Draft_Thesis_Maybe

PSUEDO PROGRESS

a s t r e a m o f c o n c i o u s n e s s

It’s been a month…but not necessarily a month’s worth of progress.

I’ve been having an internal debate about what kind of thesis I want to do and what I should be doing as a different approach to guiding me towards narrowing these large ideas of culture, mythology, and development.

Coming to no avail with internal discussions, I decided to leave it loose and see if our studio trip to Mumbai (9/18 – 9/25) would inspire me/ direct me…help me at all. I think it did. A socio economic challenge is exciting, it’s real, it needs attention; solutions need to be innovative, they need to be well researched, they need to be culturally sensitive and they need to happen now.

So now what? I have identified the arena in which I would like to work but how somehow this realization does tie into the ideas from my first post, somehow this needs to be narrowed within a manageable scope.

What am I going to do?

S a v e t h e W o r l d

Kidding! Not yet – maybe later. In any case, I wouldn’t save the world, I would give them tools to save themselves. Survival isn’t easy and if these people have survived this long without the infrastructural amenities we depend upon, they can surely advance given the right environment, the right training and the right capital.

Wait. Maybe I am on to something?

I have always argued that

a) progress by definition is a process and must be implemented in steps

b) intervention (whether is political, architectural etc) MUST MUST MUST be culturally sensitive in order for it to be adopted a community and in turn propagated through the society.

c) an architectural intervention can be so much more than a new building in a community, it can be

1. a means of implementing infrastructure by training local people in craftsman skills

2. a way to propel the local economy by employing local people and using local materials.

3. More indirectly - a way for the people of that community to take pride in their history and culture and in doing so become self motivated to advance their community

In short – it’s a cycle.

My concerns:

1) This has been done before, is being done now and is being done well – an example is the Serena Hotel done by the AKDN, mentioned in the previous post.

2) Is this architectural enough for this thesis? I am learning more and more than my directions veer towards that of a planner and even a developer – whether that is good, bad or just observation I don’t know.

3) Location. Location. Location.

Continuing with the thought process:

From my limited knowledge of these types of projects it seems that they are always in developing countries, in cities that may be more touristy and not necessarily “urban”.

Could these types of project take place in the U.S, in a city like Los Angeles? Do I want to consider this…the idea is not that appealing right now. Moving forward!

Another thought – Lets play with the scale of this type of project.

What if I took this big projects, hotels, huge cultural centers and categorized them as the “macro” versions of these projects ( yes, “these projects” is how I am going to define this idea of cyclical progress for the time being), analyzed the components, logistics etc and brought it down to a micro scale – a modular scale? So these modules of cyclical progress could be group together to form bigger centers/schools of craft/ commercial areas or they could be as small as a stall in a slum.

Ok – so I think I’ve answered most of the questions in Assignment # 2 in part

“ PREPARATION FOR UG ARCHITECTURE DESIGN THESIS

FALL 2008

4.119

ASSIGNMENT # 2

Produce a “draft” The Thesis Statement (300 words) and post it on your blog

- What are you going to do?

- Why are you doing it? What questions are you trying to answer?

- How are you going to do it? What methods?

- What are you going to learn about? What methods?

- What are you going to learn about? Area of research material?

- Why is it important?

Post by Oct 12 etc etc etc”

The two questions that pop out as “not having been answered” are the following

1. Why am I doing this?

If we don’t enable all classes of the population to progress, I truly believe the urban environments in developing countries (Mumbai for example, since I am most familiar with it at this point in time) will completely degrade and the little infrastructure that enables the city to function will eventually collapse under the pressure of population growth combined with the lack of educational opportunities. Large scale interventions and changing the city is all fine and well, but an organization or the government has to have the means to fund something like that and right now that is not an attainable goal. I think you have to start at the grass roots level if you want to educate a large population so they can help themselves get the amenities the deserve (like plumbing and waste removal) and they do this by legitimizing their trade and their right to the land they live on (now, maybe this sounds a lot like our current studio project dealing with the slum/fisherman’s village in Back Bay, Mumbai but, I think its all related).

2.Why is it important?

I mean, I’d like to believe that these two questions answer each other. Why is it important to do this now? I think architecture cannot and should not be practiced in isolation. I think architecture is going to become this central hub type thing for interdisciplinary work: planning, economics, policy will all feed into this hub to improve our built environment. It’s exciting and I would hope that the work and research I produce now gets more people thinking about the nature of architecture in the future – as a tool of social progress.

So I think I’m done for tonight. Id like to get some feedback and then go back and answer the quantitative questions solidly.

P.S.

Yes, I do write in lists compulsively and often talk that way too…It helps me organize the “internal discussion”.