Recap: April: Caffeinated Soap and What We Do

Back on April 7th we had our "Living Unit" critique. Highlights included Erin and Melissa's caffeinated soap model, to which they replied, "It was raining, so we couldn't use resin." The emphasis on this crit seemed to be mostly on water filtration. Lili mentioned the city of Fez in Morocco that is designed to flush out periodically (though its method is impromptu). Other highlights were Morgan and Daisuke's "Living Shower", "monsoons-on-demand" (Kelly & I), living units as stormwater management (Stephen & Filomena), ghats as dwelling (Mike & Christian), manipulative walls (Devon & Colleen), Ji Hyun & Jong's water filtration as a grid, "distinguishing the generational transformation" (Bo Young & Atisha), community and individualism as a network (Shannon & Josh), Lizzy and Maren with their "wall as living unit", and Hao-Hsin's and Sally's idea of wall manipulation for experiential micro-climates.

What We Do

What We Do premiered at RISD on a torrential, rainy April 11th. As you might remember, it was a student-run initiative to show the RISD community and public what exactly we do in our various departments and disciplines. I suspect that the event was a response to either the real or perceived isolation that happens at the school. :)

Maren and Melissa volunteered to give a powerpoint presentation on our trip to India. There was an initial hardware problem, but eventually the WhatWeDo people got the projector working. One of the things presented was the "questions for the studio" probably better known to all of us as "The Mutiny" which happened during our trip. I never blogged about it because I failed to understand why people were upset. Now I can finally understand the hullabaloo from the following slide:

If you can't read it, it says:

• Why Kalighat?
• Why the red light district?
• What is its significance if we are complety re-designing the area?
• How do we know and design for the needs of the people of Kolkata?
• Should this be designed by Indians?
• What can we do with the canal?
• Have you seen the canal?
• Really?
• Are we housing the people we're displacing with the project?
• How do you design a site-specific, hypothetical model to be applied elsewhere?
• How do we treat site-specificity in this case?
• How do we maintain all of the religious needs of the site--processing sacrificed goats, running bodies to the crematorium, etc--while making it a comfortable place for tourists?
• Do we design for those necessities?
• What do we do with trash?
• Do we design a new sewer/sewage system for the area?
• How do we deal with our own emotional and physical discomfort while analyzing the site?
  

The next post will cover our Mid-Term critique on April 14th. Stay tuned!

Day Eight - American Center

Our presentation at the American Center (a part of the US Consulate) was at 10:30 but we had to get there an hour earlier for security checks. I took a taxi with Erin and we ended up going to the US Consulate and not the American Center. It wasn't until we got through a few security checkpoints that they realized, and we realized, that we were at the wrong complex. The American Center, although linked to the US Consulate, is in a building a few blocks away. Keep that in mind in case your taxi driver sends you to the wrong place :)

The presentation to the Consulate Staff and others was much like the presentation to the CBE -- essentially the same content but we had more time to talk in depth of our Atlas.

Lili began the presentation and Nick and Jonathan added their own words as well. I've transcribed both of their speeches; starting with Jonathan:

Good morning.

I am Jonathan Highfield, associate professor of post-colonial literatures and head of the Department of English at Rhode Island School of Design. I have published essays and literature from Australia, Botswana, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Scotland, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, among others. My work looks at the legacies of colonialism and the ways in which artists and writers working after the official colonial era attempt to repossess the culture and its physical manifestations for the people.

In the seminar attached to Narrative Flows I set up my readings designed to provide the class with the cultural, historical, and social background of Bengal so they had a context within which to design their project. We began with Bengali folktales, a history of the East India Trading Company and Kolkata, and readings on the cultural history of the city. We moved from there to read essays, letters, and short stories of Tagore and Mallaran's novel A River Called Titash. We anchored these readings in fiction with Homi Bhabha's work on hybridity, Gayatri Spivak's discussion of the Subattern, and Arundhati Roy's Power Politics.

There are three students solely in the seminar traveling with us: Danielle Cox, Jordan Seaberry, and Jessica Wu. There are also two students in both the seminar and one at the two associated studio courses: Sally Harman and Winston Mi. Each has brought a unique perspective to the seminar and their enthusiasm and opinions have driven the course and made my time teaching in Kolkata stimulating and enjoyable.
While in Kolkata, the seminar students have worked on mapping the area socially, not only looking at Kalighat but trying to understand human interaction across the entire city. By talking to people across a range of professions and experiences, they have tried, in the best tradition of the Liberal Arts, to keep the human at the heart of their inquiry.

Ten days is not enough to even begin to understand a series of communities as complex, as overlapping and competing, as changing as Kolkata. By talking to people about their work and aspirations and responding in kind, we hope that we have begun a dialogue with the people of the city, whose lives, successes, and struggles are not as hypothetical as this design project.

