INDIAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS - NAGPUR CENTRE 7th PROF. S A DESHPANDE STUDIO DESIGN COMPETITION - 2016
aydream ouse D h /deɪd i:m/ noun 1. Gasto Ba hela d s The Poeti s of “pa e, a series of pleasant thoughts that distract one's attention from the present. is a philosophical exploration of home. "she was lost in a daydream" verb 1. indulge in a daydream. "stop daydreaming and pay attention"
If I e e asked to a e the hief e efits of the house, Ba hela d ote i The Poetics Of Space, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to d ea i pea e. C O N T E N T S Part I
01. A a idged, sta ato o pilatio of Gasto Ba hela d s e u ial ook - THE POETICS OF SPACE 02. There is an emphatic imperative for this project; the extraordinary question, HOW DO I ‘EP‘E“ENT THI“ P‘OJECT? The efo e, a po tfolio of Massi o “ ola i s d a i gs 03. Another quintessential imperative is the AXONOMETRIC DRAWING - the perfect drawing 04. There is also a section on SUBTERANIA, that begs participation in the scheme of things 05. A portfolio of some smart drawings 06. Franz Kafka - his writing is peripheral to the project. 07. Some explanations essential to the project 08. An ode to the project by Dev Bildikar
09. Some readings / Some films to watch
Part II (to be released on 08.01.2017)
10. A rather loose construct on how the project is to be comprehended 11. Some Pointers essential to the project 12. Instructions daydream house DEV BILDIKAR 2017
"I wanted not only a room of my own, but a room of my own making," the self-described "radically unhandy" Pollan writes. "I wanted to build this place myself. It was right around this time that I stumbled upon a French writer named Gaston Bachelard. If I were asked to name the chief benefits of the house, Bachelard wrote in The Poetics Of Space, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. An obvious idea, perhaps, but in it I recognized at once what it was I d lost and dreamed of recovering." 01. The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
The Poetics of Space (French: La Poétique de l'Espace) is a 1958 book by Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard applies the method of phenomenology to architecture basing his analysis not on purported origins (as was the trend in enlightenment thinking about architecture) but on lived experience of architecture. He focuses especially on the personal, emotional response to buildings both in life and in literary works, both in prose and in poetry. He is thus led to consider spatial types such as the attic, the cellar, drawers and the like. Bachelard implicitly urges architects to base their work on the experiences it will engender rather than on abstract rationales that may or may not affect viewers and users of architecture. Gaston Bachelard is a French poet, philosopher, scientist and phenomenologist who wrote the book The Poetics of Space, a phenomenological interrogation into the meaning of spaces which preoccupy poetry. Intimate spaces such as a house, a drawer, a night dresser, and spaces of wide expansion such as vistas and woods. For Bachelard this direct relation of poetry to reality intensifies the reality of perceived objects, i agi atio augments the values of ealit , Bachelard asserts that poetry is directed, at one and the same time, both inwards and outwards, figuratively linking ideas of inside and outside which is so familiar to anyone dealing with the theory of space. Discovering the work of Bachelard and his use of poetry and the poetic image to examine our way of being in the world, our lived space, provides a stark but welcome contrast to the common understanding of space as Euclidean, an empty, inert distance that gains life only through the projections of human subjects. Euclidean space is characterized by boundaries between insides and outsides, however Bachelard gives primacy to a living space that is simultaneously inside and outside.
Central to the work is the phenomenological object of the house/home. Bachelard determines that the house has both unity and complexity, it is made out of memories and experiences, each room stirs different sensations and yet it promotes a unified, intimate experience of living. Home objects for Bachelard are charged with mental experience, and with every habitual action we open endless dimensions of our existence. But any doctrine of the imaginary is necessarily a philosophy of excess.
