[Urbanstudy] Material Movement essay

[Curt Gambetta]

Dear all,

Please see a piece I wrote recently about architectural materials and globalization in Scapegoat Journal, with a heavy focus on Bangalore. Scapegoat is an interesting broadsheet journal being published out of Toronto, with a strong critical bent. See the journal here: http://scapegoatjournal.org/ and see a PDF of the essay with images here: http://www.scapegoatjournal.org/docs/Scapegoat_Issue_02_MATERIALISM_%C2%A72.pdf 


As always, I encourage list members to post article and essays whenever possible.


Cheers,

Curt

 
Material Movement: Cement and the
Globalization of Material Technologies
by
Curt Gambetta
 
In:
Scapegoat Issue 2: Materialism (Toronto, December 2011), 26-27.
 
Architecture moves. Architectural ideas, technologies and institutions travel
along routes of global and regional circulation, while construction materials
create conduits and physical pathways for their movement. These routes,
however, are not empty or neutral spaces between cultures, as anthropologist
Elizabeth Povinelli has recently argued; they are subject to the volatilities
of change and disruption. (1) Materials travel through infrastructures ranging
from transport vessels to electronic data to cultural forms, encountering
social and technical friction as they circulate. In this respect, routes are
not benign agents of transport, but rather active agents that shape how
materials are represented, manufactured and put to use as objects of knowledge
and architectural design.
            In the span of a century, a number
of basic construction materials attained near-hegemonic status in an otherwise
heterogeneous world of construction technologies and expertise. The
proliferation of architectural materials such as cement, steel and masonry
followed a map of cultural space and historical development that to this day
issues more often than not from an origin point in the West. What of notions of
space, culture and difference are embedded in this map of architectural
globalization? 
In my own observation of the social and
technical life of materials in India, I have long been dissatisfied with the
image of historical progress and architectural modernity that this map
proposed, both within and outside India. Modern architecture in India and
elsewhere in the postcolonial world remains hopelessly tethered to a powerful center
and origin in the Western metropole. The globalization of materials is used by
many critics as evidence to confirm cultural processes of Westernization.
Indeed, architecture is produced with a standardized and often reproducible
repertoire of components and materials of construction that trace their origins
to 19th century Europe and America. Still, differences are tangible
to even a casual observer. Mumbai does not look like Houston, nor is it
constructed in the same manner, whatever the common material DNA. Rather than
accept these differences as culturally determined, we might do well to consider
the processes and circuits of material and social exchange through which
difference is produced. How might attention to the conditions of material
movement reconfigure the spatial and temporal relationships that are drawn
between architectural materials and the cultural experience of modernity?
 
