Art, Architecture and Design Professionals On TFOD

Art is limitless to any medium. From putting a pencil to a paper and sketching to painting street walls with graffiti; human being, with its curious mind have evolved art over centuries to suit an ongoing trend or demand. In today’s modern world the biggest need is to save our planet from tuning into one huge dump yard. 

Recycling and reusing are concepts which are yet to be taken as seriously as they should be. But put a creative twist to it and create art pieces through the process and we shall get a trend that is fun, interesting and attention grabbing at the same time. One such amazing initiative was taken in my own city of Vadodara, by the Meraki Design Studio. The Railway Sculpture and Furniture Camp is an idea to bring back to life the scrap with Western Railways in the form of thematic sculptures and furniture for Vadodara Railway Station.

The World Architecture Festival, which concluded this year on 30^th November at Amsterdam, is always an opportunity to witness and enjoy the essential best of the architectural practice from around the world. This year, too, saw some extraordinary picks among the shortlisted projects as well as the winners. Innovation, being the most elemental promise of new designs, marked out some of the winners with exciting brilliance matched by plain simplicity. Here, we dip in to savour these virtues in two of these remarkable entries at WAF 2018, Amsterdam.

With the internet sucking us up into ever deeper into sedentary confinement, ably aided  by the increasing paucity of usable open spaces we, and importantly our young ones who make up our future, are left sadly robbed of a sufficient outdoor life. We live in times when parents find it very difficult to simply ask their children to ‘go out and play!’- out where? Space is the most premium commodity in cities, not really made easily available for play. Yet, the need for open spaces is the most urgently felt out of the list of infrastructural requirements of any city today, especially in India’s densely populated cities. Urban areas actually require outdoor play facilities for their young which are least resource intensive, easy to maintain, sustainable in every sense of the term. Here’s a sampling of such simple play parks from cities all over that have design brilliance vested in them. 

Any conversation these days is incomplete without a discussion on the latest technology to enter the market and the aspect of our lives it’s likely to impact. Indeed, tech is so pervasive that no teeny bit of human life misses being impacted by it, and its advancements are so fast and numerous that it’s almost impossible to keep up. So, we talk tech today around the design of an exterior feature/ facility that, once considered a luxury, is fast becoming a regular amenity – the swimming pool. The problems around maintenance of swimming pools have given rise to the solution of covering them when not in use, and the market sees a varied supply of these covers and ways to operate them. Here’s looking at pool covers – the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’- and some magically concealed pools as well!

‘Tallest, fastest, strongest’ says the large plaque placed on the premises of The Statue of Unity – the 182 m tall and presently the world’s tallest statue of India’s first home minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel located on the banks of the Narmada at Kevadiya in Gujarat. This one is the last in a series of hundreds of boards, dotting like milestones the newly refurbished smooth road of nearly 100 km from the nearest airport at Vadodara to Kevadiya, proclaiming the virtues of this monumental accomplishment. This statue of the ‘Iron Man of India’ honours Sardar Patel’s strong will and his contribution to the sovereignty of India by bringing together the then separated princely states and regions under the union of nationhood, thus prompting its naming as ‘The Statue of Unity’. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who initiated this project in 2013, as Chief Minister of Gujarat state then, proudly inaugurated the completed statue on 31^st October 2018 and opened it to public view, presented to the country as a validation of his government’s world-class competence and his own supreme capacity to lead.

Notwithstanding the controversies surrounding the statue – of the futile and wasteful allocation of funds much needed for development to an exercise in showmanship, of the wisdom of its location vis-à-vis its impact on surroundings, of whether ‘height’ should even be considered a significant parameter for competition between monuments in today’s context – it’s a done thing. ‘The Statue of Unity’ stands tall (literally) and completed at record speed in a total of 56 months including the planning, construction and handing over, already thronged by visitors to many times the full capacity during the holiday season. The Future of Design pays a visit to dwell on the design of the country’s newest tourist destination.