Thomassons de Goa

Have you come across any Goan examples of Thomassons, lately? The word coined by the Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei denotes any architectural relic that is found in good condition but does not serve a purpose. Today, old Goan architectural artefacts that lay forgotten and neglected amidst the spiralling growth of new urban developments are quickly falling into the category of Thomassons. Take for example the chapel behind the Hotel Mandovi in Panjim, or the beautiful baroque cross on the other side of the road from the St. Inez Church, or even the city of Old Goa and its monuments. It can be contended that the transformation of colonial monuments into Thomassons through wilful neglect is an attempt at erasure of the markers of Goa’s history.

An article titled ‘The Inexplicably Fascinating Secret World of Thomasson’ (Jan. 18, 2017) on the blog Messy Nessy, narrates the interesting story behind the emergence of the term Thomasson. The article notes that Japanese artist Asakegawa Genpei was interested in locating useless urban artefacts in Tokyo in the 1980s and wanted a term to label such relics. Around this time, the Japanese baseball team Yomiuri Giants had hired an American professional player called Gary Thomasson for a huge amount of money. However, the acquisition of this player turned out to be disastrous to the Yomiuri Giants as he did not fit their system of play and therefore they left him on the bench for most of the two seasons of his contract. Genpei adopted the use of the analogy of Thomasson, an exclusive player with a useless position on the team, for urban architectural artefacts that are in good condition, but are functionless.

In Goa, for most casual observers, architectural relics found in unexpected places might seem like Thomassons. Take for example the aforementioned cross near St. Inez Church, which shares same architectural history as the church. Today, a busy road severs the relationship of this cross to the church and, therefore, it appears to be a misplaced artefact. However, this cross was in fact a part of the church square, as can be gleaned from other similar cases such as the Holy Spirit Church square in Margao. Clearly, the road in St. Inez was introduced later. The traffic on this road has considerably increased making it difficult to imagine this cross as an element of a larger architectural setting that comprised the church square. What will further compound the matter is, over time, there will emerge plans for widening this road, leading to the demolition of this important marker of the city’s history. The Municipal Corporation needs to identify such heritage urban spaces and restore them at the earliest. While it might not be possible to re-route the thoroughfare in St. Inez, an urban design effort should be made to create at least sense of a city square. This could be achieved in multiple ways, including having common stone pavers that would connect the disparate parts of the entire area; in effect, this would create a platform, similar to the one at Kala Academy.

Goan monuments are undergoing a process of Thomassoning, as evidenced by their gradual decay. Another example of devaluing a historical structure is St. Anthony’s Chapel in Calangute, which has been reduced to a glorified traffic island. The zooming vehicles around this monument make it difficult for worshippers and visitors to approach it, making it seem like a useless relic. In Goa, town planners give high priority to roads, constantly widening them while destroying our natural and built heritage in the process. There are many monuments, which have become Thomassons, partly because of poor planning and misplaced priorities like road widening. The story of Old Goa is no different, especially because the state seems to have ignored its history while constructing a massive six-lane highway into the erstwhile capital, almost grazing and bruising the heritage city in the process.

The neglect of old monuments by the State is a reflection of the treatment of local Catholics whose heritage is marked by these structures. In part, this is precisely the process of ruination Ann Stoler refers to in the book Imperial Debris (2013). Ruination, Stoler argues, is a political project that lays waste to certain peoples, relations, and things that accumulate in specific places (p. 11). The region’s colonial architecture, as much as the Goan Catholic culture it represents -  are both portrayed to Indian tourists as Thomassons - rendered useless and maintained merely as relics.

Despite these challenges, local Goans continue to engage with their monuments. The magnificent buildings in Old Goa, for instance, might appear to be abandoned relics of a bygone era to the typical Indian tourist. These visitors fail to see how Goans use these monuments, often marvelling only at the architecture. On the contrary, old buildings like the Basilica of Bom Jesus are in fact living monuments. The clearest testimony to this is the gigantic gathering of people during the decadal Exposition of St. Francis Xavier and the yearly feast. Locals continue to resist their invisibilization by venerating the monuments in large numbers because they serve as symbols of Goan identity and as a reminder of the claims of a minority on the State. Of course, national news channels and national newspapers in India conveniently ignore the coverage of these events because such images of large gatherings for the veneration of a Catholic saint would invariably challenge the brahmanical-hindutva idea of nationalism in India. Even as it is troubling that Goans are reduced to being Thomassons in their own homeland, they continue to resist.