I.
Gayatri
Kumaraswamy and I walked through a small lane in Siddapura, a village that was
swallowed up by Bangalore after the planning of new, large-scale suburbs such
as Jayanagar (said to be the largest in Asia, in its time) after Independence
in 1947. The light was typically intense, setting in contrast even the
shallowest relief work and surface blemishes such as cracking plaster. We
stopped at a series of row houses in order to inquire about the diamond shape
that was constructed in plaster above the door of a carpenter who lived on the
lane, S.P. Krishnappa. 
            I anticipated that the quotidian
icons above our head were clues to larger circuits of proliferation within
Bangalore and abroad, and wanted to know more about their provenance. Plaster
shapes, patterns, and surface textures are common to the roadside elevation of
small-scale buildings in Bangalore and other cities and towns across India.
Pattern, especially plaster relief work, exploded into common use on walls,
windows, and doors during the 1950s and 60s. Portland cement was in part
responsible, allowing for faster turnaround on building sites and encouraging
flattened patterns over slower-drying and more sculpturally adept lime
plasters. Cement was also embedded in a wider efflorescence of novel materials,
joining a number of other globally circulating construction techniques and
materials that were introduced to India during the 20th century.
            Changes in material technologies coincided
with broader transformations in urban life and architecture. In Bangalore,
expertise about material manufacturing and construction was changing during the
20th century, as were forms of architectural patronage. Ideas about ‘city
architecture’ and urban spatial organization were re-imagined at the turn of
the century and reorganized relationships between street, building, and
community. New forms of life and labour emerged in this period with the rise of
public sector industries and the reconfiguration of older manufacturing
economies; in particular, a revamped and re-imagined industrial suburb was
introduced. Cinema halls, hotels, and other new spaces of social friction
proliferated around the city, along with new geometries and materialities of
space and surface. 
            Novel materials were suited to the
constructional demands of this new landscape, while at the same time
transforming it. New architectural materials such as concrete and steel were
celebrated by industry, planning, and architectural culture in mid-century
India for their capacity to create new forms of domesticity and urban life. It
was also thought that concrete would create new experts, such as architects and
civil engineers. Whatever its structural innovations, concrete was primarily touted
as an image. It was promoted as a building block of society, supporting new
ways of living and new forms of knowledge.
            Industry publications, such as those
published by the Cement Marketing Company and the Concrete Association of India,
featured images of new concrete architecture that referenced global trends.
During the 1930s and 40s, images of technological marvels and quotidian
architecture in Europe and the United States stood side by side with images of
concrete furniture, roads, and architecture in India. Progress was achieved by
operating at the level of everyday urban aesthetics, retrofitting
infrastructure and creating a new urban fabric through the scale of domestic
construction, echoing the aesthetic bias of colonial urban improvement schemes.
By the 1950s, concrete was expected to bring infrastructural cohesion to the imagination
of a national economy. Advertisements and print media invested in concrete the
potential to transform large scale infrastructural networks, such as transport
and electricity, to ‘catch up’ with the West. 
            Regionalism, discourses of low-cost
construction and vernacular architecture, later turned this narrative on its
head, portraying the introduction of concrete as leading to the disintegration
of local building traditions. Beginning in the 1970s and 80s, architects in
India such as Laurie Baker turned to vernacular architecture as a foil against
new technologies of construction. Inspired by the Himalayan vernacular of
Pithoragarh and Gandhian ideals, Baker describes how the “ideal house” in an
“ideal village” is constructed of building materials sourced within a five-mile
radius of the building site. (2) In addition to cost effectiveness, Baker also
argues that using local materials is a project of cultural mediation, noting
that the “delightful dignified housing [of the Himalayan vernacular]
demonstrated hundreds of years of building research on coping with local
materials, using them to cope with the local climactic patterns and hazards,
and accommodating to the local social
pattern of living.” (3) 
            Baker was keen to point out the
cultural consequences of new technologies such as concrete. If concrete was
seen by industry and professional design culture to function as an agent of
infrastructural cohesion within the space of national culture, Baker understood
novel constructional technologies as viral contaminants of traditional contexts
of material use and their cultural milieus. He ruminates about what inhabitants
of Pithoragarh think of their own houses, concluding that ‘improvements’ such
as: 
 
[P]roper kitchens, bathrooms, latrines,
chimneys, smokeless chulhas, glass
windows, brick walls, concrete floors and roofs…create problems worse than those
which they are supposed to remedy, and…are rarely appreciated by the people who
have to live with these ‘advancements’ and ‘developments.’ (4)
 
Baker
implies that architectural materials not only represent but also affect the
social worlds they interact with, attributing materials a similar agency to
that of everyday domestic technologies.
            Baker’s perspective on building
technology and culture exemplifies a longstanding problematic in design culture
about globalization, space, and cultural difference. It assumes an isomorphism,
writ large across not only architecture but the human sciences as well, between
“space, place, and territory.” (5) In a systemic rethinking of anthropology’s
colonial inheritance in the 1980s and 90s, James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta
critique an assumed spatial ordering of difference in the social sciences that
understands the space of one culture as “naturally” discontinuous with another
and ties ‘culture’ to the boundaries of a particular territory. “It is so taken
for granted,” they write, “that each country embodies its own distinctive
culture and society that the terms ‘society’ and ‘culture’ are routinely
appended to the names of nation-states, as when a tourist visits India to
understand ‘Indian culture’ and ‘Indian society’.” (6) 
            To this we can add how the
imagination of society and culture is appended to particular building materials
and techniques. Sigfried Giedion, for instance, imagined concrete architecture
as the expression of a French “constructional temperament,” drawing a line of
epistemological continuity across history, in his book Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, to
imbue new materials with the spirit of world historical progress. (7) In
Giedion’s image of history, concrete is the culmination of French architectural
achievement, from cathedral architecture to the industrial sublime. Conversely,
concrete today stands for cultural homogenization, Westernization,
Americanization, and the destruction of tradition. Whether seen as an expression
or destruction of culture, the idea of culture itself is defined by the
fortification or contamination of particular forms of identity and their
respective spaces of supposed origin (the West, France, America, etc.).
            How does this image of culture hold
up against the proliferation of architectural materials? After all, common
materials are subject to wildly different uses that seem to confirm their
“acculturation” by particular national or regional contexts. During much of the
20th century, this was understood as a failure to catch up to new paradigms of
construction and architectural design. Reflecting on his experience as an
architecture student in late 1970s Italy, Mario Carpo recalls the lament of
progress deferred. Describing his travels between Italy and Switzerland, he
explains:
 
