My latest column for Delhi on the Go:
While I take time to familiarize myself with the Indian blogosphere — from Nita Kulkarni to Sanjeev Bikhchandani to Sunil Bahl and more (all these friends I’ve yet to meet! Hands to shake! People to say, ‘I’m sorry — who are you?’) — I wanted to talk to you about a report I saw in The New York Times that said that air pollution in New Delhi was worse than it was in Beijing.
Though — from the housing market to pollution — Beijing numbers should always be approached with a bit of caution, it’s exciting to think about becoming indulging in a bit of experimental architecture, prompted — in large part — by all the time I used to spend reading a website called BLDGBLOG (an abbreviation of “Building Blog”), which is packed full of stories about someone trying to create a column of ‘cloud’ a mile high in Liverpool to coincide with the Olympics, how a city Mongolia tries to conserve money and power spent on air conditioners by building a giant wall of ice around the city so that it will melt slowly during the summer, and things like that: treating architecture and the environment as if it were the main character of a science fiction novel.
And while there are obvious steps to take regarding any kind of pollution anywhere — certain types of deciduous plants consume up to one-third of all oxygenated volatile organic compounds worldwide (‘oVocs’ are an important contributor to what makes smog smog); one oyster can clean up to 50 gallons of water a day, which is why bundles were dumped into the waters around New York City and Boston — it doesn’t hurt to think a bit creatively, too.
Would attaching filters to the lights that line the Rajpath start to help? Probably not. What about rolling a carpet of grass across the Rajpath and Janpath — just for the day? Cute. It’d inspire a lot of cartwheels, but: no. What if there was a way to chemically and genetically engineer daisies so that — when the quality of the air reached a certain point — they became puffballs, and those puffballs — when knocked off the stamen by the wind — flew through the air, cleaning up the city as it went? Is there a way to balance the idea of a miniature filter and how a daisy typically distributes its seed?
One year I was taking a taxi cab through Cambridge, Massachusetts. The driver quickly pointed out that not only was he from Turkey, but that tomorrow was Thanksgiving, too, where the food everyone eats is turkey. Talk about a double whammy, he said, continuing on to say that turkeys probably don’t call Thanksgiving “Thanks”-giving, but “Uh-oh’s”-giving or “This isn’t going to be fun’s”-giving, giggling openly at his own jokes, which I kind of liked, as the last cab ride I’d taken had left me with an exceptionally racist driver. We drove by a building on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently finished by Frank Gehry and I was glad that I didn’t have to put up with any kind of verbal smog.
The solution of clearing the city of smog remains the same as it’s ever been: better cars, alternative sources of energy (perhaps set up some solar panels in the Ghanzil landfills?), the close monitoring of thermal power plants, or — perhaps — building what Julien Combes and Gaël Brulé call the LO2P skyscraper, which would be a Ferris wheel designed to clean the air, and a thing that would look astonishing to boot.
It’s the kind of thing that would make Frank Gehry jealous.
