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Delirious City (Polity and Vanity in Urban India)

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Delirious City (Polity and Vanity in Urban India)

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Specifications

	Publisher: Niyogi Books
	Author Gautam Bhatia
	Language: English
	Pages: 312 (Color Illustrations)
	Cover: PAPERBACK
	9.5x7 inch
	Weight 800 gm
	Edition: 2019
	ISBN: 9789389136104
	HBW088

Delivery and Return Policies

	Usually ships in 3 days
	Returns and Exchanges accepted within 7 days
	Free Delivery

Easy Returns

Return within 7 days of
order delivery.See T&Cs

1M+ Customers

Serving more than a
million customers worldwide.

25+ Years in Business

A trustworthy name in Indian
art, fashion and literature.

Book Description

About the Book This book grew out of a grainy combination of despair and delight that afflicts the residents of every Indian city. Delirious City is as much a collision of various mediums as it is of mixed messages, concocted out of a desperate urge to make sense of the City, Its residents, their aspirations, and their perennial expectations. Its aim is to rile and provoke the reader with a disparate arc of writing, drawing, painting, sculpture, and architecture, and relieve the mood in satire. Daily life, events, places, personalities-houses, builders, parks, and mails, bureaucrats, politicians, the rich, the poor, the labourer and the liquor baron-all are condensed as a virulent strain of muddled voices that describe our civic reality. Bitter tragedy, urban despair, and personal desire emerge in daily urban encounters and manifest a euphoric edge, often yielding to subversive comedy. The discourse begins then by describing urban life as it exists, proceeds down the path of memory to state something of how it used to be, and finally addresses the hope of a different future of how we may begin to view the places we make with optimism and hope. Sometimes architectural, sometimes cultural-but frequently facetious and farcical-Delirious City imitates life in the Indian city.

About the Author Gautam Bhatia graduated in Fine Arts and went on to get a Master's degree in Architecture. A Delhi-based architect and artist, he has written extensively on architecture, and has received several awards for his artwork and buildings. Apart from the biography Laurie Baker: Life, Work, and Writings and various other publications, he is the author of Punjabi Baroque, Silent Spaces, and Malaria Dreams-a trilogy that focuses on the cultural and social aspects of architecture. Bhatia has participated in a number of one-man and group shows and exhibitions in India and abroad, and his columns have appeared in Outlook magazine, Indian Express, and the New York Times. He is currently working on 'Future Building: An Exhibition of Ideas for the Future City'.

Preface In the 1920s, architects wrote manifestos-moments of private, lucid comprehensions about the state architecture presented in carefully worded texts. Essentially definitions of the direction design must take, such wilting was cleansed of all frivolity and served as unquestionable statements of authority. A hundred years hence, the place of architecture, as also of the architect, is a fluid one that straddles art, sociology, invention, culture, politics, and the tike. The architect is designer, engineer, most all led into one. Obviously, such an open-ended professional position builder, theorist, and therapist all rolled to be abused. The architect takes liberties, but is himself the victim of unreasonable liberties taken by those around him. The characteristic uneasiness of his position can no longer be masked by personal theory and private practice. I have always felt that the story of architecture can be best related in film-a frame-by-frame When condensed into the form of a book, the movement across time can only development of an idea. When con be conveyed in the rough, overlapping images of a storyboard. This book therefore does not manifest a linear narrative Linear in layout, its story, I hope, unfolds in multiple ways. Like a sea voyage from Mumbai to London undertaken a century ago-two months on the high seas, with stops in Aden, Alexandria, Naples, and Lisbon. A host of cultural intrusions preceded the final arrival in England, The written narrative in this book is similarly subjected to the multiplicity of forces that affect it. It is decoded, rephrased, derided, revised, replaced, and even denied in a set of intrusive accompaniment that attach to the test like flies buzzing around a sweet dish. So, giving in to the conflicting refrains of our times, I have chosen to make the medium as important as the message. This isn't creative writing or art for its own sake. Much of it has been done in an outburst of reaction to my life as an architect. I have chosen then to comfort myself in the belief that a work of architecture is the combined residue of multiple inputs. A building interpreted as a molecular state in which ideas attach and detach in a circuitous orbit towards completion. Such an approach questions the rules of conventional bock presentation, and so, juxtaposes, superimposes, even obliterates text and pictorial matter in a way that gives importance to one idea over another, making a linear reading deliberately difficult. When writing enlarges and spreads over a drawing, it not only relates the two closely but gives more respectability to the words. When a picture bleeds into text, it suggests a graphic link between the two rather than a literary one. The layout is therefore a calculated set of fragments ads, lustrations, drawings, paintings, and text boxes-all vying for position on the page. In any biographical account on art, architecture, or urban life, a direct, wordy narrative will always be incomplete. It is in the nature of city-living today that influences, ideas, commentaries, attitudes, opinions, personal prejudices, and conversations, all contribute in some way to the overarching message. In the recorded life of an architect, they assume the form of sketches, verbal exchanges, paintings, portraits, complete or in progress sculptures, built and un-built buildings, client exchanges, diary entries of incomplete thoughts, difficult half-truths, unnecessary borrowings, even forbidden ideas. The practice of architecture is like an incoherent novel, the only thing that bestows it a grain of truth is the influence that keeps the artistic life active and constantly on the edge.

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