"Language & the space of determined spaces : The architectural experiments of the Centre of Science for Villages in Wardha & the shaping of home in Wagdhara, a Kolami village" a talk by Dr. Venugopal Maddipati at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 30th July 2013
Time : 3:00 pm
Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)
Place : Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
Venue Info : Events | About | Map | Nearest Metro Station - 'Race Course(Yellow Line)'
Event Description : The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to the Weekly Seminar on ‘Language and the space of determined spaces : The architectural experiments of the Centre of Science for Villages in Wardha and the shaping of home in Wagdhara, a Kolami village’ by Dr. Venugopal Maddipati, Junior Fellow, NMML.
Abstract : By any measure, the cost-effective, baked-whole-clay-tumbler house designed and promoted by the Gandhian Centre of Science for Villages (CSV) in the Wardha district since the latter part of the nineteen seventies, is an unusual structure. If, on the one hand, masons in Wardha have traditionally built roofs by placing the baked halves of clay tumblers shaped on a potter’s wheel, in an interlocking fashion, on a grass mat, on the other hand the engineers at CSV built a roof for their cost-effective house by piecing together baked, whole clay tumblers into a vault that quite literally yawns, from above, upon those sheltering below. Furthermore, the hulking, arched shape of the roof of the CSV house is sharply silhouetted against any of the many flat modern reinforced concrete roof slabs liberally dotting the landscape in and around the villages of Wardha. Indeed, if anything, CSV’s cost-effective, baked whole-clay-tumbler house is so unrepresentative of the domestic architecture that one sees around the villages of Wardha that one could even go so far as to suggest that it was designed, expressly, to perform the role of an object that stands apart from its own immediate environment. How, then, bearing in mind the unusual and unrepresentative form of this structure, must one historicize it?
On the one hand, as I will suggest in this paper, one could engage with the manner in which the tumbler roof house stands in for an architectural form that is by no means determined by or derived from an entire range of architectural traditions that circumscribe it. More significantly, one could examine the manner in which the form or the concept of the tumbler roof house even exceeds its very own concrete material determinations in a variety of instances over a period of time beginning in the latter part of the nineteen seventies. Pursuing such an history of the tumbler roof house as a concept exceeding its own material determinations entails, as I was informed at CSV, examining the structure primarily as a creation of an inventive mind, and only secondarily as an edifice that has been built or pragmatically shaped or deformed, over time, in keeping with the physical, economic and social realities of an immediate outside environment in Wardha. On the other hand, taking a somewhat different tack, one could also engage with the ways in which the material manifestations of the tumbler roof house have themselves served as a determining influence upon a peoples’ imagination of the form of a home in Wardha. In this regard, I will consider the manner in which the tumbler roof house has served to shape the spatial conceptions of a community called the Kolam Samaj in the village of Wagdhara some twenty kilometers from the city of Wardha, since the nineteen nineties, when CSV built quite a few houses in that village. Historicizing the tumbler roof house, from the vantages of the Kolam Samaj, as I suggest, entails historicizing the peculiar ways in which that community comprehends a circumstantial determinism or a circumstantial shaping of the space of their home. Indeed, if anything, the construction of the tumbler-roof houses in Wagdhara attests to a significant transition, that is, it attests to the leaving behind of the historical Kolami conception of the circumstantial determinism of the space of their village, into a new Kolami circumstantial determinism of the space of their home. In my paper I explore this transition which also finds some resonances in the arrival of the Marathi language in Wagdhara twenty five years ago. Indeed the historicizing of transitions in the Kolami conception of space, entails, to some degree, historicizing a transition in the Kolami linguistic identity as it has come to be affected by the advent of a marathi-speaking public sphere in Wagdhara.
Speaker : Dr. Venugopal Maddipati is an architectural historian and is a Junior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. He is currently engaged in writing his book on Gandhi, Mira Behn, Vinoba and architecture in Wardha and beyond. He is particularly interested in architecture and urbanism in small towns. He is also, at this time, writing about the architectural transformation of the town of Bulandshahr in North India in the nineteenth century.