Why, given the same materials,
techniques, and methods of construction, does it seem that on one side of the
border it is considered normal that people should live in houses that are more
or less identical, while on the other side it is not so, and everyone seeks to
avoid as far and as conspicuously as possible the anonymity of a standardized
architectural landscape? As anyone can tell you, despite an overwhelming number
of building codes and community and condominium rules, in Italy an apartment
house with forty balconies usually displays on its façade forty types and
colors of curtains or blinds. Since it would be cheaper to purchase forty
identical curtains in one lot, this must
come about by choice, not chance. (8) 
 
Carpo
describes the frustration he shared with his peers over Italy’s supposed
backwardness (to Wilson and Kelling’s broken window theory, we could add a
theory of raucous blinds!). Modernism won out on one side of the border,
whereas on the other side of the border, “the battle had yet to begin.” (9) 
            Carpo’s lament over his youthful
sentiments provides him an opportunity to undo the seemingly intractable bond
between technological and historical evolution that is implied by the metaphor
of a ‘battle’ for progress. Carpo goes onto to illuminate a period of
architectural history in which architectural forms changed radically without
corresponding innovation in materials or techniques of construction. The
proliferation of printed treatises and images in the early Renaissance
facilitated the reproduction of architectural forms without reference to their
material composition or intended users. Print media became, like oral
transmission before it, a circuit through which ideas about architecture
traveled, disassociating the historical periodicity of building from the
construction technologies and expertise that made building possible.
The assumed discontinuity of two cultural
and architectural contexts (eg., Italian vs. Swiss) is unsettled by this
historical problematic about reproducibility and circulation. Seemingly natural
historical trajectories of cultural change appear much less natural when it is
acknowledged that they are mediated by infrastructures of circulation such as
printed media and orality. These circuits of movement may be indifferent to
materials, as Carpo illustrates. But materials also act as a medium for
movement, a process that I will elaborate on further. Rather than read
perceived differences in architectural work and culture as evidence of
anachronism or cultural discontinuity, I suggest that we read the conditions of
circulation through which difference is produced. Doing so allows us to read
routes such as materials or printed media as charged passageways through which
cultural spaces are “hierarchically interconnected” rather than “naturally
disconnected,” to again borrow from Ferguson and Gupta. (10)
In the contemporary world, printed media and
orality are joined by a dense and interconnected web of circulatory forms. Circuits
of movement require that materials and their representations be configured to
fit their constraints. This process of infrastructural mediation has come under
an increasing degree of scrutiny in fields such as anthropology. (11) The
infrastructure of ships, trucks, publications,  and other forms of circulation constrain and mediate the materials they
transport and represent, both in their physical makeup and in anticipation of
how they will be put to work. Prefabrication of building construction, for
instance, requires that prefabricated components fit within particular
dimensions, weights and logical assembly in order to be transported and
utilized on site. Furthermore, institutional forms such as professional bodies,
international building standards, educational institutions, systems of
patronage and other cultural forms ask that technologies behave according to
particular standards and desires in order to be eligible for general use and
experimentation.
In India, as with many settings in the
postcolonial world, these infrastructures are notable for their instability and
vulnerability to improvisation and appropriation by non-professional circuits
of use. Infrastructural fragility is not a failure of socio-economic or
cultural development, as is often claimed. The volatility of pathways is
instead a terrain of cultural possibility, allowing for new avenues of
circulation to be created. Through their networks of circulation and
dissemination, cement and other materials have transformed urban and rural
life, just not in the way imagined by industry and design culture. 
 
