When self-publishing, an aspect that most, I would say aspiring writers leave out is proofreading. Blogs, tweets, Facebook, or Instagram posts are edited but not proofread. The task requires a second or third set of eyes to confirm the contents of the text, which includes fact-checking. Professional publishers have this embedded in their workflow to deliver the most reliable material set to their readers. They also have really large numbers to disseminate therefore a lot more people can get annoyed if they are paying money for content with errors. Texts like these are staged as a part of acknowledgments just before you thank your parents and the God Almighty in the hope that your readers will forgive your linguistic misgivings. But then those are writers who are striving to be authors. I am doing this publishing project as an experiment with no particular grand aspirations but to try out some ideas as public thinking on Indian architectural imagination. So what I have is a project that takes the form of a book. It has tried to emulate the book as much as possible but there are some parts that most leave out or don't recognize exist in known formal publishing processes I have left out. Un-proofread text is the recognized limitation of the exercise. All texts in this compilation go through three processing cycles before being formatted for kindle. First block draft on VS Code. Next is published on either substack or medium. If it’s already on either of the platforms then it is reworked as a second draft on VS Code. An essay is then reformatted as single file sets, including its images. The attempt in making kindle essay sets is to define what the components of a spatial design research writing practice are and how the model is updated in time.
That is the first part of the methodology. The second set of limitations is set by the reading of Correa's A Place in the Shade, The New Landscape & Other Essays, and Koolhaas's Delirious New York, A Retrospective Manifesto for Manhattan. If there is a benchmark for a design research practice, it is the publishing practice of OMA/AMO. Delirious New York | DNY became a conceptual guide for OMA, while The New Landscape | TNL is the first book written on practicing contemporary Indian Architecture. It is slated that Rem assembled the study from a collection of postcards sourced during his time in the city. Text blocks work in sync with the themes of the retroactive manifesto proposed. An outline of text in blocks also stage a lens to recreate Manhattan of a time while stating formal aspirations of his future practice. Correa on the other hand paints an image of the possible landscape he would try and build in. It is a book that is set within a collection of essays creating this broad book of essays titled A Place in the Shade. Like the plots and narratives making up Koolhaas's retroactive, I have looked to the contents of Correa's essay list as a context of what the state of architectural practice is seen from my perspective.
introduction
architecture
Hornby train, Chinese gardens & architecture
assembly in Chandigarh
place in the sun
public, private, and sacred
museums, an alternate typology
what one learned from Corbusier
mythic image
zero
planning
goa, planning for tourism
point of balance
public transport as DNA
the tragedy of tulsi pipe road
managing our cities
ideal city
an urban manifesto
education
learning from ekalavya
make sure it is your train
in search of brunel
making of the Mahatma
quest for the hindu garden
roots and bridges
ayodhya, an architecture that unites us
the new landscape
looking back, looking forward
introduction 1985 edition
urbanisation
space as resource
equity
mobility
great city ... terrible place
disaggregating the numbers
political will
scanning the options
sources and acknowledgments
glossary
From my review, both books, have a form that is a result of planning the material compiled and presented to outline what is a probable trajectory of architectural practice. Books by architects are argued as architectural projects and therefore ideas built. I have used both the books as case studies, parti drawings to build my version of an architectural project within an e-book. The contents listed above are almost modified divides the book into, for now, 36 sections including the cover and extended adages. Books become dated by the time they hit the press since content consumption today happens more within a stream rather than within a library or at fixed timed intervals. So this is the first of a series if possible one every year, annual conversations. It is also numbered book 10. While at publishing at the Urban Design and Research Institute/ UDRI, I worked on seven books in total. Mumbai Readers 07 to 10 and produced Landscape and Urbanism. There were also translations of the first reader in Hindi and Marathi. Book 08 is material related to my masters (by research) thesis at Sir J.J. while Book 09 is fellowship work at KRVIA. 08 and 09 are tricky to compile as raw kindle editions and they need revising to address content concerns. This project is a practice run to make e-books on the Kindle marketplace. Rather than buildings, ideas of buildings are what is expected of us to learn, see or develop. E-books as a space of discourse the publishing project tries to create. Internet communications overall are relatively broken in their current form and hence there is a necessity to look at alternatives to current spaces available.
I prefer email conversations over comments anywhere. Email as a service will be around even if social media transitions to the metaverse. For discussion of these texts, I am on isaac.at.spatialresearch.dot.net. The discourse I am interested in is how time changes architectural imagination and any strains of thought on the subject stemming out from the texts that follow I would continue on the subsequent edition, if possible annually. The new landscape is the old landscape, education is learning, planning is urbanism, and architecture is spatial design. In college, we were trained to learn from Correa, emulate his spatial strategies to think about how architecture in India is imagined. There was an overdose of Correa for a while especially when I was working at the UDRI. I was involved in a very minuscule part of clearing copyright of the text for some of his essays, for the first print edition of A Place in the Shade in 2010. I then forgot about it until last year I had to try and assemble models of architectural imagination and their frameworks of architectural knowledge production for a possible Ph.D. research. Outlining a writing practice was necessary requirement of the application procedure too. In pursuit of finding a framework to locate a practice, a community of note-taking practitioners at Roam Research and Obsidian shed some light on the advantages of maintaining a disciplined note-taking system. It was from these discussions that framed the necessity of staging notes in virtual marketplaces came up in time. These discussions started in the month of February of this year how this project culminates with, is almost as an annual report of a time spent in articulating a possible form of writing practice as a system. Imagining architectural discourses started with the xerox binder in 2001, architectural portfolio in 2004/’05, it developed to websites in 2010 and micro-sites, blogging platforms in 2012 and soon after, social media. Draft subject textbooks were also tried out in 2017/’18. That was the last 20years you could say. This is the stage for the next.
Isaac Mathew 2111082209 +Thiruvananthapuram