THE IDEA OF SYMBIOSIS BETWEEN WATER AND HUMANS

Porous coral structure (https://peerj.com/articles/208/)

            The design of the expansion of Mumbai has to do with the idea of symbiosis    – long term interaction between two or more different biological species[1]-. This project aims to the creation of a beneficial symbiosis between humans and water, through a medium, which is the city fabric that it is proposed. Water is an element, not a living organism, but its’ ability of transforming, of flow or of changing its consistence according to environmental or physical parameters is something that could be translated as ‘living’ as there is not a stable condition. The effects in the city due to this unpredictability are concerning my research. Taking into consideration the upcoming floods and the projected sea level rise that is expected to occur in Mumbai, my project is rethinking previously used design methods that have created a boundary between water and human life. Today, this boundary leads to floods and pollution in the case of Mumbai. The purpose of the new city is to invite people and water to cooperate. In this project habitation will be based on water currents and flows, something that architecture in Mumbai should had already start doing, due to the significant destruction that the original unity of the seven islands has caused to the physical environment and to peoples’ lives.

            Is it necessary to create a boundary for water? I believe that blocking water flow can only cause problems. Water is an essential element for living organisms and especially for humans. So, why do our cities always try to block it away? With appropriate architectural design a symbiosis between water and humans, could be beneficial for both and for the city fabric. The new city that this project propose has the same purpose as the ‘typical’ city, that of protection. The difference is in the way that this will be accomplished.

            The expansion of the city will be in the water, due to many reasons. Water is part of Mumbaikers society since their first colonization there, as fishermen. However, the relationship between this two is doubtful regarded the quality of everyday life that is producing. They used to be fishermen’s, now they observe water as a sightseeing full of rubbish. They used to use it in their everyday activities, now they observed it from distance. The city after a flood is full of mud, which causes dirtiness and illnesses, before the reclamation physical water flow was filtrate the polluted water. Moreover, they used to have a physical ventilation system during the very high temperatures, now the atmosphere is full of smog. They used to wash their clothes in the river, now they wash them in the streets. The boundary that the reclamation causes between them and the water is the main reason for the existing conditions. The future expansion of the city should be in the water. Except from the already existing relationship between water and Mumbaikers, a second reason for this design proposal is the idea of ‘city efficiency’. Many urbanists claim that there is a threshold between expansion distance and efficiency, meaning the maximum distance from the city center in order -city, distance and time- to work beneficially for the economical and sociological growth of the city. As Alain Bertaud argues Mumbai’s’ unique geomorphology causes many problems in the city efficiency.                 -‘Because of the absence of bridges, the land area accessible at less than 25 km from the CBD is only 230 km2, as compared to 1523 km2 for Jakarta and 1864 km2 for Seoul. Because of its geographical location Mumbai has only 15% of the land available in Jakarta, which is also a sea port.’[2]-      Therefore, the expansion of Mumbai inside the radius of 25km from the city center is essential element for its urban growth. The 25km from the city center are composed from less land than water. Due to all the reasons that I mentioned above, the expansion inside the water is unavoidable.

            The design method that I propose is influenced from the Atolls found in Maldives, southwest of India. Their organic shapes have occurred due to the hydrodynamics of the water. Several small islands, instead of one big region will allow the water to flow freely in Mumbai. After the consideration of the hydrodynamics and the bathymetries of the creek and the Arabian Sea that surrounding Mumbai, I am proposing the expansion in the side of the Arabian Sea.  An expansion in the side of the creek will affect the water currents, resulting in similar problems that the city faces today. Moreover, shrinking the Creek of Mithi River, could lead in a fast flowing water current that could result in erosions so, in destruction of the land. Last, according to the bathymetries, the contours in the side of Arabian Sea are less than in the creek, which means that the height differences inside the sea are moderate. Therefore a construction for the side of the Sea is more effective.