After the presentations we laid out the Atlas and had a lively discussion with everyone there. Here are Nick's words describing the Atlas:

I would like to speak briefly about what we are calling “The Atlas” and its pedagogical objectives in our framework for the studio course.

Firstly, the “Atlas”, which is basically a series of experimental maps, is the medium we have chosen to communicate our understandings and perception of our site and its various scales (global, national, regional, urban and neighborhood scales).

Although maps sometimes appear authoritative and purely objective; commonly they are biased and didactic. With this understanding we have approached this exercise with the precept that all maps must ask questions; that no single map can contain all the data sets for a given situation.

No single authorship can comprehend the complexity and superimpositions in a given territory. We feel therefore the “atlas” as a consolidation of the group's findings might facilitate the broadest possible spectrum of data.
Historically speaking, the map is a transcription of what is known or understood and attempts to summarize, quantify, and qualify a territory or condition – not through the use of verbal description or mathematics but through the language of code figures and pictures. So what might otherwise be a complex and advanced topic to discuss with any brevity. The map attempts to display its measurable relationships in an abbreviated yet concise fashion.

Not surprisingly, the cartographer or map maker was one of the most prized artisans in Renaissance Europe for their ability to take the experiences of explorers and translate their stories into meaningful and useful templates for others. So they might determine the topography; resources and cultures of unknown lands and permit new explorers to navigate through them with care.

I also would like to note that these maps are not empirical, or derived through experience but were developed at a great distance from Calcutta utilizing information we have collected from the internet, primary source materials, photographs, journals, as well as the stories and opinions of those who have traveled here before.

Furthermore, and most importantly perhaps is that all maps tell stories. Hopefully our database of narrations in graphic form may prove helpful or imperative in the service for our project in Kalighat of its critical objectives.

We are only in the primary phases of our analysis and now that the students have had the opportunity to test their assumptions in situ, our mapping process begins anew.
I really have no idea why I was a focus of these photographs. Must be my glowing personality :) I think it was just my sharp tunic purchase from West Side. :D These photographs were graciously supplied by Mr. Moulik D. Berkana, Deputy Director to the American Center.

We had the afternoon free again. Some went shopping I heard. I went back to Kalighat for a final time with Hao-Hsin to sketch out some sections in the perpendicular alleys to the Adi Ganga Canal.
The built typologies were more tightly integrated here than elsewhere. There were some curious structures/remnants of structures that we found. We also mapped out some shrines that found themselves at the apparent-end of an alley. I say apparent-end because the alley wove around like snake; one was not immediately aware of its continuation. We both felt more comfortable with this visit as previous visits we felt like intruders. This may have been because of a different time of day or perhaps either us or them were more comfortable with our presence.I leave Day Eight with this photograph of an Kalighat artisan drying his wares...

In the interest of present-day time synchronization, Day Eight was Friday, March 27th.

Day Six - Zoo, Jadavpur, and CBE

We had the morning free but were told that we had to be at the Fine Arts Academy by 4:30pm for the Centre for the Built Environment (CBE) group presentation. I believe there were at least three groups -- one went off to Jadavpur University to see their program, one went off for shopping, and the third went off to the Zoo. Guess where I went? :)

The top image is the Nilgai, and just above is the Sarus Crane. Both native to south/south-east Asia. We couldn't go to the Sundarbans so we got to see the Bengal Tiger in it's "emulated" habitat...

And the star attraction is.... hippos! Please note that I'm only an advocate of hippos being in zoos for the sake of the gene pool, research and education (for those who cannot go to Africa and the hippos in their native habitat).
Mama hippo and baby hippo! The baby hippo is on the right, in what looks like a protrusion from the water edge.And of course, we're in India -- so no trip to the zoo would be complete without seeing the Indian elephant! Here's a photo shoot of Mike's shenanigans... :)

Jadavpur University, Architecture Department

The other group went to Jadavpur University's Architecture Department to see what they do there. I was told by Josh and Matt that walking into that place was like walking into an abandoned building -- all the desks were empty and had a thick film of dust on them. There were only two architecture students around and even they had very little to show. The image below I assume to be from one of their architecture studios:

International Seminar: Water and City

The seminar on Water and City was meant to be a significantly larger program. I believe there were plans to co host a conference on water at RISD and Brown but things fell through except for having a landscape/architecture studio/seminar course and this seminar in which the Centre for the Built Environment (CBE) presented some of its scholars and their research.

