first times

It’s been 12 weeks since I arrived to India; one week more and that will make 3 months. It has been so intense and so many things have happened that instead of 3 months it feels like a lifetime. On the other hand, days pass by so quickly that one can’t barely get a grasp on them.

Among those many things that have happened there are quite of first timers.

I have seen a wild elephant in the open for the first time. I have seen a man riding an elephant from one town to another for the first time, I’ve seen wild monkeys in the roof of a building I was in for the first time. I have walked through a 40 cm deep flooded street to get out of the office for the first time.  I have not run to kill and smash a cockroach that was running on the table of the living room and instead I have patiently watched the servants come after the cockroach to take it outside alive for the first time.(yes, I am normally a cockroach killer). I have had the famous Hard Rock Cafe legendary burger for the first time (so desperate I was to get a beef burger and it was the only place in town). I have substituted the traditional pasta  (either spaghetti or penne) for noodles in my very much appreciated pasta al pesto weekend lunch. I have been driven by a chauffeur in my friend’s car for the 300 meters that separate one bar from another.  All this in the last 15 days or so.

Oh, I almost forget, it’s also been the first time I get texts in phone everyday trying to sell me a sauna belt to get slim, or a magic hair solution, or a room with a terrace and a view.

But I am not the only one having new experiences. I’ve got one of my coworkers to fly a plane for the first time, and even more amazing, I have got another of my coworkers to eat a beef steak for the first time. After which he said,it’s a shame we can’t have more times this type of food at the office for lunch. I couldn’t agree more. Not bad, right?

I also have to say that everything hasn’t been that exciting, funny or smily, that  there have been a bunch of very shocking, sad and worrying, tiring and frustrating first timers. Some general ones, like watching a lady washing clothes on a mud puddle in the middle of a slum, or seeing an old man with a raid t-shirt and no bottoms sleeping everyday underneath a fly-over, getting a kid begging me over to get the remains of my coke bottle while walking on the street, seeing a 1 kilometer lined street full of rubbish as the entrance to a very modern, very slick shopping mall, driving a auto through misery, real one.  Some professional ones, like being in an office that lies to the clients,  or teaching the directors’ PA to check a map …. I am really tempted to bring back the series of lessons to architects, there are a few things we could discuss.

A little bit of everything, but a lot of very exciting first times and a lot of new things to learn like the Indian number system where one hundred thousand becomes a lhak, a million dissapears (it’s 10 lhak man) and 10 millions become a crore.

that’s all for today’s lessons and discoveries folks.

winning battles, losing the war

Two weeks without writing is not really good.

I’ve heard many times about winning battles but losing the war, and I kind of understood that, but never suffered it myself, at least I was never aware of it.  But now here, this is something I’ve learned at heart. I am suffering it in all fronts of my life.

India is too much to cope to fight every single struggle you face. Auto-rickshaws prices are a clear example for that.

Every time you take one, there is a discussion about the price. Every single time you have to ask to go for the meter, every time you have to bargain them. And you might win single episodes, you can sometimes achieve the right price, you even can achieve that a reasonable percetage of times. But the process of fighting every ride’s price starts to drain you little by little.  And slowly you get tired of battling, and you can win here and then, but that doesn’t mean anything for the next ride. And you have to keep fighting, and you end  exhausted, and there is when they have won. They are used to the fight, it’s their normal living, but you are not, you get frustrated, you get tired, you give up, they won. The strategic failure is to fight everyday, you have to choose your battles, you have to make your numbers, you have to have an overall strategy.

Same applies to everything here, professional wise also. You have to know what’s your strategy, trying to say yes to everything is not good, trying to cope with too much can lead to desperation and overall failure. Before, I always felt that pushing your ideas and your projects as much as possible, moving things forward was a positive thing, but here it is clearly not the best ideas. Pushing things in too many fronts only leads to overall failure.  Normally you push projects forward and it’s ok, they stay there,  but here not, because every move it’s a fight and it’s an opportunity for someone to take an advantage. Everybody is always trying to get an advantage for anything up to unbelievable limits here. So, either you are focus to fight it, or if you have too many fronts open you have a huge fail.