[This article was first published on The Goan on 09^th Feb. 2017] 

Projects Won’t Trickle Down

Urgent need to address alternative modes of architectural practices for Goa

Architect Arijeet Raikar, one of the resource persons for the workshop organised by the Indian Institute of Architects - Goa (IIA), impressed upon the audience that it was possible to build a first-rate residence for a family within rupees seven lakhs. The problem though is that it is financially unviable to run this kind of an architectural practice within the existing ideology of practice, where the norm is that the architect’s fees is a small percentage of the total project cost. Enabling such alternative practices, with commitment from architects as much as from the State, would go a long way to satisfy the housing needs of the locals as well as the design challenges enjoyed by architects. Ensuring employment opportunities to young architects while continuing to address the specific needs of development in Goa will require the change in the architecture of practice itself. 

Architects have a major role in shaping the development process in Goa. We often act helpless and complain in private realms about the situation of crazy real estate development, while continuing to ruin the very environment we love, professionally. The question is what can young architects do in scenarios where elites from Indian metros, ably aided by the local real-estate industry, have taken up the reins of development here. While this development continues to deprive locals of affordable housing due to escalating costs, the local architects, contrary to the belief, do not benefit from these projects as the designers of these luxury second-homes also often happen to come from Indian metros.  Therefore keeping both Goan environment and employment of local architects in mind, there is a need to change the ideology of architectural practice itself. In the film, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, philosopher Slavoj Zizek states that it takes a lot of effort to recognise the current capitalist ideology. The predominant ideology in architectural practice means being slaves to glamour buildings as consumerist objects (even so-called sustainable second-homes), emphasizing form at the cost of everything else, catering to clients’ needs whatever they are, making big-bigger-biggest projects, turning a blind eye to corruption and over-pricing in budgeting, and so on.

  Goa is undergoing rapid and uncontrolled urbanizations, which are largely guided by the aspirations of elites from Indian metropoli. The Indian elites who buy second-homes in Goa are not here to settle. They are here to consume Goa and move on to greener pastures when the going is not good and the green is gone. In the 1980s and ‘90s, it were the super-rich who started the trend of buying second homes here. Since the turn of the century, with the liberalisation of the Indian economy and the boom in the Indian middle-class, this trend has changed and many more are acquiring second-homes here, making Goa their weekend getaway.  Clearly, the focus has moved from merely enjoying Goa for its sights to the ownership of sites, in the form of real-estate properties.

Most professionals assume that faster development will lead to bigger employment opportunities, seldom realising how the capitalist economy works. In his article, “Trickle-Down Economics -- The Most Destructive Phrase Of All Time?” (Forbes, 6 Dec. 2013), George Leef, writes that “[i]n a free society, wealth doesn’t trickle down, or up, or sideways. It is earned. What people … don’t understand or won’t admit, is that people of all economic strata, and no matter their race, religion, sex, or anything else, have far more opportunities to earn in a society with a small, efficient, frugal government than they do in a society with a huge, wasteful one.” This line of thinking is critical to Goa and especially for practicing architects. The impetus given to large-scale development projects in Goa is usually in the hope that there will be a trickle-down effect.  Local Goan architects for instance are under the illusion that the trickle down economy is going to cater to their needs, and deliver to them some projects. We passively allow economic policies to be thrust on us, hoping against hope that some of the project opportunities will trickle down to us. The grim truth is, they seldom do, except maybe to a few cronies of those at the helm.

At another level, architect Rahul Mehrotra, the keynote speaker at the recent Z-axis conference in Panjim, highlighted that, today, the State’s contribution to the neoliberal economy has been restricted to the development of infrastructure, such as highways, flyovers, expensive bridges, and so on, which are meant to benefit corporate projects, while the important “mainstream” projects like housing have been left to the mercy of private developers. Architects, he rued, are either co-opted by these developers, or contend with boutique practices like designing luxury second homes. While the developers’ practice is that of crunching numbers to maximise the saleable spaces of apartments, the boutique practice has become the practice of indulgence, both on behalf of the elite client as well as the architect. Mehrotra also identified the media as being guilty for encouraging glamourized boutique practices by creating signature ‘hero’ architects.  Usually architecture practices as represented in popular lifestyle magazines largely represent the projects commissioned by the rich. Today, it is important to break this hegemony of the popularly accepted ideal architectural project like luxury second-homes, so that new categories of practice emerge, categories which address the unique development model that Goa requires.

