Pub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1017/S1359135522000367
F. Lyons
The article suggests that the misuse of architectural form is the major threat to our cities. Form has power and form used mindlessly has indiscriminate consequences for the urban environment and its citizens. To explore this ‘silent’ power of form, the article takes Louis Kahn’s lecture on ‘Silence and Light’ as its opening text. Kahn‘s distinction between the ‘measurable’ and ‘unmeasurable’ dimensions of architecture is compared to similar distinctions made by Kant, and extended by Schopenhauer at the turn of the nineteenth century. We learn that it is the ‘unmeasurable’ aspect of reality that gives form its power and in the second part of the article, using detailed analyses of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, we are able to explain how the ‘unmeasurable’ is revealed within the ‘measurable’ and how such carefully balanced use of form can make a significant contribution to the health of our cities.
{"title":"Silence and the city: an examination of the power of architectural form","authors":"F. Lyons","doi":"10.1017/S1359135522000367","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1359135522000367","url":null,"abstract":"The article suggests that the misuse of architectural form is the major threat to our cities. Form has power and form used mindlessly has indiscriminate consequences for the urban environment and its citizens. To explore this ‘silent’ power of form, the article takes Louis Kahn’s lecture on ‘Silence and Light’ as its opening text. Kahn‘s distinction between the ‘measurable’ and ‘unmeasurable’ dimensions of architecture is compared to similar distinctions made by Kant, and extended by Schopenhauer at the turn of the nineteenth century. We learn that it is the ‘unmeasurable’ aspect of reality that gives form its power and in the second part of the article, using detailed analyses of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, we are able to explain how the ‘unmeasurable’ is revealed within the ‘measurable’ and how such carefully balanced use of form can make a significant contribution to the health of our cities.","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"8 1","pages":"185 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89254931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s1359135522000343
C. Branfoot
In around 1912 Gabriel Jouveau-Dubreuil, a young science teacher from French colonial Pondicherry in South India, visited the nearby town of Cuddalore in order to inspect the construction of a new Hindu temple. Since arriving in South India in 1909 he had been travelling to many temples and archaeological sites in order to understand the history of South Indian art. The modern temple that he visited in a suburb of Cuddalore at Tiruppappuliyur was not in fact new but a wholesale renovation of a nine-hundred-year-old shrine on a site sacred to Tamil Shaivas. This was just one of the many temples substantially rebuilt from the 1890s to the 1930s under the patronage of a wealthy merchant community, the Nattukkottai Chettiars, at a time of religious revival and growing Tamil cultural nationalism. The Nattukkottai Chettiars came from the villages and towns of Chettinadu, an arid region in southern Madras Presidency. This region was significant not only for being the provenance of the most prolific patrons of South Indian temple architecture in colonial Madras Presidency but also their builders, for many of the architects and craftsmen working on the temple at Tiruppappuliyur were from villages in Chettinadu. One of these men, M. S. Swaminathan of Pillaiyarpatti, was Jouveau-Dubreuil’s chief informant, one of the many ‘natives’ who were a critical and inextricable element of colonial knowledge production. The understanding of formal composition and terminology that Jouveau-Dubreuil learnt from contemporary architects and craftsmen and his observations of the evolution of architectural design contributed towards the first study of the Tamil temple for both a scholarly and wider public audience from the very earliest monuments of the seventh century through to those currently under construction. This article explores this architectural ‘renaissance’ in colonial Madras Presidency under Chettiar patronage and evaluates modern temple design through the pioneering scholarship of Jouveau-Dubreuil and his contemporaries.
{"title":"Architectural knowledge and the ‘Dravidian’ temple in colonial Madras Presidency","authors":"C. Branfoot","doi":"10.1017/s1359135522000343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1359135522000343","url":null,"abstract":"In around 1912 Gabriel Jouveau-Dubreuil, a young science teacher from French colonial Pondicherry in South India, visited the nearby town of Cuddalore in order to inspect the construction of a new Hindu temple. Since arriving in South India in 1909 he had been travelling to many temples and archaeological sites in order to understand the history of South Indian art. The modern temple that he visited in a suburb of Cuddalore at Tiruppappuliyur was not in fact new but a wholesale renovation of a nine-hundred-year-old shrine on a site sacred to Tamil Shaivas. This was just one of the many temples substantially rebuilt from the 1890s to the 1930s under the patronage of a wealthy merchant community, the Nattukkottai Chettiars, at a time of religious revival and growing Tamil cultural nationalism. The Nattukkottai Chettiars came from the villages and towns of Chettinadu, an arid region in southern Madras Presidency. This region was significant not only for being the provenance of the most prolific patrons of South Indian temple architecture in colonial Madras Presidency but also their builders, for many of the architects and craftsmen working on the temple at Tiruppappuliyur were from villages in Chettinadu. One of these men, M. S. Swaminathan of Pillaiyarpatti, was Jouveau-Dubreuil’s chief informant, one of the many ‘natives’ who were a critical and inextricable element of colonial knowledge production. The understanding of formal composition and terminology that Jouveau-Dubreuil learnt from contemporary architects and craftsmen and his observations of the evolution of architectural design contributed towards the first study of the Tamil temple for both a scholarly and wider public audience from the very earliest monuments of the seventh century through to those currently under construction. This article explores this architectural ‘renaissance’ in colonial Madras Presidency under Chettiar patronage and evaluates modern temple design through the pioneering scholarship of Jouveau-Dubreuil and his contemporaries.","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"706 1","pages":"75 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77739336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s135913552200029x
K. Durelle