Project wise, model wise, office wise is also the same.  Everything is messy and confussing and if you try to win every single thing, you’ll end up losing it. You have to get a compromise, you have to learn which battles to fight and which ones not, priorize what it is important, learn to let go, and don’t get frustrated when yhey don’t understand what you’re saying.

Decision making is also an important part of thesee wars, and if you fight for your ego and you try to show how cool you are, man on the long run you are going down.

So, let’s see if  I can lay down some strategies before I drown.

Going to Assam Valley on Monday and really looking forward to it. It can be a nice 3 days disconnection, just focusing on solving the problems of the actual trip.

 

randomness

That’s what is all about. Randomness. The amount of small little choices that keep building up in your life to form a chain of events is absolutely unpredictable. The people you meet is just merely based on two sets of those chains of events crossing each other at a given time and place. And through that random and unexpected meeting you get to know more people and more information that is purely du to the randomness of who you meet earlier.

Let’s say you work in a company and one day you’re fired. So you start looking for another job and get an offer from an office in another city. So you accept it and decide to move to this new place.

This company has decided to hire you due to a certain number of conditions, let’s asy the got a new contract because o client got rich winning the lotto, plus the girl working in the position you’re going to fill, got pregnant and decided to leave the job.  So, to start with, you are getting a job because someone got pregnant.. which implies she sound someone she liked at least to have sex with, or maybe even to get married, plus someone won the lotto and decided to build an apartment building. This is added to the fact that you got fired because your previous office lost all his main contracts due to some bad investments of its clients… which implies the company they invested in went bad for a several reasons… (lot of small choices and decisions there), the client decided to invest their money in that company for another several reasons, including maybe that some friend of the director recommended so (a lot of random choices and encounters there…. how they became friends, why the friend advice to invest in that company… and the lists goes on)

Of course you have to add to those two facts your own personal decisions that led you to look a job in that place. You were looking to go to Shanghai because you fancy chinese girls since you were a kid as you had this really beautiful chinese girl as a neighbor and also you think that is an emergent market because your friends who you met while studying in Chicago that are living in Shenzhen tell you so….. and so on.

So, due to all this small events happening you find yourself in this new city and you meet the people working there, who they themselves got there due to a similar amount of decisions, choices and events.

As the reader can see right now, the amount of things that have to happen for you to meet that specific person tends to infinite.

So, you meet these 10 or 15 people in a city of 10 million, totally by chance. And as you are a curious person,  now that you are in your new city and meet this new people, you ask them about what’s going on in the city, what are the new projects going on, the good universites and professors to meet and so on. And their answers are going to be far from objective, it is going to be just pure personal experience.  The answer would be completely different if you would have met another group of 10 people from the same city.

So, you go to see this professor, or this researcher, recommended by your new friends, and there is no actual reason for your choice of meeting that single person a no another one. The next day you might meet someone else and tell him that you went to see this professor and they might say why did you go see that guy, he is really mediocre, you should meet this other guy.

All of your choices are so influenced by an incredible number of random encounters and events that thinking you have control of them is difficult. Of course you have control of your own choices, but you have no control at all about the choices of the rest of the people you get in contact with. Furthermore, you control your own choices, but many times you don’t control the situations that put you in the position to have to make a choice, not even control the options you have.

So, we rather dig randomness, even more, embrace it and expose ourselves to it. Control is only and illusion.

 

Urban on the move. Delhi rides 01

A quick ride through delhi’s ring road traffic scene.

Urban Stills. Delhi 01

A day in Delhi can be full of surprises.
Starting with a beautiful view of a sunrise at 5.00 am, hell yes why change the time and use the daylight saving time when you can have such nice coming in your window at 5 am, am I right?

One can get out the street and start walking to find this marvelous bamboo structure that, oh wait, it’s an scafolding. People get up there to work!!!

But when the building is finished it will like an awesome new modern structure; but only on the main façade, you rather not check on the back alley.

