What About Sleeping Beauty?
When I started this degree, the title of my Memorendum was “Create to make believe / believe to create.” My starting point was the fascination of the work accomplished, according to a religious dogma, institutional or more depending on the personal perception of each. Each person has indeed this obligation inside him completely subjective to get to work. Each person creates a scenario, his proper movie in order to return to the standard of our society. I am interested in these scenarios in my memory to see how this belief so beautiful and personal arrived to confront the reality, just as each of our architectural projects, whether theoretical or achievable.
Each architect began work on a project in terms of its story, from his point of view. And this is the frame of the scenario will become gradually as the frame of the building. The frame definition in French can determine several things: the structure of a story, of a building but also a machine rather special and I found it fascinating to be as old as is: that of a trade weaving. My program began to emerge based on this architectural speculation around the textile industry. I then examined whether there were circumstances connected with this syndrome believe to create or create to make believe through this industry. I discovered in several newspaper articles that the crisis lived textile workers in Coimbatore in southern India. As a Westerner, my work is fairly focused on a dreamlike situation both very real but only perceived through writing. My speech here is part of a narrative feel to this space to write.
It is by its 26,000 small, medium and large textile factories that Coimbatore is called the Manchester of South India. It is the only city in South India to hold many textile factories thanks to massive cotton fields located in the region of the city. The strong winds of the western region of Tamil Nadu can also provide the energy needed to shattering (shilling) of cotton as well as several other steps in the production of fabrics.
The newspapers articles I mentioned earlier show that, women start working young in order to pay their wedding dowries. The dots are goods or money that young women need to get married. Families of the spouses actually want that their future daughter marries not interest more than love. However, the Indian policy prohibits the practice of these customs which prevail in India for about 1500 years.
Meanwhile, the Indian people has a culture of religion very important. Many are practiced only stands out from the others because it is represented in 95% of the population Hinduism. Religion is everywhere. It is present at all levels in the form of religious altars. These can take the form of small statues, furniture to scale the most important one, of the temple. They are everywhere in the city of Coimbatore and hundreds.
All this was within the fairy tale in a sense, for me, a girl who, at the dawn of the age of majority, hopes to become a woman and get married, but a context that goes beyond goes against it and goes against its projects by making suffer during the period that will certainly the longest of his life. By analogy, these women are Sleeping Beauty of today and hope that their living conditions so critical stops the day their prince will deliver. And it is certainly not their Bollywood culture film that will convince the reverse. Indeed cinema in India, naive stories between a woman and prince are numerous and very significant for the country that has the largest number of viewers in the world (before hollywood). It appeared to me that fairy tale as a European was then expressed more through Bollywood culture for these women. However, our personal perception exists, in one form or another whether you’re Indian, French, English, or other
The textile industry is one of the key sectors of the Indian economy. By means any textile production chain from cultivation of various plants (cotton, flax, jute, silk, wool etc. ..) marketing of finished products. The textile industry accounts for 13-14% of industrial output and over 37% of exports. It employs a large staff and unskilled. Manufacturing production is widely dispersed over the territory and occupies several tens of millions of people.
The Indian government proposed in its 2020 program, among other things:
• Construction of large vertically integrated factories equipped with the most modern technology.
• Encourage and strengthen small-scale manufacturing, seen as a complement to mechanized industry.
The idea is to develop a project that allows the viewer to connect with the plight of these women. Only textile factories are often very closed and very opaque about the tragic condition that they implement inside. The Indian textile subcontractor does not meet virtually the rights of women and lock them in prisons for these plants operate. However, the architectural richness present in each of the machines they use to create the fabric is immense. The idea is to make visible the processes in order to merge with the architecture of the plant. Knowing that these women are injured on these machines, the idea is to put these machines throughout the building to make a shield from the outside while leaving visible the complexity of their craft. However, the creation of a manufacturing plant would also leave aside the most complex machines and very dangerous in favor of machines pre-indistrielles well known people as they learn from one generation traditionally.
The most visited temple in the region of Coimbatore is the temple Maduramalaï with nearly 700,000 visits per year. This is a very important Hindu temple in the region and allows a unique perspective on the city of Coimbatore since the beginning of the Western Ghats, a mountain range that runs along the west coast of India. This temple is, as many mountain temple, originally a pilgrimage route that starts from the bottom of the road from Coimbatore to another temple further north behind the mountain (Subrahmanya temple). From this point of view, the project serves viewpoint of the city on its religious nature and textiles. In fact the city of Coimbatore is known to be the textile city of southern India. However, the role of religion can not be discarded. Each place of residence is subject to the rules of vastu shastra. This rule determines a floor plan of different program to implement depending on the orientation of the building.
My project finds itself divided into three major strategies: The vastu shastra, the perspective from which we see the project, and productive frame of the plant. The gate of vastu shastra must have a circulation space in the center, where its presence on the road leading to the temple Marudhamalaï. The program is then divided into 8 stages of fabric production, from harvest to export textiles. Each of these steps must be visible from the viewpoint. The place of worship is placed at the north, south and reserves to the west and south residential homes in the cotton harvest. The passage of a small river in the pilgrimage route will allow to store water for the various stages of production, especially when the days when the wind is absent and water mills will be solicited.
The process is divided into 8 stages: (Video Animations on: vimeo.com/54010893)
> Cotton harvesting and storage,
> Mill ginning
> Laundry
> Drying & Carding
> Roving Frame & Weaving
> Colorizing
I wanted to make this project a very utopian at first only to criticize the situation of these women. But eventually I realize that utopia of this project is so far from reality. My research career has fluctuated throughout the year between dream and reality. But I am convinced that such a project would move things somewhere in this nightmare of profitability in which India is engulfed in the name of liberalization newly affirmed. These women are the reincarnation of the Sleeping Beauty of Perrault, and formerly of Sun, Moon and Talia, where the characters did not live happily in the best of worlds.
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