Wow, Your Maid's Bathroom Is Bigger Than My House.

This is a pretty old news, probably 2 or 3 months back, but I decided to post it anyway.

If you look up Wikipedia's entry on India capital, Mumbai's demographic, it's something like this:

"Like other metropolises in the developing world, Mumbai suffers from the same major urbanization problems seen in many fast growing cities in developing countries — widespread poverty and unemployment, poor public health, civic and educational standards for a large section of the population. With available space at a premium, Mumbai residents often reside in cramped, relatively expensive housing, usually far from workplaces, and therefore requiring long commutes on crowded mass transit, or clogged roadways. According to 2001 census of India, more than half of the city's population lives in slums, that is about 54% of the population lives in shantytowns and slums."

And this, the super-fugly 1 billion, 27-storey skyscraper you are looking at is not some new apartment development that is about to rise over the skyline of Mumbai, but a house, yes this is a house, or home, or whatever you want to call it of filthy rich Indian dog named Mukesh Ambani, apparently he is the richest man in India, like eww.

According to the BBC website:

His skyscraper home in the city will be over 170m tall and will have an army of 600 staff to manage it. Its 27 floors on a 4,532 sq metre plot will provide a panoramic view of the entire city of Mumbai (Bombay) once it is completed next year.

The first six floors will serve as car parks. A health club will be built on the next two and the few floors above that will house hundreds of staff.

Fifty-year-old Mr Ambani and his family will occupy the top floors of the building which will also have a (correction: there were 3 proposed) helipad and swimming pools.

Critics say it is an obscene display of wealth, especially in a city where more than half the inhabitants live on the pavements.

Architects believe that the construction of high-rises will provide a long-term solution to the problem of sheltering the city's homeless, especially when development land is in short supply.

One architect who is constructing a building which will be even taller than that planned by Mr Ambani told the BBC that Mumbai will soon be "littered with high-rises" as the government strives to shift slum dwellers into tower blocks."

As cheesy as this might sound, I have always treated architecture as a solution to a problem, any problem that one perceived, like the word concept we love to use so much. Concept is like, a proposal, stating the problem; where it could be the site, the society, or even at bigger scale, the city or country, and designing, developing the concept is like a process of finding a solution, hence the architecture - how is the proposed architecture is going to make a difference to a site. Sure, when architects say construction of high rise could actually provide long term solution to shelter the homeless - if the high-rise is actually providing shelter to hundreds of family, not just one family.

And the firm that design this, is ironically the quite respectable firm Perkin + Will. It's ironic that this piece of crap is coming from this firm, when on their official website, they stated that their main design philosophy is, and I quote "ideas + buildings that honor the broader goals of society." Since more than 50% of Mumbai's population live in poverty and dwell in slumps, I cannot help but wonder how this building could "honor the broader goals of society" when all that people on the street is going to see is this big fucking chunk of Uno Stacko telling them just how miserable, how poor they are.

It's also very interesting to learn that Perkin + Will's company visions is that "Sustainability plays an essential role in everything we do. It's our personal commitment to creating solutions that contribute to human well-being and enhance the long-term health of our planet." Sure, the awful rendering shows they considered planting jungles on some intermediate floors, sure there are some nice tress hanging off the balcony and some nice watery features that made the building look so green, so environmental friendly. But sustainability does not only rely on plating jungles on your balcony, and having a pool won't help with the global warming, puh-lease. From my understanding that is, most things you would find in eco-friendly buildings like solar panel or maybe rain water collection is NOT part of the design. Eco-friendly? You've got to be kidding me.

So, all I am saying is that it proved my point that, most (but not all) rich people, they have a way of making poorer people look up at them, whether they are really just too ingorant to realize or, maybe they deliberately want to flaunt their richness in everybody's face, I really have no idea. And, please, I am not even categorizing people. This is daft.