            Most urban planning is concerned primarily with city organization. The proposing masterplan however, takes physical environment into consideration first, while the zoning of the city will occur according to its physical characteristics. The reason behind this proposal is the significant role that the physical environment and especially the water have in the formation of Mumbai and the every day citizens lives.  As I have already mention in my previous post treating nature with hardness will only result in problems, as the unpredictability of nature is something that none of the today constructions can come up against.  The proposing expansion takes into account that the Arabian Sea is actually part of the Indian Ocean, as a result strong waves could occasionally occur, which could lead in destructions. In order to avoid damage from the water, multiple layers of protection will be used that their characteristics will also create the zoning. Influenced from the atolls protection zoning, the first layer of protection will be a submerged continuous infrastructure that will mostly function as a wave breaker. There could be manufacture area, energy generator or even the port, zones that could survive semi submerged in the water. In the second layer of protection the development of the city will start. Influenced from coral reefs each island will be composed from semi submerged porous systems, so water can either pass inside or over it without blocking its flow. This porous system will be combined from multiple size openings. The openings are being used part for the freely water flow and part for the city structure. In the periphery they will function as a secondary wave breaker while they will also divide the physical flow of the water in multiple directions in order to slow down the strong water currents. In the center of the island the different size of the openings will arrange the zoning. Smaller openings that tend to create a compact land will create the infrastructure for public space, while larger openings will be used for building constructions. Buildings will attach to the openings  like corals are attaches to the reefs. They could be part submerged in the water and part on the surface of the island.

This system is similar to the infrastructure cities have today, the difference is that instead of building on the land the constructions will be on the water. In this way city expansion on the water could be developed without damaging the physical environment or blocking the water flow. Also the unite of the city construction – buildings, infrastructure- will be beneficial against the strong waves and water currents, a lesson learned also from the coral reefs structure. The islands size will be equal or smaller to the original 7 islands, because they had occurred from natural processes and their symbiosis with the water were successful. The connectivity between the islands will take place through submerged subways or bridges. This new sprawl design of the city of Mumbai is essential for its future development. The disurbanism that is introduced in this project will result in beneficial future for the city, as it will not only decongest the city center, but it will respect the physical environment and it will adapt to its characteristics.

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiosis

[2] http://alain-bertaud.com/AB_Files/AB_Mumbai_FSI_conundrum.pdf

ACTIVATE SUPER DENSITY

key words:

1.density

2.co-working and co-living

3.community

4.swarming

5.self-support circle
6.minimum living space and maximum community
7.Capsule Hotel

Dharavi has super density.As I mentioned in previous presentation, with only 2 sq km, over 1 million people habitants there. With same population, it's the 9th biggest city in the united states, that is Dallas, which has a land 500 times than Dharavi.

Population density always regarded as poor living condition, occupancy rate is always a important status in evaluating living condition. But Dharavi has proven us that density can also give us great opportunities in achieving lively neighborhoods and become productive.

Study with Dharavi, we first want to know, how Dharavi is capable of containing such unbelievable population. I think their spaces have been assumed super flexible, nearly nothing is permanent.They just have very general separations, and then spaces have been used in different functions on different times.It can be the place to treat the foods, after dinner the same places can be beds for 3-4 people.They even don't have permanent beds for all, kids have to sleep together to fit in the house.
the room near the entrance is regarded as pottery making places and also pottery selling store,when working hour were over.It become the living room for the whole family to watch TV.

Then we can learn from the life in Dharavi.
Dharavi is in the heart of Mumbai, which is a metropolitan in India.It's hard for us to imaging why this would happen, but the thing is. so large a population lived in Dharavi, work in Dharavi, shop in Dharavi have festival activities in Dharavi, Dharavi is like a superblock that contains all the basic needs. Compare to Dharavi, young professions in Manhattan doesn't seem to be able to achieve this convenience in such a low pay.If they want to work on Manhattan islands, they can either choose to live on the island which is super expensive or live outside Manhattan which would take really a long time to transport to work.

