AN Interior

Online – Let the Light In (The Act of Quad)

DAMN° MAGAZINE

Issue 87 – Better than Before?

Issue 86 – Works of Mariko Mori: Profound Symbiosis

Issue 84 – Honey Figs Debt Porsche

Issue 83 – Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg: Countering the Insect Apocalypse

Issue 82 – At Home in the Wild

Issue 81 – Monumental Reflection

Issue 80 – Honouring India’s Public Space

DISEGNO JOURNAL

Issue 37 – Hanging by Many Threads

Issue 36 – Home, Work, and Where Else?

Issue 34 – The Road to Utopia is Not Smooth

Issue 32 – The Making and Razing of Mumbai’s Chawls

DESIGN ANTHOLOGY ASIA

Issue 35 – Inside MuseLAB

IA&B

Issue 33/5 – The Generic Urban

LA JOURNAL

Issue 74 – A City & Its Gardens

Issue 65 – Sea of Victory: Jaisamand

Issue 58 – Land & Water: Udaipur, The city of Lakes

Issue 55 – Painting the Larger Picture: Sirohi

MAGAZINE ON URBANISM [MONU]

Issue 35 – The ‘Unfinished’ City of Mumbai

MY LIVEABLE CITY

Issue 9/1 – Manifesting Auroville’s Galaxy Plan

Issue 7/1 – Diagnosis of a City

SANCTUARY ASIA

Issue 40/2 – Another November: In the Forests of Uttarakhand

TOPOS

Issue 123 – Mumbai Can Survive The Storm

Issue 116 – The City Adapted

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

Andreas Trenker

Charo Oquet

Jacob Hashimoto

Jeremy Hutchison and Evelyn Simons

Mariko Mori

MuseLAB

Stefan Sagmeister

Studio SAAR

Sebastian ErraZuriz

Tormod Amundsen | Biotope

The Act of Quad

A significant chunk of the Indian city is a product of self-build endeavors, some of them flexible and temporal. Like a daily evening ritual in Ahmedabad, after the jewelry shops have pulled down their metal shutters, the cars in Manek Chowk are replaced with fervent human activity. Pieces of tarpaulin are hoisted up with bamboo supports, live cooking counters brought in, and plastic tables arranged in rows to attend to a mix of people from all parts of the city.

While many cities have such identifiable, local street-food spots that host a vibrant atmosphere, Manek Chowk goes a step further to become an urban nucleus for business exchange that keeps the links between the historic core and the peripheries of the city alive. It illustrates the “enormous skill of city-building, particularly in Asia” that Rem Koolhaas mentioned in an interview, also suggesting that it is “never about the new but always about the more and modified”.

Since resilience lies in the city’s capacity to adapt and renew, it can be observed in instances of juxtaposition between formal and informal architecture. The resilient city accommodates a healthy proportion of the two and addresses its social and cultural heterogeneity with ever-evolving urban environments. The city emerges as ambiguously complex, where it can unlikely be perceived, described, or ‘solved’ in one way. In fact, resilience surfaces only when the urban narrative is pluralized, with different spatial forms vying for optimized survival.

— excerpt from ‘The City Adapted’, published in Topos 116 [September 2022].