Three or four decades ago a book entitled The Poetics of Space could hardly fail to stir the architectural imagination. First published in French in 1957 and translated into English in 1964, Gaston Ba hela d s philosophical meditation on oneiric space appeared at a moment when phenomenology and the pursuit of symbolic and archetypal meanings in architecture seemed to open fertile ground within the desiccated culture of late modernism. We are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical fo s, Bachelard wrote in a chapter entitled House and Universe. A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space. In lyrical chapters on the topog aph of our intimate ei g —of nests, drawers, shells, corners, miniatures, forests, and above all the house, with its vertical polarity of cellar and attic—he undertook a systematic study, or topoa al sis, of the spa e we love. Although Bachelard was specifically concerned with the psychodynamics of the literary image, architects saw in his excavation of the spatial imaginary a counter to both technoscientific positivism and abstract formalism, as well as an alternative to the schematicism of the other emerging intellectual tendency of the day, structuralism. In his book Existence, Space and Architecture (1971), Christian Norberg-Schulz, the most prolific and long-term proponent of a phenomenological architecture, asserted that fu the research on architectural space is dependent upon a better understanding of existential spa e, citing Ba hela d s Poetics of Space together with Otto Friedrich Boll o s Mensch und Raum (1963), the chapter on space in Maurice Merleau-Po t s The Phenomenology of Perception (1962; original French, 1945), and two key works by Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1962; German, 1927) and the essay Building Dwelling Thinking (1971; German, 1954), as fundamental texts. Yet if Ba hela d s phenomenological orientation was already evident before the Second World War, the philosophy of science—the subject of his initial formation—remained a central preoccupation throughout his career. To read only The Poetics of Space is therefore to miss his originality with respect to the philosophical tradition from which he emerged, as well as the historical specificity of his development. One must consider his work on the creative imagination together with his writings on science and rationality to appreciate the dialectic that informs his thought. Indeed, in a rereading of Bachelard today, it is the interrelationship between science and poetry, experiment and experience, that seems to have the most radical potential, while his well-known vision of the oneiric house, with its rather nostalgic and essentialist world view, comes across as historically dated. In his own time, Bachelard (1884–1962) was a remarkable intellectual figure, reputedly a reader of six books a day, and author of twenty-three at the time of his death, not counting his scores of essays, prefaces, and posthumous fragments. At the Sorbonne, where he occupied the chair of history and philosophy of science from 1940 to 1955, he was a beloved pedagogue whose flowing beard, earthy accents, and elevated flights of thought made him something of a guru. Born into a family of modest shopkeepers and shoemakers in a provincial town in the idyllic countryside of Champagne about 200 miles southeast of Paris, he initially intended to pursue a career in engineering. After three years in the trenches of the First World War, however, he changed his sights to philosophy, eventually moving to Paris, where he obtained a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1927 with two dissertations, one on the acquisition of scientific knowledge by approximation and the other on the thermodynamics of solids. Over the next decade he produced eight more volumes dealing with the epistemology of knowledge in various sciences, becoming increasingly preoccupied with the dangers of a priori thinking and questions of objectivity and experimental evidence. In L E périe e de l espa e dans la physique contemporaine (1937), confronting the philosophical implications of Ei stei s monumental breakthrough in physics and Heise e g s uncertainty principle, Bachelard took up the contradictions between Des a tes s and Ne to s concepts of physical space as empirical, locational, and stable, and the abstract, counter-experiential constructs of space-time being theorized by 20th-century microphysics. Ba hela d s inquiry into the revolutionary character of the new scientific mind little prepared his colleagues for the unconventional turn his work was to take at the end of the 1930s. Influenced by psychoanalysis and surrealism, two books, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938) and Lautréamont (1939), signaled a shift in his focus from physical science to the phenomena of consciousness, from the axis of objectivization to that of subjectivity. With The Psychoanalysis of Fire—a book in which Bachelard set out to uestio e e thi g, to escape from the rigidity of mental habits formed by contact with familiar e pe ie es —he initiated a series of investigations into the psychic meanings of the four cosmic elements, conceived as