II.
Gayatri
and I struck up a conversation with Krishnappa, who, joking that a young
bystander was the owner of a local temple, made light of our bias towards the
ordinary architecture of the street over the older architecture of the temple.
Krishnappa’s story, and the architectural landscape that
surrounded our conversation, reinforced my suspicion that the urban archive of
architectural materials and technologies did not conform to the heroic
narratives of progress and decline discussed above.
            Krishnappa explained that the
diamond protruding from his house was constructed around 1980 by gare workers who, by the time of its
construction, were repositioned in a new cement-based economy of materials,
know-how, and patronage. Gare was a
basic construction material used for mortar and plastering that predated
Portland cement in India, consisting of a mixture of lime, sand, water, and,
occasionally, egg. Besides being a method of fabricating surfaces, it was closely
associated with technologies of load-bearing walls and terraced or tile roofs.
            Garewas a mixture of social forces and
materials. Its production was familiar to urban residents; the mixture was
ground in a large circular stone channel with an ox-driven grinding stone in
small units throughout the city. The scale of production units and the
materials used to manufacture it remain familiar to a mature generation of
Bangaloreans, if only as a memory. Temporally, gare was slow both in its manufacture and its application on site,
creating a culture of site relations that are said to have privileged skill
over speed. Besides requiring a good deal of time to cure and cool before being
used for construction, gare dried
slower on application than cement, allowing relief work to be reshaped by
artisans the following day. 
Aspects of the gare assemblage were transformed by the introduction of new
technologies, but were not extinguished wholesale in the manner envisioned by
the building industry and the professional design culture. Cement displaced
many qualities and consequences of gare. Cement
manufacture and material composition was unfamiliar to laypeople and users,
concealed in a new geography of far away factories. The slowness of hardening
and labour was met with a temporal acceleration of site relations entailed by
the arrival of the contractor and faster drying Portland cement. Nonetheless,
the material and building culture of gare survived decades into the introduction of cement. Material admixtures and forms
of expertise about gare persisted
well beyond their anticipated death. Gare material and expertise, for instance, survived into the 1970s, and possibly the
1980s, as evidenced by the diamonds above Krishnappa’s door. 
            Cement established a new assemblage
of materials, knowledge and urban life, though its consequences on the ground
were at odds with its imagined social and spatial role. Cement was considered a
catalyst for new forms of expertise, such as professional architectural
practice and civil engineering. Concrete design manuals stressed the centrality
of the professional in the hierarchy of architectural knowledge, an authorship
that was sanctioned at the municipal level with building bylaws that required
the authorial signature of a professional on architectural drawings. A field of
non-professional labour, ranging from unskilled to skilled workers and maistri (masons) flourished anew,
encouraged by cement’s ease of use in the domain of small-scale construction.
Educational institutions solely dedicated to architectural training were late
to arrive in the Bangalore region, and bylaws that required an architect for
construction were undermined by a combination of lax oversight by municipal
authorities and a shortage of architects based in the city. Design expertise
was distributed unevenly between patron, architect, engineer and labourer,
blurring roles and throwing into disarray the hierarchy of work anticipated by
the entrance of professionals and new material techniques. 
            In Siddapura and other older
neighborhoods in the city, discrepancies of old and new building practices are
inscribed onto building surfaces. Layers of time are exposed along the crowded
architectures of narrow lanes, conversing through plastered surfaces and paint.
Thick masonry walls, gneiss blocks, and wood trim from the 19th and early 20th
centuries occupy the scenography of the street alongside geometric patterns set
in steel grill work and cement plastering that bear the mark of the
post-Independence Indian city. Contemporary techniques of surface construction
allude to the pre-fab materials used in interiors, such as the pink floral
ceramic bathroom tile used to clad a roadside temple. This mass-produced unit
of surface inverts its interior application, with the effect of converting a
heavy masonry structure into something like a wrapped paper box, shrouding the
age or time of the original structure in a contemporary, lighter garb.
            Old and new forms of expertise are
equally heterogeneous, resisting the easy distinctions of traditional/artisanal
and modern/mechanized. Krishnappa explained that mechanized carving had been
influential to his carpentry practice, dating the transition to mechanized
woodworking to around 20 years ago, around the same time he began his own
practice as a carpenter. Pointing to the carving on his door, he explained that
its design was executed by a machine, seemingly confirming a familiar narrative
of technology replacing handiwork and traditional craft. Despite mechanization
and the propagation of new designs, Krishnappa noted that people continue to
come to carpenters for work. 
            The work of the hand retains its
value, however tenuously, in the presence of mechanical technologies, even if
it is transfigured by its encounter with new conditions of patronage and
production, as well as aesthetic demands. Knowing the experience of other
carpenters in Bangalore, I will take the liberty to supplement his short story
with the dilemma carpenters now face. The highly skilled carpentry of the past,
particularly in furniture construction, is being increasingly eclipsed by the
popularity of pre-fabricated, mass-produced furniture that is commonly known as
“Ikea,” even though it is not manufactured by the Swedish furniture company. As
well, skills have become more and more specialized, a trend not restricted to
the practice of carpentry. 
            The turn to factory production may
or may not prove to be the death knell for artisanal practices and
labour-intensive fabrication. Its consequences remain uncertain in contexts like
