Kandy: a sketch book

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(All rights belong to Vasanth Perera)

I am no artist nor an art critic, but I'm confident that I can spot beauty when I see it. And that's why I love Vasantha perera's art. As an Architect I love how those silent buildings are brought to life in his canvas. He has recently published a book titled, "Kandy: a sketch book" which is kind of the part two of his trilogy of sketch books. The predecessor to the recent book was titled as "Jaffna: a sketch book". He also recently held an exhibition of his works to mark the launch of the book.




I will be wating till he publishes his third sketch book, which is supposed to be themed on Colombo.


You can visit Vasantha's web site for more information

The Street Child: An Urban Product

This, an advertisement placed at colpetty (In front of Liberty Plaza) aiming at educating people on the importance of keeping children off the street, is a good example of urbanity seeking ways to answer some of the problems it itself has created.

Below find a strikingly similar campaign by "Aseema" a nother organisation which provides education for Street and Unprivileged Children in Mumbai.

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Movies Architects should watch : Fountain Head

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I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build! - Howard Roark, Fountain head

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Fountain Head is by far one of the best movies that I have ever watched, transmitting the text from Ayn Rands, acclaimed novel of the same name a definite must watch for Architects.

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Inscribed within the initial passage of Ayn Rand’s objectivist novel, The Fountainhead, is the presentation of the ideal man incarnated as its architect hero Howard Roark who stands naked at the edge of a granite cliff. The novel portrayed its male protagonist as an architect, investing on the regnant cultural perception that the building auteur, like the structures they design, embody the very cult of manliness. Roark’s strong physique composed of “long, straight lines and angles, each curve broken into planes” (Rand 15), can be likened to a description of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater or a Corbusierian erection. Rand’s simulacrum of an architect as the archetypal man purports how culture re-codes the architectural language for the construction of masculinity. She sought building metaphors to articulate the theme of man-worship, while Howard Roark as creator sanctifies architectural doctrine. Rand’s uncompromising male character defends the principles of modern architecture with the arguments that equated buildings with masculine virtue, asserting that buildings have integrity just like men. The Fountainhead demonstrates how culture and society enlist architecture and architectural metaphors to construct, circulate, and maintain beliefs about gender. - Architecture and Sexuality:The Politics of Gendered Space Gerard Rey A. Lico

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The film starts off with a rush, but settles down to an easy pace once the preliminaries are done.
Howard roark is a character that will be etched on to anyone's mind for some time, after seeing the movie.

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Movies Architects should watch

There are relatively few movies made about architects or their weird life styles. One such extremely entertaining movie is “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones” made in 1989 in India.
Not being one of those typical Indian movies, it violates almost all of Indian movie rules. For starters the movie is completely in English and you don’t see the typical hero heroin scenarios, the songs, dances or the flower gardens.
The screen play was done by Arundathi Roy, the acclaimed author of the god of small things, she also brings to life the character of Radha in the film. The cast also include Shahrukh khan in one of his earlier works.
In a nut shell the film revolves around the eccentricities of an architecture student named Anand Grover who is popularly called annie and his ideas of social upliftment.
The summery of the film can be found here

Is Barrelism dead?

Our jolly old fine arts teacher in the first year at the Architecture Faculty, Mr. Chandraguptha Thenuwara (Thené similar to René as he used to humorously call himself) pollutedour minds with his ideas of barrelism and neo barrelsim. His art installations themed with barrels painted in camouflage colours depict the ideology which he tryed to convey.
The artist talks extensively about his ideas of barrelism here.
After seeing an end to this 30 year old war, will we see a modification to barrel theory? are we at the end of the barrel era? we can only wonder and Thené would probably have an answer already!