By Kayla Matzek
Architect and professor Swati Chattopadhyay is trying to understand why the world sees buildings and plans as fixed things. “Buildings are built for a particular time horizon in mind. It could be 20 years, it could be 10, it could be five,” she said at a recent UCSB talk on mapping the urban environment.
Chattopadhyay is the principal investigator of a collaborative project called “Mapping Ephemerality” that addresses the challenges of documenting temporary structures specifically in Kolkata, previously known as Calcutta, the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal.
“It comes from the premise that we need a comparative frame for understanding cities in much of the world,” she said. “So, this is as much a comparative urbanism project as it is about Kolkata, and the mapping project I’m showing is nested in layers of other projects.”
Chattopadhyay is a professor in the History of Art and Architecture department at UCSB and an architectural historian specializing in modern architecture and urbanism, and the cultural landscape of the British empire. She recently shared her Kolkata project in the department’s Image Resource Center’s inaugural Digital Image Lab on mapping urban materiality. She is the author of Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (2012) .
Professor Swati Chattopadhyay at a recent UCSB talk presents images of temporary structures and decorations built for the Hindu religious festival Durgapuja in Kolkata, India.
The “Mapping Ephemerality” project brought together specialists in architectural analysis, urban history, ethnography, and geographic information system mapping tools to record temporary pavilions known as pandals. These pandals are built by local clubs or neighborhood associations in Kolkata each year for the Hindu religious festival, Durgapuja. “It’s a long tradition but it’s also a very urban tradition. Although there’s a long rural tradition going back to the late middle ages,” Chattopadhyay said.
Durgapuja honors the Hindu goddess Durga, the warrior goddess. Temporary structures for this festival are built in short amounts of time to provide the venues for worship, performance arts, revelry, and parades. “Planning for some of these venues are year-long affairs with very big budgets, while others are built in a few days and have modest budgets,” Chattopadhyay explained. “Either way, it’s an extremely innovative phenomenon.”
The aesthetics of these pavilions is attuned with the ephemeral visual culture of urban public space in the city: wall writings, what’s written on the backs of buses, film posters, street games, and such. “The city is a peculiar combination of what we understand to be temporary and what we understand to be permanent,” she said.
“Last May we all came together, graduate students and undergrads, for a conference called Urban Materiality,” Chattopadhyay said. “We came up with the notion that we should, in order to understand the visual culture of cities such as Kolkata, figure out what terms like ephemeral, perennial, temporary, impermanent, and permanent meant.”
Choosing locations to start building is extremely important because the temporary structures are built in public spaces of the city. “You cannot block every street, but a lot of streets get blocked,” she said. “Most of the decisions are made on-site and that’s where the whole process is really innovative and different from how an architectural construction would be.”
Pandal of Bakulbagan Sarbojanin, Kolkata, 2018, designed by Bimal Samanta. Photo by Swati Chattopadhyay.
Chattopadhyay showed photographs of different techniques, tools, and materials that are used precisely to make structures in a very short time that usually get torn down once the festival is over. Some become permanent, becoming a part of the city’s landscape.
“There are over 2,000 [pavilions] in the city, going at the same time, every year. How do you manage that?” she asked the UCSB audience. “This is a traffic problem, so many of the roads are closed, but the city still functions. How can a city take on this infrastructure overload?”
The members of the “Mapping Ephemerality” project used a smartphone app called “Collector for ArcGIS” where they collected three kinds of data. Locations were recorded using points, traffic was recorded using lines, and the footprint of pavilion placements were recorded using polygons.
“We came to understand there are some things that we aren’t able to map,” Chattopadhyay said. But with some large venues that attract over 100,000 visitors each day, her team was able to record durations of peak visitor time. Mapping the duration of this festival, she said, is a dizzying task.
Chattopadhyay said the main research question that drives her complex project on mapping is: “What constitutes locality?” The construction of these temporary structures that are rebuilt into new forms each year, often placed in the same locations, offers a distinct lens for this inquiry.
Kayla Matzek is a third-year student at UC Santa Barbara, majoring in Writing and Literature in the College of Creative Studies. She is a Web and Social Media Intern with UC Santa Barbara’s Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.