constituting the repertory of poetic reverie, the ate ial imagination. The project of discerning a loi des quatre éléments would preoccupy him until his death, resulting in a suite of remarkable volumes on fire, earth, air, and water. In Lautréamont, another excursion into the domain of depth psychology—more Jungian than Freudian, as noted by Deleuze and Guattari, admirers of the book—Bachelard set out to study the phenomenology of aggression in the wild, a i alizi g imagery of the 19th-century Uruguayan poet Isidore Ducasse, author of Les Chants de Maldoror, one of the sacred texts of the surrealists (and later of the Cobra group, on whom Bachelard was to be deeply influential). “If one doesn’t put one’s reason at stake in an experiment, the experiment is not worth attempting.” - Gaston Bachelard in Le Surrationalisme 1936
As Bachelard acknowledged in The Psychoanalysis of Fire, The axes of poetry and of science are opposed to one another from the outset. All that philosophy can hope to accomplish is to make poetry and science complementary, to unite them as two well-defined opposites. Yet what profoundly links Ba hela d s philosophy of knowledge to his poetics of the imagination, his scientific epistemology to his study of psychic phenomena, is his concern with how creative thought comes into being. Like Michel Foucault after him (and anticipating Thomas Kuh s notion of the paradigm shift), Bachelard directed epistemological inquiry away from the continuities within systems of knowledge toward the obstacles and events that interrupt the continuum, thereby forcing new ideas to appear and altering the course of thought. Ba hela d s concept of the epistemological obstacle—a concept Foucault would assimilate in The Archaeology of Knowledge—was an attempt to demonstrate how knowledge incorporates its own history of errors and divagations. The episte ologi al p ofile of any scientific idea included the multiple obstacles that had to be negated or transcended dialectically—and thus absorbed—in the process of arriving at more rational levels of knowledge. Countering the codification of universal systems of thought and the formation of collective mentalities, as Foucault would put it, were events and thresholds that suspended the linear advancement of knowledge, forcing thought into discontinuous rhythms and transforming or displacing concepts along novel avenues of inquiry. For Bachelard as for Foucault, such epistemological obstacles played a crucial and creative function in the history of thought. Scientific inquiry therefore had to remain nonteleological and open to the possibility of such reorderings and reversals. In this way, modern rationalism would be a transcendent rationalism, su atio alis . In Paris there are no houses, and the inhabitants of the big city live in superimposed boxes. They have no roots and, what is quite unthinkable for a dweller of houses, skyscrapers have no cellars. From the street to the roof, the rooms pile up one on top of the other, while the tent of a horizonless sky encloses the entire city. But the height of city buildings is a purely exterior one. Elevators do away with the heroism of stair climbing so that there is no longer any virtue in living up near the sky. Home has become mere horizontality. The different rooms that compose living quarters jammed into one floor all lack one of the fundamental principles for distinguishing and classifying the values of intimacy. But in addition to the intimate nature of verticality, a house in a big city lacks cosmicity. For here, where houses are no longer set in natural surroundings, the relationship between house and space becomes an artificial one. Everything about it is mechanical and, on every side, intimate living flees. Ba hela d s evocation of the rustic abode in Champagne is almost exactly contemporary with Heidegge s paean to the peasant hut in the Black Forest. Henri Lefebvre, who admired both philosophers, was among the first to point out the shared aura of nostalgia that suffuses their poetics of dwelling. The spe ial, still sacred, quasi-religious and in fact almost absolute spa e that both Bachelard and Heidegger associate with the idea of house reflects the terrible urban reality that the twentieth century has instituted. The reverie of a maternal, womblike, and stable home, sheltering and remote, is, as Anthony Vidler has suggested more recently, a symptomatic response to the experience of an unheimlich modernity. From this perspective, the work of Foucault begins—consciously—where Bachelard leaves off. Instead of Ba hela d s timeless reverie of felicitous space, Foucault prefers to confront the oeffi ie t of ad e sit in the phenomenology of human habitation, addressing questions of historicity and power in relation to spatial discourse and institutions. The Poetics of Space thus leads, at least by one route, to Fou ault s seminal essay of 1967 on heterotopia, in which Foucault suggestively proposes to shift the problematic of Bachelardian topoanalysis from intimate space to othe spa es —spaces of crisis, deviance, exclusion, and illusion; in other words, to heterotopoanalysis. DAYdream house
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.
Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts - serious, sad thoughts - and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.
Thus the dream house must possess every virtue. How ever spacious, it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest. Erasmus, his biographer tells us, was long "in finding a nook in his fine house in which he could put his little body with safety. He ended by confining himself to one room until he could breathe the parched air that was necessary to him. — Gasto Ba hela d, The Poeti s of “pa e cellar Verticality is ensured by the polarity of cellar and attic, the marks of which are so deep that, in a way, they open up two very different perspectives for a phenomenology of the imagination. Indeed, it is possible, almost without commentary, to oppose the rationality of the roof to the irrationality of the cellar. A roof tells its raison d'etre right away: it gives mankind shelter from the rain and sun he fears. Geographers are constantly reminding us that, in every country, the slope of the roofs is one of the surest indications of the climate. We "understand" the slant of a roof. Even a dreamer dreams rationally; for him, a pointed roof averts rain clouds. Up near the roof all our thoughts are clear. In the attic it is a pleasure to see the bare rafters of the strong framework. Here we participate in the carpenter's solid geometry. As for the cellar, we shall no doubt find uses for it. It will be rationalized and its conveniences enumerated. But it is first and foremost the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths. attic A creature that hides and ithd a s into its shell, is preparing a a out . This is true of the entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrection of a man in his grave, to the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent. If we remain at the heart of the image under consideration, we have the impression that, by staying in the motionlessness of its shell, the creature is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds, of being.
And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre- human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like above all still to be possessed. In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting. daydream
It is o the pla e of the da d ea a d ot o that of facts that childhood remains alive and poetically useful within us. Throughout this permanent childhood, we maintain the poetry of the past. To inhabit oneirically the house we were born in means more than to inhabit it in memory; it means living in this house that is gone, the a e used to d ea i it.
I the eal of a solute i agi atio , e e ai ou g very late in life. But we must lose our earthly Paradise in order to actually live in it, to experience it in the reality of its images, in the absolute sublimation that t a s e ds all passio .
Whe e a e at a age to i agi e, e a ot sa ho or why we imagine. Then, when we could say how we imagine, we cease to imagine. We should therefore de atu ize ou sel es.
Da d ea t a spo ts the d ea e outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of i fi it .
G eat d ea e s possess i ti a ith the o ld.
"Intimate immensity" there's no space like home from Bachelard to Soja and all the spaces in between Bachelard O e might say that immensity is a philosophical category of daydream. Daydream undoubtedly feeds on all kinds of sights, but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplates grandeur. And this contemplation produces an attitude that is so special, an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity. Far from the immensities of sea and land, merely through memory, we can recapture, by means of meditation, the resonances of this contemplation of grandeur. But is this really memory? Is t imagination alone able to enlarge indefinitely the images of immensity? In point of fact, daydreaming, from the very first second, is an entirely constituted state. We do not see it start, and yet it always starts the same way, that is, it flees the object nearby and right away it is far off, elsewhere, in the space of elsewhere When this elsewhere is in natural surroundings, that is, when it is not lodged in the houses of the past, it is immense. And one might say that daydream is original contemplation. - Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space Bachelard and the Poetics of Space might at first seem like touchy-feely, metaphysical conjecture, and he has certainly been criticized by many for being overly nostalgic, romantic or subjective, yet the house is not his house, it is, as Bachelard asserts, our own o e of the o ld , our lived space: We should therefore have to say how we inhabit our vital space, in accord with all the dialectics of life, how we take root, day after day, in a or er of the world. Gaston Bachelard.
