R L Kumar
R L Kumar, a philosopher, an architect with passion for the earth
While making the film "Vernacular Values", Wasim Baner was clean bowled.. Today as memories of Kumar fade, on the gentle persuasion by Madhu, I upload footage which Wasim did, as it still speaks to those of us in the Long & Winding Road!
Beginnings of Centre for Vernacular Architecture
Shramik was a cooperative of odds and ends workers from Kadir Sharif. Though successful in terms of getting contracts and work, the campaign for housing rights that CIEDS was part of, threw up the possibility to get involved in the issue meaningfully. Kumar felt that there is no point of talking of housing rights when you dont know what means to build one.. be a part of the process.
Meaning of Housing Rights
The translation of a Campaign for Housing Rights, translates within this paradigm into a demand for greater finance, and therefore banks, loans, infrastructure for housing. When externally planned it also means more use of cement, concrete and modern materials on mass scale. Kumar's insight is more true today, when all such rights based demands to State ends up as an avenue to increase alienating technologies, increased used of natural resources, and alienation from ways that people used to manage and build their environment.
Wearing Ethnicity
The middle class, is a creation of a shift of money. which works when there is a notion of a vishal nation and it therefore subscribes to certain ideologies...So in the field of architecture, it is the need to build of cement and concrete, a representation of the great unitary nation.
When a middle class aspiration goes in for an Alternative Lawrie Baker house it represent a search for roots for ethnicity. Unfortunately modernity has killed the ordinary ethnic, as it needs to brand value the designer ethnic.
What is Conventional? What is Alter-native!
Why is building with Mud ( not the sun dried mud bricks) considered Unconventional.. Is it a dying Art? It is when you take a art of building away from its culture into an artifact in another setting...
The term conventional seems connected to recent modern practices rather than long standing traditional growing architecture
Mud as Canvas
Moving from Walls as Canvas in Kolar, to Walls of Mud as Border in Rayalpad, and then on to Bellary...a treating surfaces..
The Wall, the Mud and the Relationship..
It was not just experimentation with materials and concepts, Sitting with his Chellas and workers, Kumar explores the relationships that each of these engagements entails. Often times uncomfortable, it led to insights..
Slow Long Knowledge