Tuesday, January 31, 2012

From the Archives: KKM Project in 'The Economist'

Building Baba Hassan Din’s shrine
by Alixandra Fassina
from the Economist article
'Echoing down a winding stairwell, a scraping of masonry and clink of chisel on marble signal a remarkable monument rising. It is in the scruffy Lahori suburb of Baghbanpura, where Iqbal lived for six decades. From a narrow alley running alongside the shrine, it is mostly hidden: its high outer walls, of recessed brickwork speckled with multicoloured tiles, rising out of sight to a pair of domes and skinny minarets. A few steep steps lead into a small cloistered forecourt, where masons are at work.


Either side of the forecourt, about ten metres apart, are two false burial chambers. These are beautifully decorated, with white marble lattice and marble mosaics studded with green jade, lapis lazuli and agate. One is for Iqbal and the other for his mentor, a mystic called Baba Hassan Din, who lived in a brick cell on this site and died in 1968. The men’s true graves lie underneath, in brick-walled chambers, faintly murmuring with the sounds of the street outside.'
The Economist
- Of Saints and Sinners,
Dec 18th 2008
Delhi, Lahore and Sehwan Sharif
 
Link to Article (Click)
Marble work at Baba Hassan Din’s shrine
by Alixandra Fassina







Saturday, January 21, 2012

Safavid Surfaces and Parametricism

by
Derek Kaplan
in Archinect.com
December 2, 2011
'... the first question is not: are we today capable of producing patterns of this sophistication? With our tools, we had better be, this and beyond. The more important question is: are we today capable of a process of aesthetic design refinement carried this far -- in which the specificity of intent drives the tools, as opposed to the tools filling an absence of specific intent? '


Breakdown of sub-pattern module distortions
(drawing by Derek Kaplan from article)

  

 



Photo by Derek Kaplan from article