For Bachelard, the phenomenological way of knowing involves creative imagination. The term imagination does not refer to an activity of a thinking subject, but, rather, to an embodied relational state of openness. It is through imagination that we live space, a space which, in contrast to the void of abstract space, is full of possibilities. The phenomenological methodology of Bachelard has significant implications for empirical research and his work has inspired the work of Foucault, Serres and Althusser. In modern culture The Poetics of Space has become essential reading for architecture students. Architects Bernard Tschumi and Peter Zumthor have employed such philosophical theories and inquiries in their design concepts, stating: Ba helard s critical assessment of memory in relation to the experience of space served as a reminder of an extensive, interesting and essential number of variables that we can consider in the conception of space in the architectural realm. Our mental reasoning, considering the social and physical spaces that surround us and also our memory, our past experiences, both formal and non-formal knowledge will help us create the truth of space, our truth of space, the poetics of space. (Rossi 2009). 02. REIMAGINING THE DRAWING Massimo Scolari Massimo Scolari investigates a ti-pe spe ti e visual representation over two thousand years, finding in the course of his investigation that visual and conceptual representations are manifestations of the ideological and philosophical orientations of different cultures. Images prove to be not just a form of art but a form of thought, a projection of a way of life. 03. The Perfect Drawing : AXONOMETRIC PROJECTIONS
Axonometric drawings are far from easy to draw by hand. Nevertheless, they are a powerful tool for visually communicating complex spatial arrangements, making them well worth the effort. Their unique viewpoint allows for highly descriptive drawings that represent three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. With axonometric projection, the usual laws of perspective do t quite apply: There is no shift in scale as there would be through a camera lens or through our own eyes. While these drawings often feature perfect proportion and measurement, they are particularly compelling as they hover between reality as we know it and impossibility: The human eye can never see space in this way. Existing somewhere between i d s eye view and a linear perspective, axonometric views allow complex spaces to coexist within a single frame. Though the rules for producing one of these projections are quite rigid, the techniques and styles with which designers choose to represent space are highly varied. This collection takes a look at several applications of the drawing technique that artists and architects past and present use to convey big ideas.
04. SUBTERANIA – Subterranean soliloquies
05. DRAWINGS
‘To draw & to represent isn’t the same thing’
06. FRANZ KAFKA Franz Kafka was a German-language writer of novels and short stories who is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, typically features isolated protagonists faced by bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible social-bureaucratic powers, and has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt and absurdity.
Kafkaesque? 07. ESSENTIAL EXPLANATIONS
Metaphor Metonymy
A figure of speech that refers, for rhetorical effect, A figure of speech in which a thing or to one thing by mentioning another thing. It may concept is called not by its own name but provide clarity or identify hidden similarities rather by a metonym, the name of between two ideas. Where a simile compares two something associated in meaning with that items, a metaphor directly equates them, and does thing or concept. The words metonymy and not use "like" or "as" as does a simile. One of the metonym come from the Greek ε ω ῠ ία, most commonly cited examples of a metaphor in etō ía, "a change of name", from English literature is the "All the world's a stage ε ά, metá, "after, beyond" and -ω ία, - monologue from As You Like It ō ía, a suffix used to name figures of All the world's a stage, speech, from ὄ ῠ α, ónyma or ὄ ο α, And all the men and women merely players; ónoma, "name". They have their exits and their entrances[...] The location of a capital is often used as a —William Shakespeare, As You Like It metonym for a government, for example: This quotation expresses a metaphor because the Brussels for the government of the world is not literally a stage. By asserting that the European Union, Nairobifor the world is a stage, Shakespeare uses points of government of Kenya Washingtonfor the comparison between the world and a stage to government of the United States and convey an understanding about the mechanics of Beacon Hill for the government of the U.S. the world and the behavior of the people within it. state of Massachusetts. Metalepsis
A figure of speech in which reference is made to something by means of another thing that is remotely related to it, either through a causal relationship, or through another figure of speech. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium? - Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus A reference to the mythological figure Helen of Troy (or some would say, to Aphrodite). Her abduction by Paris was said to be the reason for a fleet of a thousand ships to be launched into battle, initiating the Trojan Wars. 08. DayDream House
When the light of the infinite ignites Do not penetrate into the house Do not expect too much of the end of the world For othi g is da drea i all i ferred…..or is it?
