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Santiniketan Architecture: The Constru http://pathabhavanpraktoni.net/main/?p=2479

The Construed Public Space | Pathabhavan Praktoni News


Post Published: 28 May 2011 Author: CPartha Found in section: Buildings of Santiniketan, Evaluating Tagore, The Documents, Video Films Edit this entry Previous Topic: FLOWERS OF SANTINIKETAN: GULMOHOR Next Topic: FLOWERS OF SANTINIKETAN: AKANDA or CROWN FLOWER

Hope was nourished for long that at some corner of the world will I rest in peace; not for wealth, not glory too, but a small abode was all that I longed for. Hoped to embrace the serene shadow of the tree, the soft murmur of the river, the evening star rising at the dusk while going home, the sweet scent of Jasmine by the window, and the first glitter on the water when dawn breaks; hoped to fill the life slowly with them, the short life with its little joys and sorrows; not with money, not glory indeed, a small home was all that I hoped. [Tr. Mine] The poets abode did not remain so humble! It gathered wealth and junk together, it became quite an establishment, it exploded, and all that in only seventy years after his demise. Rather than being an optimal, slick caravan for the designated sojourn in the eternal space that is Life, now it has become immobile and quite a shoddy one, with fences and columns all around, with its roots forced into the ground. Was it all destined by the basic design? Was it not? Ours is an investigation into that design itself, pensive one may call it. Making a shack to live in was among the primary requirements of civilization. The issue was how big a hut one really needs; does anything less than a palace suffice? Other issues followed, like, how exactly the sweet abode would be constructed, and how the technical issues related to the availability of materials as well as the climatic conditions/constraints were going to be handled along with the aesthetics? Do technicalities override the aesthetics, or is it the other way round? Do the aesthetic features of the construction follow the local landscape, or do the architects dominate, play gods in modifying and redefining the landscape? Well, these are some of the fundamental questions that have ever haunted the whole praxis of architecture. Not exactly all of them are answered in the proposed discourse here, but the people certainly do not deserve such continued graphic violence on the environment, on their living conditions; they do not deserve to witness such a brutal rape of the soil.

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Santiniketan Architecture: The Constru

So, what was Santiniketan Architecture in the first place, and what was its philosophy?

Santiniketan is a township that is merely a hundred years old, emancipated from and conjured up around the comprehensive literary and cultural activities of the Tagores that left no cultural mile stones of their time unturned, Rabindranath being at the centre of it. Nonetheless, it has got a philosophical background that is as profound as the entirety of the collective wisdom of all human races. Since the moments of inception, Santiniketan hosted a number of human experiments in the fields of literature, music, dance, education, painting and visual arts, theatre, fashion, and dare we include economics. Architecture too was a part of it, probably not as a very conscious effort, but the thought wave prevailing in the other fields left some visible marks in the architectural thoughts as well, that took a mature shape later on in the able hands of Abanindranath, Nandalal, and mostly Suren Kar who despite not being a specialist architect, dedicated most parts of his career in architectural and interior designs, not only in Santiniketan but also in some other major trysts around the country.
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However, before we proceed further in our introspection, we would actually require a theoretical intervention here, that is to say, a note on the methodology that we intend to adopt. Methodology is a poster that demands to tell about how it all began; what are the major sources of information and what is the discourse that is either deployed scrupulously or is evolved from within the process in order to connect the visible dots. However, gathering information and ideas from what other people did on a particular subject is one of the accepted algorithm in methodology, conveniently not acknowledging the sources is yet another. Here in this case we would rather have to insist on disregarding the previously known paradigm for several reasons. Tagores hypothetical treatise on architecture is just not there. Nor are there many written texts that we can readily refer to, apart from a few preliminary works and some disjoint bits of information to be obtained from various articles, which we eventually identify as the tertiary but most immediate source of information only. The inevitable self-contradiction that we often encounter is there in identifying the role of each and every building, its design, and its relationship with the public life. What transpires is that the common perceptive architectural discourse that takes the individual buildings as the complete manifestations of the principles and then sets itself at deconstructing the same is impaired, faulty, and is often misleading; while in Santiniketan the architectural pretext was actually more of a township planning than anything else. It is there to be perceived as a conglomeration of more than one, if not all, building blocks arranged in a particular space. The space is designed as a whole rather than the individual blocks in it that are at the same time including and excluding each other. One must also consider the public space blurring its borders into the vacant land among the buildings in order to grasp the principles of this architectural style. Later we would see that the space design includes carefully planned flora and fauna too, that is landscape design in general. We would like to call it the Public Space Architecture.