I'm now designing a "Modern Slum" on Manhattan island, the site is Hudson yards.Which used to be the place where trains kept.Nowadays the developers bought the airight above the train trails, they decided to create a new dock over the trails and build skyscrapers on the dock.I want to transform the spaces in Hudson yard development into a Co-living and Co-working space. Use the principles learnt from Dharavi to make it extreme, and also have this self-support system. I'm designing the minimum living space and maximize the public space, I think the most recent micro-housing are not real micro-housing because they just built small envelopes that have everything inside, they just scaled or replaced by pre-fabricated materials.What I think of micro-housing is more a component a group of rooms, each cell doesn't even have living room, because the function of living rooms can be deconstructed and distributed to Starbucks or supported by public sharing spaces inside each component.

THE DE-INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF HOUSING

Golden Lane (Alison & Peter Smithsons)

Leisure and work are inseparable terms: one stands in for the absence of the other. As part of the well-greased capitalist machinery, leisure time is the only alternative to working time. Capitalist nations have not only invested in improving the productivity of society’s working hours but have also designed with great emphasis the leisure time of the working masses. In this sense, leisure should be understood as the “non-work” period of time carefully calculated to make the working masses the most productive. Leisure is needed to survive work.

The architectural exploration towards a large-scale social recreation is part of the state’s will to regulate leisure. Capitalist nations have invested heavily in holiday resorts and infrastructures with the aim to channelize the surfeit of non-working time of the masses. Tourism then has to be seen as the consequence of an economical system that simultaneously implied the standardization of a way of life.  From Thomas Cook to Club Med, tourism has been instrumentalized to offer a fictitious temporary space of alternative. Spaces that seem aside from the socio-political authority but which are in fact at the core of a system based on the inequalities between developed and developing worlds

If we look to the global phenomenon of tourism through these lenses, it might be easier to understand why the emergence of AirBNB is so disturbing. It is not that AirBnB provides a more distributed geolocation of tourism with 70% of the rooms offered outside the over-crowded Tourist Districts; it is not that guests usually stay an average of almost +3 nights in compared to traditional modes of tourism accommodation; it is not that guests and hosts enjoy or suffer from a new kind of interaction - all the points just mentioned are in fact advantages that City Councils would like to embrace.  If AirBnB is so disturbing, it is simply because it evidences the failure of one of the main pillars of capitalism: the housing policy.

As a principle, capitalism required a standardized working force with uniform character to assure high productivity. Housing was the device to assure such uniformity, that is, in words of Riken Yamamoto, it was hoped that standardized housing would create standardized families and continue to re-produce a standardized working force. With such an intention, housing was converted into a facility; it became institutionalized. With the premise of “one house = one family”, housing was packaged into independent units around the structure of a family. The social contradictions of society (elder, handicapped or any other “unproductive” mode of living) were treated as problems inside “one house = one family”, a system that lessened the burden of the state considerably. This is the main reason why this model of collective housing, the CIAM model, became widespread throughout the world.

AirBnB can’t be designed. It is just a mediator: its success lays on the flagrant vacancies that an expired housing model is continuously creating. Almost 80% of AirBnB hosts offer rooms in the apartment they are living in.  AirBnB only retains 7% of each transaction that goes directly to the pockets of the local citizens. For the first time, tourism has been democratized. AirBnB has signaled the end of a status quo, the failure of standardization. At the very end, societies consist of single mothers, temporary migrants, international students, travelling workers, lonely elders, refugees, divorced, …Rooms in apartments remain as empty as the back seats of a car. However, is there today a spatial model able to replace the “one house-one family” system? The necessity of a new typology of housing is more urgent than ever.

IMAGE + IMAGINATION = AGENCY

Athens as an Island (Point Supreme Architects)

The city has always been the expression of conflicting impulses, an eternal unresolved conflict whose solution seems only possible through its destruction. In the words of Burton Pike, the city is, by any definition, a social image where the conscious meets the unconscious and the imaginations of its citizens collide with the empirical city. The visible and the invisible coexist; stones and dreams are inseparable as soon as they become lived spaces that shape collective imaginaries.

The city is incomprehensible to its inhabitants. On one hand, the direct experience of the physical city can only be fragmentary even if one contemplates it from above. On the other, the unconscious city becomes an infinite number of memories and reveries impossible to collect. For its complexity, the city has always required a sort of simplification. In between reality and its re-presentation there is a whole limbo. And this limbo is habited by the imagination.

