UNIYAL
“what is not constant can no longer be a friend”
Without complete access and re-clamation of our own time, we can barely pretend to care even to ourselves about the climatic changes and their global and local effects. The imagery is misleading; the rising trend line of a growth chart has moved beyond economics and penetrated into everything we experience, whispering promises of boundless abundance, including our relationship with time. It's almost as if money and resources can sedate the clock for us, as if our seconds can count for more than they dare. The modern myth has us rushing to claim and feel everything in less and less time, and no matter the rush, we just don't have the time for the things we deem important for the world.
It's only with the fall of this myth that it seems possible to feel at ease with nature. Maybe it'll be easier to accept the many other ways of inhabiting time, beyond the time of an individual, seeing Life-Time across generations, and adapting our actions and movements slowly with knowledge and humility of a larger consciousness through time, like trees (maybe).
It's only with the humility of re-placing ourselves in the multitudes of existences in nature that newer paradigms of existing might start to seem obvious. Our very physical relation with the world might become apparent, the relation of matter and material — the finite and nuanced existence of matter that is extracted, processed, packaged, and sold as the material of our modern world, for our infinite "immaterial" digital era. We might see the error of logic and reason, the shortcomings of an individual consciousness.
So it seems that it can be with the re-claiming of the agency of our time, the humility of seeing our place in nature, and the distrust in our logic of infinite extraction that we can begin to engage with an architecture of sustainability, care & beauty.
Thus the pavilion becomes a site for testing our relationships with time, nature and matter. The physical pavilion being just one of the manifestations in an intentional & crafted process that starts much before and continues long after. The envelopes that hold the spaces of gathering, tread lightly on the ground beneath while channeling the water from above, back into the ground letting nature take its course. The materials used become sites to test their behaviors of growth and decay, making evident the non-static and non-permanent nature of all matter
Articulating an opinion on these words is slippery. Separately, they have meanings in the deconstruction of places of different make-up.
Decolonization : seems all set for a past that is as treacherous as it is mythical now; it is an attempted surgery of an Alzheimer’s, extremely charged (almost brutal) in its attempts, but acted upon the blurred elements of our normalcy - from our aspirational language all the way to our very modes of working.
Decarbonization : seems all set for a future that seems as slanted as it is trendy now; it reads like a prescription by the disease for the diseased, extremely creative in projecting solutions within the tolerated ways of thinking. Whether it’s redrawing forests and rivers as entities for “protection” or tech-savvy resource management by rationing the legality of beings.
Although when spoken together it invokes hope - even if it is at the sight of some remembered decency in the hypocrite play of these words - for the future.
As a landscape that has become speculative and an object of greed, it is often difficult to remind oneself that the city of Mumbai rests on a ground shaped by the actions of water over millennia. Not long ago, was when human alteration rose, first the gaothans were superimposed by the engineered infrastructures of the British, then post-independence development led an even more increase in the appropriation of land for purposes beyond local communities . Film City, Mahindra Factory and Charkop Industrial Area began to take root, impinging upon the rivers. Simultaneously the floodplains allowed for para-legal forms of occupation - the densest populations within the city are found here.Flooding in each Monsoon has led to increasing socio-economic aggravation for the urban poor, pronounced by administrative measures that favour gated communities, segregated planning and the automobile. In this context we asked the question of what would it mean to re-envision a relationship with the river?
As a landscape that has become speculative and an object of greed, it is often difficult to remind oneself that the city of Mumbai rests on a ground shaped by the actions of water over millennia. Not long ago, was when human alteration rose, first the gaothans were superimposed by the engineered infrastructures of the British, then post-independence development led an even more increase in the appropriation of land for purposes beyond local communities . Film City, Mahindra Factory and Charkop Industrial Area began to take root, impinging upon the rivers. Simultaneously the floodplains allowed for para-legal forms of occupation - the densest populations within the city are found here.Flooding in each Monsoon has led to increasing socio-economic aggravation for the urban poor, pronounced by administrative measures that favour gated communities, segregated planning and the automobile. In this context we asked the question of what would it mean to re-envision a relationship with the river?
As a landscape that has become speculative and an object of greed, it is often difficult to remind oneself that the city of Mumbai rests on a ground shaped by the actions of water over millennia. Not long ago, was when human alteration rose, first the gaothans were superimposed by the engineered infrastructures of the British, then post-independence development led an even more increase in the appropriation of land for purposes beyond local communities . Film City, Mahindra Factory and Charkop Industrial Area began to take root, impinging upon the rivers. Simultaneously the floodplains allowed for para-legal forms of occupation - the densest populations within the city are found here.Flooding in each Monsoon has led to increasing socio-economic aggravation for the urban poor, pronounced by administrative measures that favour gated communities, segregated planning and the automobile. In this context we asked the question of what would it mean to re-envision a relationship with the river?
As a landscape that has become speculative and an object of greed, it is often difficult to remind oneself that the city of Mumbai rests on a ground shaped by the actions of water over millennia. Not long ago, was when human alteration rose, first the gaothans were superimposed by the engineered infrastructures of the British, then post-independence development led an even more increase in the appropriation of land for purposes beyond local communities . Film City, Mahindra Factory and Charkop Industrial Area began to take root, impinging upon the rivers. Simultaneously the floodplains allowed for para-legal forms of occupation - the densest populations within the city are found here.Flooding in each Monsoon has led to increasing socio-economic aggravation for the urban poor, pronounced by administrative measures that favour gated communities, segregated planning and the automobile. In this context we asked the question of what would it mean to re-envision a relationship with the river?