As a point of entry and exit, a threshold has a
dual coding in society as both a physical and
symbolic marker of separation and connection.
Thresholds are often explicitly hard-edged or
even brutal in their expression, demarcating
rigid boundaries, as in the definite lines of walls,
barricades, and security checkpoints in buildings,
around cities, or across larger territories. Too
often, thresholds also divide human activity
or communities according to social, ethnic,
national, or economic characteristics.
Architecture and planning can unwittingly
contribute to these different forms of physical
separation, especially in ways made visible
through their practitioners’ interpretations
of culture, religion, or legislation. As the
academic disciplines that inform spatial
practices, architecture and planning are
themselves often similarly separated by
disciplinary thresholds, inhibiting porosity
between fields of research. By definition,an
individual discipline is necessarilyorganised
around a self-referential center of discursive
production, but this often happens at the
expense of the richness found at the intersection
of multiple disciplinary perspectives. Is
architecture, in its compulsive drive to
create the autonomous object, inherently
hardening the thresholds separating it
from other disciplines and, by extension,
reproducing those schisms within the built
environment? Can architecture and planning
intentionally construct soft thresholds — linesthat are easily traversed, even temporarily
erased — thereby allowing for multiple
perspectives across different modes of research
and practice and catalysing disciplinary and
social connections? What, then, is the physical
expression of a soft threshold — a space that
is visually and physically porous, plural in
spirit, encompassing of its context, and yet
rigorous in its expression?Architects working
in India, as well as many other parts of the
globe, confront these questions and challenges
in extreme forms. Acute disparity is further
compounded by rapidly transforming social,
cultural and physical landscapes in a
globalising world. In the process of working in
such contexts, the role of the professional
architect is marginalised by a conventional
praxis that is often obsessed with
specialisation or disciplinary boundaries.
Too often, the professional does not engage
with the broader landscape, rather choosing to
operate within the specificity of a site or a
particular problem, leading to a disconnect
with the context of practice.
On a global scale, architecture practice is
pandering to capital in unprecedented ways and,
in the process, creating the architecture and
urbanism of impatient capital. It has its
operating logic; capital, though sometimes
assuming patient forms as in universities or
foundations, is intrinsically unwilling to wait.
This impatience, more often than not, creates
buildings and urban forms which are whimsical,vendor-driven for ease of speed of construction,
and clearly heightening the autonomy of
architecture as an object in the city. Furthermore,
in an attempt to understand the complexity of
the contexts in which we work, architects and
planners tend to organise the world through
constructing binaries: local and global, formal
and informal, state and private, oral and
literary traditions, rich and poor, empowered
and marginalised, among others. Though
these categories may be useful for describing
the world, are they productive for design
operations? Design and design thinking are
synthetic and focused on dissolving binaries —
not hardening the thresholds between them.
Design, or rather, spatial resolution, can play
a critical role in dissolving these types
of binaries, thereby softening the thresholds
between them. Put another way, designers
possess the potential to address complex
contestations through constructing spatial
arrangements.The “context of the context”
As architects, the idea of context is something
we have traditionally understood as the broader
physical environment of a given site, the
comprehension of which is extended through
wider parameters such as climate, culture,
and embedded histories. But is this reading
potent and dynamic enough for designers
to understand the world in which they
intervene? If not, how does an architectPhoto Rajesh Vora