Along history the re-presentation of the city has been a recurrent and fascinating topic. Literature, painting and photography have incessantly reduced the city to words and images. Nowadays the digital revolution is offering again new gazes to the contemporary metropolis. No matter if it is a novel of Balzac, a photography of Berenice Abbott, the film Naked City of Jules Dassin or a view from Google Earth, the city has always required a representation. And every representation is subjective as well as its interpretation. If no real city can be grasped in its totality by any single person, then the way we conceive a city is ultimately a subjective work of the imagination, a urban imaginary.

What is important to consider here is that these urban imaginaries are not just fictional representations of the city but essential parts of its reality. The way we imagine a city is directly related to the way we act in it. Following Appadurai understanding of imagination as a social practice, imagination becomes central to all forms of agency in the new global order. If fantasy implies fiction, imagination implies action. Especially when collective, it becomes the space of contestation in which the individuals seek to annex the new global conditions. The impact of mass-media in the global world have allowed diasporic groups of people to imagine things together. The global flow of images and information has created diasporic communities of sentiment with no sense of place. Readers of a newspaper, members of NGOs or religious adepts are examples of these transnational communities that share an imagination.  When Appadurai claims that active role of imagination means that these communities are capable of moving from shared imagination to the collective action.

The creation of the image of a city is therefore a catalyst of action. In the way it arises different kinds of imaginations, it implies different types of agency. Therefore, images and imaginations have been strictly controlled by the nation-state to silence difference. However, electronic mass-mediation and transnational mobilization have broken the strict surveillance of the nation-state over the imagination. Imagination has become not only a cultural fact, but a political tool.

TYPOLOGIES

I want to look at typologies of communal living at both the individual building and the neighborhood/settlement scale. I will look at that larger scale through the lens of refugee housing. It is amazing how similar the layout of refugee camps is to the layout of military camps. Even in terms of facilities, they are fairly similar (check-in/administration, medical, sanitation, power). Above is a picture of the growth of Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. Here you can see how regimented they start out as and how organic their layout becomes, even in the distribution of services. Part of this is due to an influx of popultation growth that exceeds the space limitations needed to keep it regimented.

I began looking at how the typical layout for refugee camps could be staged in a way that would allow it to transition from temporary to permanent at both the programmatic and structural level (at this stage, with no particular innovation to the system). At stage one, the necessary programs include administration, emergency medical, waste disposal, and housing as defined by its structural elements. The elements used within the housing and other structures are walls for function of privacy and roof for function of shelter from the elements. The utilites provided (water, latrines) exist at a communal level and are not accessed through the individual shelters. The layout of shelters in stage one, is also a simple open floor plan without any differentiation of rooms within the individual "building."

Stage two would bring ewlctricity and water to the individual shelter, requiring piping and infrastructure to make this feasible. They would most likely be laid in the pedestrian pathways that weave between the shelters and demarcate regions. Structural, walls would be begin to have a structural function beyond privacy and temporary protection from the elements. This means that walls would have foundations and and footings that allow them to be load-bearing. This would still allow a degree of mobility and thus impermanence. Precast foundations can be set into the group, and then with proper machinery can be moved as one unit or dismantled. There are also foundations that rely on jacks that can support a building but can be moved when necessary. These are most often used with mobile homes or with fabric/inflatable structures. 

Finally, stage three would bring slabs--an element much more difficult too move and almost always rendered unusable when its (re)moved. This provides a foundation that walls can be structurally bound to, and thus the permanence filters up through the system. Programmatically, a more permanent stage renders a more heterogeneous mixture of program types, specifically with the opportunity for income-producing spaces, ie small business incubators. Administration grows to include municipal services, specifically more waste removal and transportation. Finally, public facilities (often a luxury in emergency situations) are brought into the fabric of the community, including schools, a hospital, and recreation.