Related Events : Talks
Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)
Place : Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
Venue Info : Events | About | Map | Nearest Metro Station - 'Race Course(Yellow Line)'
Event Description : The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to the Weekly Seminar on ‘Language and the space of determined spaces : The architectural experiments of the Centre of Science for Villages in Wardha and the shaping of home in Wagdhara, a Kolami village’ by Dr. Venugopal Maddipati, Junior Fellow, NMML.
Abstract : By any measure, the cost-effective, baked-whole-clay-tumbler house designed and promoted by the Gandhian Centre of Science for Villages (CSV) in the Wardha district since the latter part of the nineteen seventies, is an unusual structure. If, on the one hand, masons in Wardha have traditionally built roofs by placing the baked halves of clay tumblers shaped on a potter’s wheel, in an interlocking fashion, on a grass mat, on the other hand the engineers at CSV built a roof for their cost-effective house by piecing together baked, whole clay tumblers into a vault that quite literally yawns, from above, upon those sheltering below. Furthermore, the hulking, arched shape of the roof of the CSV house is sharply silhouetted against any of the many flat modern reinforced concrete roof slabs liberally dotting the landscape in and around the villages of Wardha. Indeed, if anything, CSV’s cost-effective, baked whole-clay-tumbler house is so unrepresentative of the domestic architecture that one sees around the villages of Wardha that one could even go so far as to suggest that it was designed, expressly, to perform the role of an object that stands apart from its own immediate environment. How, then, bearing in mind the unusual and unrepresentative form of this structure, must one historicize it?
On the one hand, as I will suggest in this paper, one could engage with the manner in which the tumbler roof house stands in for an architectural form that is by no means determined by or derived from an entire range of architectural traditions that circumscribe it. More significantly, one could examine the manner in which the form or the concept of the tumbler roof house even exceeds its very own concrete material determinations in a variety of instances over a period of time beginning in the latter part of the nineteen seventies. Pursuing such an history of the tumbler roof house as a concept exceeding its own material determinations entails, as I was informed at CSV, examining the structure primarily as a creation of an inventive mind, and only secondarily as an edifice that has been built or pragmatically shaped or deformed, over time, in keeping with the physical, economic and social realities of an immediate outside environment in Wardha. On the other hand, taking a somewhat different tack, one could also engage with the ways in which the material manifestations of the tumbler roof house have themselves served as a determining influence upon a peoples’ imagination of the form of a home in Wardha. In this regard, I will consider the manner in which the tumbler roof house has served to shape the spatial conceptions of a community called the Kolam Samaj in the village of Wagdhara some twenty kilometers from the city of Wardha, since the nineteen nineties, when CSV built quite a few houses in that village. Historicizing the tumbler roof house, from the vantages of the Kolam Samaj, as I suggest, entails historicizing the peculiar ways in which that community comprehends a circumstantial determinism or a circumstantial shaping of the space of their home. Indeed, if anything, the construction of the tumbler-roof houses in Wagdhara attests to a significant transition, that is, it attests to the leaving behind of the historical Kolami conception of the circumstantial determinism of the space of their village, into a new Kolami circumstantial determinism of the space of their home. In my paper I explore this transition which also finds some resonances in the arrival of the Marathi language in Wagdhara twenty five years ago. Indeed the historicizing of transitions in the Kolami conception of space, entails, to some degree, historicizing a transition in the Kolami linguistic identity as it has come to be affected by the advent of a marathi-speaking public sphere in Wagdhara.
Speaker : Dr. Venugopal Maddipati is an architectural historian and is a Junior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. He is currently engaged in writing his book on Gandhi, Mira Behn, Vinoba and architecture in Wardha and beyond. He is particularly interested in architecture and urbanism in small towns. He is also, at this time, writing about the architectural transformation of the town of Bulandshahr in North India in the nineteenth century.
Related Events : Talks
"Language & the space of determined spaces : The architectural experiments of the Centre of Science for Villages in Wardha & the shaping of home in Wagdhara, a Kolami village" a talk by Dr. Venugopal Maddipati at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 30th July 2013
!["Language & the space of determined spaces : The architectural experiments of the Centre of Science for Villages in Wardha & the shaping of home in Wagdhara, a Kolami village" a talk by Dr. Venugopal Maddipati at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 30th July 2013]()
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