes place behind it?” ~ Jean Tardieu

In the context of this lecture, one wonders if recording and registering the context becomes less about representing thought, and returns in the hands of the architect as an act of thinking.

© 2018 shubhra raje_built environments