Bangalore. Still, despite the de-skilling of labor, specialization of design
knowledge, and mechanization of fabrication, site-based processes of
architectural proliferation continue to thrive. Windows and door frames,
household carpentry, window grills, walls, floor slabs and structural framing
are all produced on site. Novel pre-fabricated building products are drawn into
these larger regimes of circulation and site-based mimesis. In the traffic of
borrowing, appropriation, and re-articulation of surface techniques, both
handmade and industrial objects act as potential points of departure. For
instance, imitation wood replaces real wood in the use of formica furniture and
cabinetry. Additionally, imitation wood is itself imitated and transposed from
furniture to architectural surfaces. Paint is used to achieve the look of wood,
though the look is distinctly graphic in quality, like formica. Or, common
shapes such as diamonds are unhinged from any one material or dimension and
rendered in different media, such as wood, paint, cement, or steel. New
materials are also suitable to unforeseen or heretical uses, as in the example
of the temple wrapped in bathroom tiles.
            The city is not a quiet backdrop to
these promiscuous transferences among media. Shapes and patterns wander the
streets of Bangalore like spirits in search of a medium to temporarily occupy.
Though cement industry publications were available from the 1940s onwards, they
were printed in English or Hindi, rendering them inaccessible for those illiterate
or not literate in either of these two languages. In the absence of widely
available publications, the street served as a conduit for ideas about
construction and design. Contractors frequently cite “experience” as the locus
of their inspiration, an embodied knowledge of surface designs and spatial
typologies forged through experience and, critically, a streetwise knowledge of
architecture. Though printed media such as Indian design magazines and global
remainders such as Ikea catalogues are now readily available through bookstores
and roadside booksellers, the street remains an important conduit for the
circulation of knowledge and forms. 
            The circulation of images also
connects the local to the global. Cement industry publications were initially
the venue for the dissemination of perspectival images, plans and elevations of
novel building types in mid century India. Other books published by engineer
authors, such as R.S. Deshpande’s Modern
Ideal Homes for India, were in wide circulation from 1939 to at least 1982,
and were authored explicitly to cultivate and transform modern home types and
ways of living that directly or indirectly invoked European and American
designs. Home planning books such as Modern
Ideal Homes featured allusions to European modernist housing or direct
appropriations of examples from architects such as Bruno Taut. These
publications predated large-scale modernist projects in India such as
Chandigarh (Albert Mayer and Matthew Nowicki, and later Le Corbusier) and the
Delhi Master Plan (the Ford Foundation), challenging storied notions of
modernism’s temporal alliance with postwar economic development and its priveleged
‘introduction’ to India through these circuits. 
            In contemporary Bangalore, personal
travel photographs have replaced industry publications as the entry point for
images of foreign design. Kedar Diwakar, principal of one of the oldest offices
in city, founded in 1966 by his father, L.P. Diwakar, suggested to me recently
that the use of personal photographs and other media signaled a decline in the
respect that clients accorded to architectural expertise. While his father
would carefully illustrate drawings by hand, clients now come with photographs
and measure the quality of a designer according to how faithfully she is able
to emulate them. Photographs upend the ascendancy of the architect in the daily
terrain of practice, deploying materials of construction as a speculative image
on par with requirements of style and space. Impersonating a client, he
described a typical demand: “I want a building, and I want to use granite
everywhere.” 
As with home planning books in the 50s,
these images are inserted into radically different economies of construction
than their original referents of domestic life in the United States or Europe.
However, in settings that rely on in-situ construction, similarity begets
difference. Images are subject to the material contingencies of the site and
varied levels of skill, and are notable for what they do not represent
(depending on the angle or image resolution, for example). The reproduction of
common trends relating to surface and space is desired by makers and patrons
alike, but is altered as it moves through different circuits of material
realization and constructional expertise.
            Given its complicated status as an
image, a technology and raw matter, what is a material, and what is its
cultural agency? (12) The question has been asked in many ways of architecture
proper during the 20th century, revealing a productive and unresolved tension
between the technical capacities of architectural materials and their status as
images and cultural objects. In the Pre and Postwar era, materials such as
cement and steel were tied so closely to their representation that they were sometimes
asked to function as a medium of communication. In his history of technology
and avant-garde culture in post-revolutionary Mexico, Rubén Gallo positions
cement alongside technologies of communication such as the camera, the
typewriter, and the radio, suggesting that cement was co-opted alongside media
technologies in order to communicate revolutionary political messages. (13) In
Mexico and other contexts such as Russia and India, cement was photographed,
filmed, and even narrated in fiction in order to communicate its radical social
potential as both a medium of industrial production and architectural
innovation. Mid-century American architectural practices such as Eero Saarinen
and Paul Rudolph distanced themselves from this social project, rendering the
friction between representation and material in the formalization of surface
and structure. (14) Concrete was inscribed into the by the very techniques of
representation through which it was rendered and speculated upon, as in the
transference of Rudolph’s textured pen and ink drawing technique to the
corrugation of concrete surfaces in buildings such as the Art &
Architecture Building at Yale. (15) 
            While images (and other forms of
representation) carry these histories of material inscription and meaning with