Edited by three historians of varying seniority,1 A Global History of Runaways provides an overview of worker desertions in European imperial territories during the early modern period. Encompassing a range of worker types (slaves, indentured workers, wage workers, convicts and penal labourers, sailors and soldiers, domestic servants, and agricultural workers), the eleven essays outline the experiences and coercive labour conditions that compelled them to abscond from their circumscribed positions, and the effects of desertion on developing capitalist organisation. What is common to the various categories of workers represented in the volume is their labour power in the vast projects of European states’ imperial expansion, often via the East and West India Companies – corporations acting as the vehicles of early capitalist production and trade in the colonies [1]. The historical context of the essays is ‘the establishment of European empires and the rise of capitalism around the globe beginning in the sixteenth century’, two ‘entwined processes [that] created multiple labour regimes’.2 The Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and Danish India Companies feature prominently as the dominant force in coercive labour relations, as do military and police institutions, local colonial governments, colonial planters, and slave owners. Though perhaps not immediately apparent, this web of colonial agents commanded a tremendous amount of labour power. Taking, for example, the Dutch East India Company (or VOC): Throughout its Eurasian empire, the VOC employed large numbers of sailors, soldiers and other workers engaged in construction, maintenance, warfare, control, and the production and transport and goods. At its height in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Company directly employed some 57,000 workers.3 Texts in this volume share a commitment to studying the historical agencies of these ‘...spatial relationships between escapees and the territories they were fleeing ...’
{"title":"Kirti Durelle on spaces of desertion and the historical architecture of class formation","authors":"K. Durelle","doi":"10.1017/s135913552200029x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s135913552200029x","url":null,"abstract":"Edited by three historians of varying seniority,1 A Global History of Runaways provides an overview of worker desertions in European imperial territories during the early modern period. Encompassing a range of worker types (slaves, indentured workers, wage workers, convicts and penal labourers, sailors and soldiers, domestic servants, and agricultural workers), the eleven essays outline the experiences and coercive labour conditions that compelled them to abscond from their circumscribed positions, and the effects of desertion on developing capitalist organisation. What is common to the various categories of workers represented in the volume is their labour power in the vast projects of European states’ imperial expansion, often via the East and West India Companies – corporations acting as the vehicles of early capitalist production and trade in the colonies [1]. The historical context of the essays is ‘the establishment of European empires and the rise of capitalism around the globe beginning in the sixteenth century’, two ‘entwined processes [that] created multiple labour regimes’.2 The Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and Danish India Companies feature prominently as the dominant force in coercive labour relations, as do military and police institutions, local colonial governments, colonial planters, and slave owners. Though perhaps not immediately apparent, this web of colonial agents commanded a tremendous amount of labour power. Taking, for example, the Dutch East India Company (or VOC): Throughout its Eurasian empire, the VOC employed large numbers of sailors, soldiers and other workers engaged in construction, maintenance, warfare, control, and the production and transport and goods. At its height in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Company directly employed some 57,000 workers.3 Texts in this volume share a commitment to studying the historical agencies of these ‘...spatial relationships between escapees and the territories they were fleeing ...’","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"1 1","pages":"109 - 112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86522047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s1359135522000306
{"title":"The Indian temple and modernity","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s1359135522000306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1359135522000306","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"58 1","pages":"3 - 3"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83595854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s1359135522000409
{"title":"ARQ volume 26 issue 1 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s1359135522000409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1359135522000409","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"129 1","pages":"b1 - b2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83988229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s1359135522000227
Megha Chand Inglis
Let us sit down here on this seat. We had it made as a sample for a temple in Junagadh. Now it has a place here at home. We call its back the kakshasan. Do you know why? Because the backrest supports the kaksh or the armpit, when you lean against it while sitting, just like this.
{"title":"Living (in) the archive","authors":"Megha Chand Inglis","doi":"10.1017/s1359135522000227","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1359135522000227","url":null,"abstract":"Let us sit down here on this seat. We had it made as a sample for a temple in Junagadh. Now it has a place here at home. We call its back the kakshasan. Do you know why? Because the backrest supports the kaksh or the armpit, when you lean against it while sitting, just like this.","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"17 1","pages":"57 - 74"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75154308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s1359135522000380
Deborah Sutton
This article considers the relationship between architecture, bodies, and custodies in the making of Indian urban monuments. Monuments are created through a combination of design and designation. In this article I explore a religious architecture that is dynamic and iterative and at which monumental designation was attempted and quickly abandoned. I align three issues: what a monument looks like, what a monument does, and how both design and function connect to the custodian regimes at monumental, or potentially monumental, sites. In particular, I am concerned with architectures of divinity, and devotion, as both quotidian and monumental aspects of a city.