The presenters for CBE were:

• Dr. Barendra Purkait, Director, Publication Division, Geological Survey of India, Kolkata. He discussed "Deltaic Alluvial Plain of West Bengal - Some Environmental Issues"
  
• Dr. S.P. Sinha Ray, CBE Water Studies, with "Ground Water of Kolkata Metropolitan Area"
• Parthan R. Das -- which I didn't notate the title quickly enough, but he had a graphically rich presentation on built river edges. I personally thought that some of his ideas were very questionable from a landscape architect perspective, especially in terms of the reactions of a built edge to flooding, but I was definately impressed with the quality of his work. It was a pity that he did not have more time to discuss his slides, since he showed at least a 100 slides!
• Architect Sobhanlal Bonnerjee, CBE, with "Canals and Waterways in and around Kolkata Metropolitan District"
• Dr. Shivashish Bose, Dept. of Architecture, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, with "Urban Flooding, Case Study: Kolkata"

Then we Jonathon and Nick present, followed by a representative selection from our class to show the atlas we had been working on since the start of the semester. I should add that Lili (Elizabeth Dean Hermann) gave the first talk as way of introduction. We ended the seminar with an explanation of Design for Development.

Day Two - In the Footsteps of the Raj

Early this morning we had a walking tour of Dalhousie Square and the buildings from the British Colonial period from Calcutta Walks. We were split into two groups, the group I was with had Ifte as our guide, seen in the maroon shirt.
This is the Writers Building, the one famous building that you cannot photograph... from up close. They might arrest you. Luckily although Nate was taking a photo of a tree and not the building (though it looked like he was taking a photo of the building), nothing severe happened. Oh dear.
This was a Life Insurance building that had many local ornamental features after being copied from European plans. Including a representation of both life and death on the facade..
It is said that there are two things good for your stomach in Kolkata: one is yogurt, and the other is coconut milk.
After the walk, which also included seeing St John's Church, the Town Hall, the Governor's House (from outside the gate), we trekked over to the flower market near the Howrah Bridge. The railroad tracks were the only way to get there from where we were...
This a view of some of the architectural and street typologies that we've been mapping for the atlas. Almost at the flower market...
Here we are at a river ghat, and what everyone here is taking pictures of are the local kids posing for the camera.
The ghat with curious trees growing from the retaining wall. These trees growing on the sides of buildings are fairly common.
The flower market. Those marigolds on the left. It was this crowded throughout.
This was the harrowing craziness of the walk towards the idol makers in North Kolkata.
The idol makers statues for the river festivals.An alley in the idol maker neighborhood. After seeing this neighborhood, the time being about two pm, we all went back to the hotel for a free afternoon. I went with some other people to check out Kalighat, which we will not see as a larger group until probably? tomorrow afternoon. I took a taxi with Jonathon, Danielle and Bo Young which took some 20 minutes to get back to the hotel.

Day One – Arrival and Adjusting

It was first the musty old book fragrance that met us as soon as we left the plane. Then a pungent cigarette texture was added. When we left the airport, the oppressive heat and high humidity enveloped us like a tight fitting glove, only seeming to tighten its hold as the day progressed. We arrived at the Lytton Hotel before 10am and arranged to meet as a group once more at 1pm after room assignments were established. Atisha arrived sometime thereafter (she went to India a bit before us to visit her family in Jaipur) and I went with her to get a SIM card for my cell phone. What was until then a relatively simple affair turned into a complex merry-go-round of identification verification and activation for service. Atisha, ever so patient, explained later that the shop owner wanted to feel self-important as to having a foreigner on his doorstep and thus made the process a lot more complicated.

After meeting as a group with Papi, our guide for the day, we went on a walking tour towards the Park Street Cemetery (The East India Trading Company Mausoleums). Coupled with the heat and 30 hours of travel, what made the walk all the more tiring was the incessant honking of street traffic – everywhere from the tiniest scooter to taxi on the most unimportant side street to the major arteries of the city. In fact, the street traffic seemed to be a chaotic mess – there were discernible patterns and a vague sense of order – but even on the streets that had lights (and that's very few indeed) pedestrians and vehicles alike fought each other for right of way. There was this one crossing near a flyover (a raised “highway”) that had a recurring message on a loudspeaker asking people not to cross the street but after a minute of this and a helpless? Traffic police officer attempting to direct traffic, the message stopped for 5 seconds and then started up again. Frustrated, people ignored the message and tried crossing anyway.

Arriving at the Cemetery, we had half an hour to explore the site. The site wasn't significantly large by any means, but the structures built on top of it were. The majority of men who worked for the East India Trading Company died in their twenties, succumbing to malaria, typhoid and a host of other terrible diseases that would accompany workers in the tropics.
It was decided soon after this that because everyone was so tired, we would cut the day short. So we all went to this rooftop restaurant to drink beer and eat food. We then had the evening to ourselves, but, not before being told that we would need to meet at 6:20am in the hotel lobby to go on a walking tour that starts at 7am (i.e, the tour doesn't start until we get to the location at 7am). Sorry if I don't quite remember where that location is. I suppose you can look at the itinerary – since we didn't make it everywhere today anyway. I hope to have more provocative pictures soon; Jonathon has been generously taking photos especially for the blog. Everyone also has their own digital camera; some even brought their D-SLRs, so at the end of the trip we're going to have copious amounts of photos that hopefully will, for the lack of a better phrase, paint the picture of Kolkata very well.