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Gour Prangan While studying the architectural school of thoughts of Santiniketan we would first discard the idea of deconstructing the individual buildings, for the individual units might mean nothing in the purview of the greater whole. In fact, Tagores purlieu was more of public space architecture` than architecture standalone. Lets think of it in this way that the major portion of existence inside the campus, the asram-jiban, was supposed to rest its balance on the interactive space out there in the open, while the interaction went on perpetually often referring back to the rooms and studios, libraries and archives surrounding the space. There was such an immense scope of learning through such interactions and dialogues, even the uncalled for at some moments, that unmistakably became the hallmark of the Tagorean principle of education. The buildings and the institutes placed on the periphery of this space are therefore gateways through which people could interact with the world outside this given discursive space, and hence each such building has essentially two faces at the least, one facing inside, and another outside. The reason could be speculated as that the imposition of a frontal piece on any one of the sides would necessarily imply the existence of a back on the opposite with all its mundane and filth and hypocrisy, to say the least. There are certain perfect examples of such architectural pieces inside the campus where the building itself is a gate that has no front in particular, for instance Sinha Sadan, Shantiniketan Griha before the recent modifications, the glass temple or the Upasana Griha, the Udayan, and so on. One is allowed to walk through a given building without experiencing any obstacle or sense of limitation invoked by a closing wall at the end of it; there was no end ever imagined. Secondly, we would try to make ourselves evolve from the methods of reconstructing history from the anecdotes, for when most known anecdotes tend to contradict each other in essence, there is an obvious pitfall in that method. The reason being, anecdotes, by their virtue of being so, essentially require some nonspecialists talking about highly specialized subjects, and in most cases the message of the original story is exactly inverted in its anecdotal presence. There are several instances of such inversions in the history of art, the peaceful pigeon in Picassos Guernica being one of them. However, that makes the researchers lives a little more difficult, and in every case we have to begin at the scratch, re-invent the wheel in every given opportunity. In its stead, we would rather insist on an inside-out introspection that tries to match the internalized design requirements with the visible exteriors. Gothic it may sound, sans the extravagance.

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Dinantika / Cha-Chakra Santiniketan architecture or what was fondly called the Sourindrik School by some, was by no means a well documented one. The basic impetus was not accidental by any means as it is already identifiable as an obvious fall out of a fully bloomed philosophical stance taken by Tagore et al, but there have been no such evidences so far that a conscious plan was ever taken up and was implemented at some point of history. One would be tempted to refer to the legendary Patrick/Arthur Geddes plan though that reportedly was submitted once, back in the 30s, and is now lost into the abyss of irretrievable forgotten history. We come to see a self-contradiction here, but then the contradiction is embedded in the entire history of Santiniketan, if not of post-colonial India in general. Following a given design and deferring, if not denying, the acknowledgement is what the colonial subjects specialize in. Therefore, logically speaking, our primary sources are the buildings and the complex as a whole that are not known to have been modified drastically in the later years so as to lose their basic functional and aesthetic characteristics, while the secondary source being Tagores literature, his entire gamut of works. The onus lies on the inquisitive people to reconstruct the nuances of the constructive generic framework from the secondary and even the tertiary sources. The primary source is given there in the forms of brick and mortar, though not irrevocably; some buildings have indeed changed minutely but significantly and irreversibly, not to mention the gross suicidal attempts to destroy its own assets. The tertiary sources might include two major components that are not mutually exclusive; the first being the contemporary reappropriation of the school of thought or the way the thought has had infiltrated into the domain of local vernacular architecture, while the second is the modern day textual representation of the school that has got three different visible traits but surprisingly all of them coming from the domain of the visual arts.

