New Year in Mumbai

My travel companions and I had been on flights for days, travelling from Mississippi to Mumbai.  As we left Heathrow, heading east, we realized not only that we would arrive near midnight on New Year’s Eve, but that we could celebrate the new year in each time zone along the way.  

When we arrived, there was the typical chaos of a foreign airport: unknown customs, money exchange, and baggage retrieval.  The wait for our bags was quite extended, and people were restless to be away with their families; we could hear celebrations outside.  The luggage hall was marble-tiled and quiet with exhaustion, but the muttering began as we waited.  A young man lifted the flap on the conveyor to see if anything was happening, and shouts rose from inside.  I had time to see open bags, and frantic searches by the baggage handlers before the flap was lowered, but the bags began to arrive immediately afterwards.  Two of our group had locked their suitcases, and those locks had been broken and the contents overturned.  We would discover later that all electronic items had been pilfered, but only from the locked cases.  My unlocked bag was untouched.

We exited into a rush of taxi-wallahs, all clamoring for our business.  We were to spend one night in an airport hotel, and the only man in the group, an older Sri Lankan returning to Asia for the first time in years, went back inside to find coins and call for the shuttle.  That left four young women on the curb as the midnight hour struck, surrounded by men chattering in English, Hindi, and all manner of dialects.  Our general lack of enthusiasm hardly dampened theirs, until the pink shuttle bus arrived from the Orchid Hotel, and they melted away. 

The short ride from the airport to the hotel fulfilled all of our stereotypical expectations of India.   The slums of Dharavi are right there.  Even in darkness we could see a tremendous gap in the city fabric: handmade enclosures, common water taps, children sleeping in the open, watchmen guarding refuse piles, the clutter and density of human inhabitation within circumstances hardly imaginable to us.  It was our New Year’s Eve, but not their Diwali celebration, so there were occasional fireworks, clusters of people sitting around fires, and children playing late in the darkness; all this activity contained on one side of a smooth new highway lined with billboards for cell phones and Bollywood movies.  The infrastructure was built to get tourists from the city to the airport on new tarmac, and a wall to hide the teeming informal settlements from view was sure to follow.

We pulled up at the Orchid, and it was as if we had magically teleported right back to London.  We entered the lobby’s multi-story atrium - a party was underway in the second-level disco, and there were beautiful Eurasian women in high heels and short skirts, accompanied by young men in bespoke suits, drinking champagne and laughing.  The elevator was filled with these ephemeral creatures, so we left the girl who had overpacked two huge duffels, and humped our single cases up three flights of wool-carpeted stairs.  At the rooms, we were confused by the eco-feature requiring the room card key to be inserted for lights and ventilation – it was 2001 by only a few minutes, but none of us had ever seen this system before.  The amenities were fabulous – spa settings on the tub and showerheads, fluffy towels, and of course, Western toilets. 

It would be a long time until we saw such luxury again, as we traversed the country.  We became accustomed to the juxtaposition of abject poverty and profligate luxury, between the extensive natural resources and intensive degradation of the land.  We stayed in private homes, racetrack clubs, restored boat houses, political guesthouses, ashrams, and in Pondicherry we were guests in the Governor’s Mansion.  Every place told a story from a civilization more ancient than our own and a place long inhabited.  Our preconceptions were gone by our second day in India, in this puzzling place where everyone had a cell phone and no one a landline, where infrastructure was elaborate except where it didn’t exist, where neighbors across state lines couldn’t communicate unless they did so in English.  Adaptability is the most useful thing to pack.

Indeterminate Space

As young adults, most of us spent a lot of time in transitional spaces - neither within nor without, incompletely lit and arbitrarily organized - occupying them in ways that mirrored our own lack of fixedness in opinion, friendship, ambition, and lifestyle.

Transitional spaces are not only transportation spaces, but there is  overlap; bus stops are the last resort of those without autos, but so are sidewalks, stations, and bridges.  Rooftops, empty lots, childless playgrounds, embankments, docks, trails, underpasses… young people spend a lot of time outdoors, seeking a new view of the world, or the company of others, or the adventures denied in their everyday pursuits of school, and chores, and modesty.

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time outdoors at night.  My friends and I would linger in stadium stands, parks and soccer fields.  We were tied to trees on the hillsides of Tantalus, saved later by older brothers and treated to a terrifying ride down the mountain in the back of a pickup.  We traversed hotel balconies on the eleventh floor, strolling through empty guest rooms to escape, still unscathed.  We would dare each other to slip naked beneath the crashing waves, to be the last one out in the freezing darkness before bodysurfing in to shore.  There were never consequences. We reveled in the terror of nighttime exploits, tired of the programmed spaces of classroom, chapel, gymnasium, bedroom – every room with a purpose, but none for dreams.