He will go and fetch help from the riddle with fissures & caverns From the riddle springs the extraordinary question The volume of the House is in cubic inches? In the bosom of its deepest darkness he dwells For he is the first & the last AND therefore a great daydreamer
We do not even know with certainty The initiates are at the edge of the path to the house YOUR name shall have 10 letters For these texts are not addressed to common mortals
All the di tu s & dog as of the house are attri uted to our h pothesis, a d the are orre t…..are the ? Your e e ould al a s see the house, et ou ere lost i the la ri th of e or &…i perati es…. Ia hatIa …. ou said…to people ho et ou o the street…… ou ere also the first & the last…… ou aited e eath the earth…k o i g ell our house as hea e …..a d as alled a da drea er for o reaso …
An Ode to the DayDream House by Dev Bildikar (2016) 09. RECOMMENDED READINGS
1. Works of GASTON BACHELARD, FRANZ KAFKA, MARTIN HEIDEGGER 2. PHENOMENOLOGY 3. MASSIMO SCOLARI – axonometric drawings : the perfect drawing 4. ALBERT CAMUS – absurdist works 5. ROLAND BARTHES – the analysis of narratives 6. DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra – fighting realities 7. DREAMS, ILLUSIONS OTHER REALITIES by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty
FILMS
1. ‘ABOUT SCHMIDT’ by Alexander Payne 2. ‘ALICE IN WONDERLAND’ by Tim Burton 3. ‘THE CELL’ / ‘THE FALL’ / ‘BRAZIL’ by Tarsem Singh 4. Films by Yasujirō Ozu Q. Why the necessity for such projects?
I BELIEVE IN THE ARCHITECTURAL IDEAL. THE UNIVERSITY IS ONE PLACE TO GIVE IT, IT’S PLACE IN THE SUN…..TO GIVE IT, IT’S VOICE….
IT IS NO PARADIGM….IT IS AN IMPERATIVE….IT IS A GRAND NARRATIVE...
I TRY TO IMPART INSTRUCTION…..WITH ONE EXPRESS INITIATIVE…..
HOW TO PONDER…..THAT IS THE EXTRAORDINARY QUESTION….
PROJECTS OF THIS NATURE HELP YOU TO PONDER…TO THINK…
I OFTEN ENCOUNTER ANGUISH….THAT IS SO BECAUSE WE HAVE LOST THE ART OF PONDERING…
HERE IS ANOTHER POEM TO GET YOU TO PONDER…….remember poetically, man dwells An Epistemological Murmur, or is it?
Metonym, Metalepsis, Metafor and Martian landscapes….look at this arrogance of form & space….obsessed with Utopia & Idea….. ARE YOU?.....This is their argument…..not mine…. I am not lost on the Architectural Ideal…..a little less on the Empirical Benefit…..Alas ….for Architecture is no more the enterprise of Idea….devoid of, and corrupted by a vacancy of intellect…or is it? We have lost the Art of Pondering, or is it? The whole phenomenology of Architecture is no more than a contemplative anguish….or is it? Where are those Adventures…..if I may ask…..at least where are those Reason s adventures…. Form is now regressive utopia…. listen ye Kafka….you will rest in peace…..at last. I am trespassing Narrative once again…..have we lost the Art of Pondering, or is it?.....rationale is all….is what I hear…. I embark in the Studio with a pocketful of thoughts…..only to fill them back with anguish & angst... The least is a murmur….I expect……The murmur is inaudible…..once again. I walk by the Library of Babel Project….the Earring Project….the Janus Project….with a market-ful of propositions…the murmur is inaudible once again…. Open a book….turn the page……stand beneath yourself….Reason s adventures are many… bring back the Art of Pondering…..read, if you will……or will you? Architecture is no macabre tale……not cataclysmic either….it is adventure all the way… I shall seek the Narrative……but a happenstance, it will not be…in that I shall revel….or will I ?
The Art of Pondering is all there is ….or is it?
Dev Bildikar/a poem on the loss of the art of pondering, the anguish of imparting instruction, the futility of utopia
END OF PART I