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New school Architecture The relation between the primary and secondary is certainly dynamic and often emphatic. The oeuvre of Tagores text is full of contradictory statements, if one is allowed to go by the standard methods of deductions, yet there is a kind of coherence in those contradictions. As the linguists say, vide Dr. Sisirkumar Das, the typical Tagorean logical construct was essentially circular in nature dwelling on a series of nested allegories and metaphors where he drifted from one allegory to another like the twitting and tweeting bird hops from one branch to another. The statements in the spiralling algorithm, as understood by the logicians, kept touching both extreme opposites periodically and harmonically, while the chariot of his inductive logic trudge up safely along the road in between there. Hence, the historians life is not easy either in case he fancies relating the palpable reality, subtracting all moss gathered, with statements made by Tagore; he is certainly asking for endless misery of bafflement, which in turn, puts the authenticity of his deductions at stake. However, to give them some relief, Tagore did try to reiterate certain points, certain expressions throughout his works, and in most cases those points actually formed the core of his entire philosophy. One such was his idea about the relationship of Sudha (the nectar or ambrosia) and the Soudha (the building). One hardly believes that etymologically these two words are connected by any means or one is generated from the other, but Tagore seemed to have established an alliterating connexion more than often in his works. First it appeared in his play Grihaprabesh, where Jatin says: A piece of architecture is not just brick and mortar, there has to be nectar in it: [Tr. Mine] Again at a different place, in the poem Beethika he says: The nectar that the heaven showers is meant for the roads only, not for the rooms with all doors closed. [Tr. Mine] For Tagore, the world itself is a great traveller, and all its greatest treasures are reserved for the travellers only, not for the one who meditates behind the closed door. We might also propose a reading of the play The Post Office [Daakghar] while assigning this new significance to the names, where the ambrosia beckons the innocent to join her in the world outside, and the innocent invariably fails on her. Nonetheless, one can thus easily establish a relationship between the primary and the secondary sources as all these references to the textual oeuvre indicate towards Tagores unambiguous take on the mutual
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indentation and intervention of the home and the world, and also necessitate an architectural design where the home will be an appendage to or extension of the world so that there goes no false alarm of crossing the barriers or breaching the boundary walls separating the two inseparable. Unfortunately, modern VisvaBharati is all set to defy and negate this core Tagorean principle. Three most natural design concepts followed this basic philosophy; 1. A building could essentially be reduced to an arch or tunnel, where the rooms are placed on the wings having a run-through space right at the centre of it, or is a combination of a number of such arches and tunnels; 2. The designing and/or building process always started with the central lounge while the other rooms and components grew and appeared organically around the lounge, 3. The elevations of the buildings are never monumental, the floor and the plinth always being close to the ground level, with two/three exceptions that we can discuss separately.

If the above was the primary architectural text, the immediate context was there as follows. Along with those discussed above, there were several other deciding factors that played their roles in shaping the final form of the architecture, namely 1. The compulsions caused by the perpetual cash-crunch leading to the maximum usage of space 2. The direct inspirational impetus offered by the local architectural styles commonly visible in the surrounding villages. 3. The not-so-friendly tropical climate of the particular geographic location implying orientation of the buildings in a certain way, lot of fins, overhangs and lighter colours of the exterior to protect the walls, not to mention the trees 4. The obvious pressure of creating something very Indian in the face of the audacious imperialism embedded in the architecture dished out by Lutyens and Emerson, though ironically enough, both Lutyens and Emerson imbibed and re-appropriated the arch-structure and other Indian elements in their most famous works, and there are enough reasons to believe that both Lutyens and Suren Kar were drawing on the same resources, the same texts were being read with different pretexts. That explains, visually, all the specific design elements that one gets to see in the typical Santiniketan architecture. It assimilated from the vernacular architecture, collective wisdom, and brewed it through the aesthetic and philosophical sensibility that Santiniketan had ever had to offer. In a nutshell, what it did was to violate and neutralize the basic dichotomy of mans private and public life that the city dwellers often
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suffer from.

However, the relationship between the Sourindrik and the vernacular became rather complex when the ideas started flowing in both directions. The relationship between the primary and the tertiary texts is dynamic, as expected. As they say, the donor is always wise, but the receiver has to be wiser enough not to accept all that is donated without questioning it. In the buildings that came into being around the ashram during the 40s and 50s decades are mostly near replicas of the smaller buildings in the modern Uttarayana complex, either of Punashcha, or of Konarka. I wouldnt say that the entire architectural design was reappropriated in the vernacular architecture then, nor was it true that the named buildings represented any innovative architecture or that they were the representative works. Nonetheless many houses in the old Purva Palli area that were built in the late 40s or till late 50s were designed in this line, though one cant be very sure if all of them followed the same architectural principle.

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The similarities in most cases happened simply because more or less the same team of masons and consultants was involved in constructing all these buildings. What was imbibed clearly was the outwardly aesthetics of serenity and rarely the sense of unison with the surrounding Nature and atmosphere that also included people. During the sixties the relationship changed because of an influx of a populace who came in suddenly and before even understanding the essence of Santiniketan life they built their own residences around the place, and the relationship became complex. The scenario changed rapidly when in the early seventies the law and order issues became a big time trouble, and many of the houses with open veranda and all were covered with ugly, shoddy grilles. It was even more complex when most of the textual representations happened in the 80s or later that included a distorted context in the first place, and also had one or another academic pretext in them. However, we will get back to them later on.

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