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shahana dastidar
Tuesday, 18 August 2009
The Ultimate Duck
lives in Nehru Place, New Delhi. Also known as the Baha'i Mandir or the Lotus Temple. This place is exactly what its name says it is. Its a HUGE LOTUS and its a TEMPLE. You're supposed to go inside this humongous lotus and pray. That's what it is. Not an abstraction, not a concept, neither the spatial quality nor geometric principles inspired by a lotus. Nope, the whole thing JUST IS a lotus. Which reminds me of what Robert Venturi said about all buildings being either a Duck or a Decorated Shed. Well this is the Ultimate Duck.
And the whole of Gurgaon, one giant Decorated Shed. Kilometres and kilometres of Decorated Sheds. Every phase of DLF a fantasy of candy pink neo-classical awfulness stuck on giant housing blocks with weirdly English names like Princeton and Trinity Court. We've come full circle in Delhi. We removed Connaught from CP to forget our colonial roots....and then went and brought Wellington back to Gurgaon. I think he lives on plastered somewhere in the pinkness of DLF Phase V.
Mental
Coming back to the duck. I love it. Part of the reason I do is because it lives in Nehru Place, the ugliest Place ever (with a capital P). The corridors and mazes and aisles and piles of parked, parked, parking and more parked vehicles, the smoke, the dust, the uniform greyness of crumbling buildings with rotting windows, a million generators growling and about a hundred million people trying to growl just a bit louder above them as they try to sell you printer cartridges. And in the midst of all this, this SHINING WHITE MARBLE TEMPLE. How on earth do they still manage to keep it white?!!!!
And Duck it may be, and every modernist's worst nightmare come true. And every deconstructivist's too. In fact every architect who was ever a something-ist's nightmare except the post-modernis-ist. So Duck it may be and Duck it indeed is - yet inside its lovely. And why is it lovely?
Because inside it is very,
very ,
very,
very,
very
quiet.
And everyone goes in and feels like being
very,
very,
very
quiet
too.
Notes: I didn't take this pic - its from Wikimedia Commons. In fact if any one's curious enough about the temple, you can look it up on Wikipedia. Also look up 'Nehru Place' and Robert Venturi's 'Complexity & Contradiction in Architecture'. There's a good explanation here about the Duck and the Decorated Shed.
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