them, they can also be dislocated from them when they enter new contexts.
Reyner Banham’s account of the one-sided romance between European modernism and
American industrial architecture, for instance, frames the friction between
image and material in terms of circulation, where myriad misreadings of
material innovation occurred along the journey of architectural images from
North America to Europe. Banham’s narrative is in part a critique of
derivation, describing how Le Corbusier and other European modernists “picked
and chose” from the supposedly objective photographic representation of
American industrial architecture the elements that were appropriately primitive
or mechanistic for their own modernist objectives. (16)
            If in Banham’s critique of
derivation the reference point was the ‘ruins’ of industry in the United
States, in much of the colonial world, the reference point was the West and
Europe more specifically. Gregory Clancey, in a brilliant reading of the
complicated cultural dynamics of material technologies in late 19th and early
20th century Japan, argues that the gaps and partial knowledge in the
appropriation of ‘Western’ techniques of carpentry and masonry seriously
undermine historical narratives of cultural derivation and related models of
‘technology transfer’ that all too often find their way back to a Western point
of origin. For example, Clancey traces the emergence of what he calls,
schematically, ‘Japanese Western Carpentry,’ a contradiction of terms only if
we maintain our faith in the isomorphism of ethnos and territory writ large
across global histories of design. (17) 
            In the 1870s, the Meiji government
hired a class of foreign experts such as Joseph Conder for its newly formed
technical schools, entangling technologies such as masonry construction and
knowledge-making about these materials in a cultural politics of progress.
British and German texts circulated into design discourses through this
framework but were transformed significantly when re-drawn and interpreted by
Japanese authors. Rather than cultivate a historical consciousness about
“Western carpentry,” foreign texts were notable for their drawings of fragments
and abstract principles without application to a larger building or cultural
context. Particular designs for bracing systems were evaluated by Japanese
designers not for their cultural significance but earthquake resistance. The
partial knowledge of European material techniques allowed for their flexible
appropriation in emergent domains of technical expertise driven by geologic context.
An idea of cultural derivation here is not very useful, since Western carpentry
is not evaluated in this context in terms of its origin in the West, except
perhaps within the larger framework of its introduction. Clancey offers the
concept of inscription to describe the physical and material agency of these
transformations, an effort to give language to cultural transformations that do
not adhere to essentialist notions of cultural contact. (18)
            It is in the context of this
historical problematic that I continue to wrestle with the consequences of the
circulation of materials in Bangalore. Though reference points to Western
architecture and expertise are everywhere in the media landscape and
architecture of the city, they are departed from in critical ways. Material
origins are themselves unstable, shifting constantly between representation and
raw matter. Wood and other materials are reified as materialities that are dislodged
from their origins and intended uses, enabling the creation of knowledge
networks, patronage, and urban spaces that necessarily respond to the limited
means of an expanding middle class and, more recently, an increasingly mobile
underclass. Material and cost constraints demand that qualities associated with
a natural material (or its imitation) must alter and conform to the status of
an image, such as hand-painted wood or formica, or industrially produced
formica ‘stone.’ Architectural typologies are also subject to these conditions
of circulation. In mid century Bangalore, the idea of the concrete home
circulated as an image long before many users were acclimated to concrete,
meaning that designs of RCC construction that were portrayed in
industry-published home planning books were realized in older technologies of gare or mud and stone. Similarly, images
of wood framed homes from the suburban United States are replicated in
contemporary Bangalore in RCC construction. 
             Complicated
materialities such as cement or wood participate in a cultural efflorescence of
matter, media and non-professional forms of expertise where mechanization and
expenditure is significantly constrained, or is simply reconfigured to the
demands of a labor-intensive building economy. Movement relies on common
material and spatial types to achieve an endlessly differentiated set of
material claims over urban space. (19) Seen through a wider lens, everything
from textures and shapes to spatial and tectonic typologies are subject to
significant transformations in the course of their movement. Materials are unmoored
from their origins; the vacuity of their referents facilitates an ease of
translation and adaptation to the sometimes difficult conditions and conflicts
of construction on site.
When tracking the circulation of concrete
and other materials of construction, notions of an ‘Indian’ way of building or
an ‘Indian’ urban vernacular may not do justice to the ways in which
technological changes have unfolded in relation to cultural and social forms
that cannot be easily enclosed in concepts of identity and space such as a
local, regional or national vernacular. An analysis of circulation redraws the
map of material technologies and cultural change. Circulation is not
necessarily global; it can also be urban in its extent, inviting a critical
discussion of collective spatial forms that are not necessarily transnational.
Removing the movement of materials from narratives of “cultural difference”
also facilitates a re-reading of sites of architectural production that do not
fit with already acknowledged centres of innovation. (20) Thinking a
materialism of movement allows us to take into account forms and sites of
circulation that are unacknowledged or willfully ignored, and understand how
routes of circulation are constituted along axes of movement that do not
necessarily coincide with powerful images of architectural modernity and its
well-established networks of circulation.
*Please note that there are two minor revisions from the published text, including the paragraph associated with endnote 10. 
            