Humans speak more freely in darkness than in daylight.  Movement and wind, unknown shadows and sounds inspire confidences in one another.  Sharing the experience of deprivation, triumph and lust releases inhibitions.  Young people need emotion, the overwhelming acknowledgement of perception, the rush of blood that accompanies fear and trials. 

We never grow out of the need for spaces of potential, for unprogrammed and loosely defined places.  In cities, rapid deindustrialization and shrinking urban populations have supplied new space for occupation by informal economies and activities.  The cracked lots previously for car sales, warehouses emptied of their goods, and apartments long unserviced by power and water, encourage spontaneity and artistic experimentation.

In recent months, we have seen the occupation of public spaces by a vocal new crowd, united not by age or faith or even intent, but by an emotion that is no longer willing to be limited by fear.  In spaces across the globe, with virtuous slogans of wealth-sharing and equality, justice and rage begat by the lack of corporate accountability.  “Representation through occupation” reads one of the signs.  Sparked in part by the similar intensity of the Arab Spring uprisings against power and tyranny, Occupy Wall Street appeals to those who were too young for the sit-ins of the 1960’s and the civil rights movement, but who wish to contribute their time to an ideal, albeit one with a still-undefined outcome.  The tent cities and bonfires, the overwhelming visual attack of handmade signs and vandalism of corporate identity, have returned these planned and formal green spaces to indeterminacy.  The protestors have made places of conflict out of the formal lands developed by commerce and government, and have created the necessary incompleteness in the system to allow spontaneity to thrive.

Architects continue to experiment in making indeterminate space, especially within places of culture, loci of creativity.  Provocative spaces for learning such as SANAA’s Rolex Center in Lausanne, empty the frame of the wall with floor to ceiling glazing, and establish circulation paths that curl in waves beneath the feet of university students.  The fiercely iconographic patterning of the façade and dogmatic geometry of the CCTV tower in Beijing by Rem Koolhaas, “promotes the void as the structuring agency of the new urban form,” according to the New York Times.  We work awfully hard to capture and collect playfulness in structures that must act as anything but. 

We desire the rough achievement of gaining safe ground, but only after experiencing a tremor of thrill, a doubt, a connection, a surprise.  The best spaces have unclear corners, hidden lighting, tangible air movement, sudden views back to where you have already been…. We need look no further than our nearest abandoned warehouse for inspiration.

Treasure

The most efficient way to preserve the potential for life, paradoxically, is cold and snow, darkness and ice. The most treasured resources of mankind are the seeds of crops once grown across the globe in small gardens and wild preserves, in forests and wetlands, along river valleys and canyon cliffs. Collected, they offer a glimpse of the potential to fulfill dreams: cures for animal and plant diseases, insect-resistance, drought-tolerance, explosive fertility and exceptional harvests. Seeds are stored by the Global Crop Diversity Trust in an ark – a secure, underground cavern devoted to preserving the world’s plant resources – in the tiny island of Spitsbergen in the arctic Svalbard archipelago of Norway. The treasures are duplicate samples of seeds held in 1400 other gene banks, and in the event of cataclysmic losses of crops and caches worldwide, could be the last survivors. 

The site was chosen because of the permafrost, which naturally maintains temperatures close to freezing year-round, reducing the possibility of seed sprouting. The site is 130 m above sea level, and the island has no history of tectonic activity. The sandstone bedrock of the tunneled site shields the seeds from harmful radiation or exposure to light, with limited supply of oxygen to further slow deterioration. The vaults can store 4.5 million samples, from the estimated 1.5 million distinctly varied crops thought to exist (in 2009, at the one year anniversary of its dedication, it held approximately one-third of known crop species.) The Global Seed Vault’s mission is to provide a safety net against accidental loss of diversity, whether through neglect, mismanagement, destruction, war, fire, or other events, either natural or manmade.

Norway’s Directorate of Public Construction and Property led the construction of the vault within an old copper mine, only 800 miles from the North Pole. Crops such as peas may survive for 20-30 years, but sunflowers and grains may survive for hundreds of years. Even with the protections of the site and structure, the seeds will one day lose the ability to germinate. A constant stream of replacement seeds are supplied by taking seeds from the stored samples, planting, harvesting, and replacing them in storage.

The vault is unassailable, beyond the reach of accidental harm and with limited access for intentional acts. But this is not an architecture which can become a model for most communities, or can accommodate most functions. The exposed entrance is beautiful, logical, and practical… but the majority of the project exists in extreme temperatures, low oxygen, and severely restricted light. This prototype exemplifies “inhumane” conditions, but it is not for humans, after all.

The treasures with which we live are susceptible to loss, through burglary and vandalism, flood and fire. As the creators of shelter for humans and their goods, architects take on the mantle of public health, safety, and welfare. We rejoice in light and air, moderate temperatures and access to the outside. We consider security, but not at the expense of beauty. People cannot live in suspended animation like the seeds of Svalbard.

“Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.” Epicurus