(This article is based on the keynote address I gave on ‘Refiguring the Architecture of Practice’ at a workshop organised by IIA Goa on the occasion of World Architecture Day.)

[This article was published on The Goan on 23/10/2016.]

Buildings as (Bad) Ideas

South African architect Ilze Wolff suggests that we work towards an architectural practice of radical openness.

As a tribute to its namesake, a three-day international architecture conference was organised by the Charles Correa Foundation at Kala Academy in the first week of September. With the theme “Buildings as Ideas”, the intention of the organisers, as written on the conference programme booklet, was to “explore further what Correa believed – that buildings are ideas that manifest and take form.” However, as one of the presenters, Ilze Wolff from Cape Town, South Africa, reminded the audience, if buildings are ideas, they could also be bad ideas. It is this precise notion that is scary, because most times energy is only invested in making a building aesthetically and functionally ‘good’. In an environmentally sensitive place like Goa, for instance, no building or less building is also a good idea. But let us assume that buildings have to be constructed, in which case it is imperative to ask what constitutes bad ideas in architecture?

Wolff stood out amongst all the other guests because she seemed to be most sensitive to the context of her practice. She argued that buildings that were designed by architects in the apartheid period endorsed discrimination based on class, race, and gender. Apartheid was the official policy of racial segregation formerly practiced in the Republic of South Africa, involving political, legal, and economic discrimination against non-whites. In this regard, Wolff referred to the case of the garment-manufacturing factory, Rex Trueform, a modernist building designed in 1938 in Salt River, Cape Town. Segregation based on gender and racial stereotyping was manifest in the zoning of activities in the building, where areas were earmarked based on race, gender and class. Discrimination was also made apparent in the factory by having separate entrances and staircases for different people. There also was a difference in the amount of area given to people, based on race and class. The most privileged were the white male employees from the management, whereas the black female factory workers were the worst off. Wolff was sensitive to reading the (bad) ideas inscribed in the buildings in order to “unstitch” them by dismantling the biases in her own design projects. Most importantly, her building philosophy makes a point to not differentiate between people based on race, gender, or ability.

Ilze Wolff

Another problem with architects is their limited understanding of the ‘context’ for their design. Common responses of many architects presenting at the conference to ‘context’ were superficial interventions at the level of the physical forms, like mixing the local soil with cement in order to transform the colour of concrete. This allows architects to play at being modern - by using concrete, the archetypal modernist building material, while appearing ‘sensitive’ to local context - by matching the colour of buildings to the surrounding landscape. Similarly, in Goa, while I love the overall design of Kala Academy, a Correa project, I harbour deep reservations about its use of laterite pebbles on the walls to imitate laterite stone masonry, probably in an attempt to merge the building with the surrounding context. Such form-based ideas are a limited way of addressing local issues of context. As Wolff advocated, ‘context’ in architecture must not be reserved solely for understanding the physical surroundings of the building, but must include broader references such as ‘context of freedom’, ‘context of race’ or ‘context of ideology’ to name but a few. Only when design starts responding to these contexts can architects aspire for a practice of radical openness.

As suggested above, Wolff was the only architect present at the conference who seems to be “working towards an architectural practice of radical openness”, as quoted by her. An Indian architect, Sameep Padora, in contrast, was proud to present the design for a temple project. Given that projects like temples promote segregation, both on religious grounds as much as on the basis of caste, it seems like a bad idea to have included the temple project in the conference. The Jetavana Centre built for Buddhist Ambedkar Dalit Communities, and designed by Padora, also embodies bad ideas in its architecture. For this structure, Padora prescribed cow dung coating as a finish for all the floors. This is despite “most vocal members of the [Dalit] group wanting to use tile and concrete” (quoted from Padora’s admission, as written in an Architectural Review article by Mustansir Dalvi, 16 May, 2016). In India, it is always women of the marginalised communities, who happen do the job of applying cow dung. Imagine the suffering of Dalit women having to apply cow dung to the floor of the entire project every fifteen days. Architects promote such terrible ideas usually under the garb of protecting “Indian values” to achieve sustainability. Such bad ideas for buildings continue to discriminate against people based on caste and gender.

Unlike their South African counterpart who seems to have accepted the problems of race and tried to address the issues of discrimination in her design, Indian architects have not even accepted that casteism is a problem, let alone one that is reflected in the designing of buildings. This is probably because most practitioners of architecture in South Asia are themselves beneficiaries of caste privileges and, accordingly, perpetuate such discrimination in their own design practices. Conferences like Z-axis are thus important to critically evaluate architecture for good ideas as well as bad.

