On high rise buildings

A high-rise building transcends the typical x-y axis heavy model of thinking by leaning heavily on the z-axis. A monument to human intelligence that enables this efficient use of space; the result is that the same plot of land that previously in the x-y axis model of thinking could house limited people now can virtually habitat multifolds of them. Though when you look past the practical ingenuity of the idea, born out of perceived necessity, stacking humans upon humans sounds inhuman.

I live in one such building that is too tall for its surroundings. The tall building has 31 floors and is situated on a hill-like mound of concrete and earth about 10 floors high. A cement road full of imperfections wraps around the base of the building like an upward spiral. This serpentine road which is colloquially referred to as, ’slope’ always (literally always) water flowing over it. The water springs from the ground and trickles through the faults of the cement road. Inspite sitting on a pool of groundwater the building doesn’t have a reliable source of water. To compensate for the lack of a water source potent enough to supply the building which has 2 wings ( A and C, no B), each with 31 floors and each floor with 5–6 2BHK apartments, the building administration has hired a water supplier that sends two water trucks, with, ‘Gayatri’ written at the back of it in lurid characters, that make rounds every few hours. They empty their tanks at two points on the slope, one midway and another at the ground floor situated at the top of the mound. The constant filling of water adds to the dripping/flowing of the water over the slope. Adjacent to the slope is the primitive-art-looking concrete sidewall with irregularities on the surface and TMT rods sticking out of it. This wall (if it can be called a wall) converges at its top with the incomplete edge of the building. Then the controlled architecture, which seems to be imposing itself on the land that shares a different design philosophy, begins. To further highlight the incongruous wall is the adjoining wall which is smooth and white and has a giant door right in the middle of it which isn’t accessible from any side to add to its confusion. But there is a sincere attempt to decorate the place with two rows of in-numerous pottle plants, on either side, that start at the base of the slope and spiral up with it till the ground floor. The incredible slave-like effort put into something so redundant earns it a charm. (Note: Keep in mind that someone has to water these plants every day. That means watering each plant on either side from the base of the slope to the top every day.)

The steep serpentine road feels like it has no end, partly because it connects after it converges so that it isn’t visible from the bottom of the slope to the flat base of the building called the E-deck. The journey from the bottom of the slope to the ground floor ( which also functions as a parking lot despite having two parking lots named P1 and P2) is unintentionally meditative, maybe because of the inherent quality of a passage, you become painfully aware of the difference between the outside and the inside, and watch every step the distance reduce with each turning of the wheel and with every step upward. The design incongruity melts into complete abstract control at the ground floor, structures become rectangular with fluorescent tube lights, grids of organised red fire safety pipes, the allotted yellow border of the parking lot, the neat edges of the ash grey concrete floor. Somewhere between far and close is the faux-marble-tilled entrance with glass doors that lead to the A-wing, the entrance feels like the crimson of the inside of the mouth in this landscape. A shaft of light reflects off of the tiles through the glass doors and spills over the crude surfaces of the parking. Inside the entrance is a modest desk behind which sits a security guard ( which security guard depends on the time of the day and the month) who vets everyone entering the building as politely as he can. The constant looking at the exit with dull lifeless concrete and viewing everyone entering the building as a potential hostile must affect him, but he doesn’t show it to his employer’s employers. On the right, there is a passage that has three lifts that lift you above the reality of the base into the inert security of enclosure. An obvious yet overlooked feature of the entrance is how you transition from crude-rough to smooth-reflection surfaces. The metallic lifts, like the glass doors of the entrance, reflect; you notice it when you wait for your floor in the lift. It is perhaps not a coincidence that a highly self-conscious generation is surrounded by reflections. Looking at your reflection and identifying yourself with the reflection must have some impact on you.

You can enter the C-wing from the ground floor through 5 ways: P2, E-deck, refuge area on the 11th, 18th, and 25th floor. P2 has a similar construction as the ground floor with P1 between them. Its entrance lies at the very end of the serpentine slope’s curve that precedes entry to the E deck, which is right above P2. It would’ve been much more convenient if the entrance to the C-wing would be on the ground floor which is the earliest point of access into the building [ it is also infuriating for the C-wing dwellers to know that the A-wing is accessible on all three, ground, P1and P2, floors while the C-wing entrance is only available on the P2] on the slope but you have to toil a fair bit before reaching P2 from the slope.

