Mumbai Day 4

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Taylor

Dust

Posted on March 3, 2013 by Taylor

Dust in Mumbai is all-encompassing.

It is the one constant of the city, blurring boundaries of the vertical, lateral, private, public.
It nullifies any intended separation of urban space.
It reduces streetscapes to a primordial tabula rasa, a continual sea of possibility.

Dust in Mumbai interrupts imported European architecture, stripping it of all importance.
It catalyzes the need for symbols: objects are decoded only by signage advertising their most important organs.
It denies architecture’s ambition for the glossy spectacle, instead permitting only a showcase of built mass, of enclosed volume.

Dust in Mumbai liberates the city from the choke-hold of Architecture.
It reduces all architecture to urban form, at once lending slums and corporate towers a marginal state of legitimacy.
It plunges the city into a constant state of amnesia.
It demands a constant renewal of the public realm.
It welcomes chaos, experiment, hypothesis.
It unifies the South with the suburbs, the five-star hotels with the markets, the formal with the informal.

Dust in Mumbai gives rise to a city in which there is no architecture; there is only urbanism.

Mumbai Day 3

Posted on March 2, 2013 by Taylor