[This article was first published on The Goan on 25/09/2016]

No Bamboo Banawing!

On a recent visit to the Konkan Bamboo and Cane Development Centre (KONBAC) at Kudal, I came to know that there has been a drastic change in strategy to promote bamboo as construction material. Rather than endorsing bamboo as an affordable material for the poor, especially to build cost-effective houses, it is now being popularised as a material that satisfies the upwardly mobile elites’ fad of sustainability. Although the desire to replace unsustainable materials is laudable, the question is whether these projects, using bamboo, are truly as sustainable as they claim to be? Moreover, there also arises an issue of appropriation of material culture, especially of the poor in tribal areas by the dominant elites.

One of the strongest criticisms of the appropriation of the architecture of the poor has been made by the sociologist Anthony King, who writes that the rich often appropriate the architecture of farmer’s cottages (farmhouses) for their vacation homes (which are usually their second or third home). These elites, King observes, only absorb the aesthetics of a farmer’s house and not their lifestyle. The problem of the cultural appropriation of marginalized cultures without assimilation of the marginalized population seems to be prevalent everywhere. Raising the issues of cultural appropriation of hairstyles is a recent video titled Don’t Cash Crop on My Cornrows by Amandla Stenberg. There are many similarities between hairstyle and architecture. Both are about identity, and clearly about style. In so many ways, hairstyles are, in fact, a form of architecture. Stenberg’s major criticism is that white Americans love black culture more than they love the black people.The video demonstrates how hip-hop and pop have been appropriated from African American culture especially in terms of hairdos such as pleats, cornrows and so forth, while continuing with the racist hatred towards black people. These hairdos, as Stenberg notes, are ways in which black hair is kept from knotting. Stenberg laments that while these hairdos are stereotypical of the community, when white Americans adopts them, they turn into high fashion. This is a similar way in which vernacular architecture gets appropriated when architect claim them as ‘contemporary-vernacular style’. While the rich appropriate the poor farmer’s cottages to model their vacation-homes, these houses are always fitted with appliances and systems (air-conditioning etc.) needed for the comfort of upmarket modern living, which the vacationers cannot do without. Additionally there is also a failure to acknowledge the role of vernacular people, the ones who have championed the use of sustainable materials and forms in the first place.

In his book, The System of Objects, Jean Baudrillard argues that a suburbanite who aspires to move up into a higher class usually does so by buying antiques – symbols of old social position brought with new money. Essentially, he argues that the upwardly mobile class signal their social standing through material signs such as antique furniture, works of art, and so forth. Today, it is materials like bamboo that are being pressed into the service of consumption, because they give the image of sustainability. Using bamboo is fast becoming fashionable as appearing sustainable can symbolize that one has truly arrived in the elite world. Bauldrillard further discusses that every object has two functions – to be put to use and to be possessed. While a plastic chair in a living room can be put to use, it never seem to be dearly possessed, whereas the antique voltaire, may at times not even be used but is dearly possessed as an object. The argument for the bamboo is similar. The rich use it in an attempt to possess it as an object rather than utilising it functionally. It seems that the dominant cultures intermittently stoop to peripheral ones in order to appropriate from them, without the guilt of further marginalizing them. The violence is doubled as the poor are made to believe that there is legitimacy in the marginalized culture only when there is a sanction of it by the dominant ones.

The use of bamboo as ‘sustainable’ material in the construction of elite houses is also problematic because of the cost and distance of procuring it, as it is usually not locally available. Holistic sustainability has to factor in the ecological implication of transporting materials, plus the carbon footprint of the air-travel that the ‘designer’ architect would spend on travelling to the site. Moreover, even if sustainable material is used for the building of a second or third home, then the very idea of sustainability is defeated because sustainability has to be about satisfying only the primary needs of living and not about luxury.

It is not that architects and clients should completely ignore bamboo as a sustainable building material. In fact, organization like KONBAC have resorted to the marketing of bamboo to elites because there is no culture of building in bamboo in our society. Today, bamboo should not be a material of choice but that of convenience and compulsion. What is then required is a system of making bamboo easily available by creating a network of bamboo farmers, as KONBAC claims to have done. It is also important that the government create bamboo forests in close proximity to urban areas so that its transport from the source to the site is sustainable. Building in bamboo should not be about style but that of real ecological and social responsibility.

[This article first appeared on The Goan on 24th April, 2016]