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OBSERVATIONS/ Aneesh Nandi Design is at crossroads, we are in midst of a medley of sensibilities, tastes an d opinions- with little or no overall consensus.

There are various aspects and f acets to a final work, and if we restrict ourselves to the realm of architecture , we can broadly classify them under two categories- the pragmatic and the roman tic. What the classics believed can be dismissed as superficial and shallow, and conc erned with just the romantic aspects of architecture. This genre would have us l ooking at the visual merit of a series of facades, with spatial experience a sec ondary concern. The importance of aestheticism reduced architects of pre-moderni st era to petty concerns such as the proportions of columns and the option of ei ther gothic or greco-roman styles of construction. Nobody questioned the need fo r said columns or like expressions, or got to the roots of the segmented arch: t hey were all content with aping what was. Romantic aspects at work were- the vis ual experience of the product- rhythm, balance, grace, even character and identi ty. Entrances, halls, courts and terraces received a semblance of experiential t reatment; to invoke a certain set of feelings and heighten the act of being in t hat space. With the advent of Industrial revolution came the pragmatic aspects; spaces desi gned for a specific purpose- like a solution to a mathematical problem, pointed and exact. Then came the inter-relation of spaces and their organization, in a m anner to further the purpose. Objectives and intents were met and allayed with str ategies; and in the end, the physical outcome happened on its own, without the z eal that characterised it before then. Examples of such buildings are factories and mills, bridges and housing for workers, structures which in their eyes just had to get the job done. The resulting formal vocabulary inspired modernism; an d their take was a hybrid of the romance and pragmatism. Modernist romantic aspe cts had to do with minimalism, structure as ornament , geometric and uniformity, an d was even fascinated by and made vague references to the technological progress (steamboats, cars = Corbusier). Spatial experience became a by-product of the f unction, and variables such as light, ventilation, orientation, juxtaposition, o penings and enclosures were all dictated by it. Later on, modernist aesthetics m ade architects re-interpret the vernacular into a regional style- as a practical a spect because it was in essence the climate and geography they were responding t o(and to the people and their culture too, but then that is indirectly the same) . This, in my opinion at least, was a huge step forward: the end user was consid ered as the client and everything wrapped around it; almost democratizing the pr ocess as opposed to the bourgeoisie tendency of the classical. In conclusion, this division between the romantic and pragmatic is re-enforced b y the universal ideas of duality and balance: the yin and yang, if you will. The reason such difference exists in the first place, can be traced back to the ear ly modernists, who theorized and orchestrated the break-away from an antiquated set of rules and orders in form-building; to come up with a new approach, a simp le but potent idea of fulfilling function, and nothing but. Later on, this led t o a set of rules which became as suffocating as the ones they broke away from, c ompleting a full circle. Today, We have works ranging from the unapologetically romantic de-constructivist structures by the likes of Gehry, and the yawn induci ng scattering of grey boxes: offices, housing blocks, doesn t matter. Meeting half way is the obvious solution and seems like the ideal, maybe like Hadid s work. The se basic twin parameters are the cornerstone of the current epoch, and to have o ne but not the other is sacrilege.

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