 
Notes
1.
Elizabeth Povinelli. “Routes and Worlds,” E-Flux
Journal 27 (September 2011): 1-12.
2.
Laurie Baker “Building Technology in Pithoragarh,” in Gautam Bhatia, ed., Laurie Baker: Life, Works & Writings (New Delhi, India: Penguin, 1991), 234.
3.
Emphasis mine. Ibid., 235. 
4.
Ibid., 236.
5.
James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, “Space, Identity, and the Politics of
Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7
(February 1992): 7.
6.
Ibid., 6-7.
7.
Sigfried Giedion, Building in France,
Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete (Malibu: The Getty Center for
the History of Art, 1995).
8.
Emphasis mine. Mario Carpo, Architecture
in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography and Printed Images in the
History of Architectural Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 3. 
9.
Ibid., 8.
10.
Ferguson and Gupta, “Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” 8.
11.
The anthropology of circulation encompasses an expanding body of literature in
anthropological discourse. For the purposes of this article, three platforms of
discussion were primarily referenced, including Elizabeth Povinelli. “Routes
and Worlds,” E-Flux Journal 27
(September 2011): 1-12; Elizabeth Povinelli, Response to Infrastructures of Circulation Panel, American Anthropological
Association Annual Meeting (New Orleans, LA), November 17, 2010; and Dilip
Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli, “Technologies of Public Form: Circulation,
Transfiguration, Recognition,” Public
Culture 15(3): 385-397.
12.
My questions allude to the core argument and title of Reinhold Martin’s essay
“What is a Material?” in Donald Albrecht and Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, eds., Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
13.
Rubén Gallo, Mexican Modernity: The
Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005),
168-198.
14.
Martin, “What is a Material” and Timothy Rohan, “Rendering the Surface: Paul
Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale,” Grey Room 1 (Fall 2000): 84-107.
15.
Rohan, “Rendering the Surface,” 89-91.
16.
Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: U.S.
Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1986), 16-18.
17.
Gregory Clancey, Earthquake Nation: The
Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868-1930 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2006), 202-211.
18.
Ibid., 7.
19.
This is a phenomenon not unlike the proliferation of the “original copy” that
James Holston witnessed in the periphery of late 1980s São
Paolo. See James Holston, “Autoconstruction in Working-Class Brazil,” Cultural Anthropology 6 (November 1991):
456-462.
20.
Banham observed a particular geographic blindness implicit in the
instrumentalization of American industrial architecture by Modernist design
culture, noting how his analysis brought into historical critique the
experience of American cities which then, as in now, occupy critical blind
spots for architectural culture at large (except, of course, as a ruin). Reyner
Banham, A Concrete Atlantis, 107.
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