But in anyway, Delhi takes very seriously the idea of making a better urban space to its citizens, getting signals for the blind so they can walk safely on the sidewalks

And asking people kindly not to honk too loud or the poor girl will have terrible headaches.

Sometimes you would feel dizzy and ducky, like an elephant walking into a hardware store, the only difference is that here that would fit perfectly, elephants walk into shrines….

But he best thing about Delhi is that they have new meanings for…
Moving Truck.

Facing Nice River Views

or Delhi, a wired city!!!!

But once you learn the new idioms and expressions, everything becomes easier and you can go high street shoppinng, or maybe highway one stop shop on the go.

They also are very creative You need to get a new barrack in an old monumental fort…. no problem, just wallpaper it.

But I am not being totally fair. The city also have incredible stuff. Like the Palm Podium, bet you want one of this.

or more seriously, Humayun’s Tumb.

And of course the one car I want to have if I ever get a car here It’s just a classic!!!!!!

auto rickshaw speeding

And yet another sunday It looks like I can only write on Sundays. It’s been a couple of crazy weeks ending yesterday with a big client meeting at the Oberoi Hotel here in Delhi. I have to say it was the most luxurious hotel I’ve seen and the quality of the service was incredible. Amazing place. Delhi famous contrasts.

We are finally settled, including new phone line and bank account, so all good and this starts to feel like home. A weird one.

Moving around Delhi is mostly done through Auto-Rickshaws, or “autos” as people commonly say. There are plenty of them, there are quite reasonable in price terms and quite skilled to sneak through heavy Delhi traffic. As everyting here, taking an auto has its own peculiar routine. They can be very harsh in the mornings, above all around 9 when everybody is heading to work. It is very usual that they decline you because your route is too short or because is not going in the direction they want. It seems that for the drivers it is very important the first ride of the morning as it can be a signal of how the day will go. They also overprice more than usual in the morning, so you have to fight harder for a fair price. The “autos” actually have a meter, but you can’t always get them to use the meter, so it’s basically a price bargaining dance. As in anywhere else there are more honest and reasonable drivers and there are real bullies, if you look foreigner (hello) some of them will go over the top and ask you 3 times the price. I sometimes wonder what they feel and think when you get to chop their initial price in half or more.

On the contrary in the evenings, and the later the better, they are tired and much more open to take you home for a lower price. Again, rush hour is worst, but after that it is usually quite easy to get a good ride, not a lot of business as the day ends. Somehow is a mix between market economy and spiritual auspicious beliefs.

“Autos” are basically a 3 wheeler motorbike with a back sit and a fabric cover. They can’t go to fast but they get a fair 80 km/h. When going upwards your speed will depend on how fat your driver is. Sometimes the poor engine barely can push the fat driver’s ass upwards (or the passenger). Anyway, last thursday night I had one of the several interesting “auto” rides.. I’ve been almost hit by a bus before, also saw a cow crossing the highway a couple of meters from me and once my driver took me over the pavement, but on thursday I had my firs speeding race experience. It was kind of late for here, around 22 h ,and the guy must had been in a hurry because as soon as I jumped in he started to speed the “auto” to its maximum driving in crazy “s” avoiding cars and buses and almost jumping to the pavement. I had to hold myself from the tiny steel bars of the roof structure at every turn not to be thrown out These wheelers are much weaker than it seems, a 3 wheel layout is not very stable at turns, neither its seating and roof structure, so it’s scarier than one might thought.  Stopping was not either one of the things the guy did smoothly. But all in all I have to say that it took me only 10 minutes to get back home. So now I am wondering the pros and cons of “auto” speeding, I might just need a helmet and we are good to go.

(brief parenthesis, I just saw a commercial of the Indian Air Force on TV, it was like a trailer from Top Gun… touch the glory in the sky….. so80′s)

Project work with RKDS repeats the same old stories of a bad managed, small architecture office with despise for clients. This stubbornness to recognize that we are professionals that offer a service really strikes me hard. But the complete ignorance of the stage of the project and what we have to do, and how to optimize our work it’s even worse. We just focus on doing our small little thing that we love and design, and design, and we don’t care about the requirements, or the program, or the strategy, let’s just make “sexy” images. Unbelievable how we can degrade ourselves while having our own little fun playing with legos.

