2024-11-23T07:20:00-05:00 https://archinect.com/blog/article/149974890/the-theatrics-of-daily-life-act-iii adityaghosh13 2016-10-23T17:36:00-04:00 >2018-01-30T06:16:04-05:00 <p><strong>Act III - The Review</strong></p><p>You are being watched, evaluated and judged. One misstep and the city will disown you; deport you to the imagined wasteland at the other end of that bridge or tunnel whence you came from. The most important lesson you have learned since you have arrived is that notions of proximity define an urban community. Not strictly in the physical sense but in terms of a way of thinking. Communicated through either direct means or networked via your performance. We hold the space around us and this collection of spaces is our metropolis.</p><p><img title="" alt="" src="http://cdn.archinect.net/images/514x/tf/tf0lpjm7og6uvmvm.jpg"></p><p>These connections have in the past and continue to manifest themselves into physical realities within cities in the form of defined communities occupying the same urban space, with a shared sense of usage, customs and function. They might have always been a dramatic ritual but adopting those procedures and ceremonies in your routine is what makes you the perfect subject for the voyeur, your fellow citizen. Needless to say, bravo, you have en...</p> https://archinect.com/blog/article/149973900/the-theatrics-of-daily-life-act-ii adityaghosh13 2016-10-16T13:14:00-04:00 >2016-10-24T15:48:16-04:00 <p><strong>Act II - The Setting</strong></p><p>Architecturally speaking, you are the anthropometric component of a built space. Every doorway, street and habitable room is scaled to your dimensions and those of your belongings and transportation. Once this configuration is fixed however you are subject to a series of interactions that have nothing to do with the physical world and instead is social, political and economic.</p><p>Every aspect of getting around in the urban realm is memorized using a representation of it even before you set foot out that door. These are communicative aspects of space that we regularly encounter in our daily lives. Maps depicting location, landscape, and subway lines and eventually, in your mind a desirability of association (Uptown? Midtown? Downtown!). Metaphors of physical space like openness and confinement are ways to define conceptualized space in absolute terms. This is your cue, like those x marks on the floor, where you know you will stand at the time you are supposed to. Ther...</p> https://archinect.com/blog/article/149972902/the-theatrics-of-daily-life-act-i adityaghosh13 2016-10-09T20:40:47-04:00 >2019-01-05T12:31:03-05:00 <p><strong>Act I - &nbsp;It Is You</strong></p><p>The stage is set the moment you step on the tarmac. No, not the tarmac, but the vaguely threatening square frame that will take you from the airport to the baggage claim and eventually to the tarmac, where you hail a cab or board a bus or meet a familiar face and you are suddenly elated to be in the city. It is the conglomerate entity that everyone refers to as a singular mass although morphologically it is anything but that. You have already started to redefine yourself as urban, you have begun the process of slowly discarding any coat or aspect of identity that would betray your earlier life, especially something embarrassing like being from a less exciting, slower and by assumption drearier setting. And in that process of molting your layers, dear caterpillar, your performance has begun.</p><p>The cities of today, more than ever before, are about their publics. A New Yorker or a Londoner is as much a sampling of the city&rsquo;s flavor as say the Empire State building or the...</p>