Your path to enter C-wing are:

1) Go to P2 and take the main C-wing entrance with a similar-looking entrance as A-wing.

2) Take a lift from the ground floor to the P2 floor and change wings.

3) Access the refuge area[ Refuge area is meant to function as a safe area in an emergency but its purpose upon use changes to acting as a connective tissue between the two wings] from 11th, 18th, and 25th floor.

4) Take a lift from the ground to the E-deck and change wings.

E-deck can be entered through the lifts or the slope. You can effectively think of the slope as a tail of the E-deck. The slope is walled as such that the view on either side is blocked, the entire experience of walking on the slope feels like you are hiking at the bottom of a cave. As you approach the E-deck through the slope you see the distance between the floor and the sky increase until it is disproportionally favouring the sky. The building is situated right next to the film city ( which is in a pseudo reserve) with beautiful green on one side and a building populated city on the other, you get a panoramic view that covers green, brown, and grey. The E-deck is condescendingly over everything it surrounds, except other buildings, so you get a good seat to witness the happenings in the surroundings which is mostly slums and rehabilitation building for the destroyed slums. Through the gaps between the surrounding buildings, there is a clear view of the nearby market which is so densely packed and congested that you consider the moving mass as one ceaseless viscous flow of bobbing heads and vehicles. From this distance they look like ants, there is a clear distinction and safety that the distance provides between the viewer and them, the viewed. The only real obstruction in the view from the E-deck is the building itself that looks like a giant phallus when viewed chin up from the bottom. If you are a resident looking up you may feel a sense of perversion at the thought of someone possibly looking at you from one of the floor’s apartment’s rooms, hidden from view. The role you played a moment ago while super-viewing the city is reversed and you become the super-viewed. The boundary walls of the E-deck are big enough that the children can’t look out, this affords them oblivion in which they play while the adults, too tall, can’t take their eyes off from the world that surrounds them so they walk around the boundaries, revolving around the phallus until they return to their apartments.

The building only has standard 2BHK apartments which are more or less similar, the only differences are a minor geometric rearrangement of the same square footage. The door to every house is the same with a gold-colored combination of alphabets and numbers that denote the wing and the apartment number. You open the door to see a small hall with a window as big as a wall at the far end of it, this, I suspect, is done to give you an illusion of having more space than there is. Since the skeleton of every house is the same the only opportunity to express any individuality is through the possessions of the occupier of the apartment, otherwise, it’s the same setup with a smaller room next to the hall, a kitchen in front of the smaller room, a washroom next to the kitchen, and at the deepest end of the house, a master bedroom with faux-polyvinyl-wooden flooring, an attached washroom, and a small space for storage. The view from any apartment above the 12th floor is too massive to digest without being overwhelmed to the point of indifference. The window of a new apartment has a layer of translucent film over it that makes the view from the closed window hazy and undistinguishable to save you from realising how far up you are and how different the surroundings are in contrast to your cosy apartment, but once you get rid of the layer, or open the window, you have, from a C-wing apartment, an interesting landscape with white, brown and orange. Buildings seem to parasitically grow over the green of the reserve. The view stretches for kilometers and people look too tiny to be real and other buildings too lifeless to contain life; everything is rendered into an object when viewed passively, in this passivity breeds apathy. In my experience the human eye can’t understand depth when looking straight down, something funny happens to the vision, things don’t seem as far as they should be. When you are looking straight down from your apartment at the people’s heads walking around at the E-deck, or the potted plants, there is a weird closeness to the objects that feels wrong.

But when you are in your apartment with closed windows you forget that right below, above you, and next to you there are humans as real as you living. The prized privacy and individuality of an apartment comes at the risk of feeling one of the most terrible sub-species of loneliness where you are surrounded by people and yet you are alone in an inescapable way. The view from the top is beautiful and grandiose but the same can’t be said about the experience of the viewer.

Related posts:

People coming on news and forums and justifying actions taken by the administration in rash and reckless bigotry. Don’t call yourself a democracy, it’s so against your narcissistic nature, just take…

When I was in private practice as a holistic health practitioner, I used a variety of healing modalities and discovered early on that one of the most effective therapies is therapeutic writing. When…

Sally climbed up the stairs. The hard work of the past several days must have strengthened her muscles, as she carried Wendy to the top floor without much difficulty. Sally set Wendy down on the…