It’s not so difficult people

On the bright side there are really good perspectives on out independent projects and a promising new competition taking shape in finland. Looking foward to it.

Hopefully I’ll get back to the Urban Stills, Urban on the Move posts these weeks, some cool stuff from Delhi

post conference note

Just watched the lecture and I think I am losing respect for some people. Am I getting old? am I getting dumber? am I spending too much time awake at night talking to the other end of the world?

It was interesting to realize that one of the articles I have pending about the profession is so relevant, and I can’t believe they don’t get it. It’s so obvious!!!! It was also very shocking to see that he is turning to things I saw so long ago, (ok, maybe not so long, but I am young, for me 30 years is a whole life)

So many fields and issues touched that there are so many confronting thoughts about it. But there is still that underlying smell of the past century, and maybe some awakening. ¿?

On the other side, I have to say he is so brilliant in certain things and they way he stretched the profession is so amazing, and at the end, the feeling is that I love that guy, so much.

confuzion

It’s sunday and here I am again, writing while I am waiting for an OMA lecture video to load (http://www.vimeo.com/25071414). I don’t know what happened to the meaning of the words over the last few years, before fast meant fast, broadband meant broadband and yes meant yes, now it looks like you are allowed to signify whatever you want in a word, which makes things much harder. I miss Humphrey Bogart’s days so much.  Oh, there is this great head gesture around here, a kind of turning sideways your head like saying no, but with some vertical movement add it to it in a kind of infinite loop symbol that can mean from yes to no, to maybe… and you have to guess… funny isn’t it.

Anyway, time flies and it’s been 6 weeks since I arrived to India, this week was mostly calm except for a 24 hours food poisoning episode that had the good reward to learn that the problem with the over spicy food was in part caused by the restaurant I was getting the food delivered from which is know for its over spicy food. So, now I got a change of my menus and on my restaurant selection. I mean, food still spicy, but now, hopefully milder.

Walking in Delhi it’s an absolutely Not-to-do thing and even more in summer, but as I am quite stubborn and I love wandering around cities I’ve been walking around a bit, not much I have to admit, but enough to get used to the amazing contrasts that exists  within few hundred meters between the different areas of the city.

There is one thing that still strikes me in the face everytime I go around and it is the misery, poverty, dirt and rubbish that lays around. I am still not sure how “wealthy” locals can ignore that with such an ease. I am not sure if it is because they are so used to it since they are kids, or because they feel some kind of disdain to it, in any case there is not clear thought about what could you do to change it.

Definitely there are many Delhis within Delhi, in one of them you can get to feel real comfortable, like living in any western city, maybe with an exotic local touch and some specific changes, like manpower cheap price or dressing costumes, but there is also a very poor delhi with bums wandering the unpaved streets, and this second delhi overpass the first one in thousands and thousands of people.

We as architects deal with the first delhi, office is nice, work is business as usual, clients are wealthy people or public institutions, and so on. We as foreigners also belong to this wealthy delhi, and from both aspects we are still regarded as a strange element incrusted into the local culture and therefore we are sometimes rejected, sometimes embrace. There is still a peculiar relationship with anything that might look modern and western, for some is a kind of fascination, for others is some kind of rejection.  In general the country and the society though craving for western technological goods, is  not ready for an integration of foreigners here. The proof  for that is the difference in price you have to pay when visiting a monument, or playing golf or so may other activities that have officially tagged different prices to it. Locals 0 rupees, foreigners 250 rupees. Sometimes I felt raped, and I have to say I didn’t like it.