{"title":"Sacred architectures as monuments: a study of the Kalkaji Mandir, Delhi","authors":"Deborah Sutton","doi":"10.1017/s1359135522000380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1359135522000380","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the relationship between architecture, bodies, and custodies in the making of Indian urban monuments. Monuments are created through a combination of design and designation. In this article I explore a religious architecture that is dynamic and iterative and at which monumental designation was attempted and quickly abandoned. I align three issues: what a monument looks like, what a monument does, and how both design and function connect to the custodian regimes at monumental, or potentially monumental, sites. In particular, I am concerned with architectures of divinity, and devotion, as both quotidian and monumental aspects of a city.","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"49 1","pages":"47 - 56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87984891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s1359135522000197
Ashok B. Lall
At the Cambridge University Department of Fine Art and Architecture, we were brought up in a tradition of architecture in which the architect was the designer of cultural artefacts. Imagination, here, was aligned to the histories and philosophies of European art and aesthetics, leading up to the ‘modern’ age. It was also concerned, primarily, with the language and expression of philosophic positions and values through form and space of buildings. At the Architectural Association, which I joined after completing my degree at Cambridge, the architect was to be a strategist exploring the systemic possibilities concerning what purposes buildings serve in a changing, dynamic world. This was aligned to systems theory and computer sciences, and the potential of new materials and technologies. And at the Tropical Studies Department, which ran a postgraduate course that evolved into the Development Planning Unit at UCL, the strategist architect or planner was to place herself as an expert of the built environment in the service of the challenging tasks of social and economic development in the developing world.
{"title":"Jeenay bhi do yaaron: reimagining architectural pedagogy and practice in India, 1990–2020","authors":"Ashok B. Lall","doi":"10.1017/s1359135522000197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1359135522000197","url":null,"abstract":"At the Cambridge University Department of Fine Art and Architecture, we were brought up in a tradition of architecture in which the architect was the designer of cultural artefacts. Imagination, here, was aligned to the histories and philosophies of European art and aesthetics, leading up to the ‘modern’ age. It was also concerned, primarily, with the language and expression of philosophic positions and values through form and space of buildings. At the Architectural Association, which I joined after completing my degree at Cambridge, the architect was to be a strategist exploring the systemic possibilities concerning what purposes buildings serve in a changing, dynamic world. This was aligned to systems theory and computer sciences, and the potential of new materials and technologies. And at the Tropical Studies Department, which ran a postgraduate course that evolved into the Development Planning Unit at UCL, the strategist architect or planner was to place herself as an expert of the built environment in the service of the challenging tasks of social and economic development in the developing world.","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"289 1","pages":"113 - 116"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77860738","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s1359135522000215
S. Chattopadhyay
Between the months of September and October, Kolkata celebrates the Hindu religious festival of Durgapuja on a grand scale. Organised by local clubs and neighbourhood voluntary associations, approximately 2,500 temporary structures – pandals – are built for the worship or puja of the goddess Durga and her entourage. Of these about two thousand occupy the city’s public spaces: streets, parks, green islands, and vacant lots. A large number of the pandals are finely engineered structures that are fabulously decorated and attract hundreds of thousands of visitors each day of the festivities. It takes anywhere between three months to three days to build these pavilions. After five days of festivities the pandals are dismantled and the clay deities destroyed by immersing them in the Hooghly River or another nearby body of water.
{"title":"Ephemeral by design","authors":"S. Chattopadhyay","doi":"10.1017/s1359135522000215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1359135522000215","url":null,"abstract":"Between the months of September and October, Kolkata celebrates the Hindu religious festival of Durgapuja on a grand scale. Organised by local clubs and neighbourhood voluntary associations, approximately 2,500 temporary structures – pandals – are built for the worship or puja of the goddess Durga and her entourage. Of these about two thousand occupy the city’s public spaces: streets, parks, green islands, and vacant lots. A large number of the pandals are finely engineered structures that are fabulously decorated and attract hundreds of thousands of visitors each day of the festivities. It takes anywhere between three months to three days to build these pavilions. After five days of festivities the pandals are dismantled and the clay deities destroyed by immersing them in the Hooghly River or another nearby body of water.","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"33 1","pages":"30 - 46"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75838688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S1359135522000318
J. Chatterjee
My fellow architects, let me begin this piece with a provocative, even blasphemous, proposition: it is time to do away with the twin terms ‘architect’ and ‘architecture’ as signs that stand in for what we are, what we do or as a ‘thing’ in the world.
{"title":"Rethinking ‘architect’ and ‘architecture’","authors":"J. Chatterjee","doi":"10.1017/S1359135522000318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1359135522000318","url":null,"abstract":"My fellow architects, let me begin this piece with a provocative, even blasphemous, proposition: it is time to do away with the twin terms ‘architect’ and ‘architecture’ as signs that stand in for what we are, what we do or as a ‘thing’ in the world.","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"136 1","pages":"117 - 120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85886108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}