monument
— an architecture that rests on the fictive performance of eternity. It has long been equated with architectural genius, a stand-alone artefact in the architect’s portfolio. The monument aspires to permanence, but time undoes it.
concrete I begin with the solidity of concrete: it paves the material ground we enter and reinforces the architectural canon we reference. Concrete is a material often confused with concreteness itself. It is cast, poured and cured onto our built environment, solidifying ideologies that endorse our spaces and suspend them in time. Concrete does not merely build, it instructs. Concrete shaped my earliest attachments to home. For me, home is Le Corbusier’s modern city, Chandigarh; a city without dust, cast in béton brut , a city that emerged from the fragmented disorder of partition. The hurried lines of the Boundary Commission haphazardly cut through Punjab, leaving Lahore, its historic capital, on the western side of the border, now claimed by Pakistan. For Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, this meant realising a new, modernist capital, one ‘unfettered by the tradition of the past’. Construction carried these ambitions forward: concrete as immutable and resistant to decay. The concrete city, one without dust, could be mythologised as eternal, a spatial expression of Nehru’s vision for an industrialised future. It was understood as a material with endless potential – circulated globally throughout the postwar period while produced locally – well-suited to a nation with similar aspirations.
Pierre Jeanneret Collection, CCA Montréal
High Court, Sector 1, Chandigarh, India, ca. 1955. My mother (far left) and her classmates outside of Gandhi Bhawan, ca. 1988. Both my parents were born in Chandigarh, a decade after it opened. Their parents came in the early 1960s with the promise of a healthier quality of life. Then, some thirty years later, I was born.
Alisha Kapoor
canvas Whereby concrete walls may be monumentalised to the point of social irrelevance, offshoot temporary materials such as canvas, plastic sheets, scrap metal and waste wood shape our city’s cultural canopies, accepting other simultaneous and even contradictory forces. Malleable, soft, they lay bare the interstitial spaces of a city that is always in a state of becoming. Canvas is not made to last. It moves because people move. To build with canvas is to anticipate breakdown and maintenance, not to deny them. In Chandigarh, this slippage re-imagines urban life through the steady invention of its people: plots once designed for single families now house multiple generations under one roof, sidewalks are appropriated by residents to sell chai and other goods, temporary enclosures are made by vendors affixing cloth and rope to existing buildings. Rahul Mehrotra refers to these practices as kinetic cities ,where urbanism is understood as a field of movement, elasticity, incrementation, informal economies and temporary occupations – a city made through flux, not fixed monuments. Soft matter crafts its own cultural heritage that acknowledges patterns of occupation and appropriation as tenable markers, attuned to the changing material realities of the people, recognising that the city’s vibrancy came not from the permanence of its buildings but from the flexibility of its making. left: Rows of clotheslines, Dhobi Ghat, Mumbai, Maharashtra, 2011 Still from Souvenirs in Situ, 2022. https://www.gsdkirklandgallery. com/exhibitions/2023-02-souvenirs-in-situ
Christina Brodu
Alisha Kapoor
51
on site review 48 :: building materials
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