conversations with bricks and concrete
January. 28. 2012
“And if you think of Brick, for instance,
and you say to Brick,
“What do you want Brick?”
And Brick says to you
“I like an Arch.”
And if you say to Brick
“Look, arches are expensive,
and I can use a concrete lentil over you.
What do you think of that?”
“Brick?”
Brick says:
“… I like an Arch””
-Louis Kahn
freedom from fear
September. 11. 2011
“All material in nature,
the mountains and the streams and the air and we,
are made of Light which has been spent,
and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow,
and the shadow belongs to Light.”
– Louis Kahn
I came to the United States as a student on August 30th, 2001. 12 days after my arrival, the WTC was bombed.
Still jet-lagged, skipping Ms. Olin’s 9am class, I was asleep when Alli barged into my dorm room and exclaimed, “Ishi! They bombed the WTC!” But in my fitful fever, my mind couldn’t parse through the information well enough to command consciousness and I zoomed back into sleep. It was only later when I answered the phone to my new best friend’s quivering voice that I realized what had just happened.
Even as I stood trembling, incapacitated by shock waves of horror flowing through my being, living the crash in my head, I couldn’t entirely fathom it all. And somewhere in my trembling, I realized I knew this feeling all too well. It was the first attack on American soil, but the Indian soil in me had quivered before in the face of the same terror, many a time.
Before that morning, I did not know what WTC stood for and had never been to New York. Shy in my newness I wondered if I could honestly be a part of the grief? In which capacity does a legal alien console her 12 day old friends?
Although it wasn’t all 9/11 that did it, since that fateful day, I have grown up. The event gave me a premature preview into the American psyche and this society’s mechanisms of dealing with grief and disaster, very different from the fatalist nonchalance I was used to in India…With typically American efficiency, meetings were called, we were given phones to call home to re-assure our parents and cautioned against going out into town alone. Caught off-guard and cornered into switching points of view, my sense of self questioned itself and for the first time I contemplated my being as the Other.
I have lived and loved, won and lost and surrendered pieces of my heart to souls deep within American folds while nurturing them into mine; I have watched the dispersion of fear and the struggle to overcome it in an intoxicated, unpredictable dance which moves us all through the darkness, through the light. Resilience is a beautiful thing, grace under pressure, that is what defines a great civilization, or a human being.
“I have no fear at all at all, I have no fears at all.”
marfa window
September. 7. 2011
looking through concrete Judd into the wilderness…
Cyclical City
September. 1. 2011
Meandering through the streets of Tokyo, by yours truly. A very brief photo-essay for Architizer based on my Traveling Fellowship to Tokyo in October 2010…hope you enjoy the escapades!
full stop.
August. 8. 2011
August 8 marks the second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and is a good time for reflection, no matter which side of the war you fell on.
Sometimes it is good to encounter the edges of one’s profession, because then you may begin to stretch it. At the peace memorial in Hiroshima, I watched this little girl walk round and round the monument. Architecture can only do so much, I realized. No pain will be alleviated by the helix better than the cube, no wounds healed by steel and concrete. All it can do, is give a community a sacred space in which to collectively mourn and remember, and hopefully find the love to see each other through, and to let bygones be bygones.
check it!
August. 4. 2011
Commission for Architizer- shots of the Perot Museum as published.
The deck park is going to make this whole thing come alive, hopefully people will get out there to hang, once the triple digit heat leaves the city alone! All in good time, I guess!
za-koenji
August. 3. 2011
It’s the kind of day that I if I lived in Tokyo I would swoop up Suginami and hit up the Za Koenji Theatre in Tokyo by my very beloved
Toyo Ito. You won’t find a single square here, and that’s exactly what I crave somedays!
morphosis
July. 31. 2011
Just got off Woodall Rogers Freeway, shooting the Perot Museum of Science and Nature for Architizer after an exhilarating adventure, treading the highway and feeling cars swooshhh past my tripod!
Something about the first shot reminds me of the quarries Edward Burtynsky’s often shoots…except the delineation of chiseled form is so much more controlled…more photographic adventures ahead, as this beautiful beast comes alive.
