BUILDINGS | BODIES
TRANSMUTATING COVALENCIES
Project: Swiss Alps Wellness Retreat_ Competition Entry
BUILDINGS | BODIES
TRANSMUTATING COVALENCIES
Project: Swiss Alps Wellness Retreat_ Competition Entry
BUILDINGS | BODIES
TRANSMUTATING COVALENCIES
Project: Swiss Alps Wellness Retreat_ Competition Entry
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There's Always An'OTHER' Side!
"Every Space is sexual"
Architecture is continuously involved in the production of social space that transforms the everyday lives of people by use and experience.
Gender and Feminism, are the socio-spatial phenomenon that inform the production of the social space. and construe the creation of Gendered narratives and differential sense of identities even today....
The social space of the Practice of Architecture and of the built environment , both are
in question today !!
WONDER
Why GENDER?
The practice investigates the relations between spaces and sexes, between clients and designers, between workers and consumers, reinforcing the stereotypical gender roles.
We believe that Architecture needs to provide environments that needs to respond to the differential needs of all genders and paves way for maximizing the choices of sociability and recreation for all genders, and works to destroy environmental oppression and misogyny is what one....aims for!
THEMES
01_ Gender And Visuality
TO BE SEEN OR NOT BE SEEN?
"The House must not be conceived as work of art, that there is a difference between a “series of decorated rooms." Loos breaks down the condition of the house as an object by radically convoluting the relation between the interior and the outside. One of the devices he uses in the Mirrors, placed such that openings can be mistaken for mirrors."_ Beatrice Colomina_ sexuality and Space
With concerns of Gender in Architecture, one of the primary Observations have been regarding visuality. The patriarchal bonds of treating women's bodies as treasure troves and hence 'to be seen not' are outdated yet much in fashion, especially in the Indian context.
The ideas of the Home, as a theatre, a stage for the drama of the family has been historically explored in Architecture. Does this concept from modern architecture hold keys to unveiling the mysteries of contemporary life today?
Can the ideas around visuality tweak the making of the House? What can it become ?
Image of concealment, container and secrecy_ veiling implies secrecy, women's bodies cannot be treated as fully public, secrets be let out if they were open to view. Yet in presenting something inaccessible and dangerous, an invitation to know and to possess is extended. The spectator, often are the guests or 'strange' men while the women become objects or spectacle.
The gaze is decided by the relative positioning of both that largely plays out in the spatiality of the space.
The play of visuality in the domestic household is a detective story. The relationship amongst the family often establishes a ceratin hierarchy which also is the beginning of a structure, a power dynamic that is rendered through the gaze...
The active look, look of control, and controlled look often reveal stories of voyeurism and mansplaining. The gendered narratives reveal that these can happen within any gender...male to male, female to female..etc.
In what ways do feminist architects then , plan, reveal or hide... to provide autonomy to the women against patriarchal patterns of living
to diminish these hierarchies, to provide opportunities?
THE CONTROLLED LOOK, THE ACTIVE LOOK AND THE LOOK OF CONTROL
POWER DYNAMICS !!!
THE KEYHOLE HOUSE
02_ Gender And Performativity
"GENDER PERFORMATIVITY IS NOT A MATTER OF CHOOSING WHICH GENDER ONE WILL BE TODAY "-Judith Butler
Misapprehension of Gender Performativity is : that gender is a choice, or that is a role or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes...that there is a “one” prior to this gender, who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides which one it will be today. Gender presumes a subject , prior to it’s gendering.
As Judith Butler explains to us that gender performances are free of subjects or notions of ‘gender’ itself but formulated from gender differences that have been constructed through norms and repetition of the exclusionary regimes. That is to say that a woman ( a body) does not decide that she would be a female ( a sex) today. Rather it is imposed in the term ‘woman’ that it will perform as a female. The gender ‘female’ presumes ‘woman’ as the normative subject. Gender performativity is the result of the regulatory regime of gender differences and hierarchies (irrespective of a gender type but a historicized ideas) that are fed by social constraints, taboos , prohibitions, threats of punishment that operate in the ritualized repetition of norms and this repetition constitutes the temporalized scene of gender construction and destabilization.
The repetition of gender norms: creates a gender uniformity , a stable effect of masculinity/ femininity and attaches this to the subject instead. The subject instead gets retroactively produced within the norms of the ‘gender’ and the effect of self repetition it interpals.
We propose that The built environment is capable of accepting , rejecting , offering such attestations of masculinity and femininity or queerness.
Architecture becomes a mediation if not the complete solution to address the chain of ideas that affirm this gender performativity in several spaces.
The Fitness Club became an experimental project in the threshold of this discourse on gender and performances , for our feminist practice, to thus deconstruct the idea of prerogative roles and choices that come for and with a certain ‘gender’. It projects a conscious attempt to reversal of the normative sharing of spaces and in fact damages the difference constructed between the activities of Aerobics, Yoga and weightlifting.
What if one never had to think where to exercise, who’s watching, “I can’t go to the gym with a child , the men will watch “ ...and many more apprehensions…
What simple and simpler solutions can feminism produce for the complex processes that associate to Gender and Performativity?
WE ASK !
WE UNDERSTAND !
FITNESS CLUB
IN SAGAR
03_ Buildings | Bodies
The Social SCRIPT
How do all bodies behave differently?
What is the level of comfort that a body of a gender seek?
Social Script is pre-determined because of the performativity of gender Itself.
Experience of Finding, Settling, Projecting, Relaxing, inhabiting all intrinsic to wellness are subconsciously associated to the embodied experience of the feminine or any gendered body.
All bodies find ways to negotiate with implicit and explicit forms of boundaries be it cultural, geographical, physiological, etc.
Humanisation and Assertions of Identity are addressed through various degrees and tactics of claim on spaces.
THE ACT OF CRUISING
Cruising is not only a hunt for gay male sex. It is also a political quest for comrades and a social marking of space. The gaze, watching, visual , look, control over self and other bodies, of technologies over bodies has become so primordial that one has lost relationship with nature and with oneself.
DISCLAIMER
We extensively put all our resources, data and studies that include the detailed processes of the project foreward to be available to the professional and educational forums for referential and academic purposesonly.
With regards to copyrights, the drawings and any written and analytical data are a courtsey of The looking Glass and cannot be reproduced except for and by CEPT university and Gazal Nanwani.
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2 .The Lens (landing page) is metaphorically, a rounded glass
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We write about our new initiatives and build themes of inquiry
and discussion here.
3. The Main Menu also has The Projects ( connect to different pages)
Numbered and named in sequence as per the Themes (on The Lens)
which also link to the projects.
4. QuasiPace is the writing section which the author pursues
out of personal interest with
writings and topics on women and by women in Architecture
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