At the individual building scale, I would like to look at a typology particular to India: the chawl. I had looked in the past at Soviet examples of communal housing. Most had linear arrangements of minimal living quarters with circulation down the center. Communal facilities such as the kichen and dining area residing on the first or top floor, not dispersed within the living areas. Communal programs included organized childcare, libraries, and sports facilities. The Indian chawl is a 4-5 story building with 10-20 tenements (kholis) per story. Latrines and kitchens are communal, as are the balconies by use. They become the social area of the building and represent the lifestyle embodied in the chawls. The first floor is most often commercial, with business owners living above. 

By focusing on what structural elements occur in which stages, innovation can occur in the structure, its relation to living space, and its transition to the next stage. What I intend to explore in terms of materiality are several conditions. 1) Walls that double as foundations. This usually occurs with mass, such as dirt filled tires or earthbags. 2) Foundations that double as living spaces. The example I found for this were large fabric and structural frames that use shipping containers are foundations. 3) Finally and most promising, I want to look at temporary walls for a first floor living space that can transition into a permanent foundation for a second floor living space and allow the first to be used either as communal or income producing. 

MEMORY MACHINE

Etoile Metro Station in Paris (1895)

Commute, work, sleep. This triad can be seen as the symbol of contemporary alienation.

The idea of individual life is ultimately born from the constraints that apply to all social life. Every day, everywhere, individual itineraries are imposed to everyone. Each person distinctively experiences how to relate their paths and to each other.

If we consider metro stations, the physical dislocation to the subterranean realm immediately inserts an additional layer of estrangement. However, simply revisiting certain specific itineraries can evoke names and sensations that are good enough for distracted travelers suddenly to realize that their inner geology and subterranean geography converges at certain points.

Certain stations and tunnels are so associated with exact moments, that the metro map functions as an individual memory machine, a foldable mirror on which we can find reflections of the past and recall intimate shivers in the accumulated stratums of our memories.

Then, it is necessary to identify of what is comprehended here through the concept of place. On one hand, there is the idea of a place endowed with different values by people, in opposition to a space unprovided of any meaning. On the other, the concept seems to attract the idea of occupation by the people as opposed to the image of an inhospitable place without human activity.

As a consequence of historical neglect with the space qualification of urban infrastructure, these portions of the territory have eventually magnified their negative characteristics as the lack of identity and value.

The infrastructures of mobility are characterized by transient passage, being initially devoid of any sentimental or historical value. However, is it possible to awaken a desire to actually be in an infrastructural space, not only go through it? Which relations can infrastructure establish with individuals, to ultimately catalyze its urban potential?

Homo Mobilis

This time is not another utopian tale. We don’t need to build New Babylons for the homo ludens, nor a ticket for the Barnum Junior Magnificent City. The modern subject, the real modern subject is finally on the move. Mass-mobility has become the common denominator of the global world. Images, technology, capital, people…everything is moving at an ever increasing higher frequency and speed. A new ethnoscape has emerged where human motion becomes embedded in our daily lives. If the temporary home is the hotel, then the city of the homo mobilis will be the City of hotels.

Mobility has become unavoidable. If not literally, mobility is inevitably part of our imagination. Television, cinema, literature are now globalized commodities that have triggered all kinds of fantasies. The massive flow of mass-mediated images creates the constant desire to move. Whether it is real or imagined, mobility has democratized.

While nations are suppressing borders and mass-media monopolize our imagination, the old flâneur can no longer remain in the arcades. In this shifting world where present is constantly past, uncertainty is the new condition. There is a feeling of disorientation, a constant fear for the unknown that comes with the new urban experience. Confronting strangers has become a habit. The stranger of Simmel is no longer the exception but the most prominent figure of our contemporary cities. We live in a City of Strangers.

Confronting uncertainty has become our daily practice. Susan Sontag expresses how tourists deal with this feeling of the uncertain: “to take possession of space in which they are insecure…the very activity of taking a picture is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation….Unsure of other responses, they take a picture “.  Unconsciously, iphones in hand, we are all becoming tourists. The city is no more than a City of Tourists.

