envisioning an institution

There was a strange rumour on the south wind; a new movement stirs on the ridge, a new vision uncurls, runs away with itself, is captured, is edited, is snuffed out, is copied, is transferred, is corrupted, is subverted, and is made and remade and morphed and transmogrified, and an institution is instituted. On the skirts of a suburb in south Delhi, where the villages meet a city meets an ancient forest, a new movement in an old institution makes for an Open Source Urbanism.

New legends rise here from the corridor and fall to the canyon; new heroes and villains play frisbee on the bridge, the baoli and the balcony. The monsoons change the shape of the land every season, a reminder of the might of nature, always present, like mythology. Here new stories are scripted, acted out, scratched out, dug up and rewritten, first term, second term, next term and next year. New memories are dreamed. An SPA where every student, every visitor, every teacher and every peon, can write a new scene into a colourful panorama.
Where brats from a slum instruct on tensile structures, where engineers go to tap dance, and just yesterday some first years claimed a studio by painting it red.

The institutional source code multiplies, is borrowed, and appropriated, and returned to the pool of knowledge. Soon an IIT feels a little like SPA, a NIFT organises theatre spaces like SPA, TVB’s library circulation reflects SPA’s, but works even better! The NIDs admire SPA’s arts strategy and adapt it to their own use. Slowly the source code of the SPA is instituted into the fabric of the city, the statute of the country and the roster of schools of built environment studies in the 21st century world.

This school operates in the open, producing knowledge for public consumption, public goods all. With creative commons licenses for thought or craft or bits of space.a place where hackers have dignity and information is free - a new SPA, with no copyright.

I wrote this for a design competition for a new campus for my old architecture school in Delhi. The deeply secret competition blog has now been declassified, so i thought i'd share some excerpts.