Pulkit Mogha

Interactive Installations to give users chances to engage with..  

Fun tactile games for people of all ages.

A 360 degree room narrating Indo french collaboration through Audio visuals. 

Mixing old and new museological tools. 

Graphic Panels to suggest ideas.

A realtime VR screen with audience interacting with data. 

Interactive flip-book to illustrate graphic novels for a wider audience.

The Pavilion installed next to the India Gate in Delhi.

The Pavilion travelling to other major cities including Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai. (Photo) Installed on the Oval Maidan in Bombay.

Our association to postmodernist buildings (as with deconstructivist) is the idea of singularity. Signature forms that are irreproducible, alien (as with the Parc de la Villette Paris), post-humanist(?) examples illustrate how this New Architecture cannot be summed up in an architectural theory simply because of its resistance to be the archetype of unique singular buildings. The author asserts that designs of new architecture are unable to/deliberately don’t contribute to the discourse surrounding New Architecture and its principles.

Modernism's new worked on the principle of erasure and replacement. It sought to overthrow spatial hierarchies and create Democratic arrangements and spatial typologies. This new is different from the ambitions of the postmodern, in the ways that it follows in response to the old. Postmodern employs the heterogeneity of history over the heterogenity of space. It celebrates this heterogeneity instead of working in tabula rasa.

Is there a postmodern new? For the very act of reiteration and recombination is to question the existing. PoMo doesn't believe in the new. It destabilizes existing form, employs heterogeneous diverse spaces, empowers. This definition of PoMo, however, is also scope for its abuse, in reactionary measures of reestablishing the power systems it aims to remove itself of.

The problem with postmodern is that it is thought to be exhausted of new forms. The author suggests that there are tremendous possibilities of space and form that are still left unexplored, and it is here that we should seek our New Architecture.

New architecture sees a shift from Derridean to Deleuzian discourse. (How?) The use of collage or grafting in the heterogeneity of new architecture is seen in the works of Eisenman, Tschumi, from PoMo to deconstructionists. The author sees collage is unable to address the aims of postmodern design, its historical needs to contradict the institution lead to the creating of a new institution. Theoretically, compositions of collage are endless but the act of collage is limiting to a finite catalog of elements and processes of collage. Collage leads to collage. The author offers a solution to the suggested problem in renewing collage, by tapping into uncharted sources. Or by finding grafts other than collages.

Here he perhaps points to a desire of the new, grafts to produce heterogeneity in cohesion rather than incoherence and contradiction that comes with collage.

Unger's hazy five pointer on new architecture for non-hierarchical, heterogeneous political space are, according to the author, an indication to the grafting alternative he previously spoke of. He also sees them as strikingly similar to the Le Corbusier's five pointer on modernism's democratic homogeneous. Similar political goals through different processes. DeFormation and InFormation. DeFormation is a grafted abstract typology; resistant to formalism, stable alignments, decomposition to simpler. InFormation on the other hand is to form a collecting graft (sometimes orthogonal) enclosing elements to one, and giving function to residual spaces. Because of its orthogonal language of expression InFormation is reduced to use of signs and semiotics as with Modernism (as opposed to Postmodernism).

In Mille Plateaux, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari conceptualize two kinds of space, in fundamental opposition but always existing in combinations. In principle, the analogies are numerous and the authors illustrate this from various models, - textile fabric, musical, mathematical, maritime.

I will discuss how the attributes of smooth and striated space are explained in various models and how they apply to analogies I am familiar with.

Smooth is not homogeneous, but amorphous, nonformal space. The sea before maritime model, the desert, the nomad, all belongs to the smooth. In striated space-time, one counts in order to occupy. The formalization is what makes the music perceptible, and oceans navigable. Smooth is uncharted territory, one occupies without counting (John Cage). The smooth possesses a greater power of deterritorialization than the striated. The stagnant nomad in the city (squatters, those out of the recognition of the state authority and policy/privilege), on a journey of time, is a element of the smooth, living in opposition/or simply in the underbelly of the striated city. The two share a complex relationship where one does not exist without the other. This application would also be useful to look at city-village complexes.

Texture is one such element of transfusion. Texture in sound is one way where homogeneity of music is replaced by displaced intervals, slips in tempo and son art transformations. Coarseness of fabric, khadi vs silk is a matter of texture. So is the coarse grain of cities, planned and unplanned.

In the maritime model, the authors highlight the role of lines, points. Lines or trajectories are subordinated to points in striated space. In smooth trajectory is supreme. This can be observed in an analogy of the individual vs the state/corporation. A state apparatus is smooth space with striations that it wants to eradicate to aspire efficiency and capitalism. The individual, the unit, and their individuality is a point that within the corporate model means little as opposed to the vision and corporate spirit (trajectory). Much like the presence of minority rights as insignificant under neo-liberal fascist regimes. Like that of India. In striated systems, cities, fascist regimes, power is concentrated and not decentralized. Power is realised and kept to a few.

Voyaging smoothly is a becoming.

The paper gets confusing towards the Physical model. “The more regular the intersection, the tighter the striation, the more homogeneous the space tends to become.” Hence the homogeneity becomes an attribute of extreme striation. Globalization leading to the homogenization of markets and production everywhere is one such example.

Describing space as negative is inadequate. It paints a picture of space as a residual response to the politics of the surrounding. The paper however doesn’t treat spaces as apolitical (it suggests that this is how designers approach public space). But quite contrary, the public plaza is the subject of politics; which Bolton speaks of about the public space as a ‘showroom of the social’, a controlled experience, a display of authority, subject of privatization.

He builds on Marx’s idea of mystified labor value, in corporate symbols responsible for abstracting labor and product.

The paper adequately bridges the gap between authority and architecture and the use of space as a medium of instruction and discipline. Controlled access, controlled public behavior and controlled experience are three key realities of public space. “The corporation legitimates the system through rhetorical persuasion.” And architecture becomes one of the means to augment economic exchange (rather inflow) and authority. Phallocentricism in design is but one of the small ways this authority is enforced. This enforcement is latent in the most unitary design principles practices today. “For architecture is an authoritative, even stereotypical symbol of culture”, and thus architecture becomes the backdrop for commodity. There is little room for diversity, subcultures, social complexity in the quest for planned efficiency of the corporate system.

What the paper lacks is in the addressal of contestation of public space, counter responses to privatization, the existence of the very subcultures that the corporate ignores.

On design, the author poses a dilemma in my mind. Semantic meaning of design, he says, is a phantasm of publicity. Humble function is eclipsed behind the semantic meaning; architecture becomes/is a mystified commodity. Postmodern design was illusive, and formerly a fetish of rationalism, now an extravagant excess.

An interesting notion is that of the decline of the public spaces as they used to be, to a new one. In the Indian context the simplest examples of the same is the emerging culture of gated communities, enclosed private streets, controlled and maintained parks. The processes are detrimental to fundamental idea of progression, that of exchange, of ideas, people, resources, capital. But they exists, for capitalist gains, efficient regimes, and in this case for decentralized responsibilities.

After reading ‘Figments of the Public: Architecture and debt’ (Richard Bolton)