My photographs are up on architizer’s website, so enjoy some Morphosis if you will, and send me some lovings on www.facebook.com/studioish!
elemental
June. 14. 2011
thinking in charcoal for an imagined bath house…
i have about a thousand charcoal sketches of the frigidarium, tepidarium, caladarium, you-name-it-arium lying around dying to be scanned, or better yet, built.
all i want to be
June. 6. 2011
you know…as opposed to, not-
the roost!
May. 13. 2011
design + photos by Cletus Pippin
Cletus Pippin, one of the coolest people here at Corgan won the Bird House Play House Design Competition sponsored by the Audubon Center! His winning design (above) has been constructed and now resides alongside Predock’s building…So proud! CONGRATS Cletus!
Don’t miss the opening of his newly constructed playhouse to be unveiled May 19th, at 11 am at the Trinity River Audubon Center.
the fag
March. 27. 2011
Fag, as in cigarette, you pervs!
Salute to the smoker- woman to woman.
This probably isn’t a stellar shot, but I enjoy the moment in it- the position she chose to indulge in this particular cigarette. There had to be some affinity there- SXSW weekend in Austin…somewhere around dirty sixth.
roppongi
November. 9. 2010
Roppongi is known as the foreigner district of Tokyo…one of the places where ex-pats and the likes settled, and gaijene run amuck. Except- I saw maybe three foreigners on my three trips out to Roppongi.
Regarding my proposal, with Roppongi I was concerned with the local reflections of international trends- and rest aassured that didn’t dissappoint. There were malls scaling city blocks full of merchandize familiar to any cosmopolitan metropolis- the same brand names that plague the world abound in Roppongi Hills and Tokyo Mid-Town (not neighborhoods as their names may suggest, but more like giant developments).
It was the in-betweeen-ness found while roaming the backstreets that really became interesting to me. Small scale shops with foreign flavors nestled in the messy blocks scattererd around the larger developments haphazardly hold treasures like the shrine above and even create community spaces where people gather to catch their breaths…
tskuiji
November. 7. 2010
If you follow my blog or know me, you’ll know I love corrosion in general and rusting in particular…
Weathering marks the passing of time, and I enjoy the reminder.
In the back-quarters of the Tskuiji district old meets new. This is one of the last few spaces where remnants of old style Japanese houses still remain. Guess, what dominates what?
dior
November. 6. 2010
Dior wearing SANAA-
separation/adornment/ostentatious understatement
I came back reeling from Tokyo’s capacity to CONSUME…
splice
November. 5. 2010
I get high on moments like this one…
See how an architect can carve magnificence from residual fragments? You can always tell things that have been designed rather than just constructed.
Atelier Bow-Wow and Klein Dytham have recognized and written about what has now been termed PET architecture.
Read this, by Yoshiharu of Bow-Wow.
Incidentally, this kind of architecture permeates Earth’s largest cities, but its presence and necessity is exacerbated on the streets of Tokyo, because, as you well know, real estate prices are uncannily high. Couple that with the Japanese mentality of economy, efficiency and innovation, and you get these magnificent instances like the one above.
If you ever want to go there- it’s about 50 meters from the GA Gallery near Omotesandu.
the looking glass
November. 4. 2010
The search for the global anonymous which took me to Tokyo, was for intersections like this one.
It is moments like this that made Tokyo unique- the unapologetic juxtaposition as scattered old sacred shrines quietly nestle into the urban sprawl with a dignified subtlety. When an old city becomes new again, splices such as this are left behind arguably with unintentional intentionality…and in Tokyo, a city with a painful dirth of space, the interstitial boundaries between the two conditions are often reduced to nothing, made more through joints rather than connections.
The architecture of cultural hybridization- need I say more?
wooden
November. 2. 2010
The Port Terminal in Yokohama, port-sister-city of Tokyo, is one of those mind bending system of planes that makes you want to run around barefooted and strike a yoga pose or two. Ships set sail to all corners of the world from this gorgeous piece of shore…and you can see travelers lined up around the block waiting to board.
The success of the construction is reflected in the fruitful use of the public space by people engaging with the architecture, and contemplating what lies outside of it.
The structure is sited so craftily that it seems to emerge from the end of a small peninsula automatically, somewhere losing the distinction between natural and mechanized in its wooden splendor. Attention to detail goes above and beyond the call of duty- even the parking garage is beautifully designed.
smoulder
October. 23. 2010