Ready to capture the city in motion, we gaze upon everything as a sign of itself. When seeing a musician playing in the streets of Salzburg, a woman dancing tango in Buenos Aires or a couple kissing in Paris, we believe to be gazing upon the timeless melomaniac Austria, the traditional street life of Buenos Aires or the romantic Paris. Globalization has democratized the practices that before were exclusive to tourist. The proliferation of tourist sites across the world is happening at the same pace than everyday sites of activity get re-designed in “tourist” mode. In the panic of forgetting, the whole city has been converted into a museum and while doing so, its inhabitants have been simultaneously transformed into collectors of gazes, into tourists. Quoting Park, “in making the city, man has remade himself”.

The joint effect of media and migration has narrowed the existing gap that traditionally has separed the tourist and the local. A new global hybrid emerges: the homo mobilis.

MATERIALITY OF DIFFERENCE

In looking at the manifestation of structural elements in different stages of permanence, I will be looking at the following elements.
- structural frame (columns, girders, trusses)
- bearing walls (exterior & interior)
- nonbearing walls and partitions (exterior & interior)
- floor construction (support beams, joists)
- roof construction
- foundations

Shigeru Ban has become the leading architect working to master the architectural transition between the temporary and the permanent. What is most interesting about his work is that while he has spanned varying levels of permanence, he does so with variations and additions to primarily the same material. He has primarily worked with paper tubes for the walls and roof structure. What has varied is the materials used for foundations and thus flooring.

As a wall structure, the paper tubes have been used in both temporary and permanent buildings as both walls, roofs, and columns. In more impermanent structures, the foundations have ranged from beer crates held together with zip ties to wood planks. Floor structures have ranged from typical wood joists with plywood covers to indigenous mud floors over plywood. While most structures have an open floor plan, curtains and storage units have been used as interior partitions in some examples. While the paper tube roof structure has been the same at the first two levels, the covering ranges from a tarp to layered plastic and woven matting to corrugated plastic. 

While more permanent structures still use paper tubes as walls, roofs, and columns, they are reinforced with rebar, plasteer of paris, and concrete pedestals of foundations. The key to permanence seems to lie in the types of footings used. For temporary buildings built on concrete slabs and foundations, Ban has examples of them being used for the foundation of later permanent buildings.

In looking at some of Ban's other work, it provides some interesting examples of how structure can organize layout. He had two that I would like to test and develop further. One was seen in his curtain wall house. The permanent structure was further within the layout. The edges, which could be open, can also be enclosed in a non-load bearing structure. The Hayek Center used a similar strategy but moved from permanent enclosures within the larger structure of the building beginning at the top, leaving the bottom to become increasingly more open with the potential to be filled in later. 

MATERIALIZING THE GHOSTS OF CAPITALISM

Photo taken with iPhone
Downtown Manhattan facing the 9/11 Memorial 

After briefly looking into typologies of control, this post will try to concisely review the various forms in which these typologies were materialized. What were the materials most appealing to the corporate architects that designed the mega-malls and spaces of managerial power and control? And why were they found to be appealing? In Goss’s study on mall typologies, he makes an interesting observation writing:

“Bridgewater Common in Bridgewater, New Jersey, for example, has three distinct leasing districts designed to appeal to specific market segments and, by implication, not to appeal to others: The Common Collection contain upscale boutiques and includes marble floors, gold leaf signage, brass accents, individual wooden seating, and extensive foliage; The Promenade contains stores catering to home and family needs, storefronts have a more conservative look, and aluminum and steel features and seating are predominant; The Campus contains stores catering to a “contemporary clientele” with dynamic window displays, plastic laminate, ceramic tiling, bright colors, and neon signage (Rathbun 1990,19-21). Almost every shopping center marks the distinction between high-end and low-end retail by such environmental cues” (Goss 1993)

Goss argues that, apart from the segregation made between the exterior and interior of the wall, where only people admitted in are the ones allowed in by the security; there is a strong felt discrimination within the walls of the mall, specifically between each level. He further elaborates on this point explaining:

