Rupali Gupte

Of Corrosions, Continuums, Refractions, Seepages and Entanglements: Towards an Architecture of Life

The Takshila Lecture on Architecture and Society is delivered by an eminent professional / academician that addresses the growing disparity between the practice and pedagogy of Architecture in India, and the realities of our social, cultural and economic contexts. The lecture and the following dialogue aim to challenge the status- quo with a conviction that an open and honest conversation on the state of practice will instigate positive change.

The 2022 Takshila Lecture on Architecture and Society was delivered by Rupali Gupte at Arthshila Ahmedabad on October 16th, 2022.


1. The Many Ways of Imagining Space
Fig 1. Home as a Landscape – Warli Imaginations of home (Dinesh Barap).

House as a Continuum
Strokes of different densities and intensities, short wavering lines, long thin ones, bursts of sprightly lines, dots and pochés made from rice paste mixed with acrylic paint, form force fields that gently sway on a canvas prepared with mud and paint, to create a tableau. At the lower left corner of the painting is a house made with ephemeral material, drawn with thin delicate lines, showing the logic of its construction. This is a wattle and daub structure made with bundling together branches of the karvi plant that flowers once in eight years. The forest dwellers forage it but also worship it as the ‘karvi devta, the god of karvi’. The impermanence of the house in the drawing is further reinforced with the agility of the birds and animals around that seem to be in a ballet with the winds blowing through. The path that emerges from this house is thin, about shoulder width of the stick figure walking along it and a little more consolidated than the brown mucky terrain around but porous enough to let the water percolate through it. The central space is occupied by a lake in which turtles, crocodiles, snakes and shoals of fish swim gracefully in tandem with the rhythmic movement of its waters. The house is small and occupies a very small part of the painting but the home – it seems is much larger, encompassing the entire landscape. This house appears ephemeral, made with the same intensity of the landscape around, suggesting that it will soon become one with it, only to be rebuilt for a continued inhabitation. The idea of the home here seems to adhere to ideas of impermanence, incompleteness, imperfection and a lack of private property. On the right side is another completely different house. It is the house of the colonial forest officer. The lines in the painting here become bolder, darker, thicker, suggesting more robust materials and a degree of permanence. The materials themselves do not seem to breathe, requiring definitive openings in the form of windows cut into solid walls. The house seems separate from its surroundings, self-contained, reinforcing ideas of permanence, completeness, perfection and a sense of private property. On the terrace of the house is the colonial officer surveying the landscape with his cartographic gaze. This same epistemic thinking is also at work, creating a dam on the lake, in which the community is rendered as construction labour. The sun, the mythological mother, occupies the upper right corner watching this transformation. The painting is made by Dinesh Barap, a young artist who resides inside the Borivali National Park in Mumbai in the Navpada settlement. It deploys the art of Warli painting he has learnt from his grandmother. While the painting follows the narrative turn1 that Warli painting has taken from its basic an iconic visual form, used in sacred paintings, made during marriages and other rituals, it also shows two divergent epistemes of knowledge and ways of thinking of space. The colonial house professes a container idea of space that reinforces notions of private property, while the Warli house is part of a spatial continuum, where inside and outside, public and private, built and unbuilt coalesce to produce a spatial imagination that challenges the former. (Fig 1)  

[1] Yashodhara Dalmia (1998: 35) writes about how “in the 1970s the entire tradition of the Warli area was transformed to suit the needs of individual artists’ own expression. This required a radical alteration in consciousness, and the catalyst was brown paper and white paint. Released from the ritual needs of wall paintings, the painters and more specifically Jivya Soma Mashe began to paint lively scenes of human activity in fields, forests and at home”. Jivya Soma Mashe had in many ways initiated the narrative turn in Warli painting. 

Manoharpur Palace
When we were curating the exhibition ‘When is Space’ Conversations in Contemporary Architecture in India at the Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur in 2018, we invited 30 spatial practitioners including architects, artists, planners and others to present their expositions on the production of space. Being located in Jaipur and in Jawahar Kala Kendra, the curation set these 30 practices in an anachronistic encounter with two other contextual spatial provocations: one on the city-making principles of Sawai Jai Singh, the 18th century city builder and the second on the typological experiments of Charles Correa, the architect of Jawahar Kala Kendra. Two rooms were set up as provocations through which each of the 30 practices could rethink their own spatial arguments. The Jaipur room as it was called was created through an assemblage of drawings from the City Palace Archive, models from the Jantar Mantar the astronomical laboratory of Jai Singh, the portfolio of Swinton Jacob, the PWD officer who was commissioned by Jai Singh to make drawings of the buildings in Jaipur and several other material evidences from the archives of Sir JJ College of Architecture, which showed how Swinton Jacob’s portfolio influenced architectural thinking. In the exhibition we asked, “how were all those sophisticated buildings in Jaipur made”? What were the drawings that produced these buildings? We found two drawings in the City Palace Archive that gave us an insight into this. One drawing was that of the Manoharpur Palace. This drawing we realised, is a working drawing, from the various marks and annotations we saw on it. Some annotations were instructions to workers with specifications of the kind of mortar mixes and the costs involved in transportation.

Others were poems and notes on the proportioning system. The drawing itself was a combination of plan and elevation views with annotations for entry points, movement, trees, ornaments etc. This was more like a script, which could be interpreted in multiple ways. Here the architect was not a singular individual but a plethora of people who contributed to the making of the building through a distributive logic. The singular figure of the modern architect was yet to be born. Here space is imagined using the logic of the narrative painting as continuous, imagining spatial flows; sequential, choreographing movement, as synoptic, where the ground is lifted to reveal the diagram of spatial types (in this case the idea of nestling spaces). (Fig 2)   

The second drawing is that of the Madhavendra Palace in the Nahargarh fort in Jaipur. At first glance the drawing seems to be drawn through an orthographic logic. However one soon realises that the drawing is square in proportion, as opposed to the actual building which is rectangular and that in the drawing, the X and Y axes are not at the same scale. There is another logic operating here, which is not a cartographic one. It is a diagram, where the communication is a set of rules that the co-producers of the building have set up for themselves. Here the imagination of space seems to be produced through an understanding of an architectural type consisting of multiple aggregations of a unit space, each unit composed of smaller spaces around an open court for each queen, separated by secret movement corridors for the king to traverse, no wider than the width of the king himself. Here body, pleasure, event and space refract and come together in unstable ways, to produce a spatial imagination that has multiple continuously re-forming referents. (Fig 3)

A series of bi-annual journals published by Matter in collaboration with H & R Johnson (India) on Contemporary Architecture and Design in India. The books chronicle and document ideas and work of some of the most innovative designers from India. The 200-page journal is a compilation of drawings, essays, dialogues and editorial on projects of many scales and typologies.

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