During the week I got my first contacts with university faculty here, a probable meeting to be held with some sociolgy  professors in the begining of July, and the infrstracture is getting in place. I also attended my first architecture lecture yesterday at the Indian Habitat Centre, a kind of local Barbican.. (first world delhi). It was funny to get to know the local architectural environment, and see how people pretend to be cool and to be the next thing for India. Attending the lecture I could not stop thinking how ignorance can make you believe things that are not, but in your little world, they are true. I think that’s the best part of traveling, it makes you so humble…

 

Photos are coming soon to a post nearby your house. and I have to say I am starting to really like this place…

oh, and I also reassured myself that I am a very good liar.

it’s been a little while

It’s been more than 1 year and 4 months since I last published something on the blog, that’s really a long time ago.  Many things have happened since then and many times I thought of writing and posting, a few I even started writing something, but for one reason or another never went through.  Somehow, email, twitter and the website took over the blog, somehow I always felt the blog as something more complete, more formal than just writing words not knowing where I was headed, but overall, through this roller-coaster of busy times and dull periods mental tiredness and laziness is what have pushed me away from the blog.

Now I am back, writing from the New Delhi, the huge, dense, chaotic and confusing capital of India hoping that the blog will help to keep the news going as well as will become again the place to share my findings, tamospaya`s news and the miscellaneous thoughts and events happening around us.

Maybe I’ll do a quick recap of the past year soon in another post.

It’s been a month since I arrived in Delhi, in the hottest period of the year, meaning walking under a burning 45º celsius clear sky every day making even stones to sweat. Having been in many places this one is the most confusing and shocking of all. It takes time to understand their behavior, their actions, everything. Their standards and what they consider normal are completely to mines and to what I consider the norm. This fact makes everything a bit more difficult and every action becomes a little struggle. Sometimes you feel that they are bad behave or that they don’t have manners, but that’s not true, it’s just their way, the indian way and you have to learn it, maybe not to love it but to know where you are and what to expect. A good thing about their way, in words of a local colleague, it’s that they might not do the right thing when confronted with a problem, or might not choose the right option at the beginning, but in their way, there is always a way out, there is always a way to achieve that that you want, there is always a way forward and that tenacity I admire.

Once settled things are starting to unfold quite nicely, office is doing good, school project in Assam is going forward with a meeting to be held at the end of the month and a few very interesting possibilities regarding research articles and interviews about Chandigarh, meetings with local sociology professors to get a better grasp of New Delhi’s city conception and evolution and some other things floating around.

After this first month my impression of Delhi is that is a city made of a conglomerate of delusional images that trick your eye and can make you believe something that is not. It’s not so modern and advanced as it might seem visiting their restaurants or shopping malls, traveling in its new metro and working in the brand new office buildings of Gurgaon, but it’s not so cramped and ruined as you might think visiting some of the slums and the semi abandoned street market camps out of nowhere. It’s no so local as you could think visiting the most traditional hindu areas with its temples and local gurus demonstrating against the government, not so international as you might think visiting its hotels and diplomatic areas.

The most shocking of all these contradictions is the difference between the british city area and the rest of New Delhi, the change of scale, of conception, of use. From a monumental static homage to utopia and grandeur to the mega dense tiny meandering streets full of  shops and local citizens walking over unpaved streets. The british city was left behind, emptied by locals that only colonize the touristy spots with is mini scale activities and street carriages selling all types of good. The local society has seemed to reject that weird body than the british built and that now is occupied by government institutions, embassies and millionaires.

As June goes by I wait for the Monsoon season to arrive in early July, in what presumes to be a heck of an experience. In the meantime lazy saturdays win over me as I try to hide from the outside hot, while pushing our projects as much as I can so I can take some time off when the cooler weather arrives.

I’ll try to keep this going.

urban stills. tripoli week o1

a normal city, cars, modern looking buildings, a bit dusty…..

with some old nice reminiscences…

and an interesting old town madinah…

or that was just what you thought.
let the show begin with the real stuff

tripoli. under construction / under demolition…

wires everywhere, half ruined canopies

going nowhere

bottles stuck from the 70′s

pavement, what pavement?. be aware of the arch

in front of the market. the testimony of how to build with concrete. vanguardist urban art

makert square / parking lot / waste disposal

grand hotel is waiting us

and of course, always coca – cola

so fifties…

everything arrives late to tripoli

or maybe too early. van-house. urban nomad

in any case you find anything you can imagine