“Within the shopping center itself, social segregation is reproduced through separation of specific functions and of class-based retail districts. Fiske et al. (1987, 110) describe an example of the vertical structuring of mall space according to the social status of the targeted consumers, and while the exact homology is seldom realized so neatly elsewhere, interior spaces are carefully structured to produce appropriate micro-contexts for consumption.” (Goss 1993)

Goss further expands on the use of reflective glasses which, “add to the decorative multiplication of images and colors, double the space and the shopping crowd, and reflect shoppers, asking them to compare themselves with the manikins and magical commodities on display…” (Goss, 1993). However, considering the date in which Goss’ study was made, various changes have taken shape within the realms of aesthetics, technology, and the economy. What may have been used to lure shoppers in the 1990s may even be viewed as unattractively outdated today. Looking closely at the award-winning mall Phoenix Market City in Mumbai designed and completed in 2013 by the architectural firm Benoy, the materials predominantly used are concrete, glass and steel on the exterior and interior with polished mirrored surfaces that wrap the stacked escalators, a total of 5 atriums with glass and steel skylights highlight these vertical circulation cores. Interestingly, looking at this recent model, built exactly 20 years after Goss’s paper, the use of glass and mirrors has withstood the test of time. In Utopia’s Ghost, Reinhold Martin delves deep into the implications of the use of mirrors in architecture he writes:

“…an architecture of mirrors does not merely reflect, whether directly or through a sort of disciplinary transliteration, the protocols of new socioeconomic arrangements. It helps to produce those arrangements, in space and time. […] It belongs to late capitalism […] It means that with postmodernism, architecture’s immanence is secured by its status as an artwork: as an Architecture, that is.” (Martin 2010 p.106)

Martin elaborates further writing:

“…these materials do not simply represent the network (referring to the “global network”); in combination with many others, they are the network, both as representation and as things. Like the processes that produce them, the exchanges that consume them, and the arrangements that organize them, they are concrete, tangible. The tricks with mirrors and other real materials performed by corporate globalization produce the illusion that there is an illusion; the illusion that their materiality is illusory, unreal, derealized. The illusion that there is an illusion – neither a double negative nor a tautology – also describes what a new stage in commodity fetishism might actually look like: the inability simply to look at something directly, rather than attempt to see through it. This mode is distraction draws us in even as it keeps us out.” (Martin 2010, p.121-122)

This terrifying and highly evocative observation could sum up the notion of what a shopping mall on a large parcel of an “island” meters away from a slum in Mumbai represents. Which drives one to question how do we escape this vicious circle? What will break this loop? How will this new re-interpretation of a marketplace/mall/public space materialize? Perhaps this will seem reductionist but a quick look at the locally available materials would be a good start, firstly because the construction of the building would be carried out by locals who already have developed the skills of fabrication and secondly, for the simple reasons of sustainability in terms of transportation and distribution. 

CONCEPT AND CONTEXT

Hidin in the City, Liu Bolin, 2011

"to be a body, is to be tied to a certain world...our body is not primarily in space: it is of it." – Merleau-Ponty

So far I have mentioned that a large part of my work will deal with camouflage and also introduced some of the types of the techniques used in the World Wars and in architecture.  However, I still need to provide the conceptual framework for the use of the term.

Camouflage is normally associated with the act of becoming invisible or hiding, which is not my goal for the architectural strategy.  For me, it will be the only first step, an important one though, for the immersion of the building in his environment. An act of absorbing the context and developing its own identity from it. Laura Levin further develops this approach:

“I suggest alternative ways of reading camouflage: as a political critique of structures of visibility; as a mischievous tactic of infiltration; as an empathetic response to the other; and as a form of eco-activism. “

In her book Performing Ground (2014), Levin challenges artists and theorists to understand the different bodies that compose the background in performing practice. For her, the recent impulse in performing arts of blurring the edges between the main figure and the ground should be seen as a productive and permeable relationship between the self and the world. She proposes that this blending relationship makes the figure gain (instead of losing) support and political perspective.

It reminded me of the paradoxical way in which Geneviève Brisac described Liu Bolin’s presence in each of his scenes of the book Hiding in the City: invisible and/or invincible? Fragile and/or firm?