Hello......friends, this is a funny little picture of mine by the redoubtable Chuck Bryan and I am going to tell you a story.

The whole story begins with this handout in the class about an ‘encounter', an ‘engagement’ with a ‘place’ by visiting it regularly. The objective revolves around the whole issue of place, home and space and our sense of these.

Is it an achievable thing ?

Can I stage an encounter with a place which I already don’t belong to ?

These were the questions that haunted me when I started thinking about this ‘project’. Being for the first time in Austin in my entire life, and for that matter in this country from a place ‘half a world away' did not help it in any way.

Coming from a country where for most part of your time, you are in the midst of a multitude of people, where the words ‘privacy’ , ‘personal space’ have an entirely different meaning, where your ‘home’ flows into the ‘mohalla’ ( the correct translation will be ‘community’ but in American context it will be better to use the word ‘courtyard’ ) you never exactly know where which in turn inconspicuously merges into the ‘street’, my first impression of this State Capital in a weekend was ‘a dead city’. It was difficult for me to fathom the reason of so much of separation of spaces between people by closed houses which do not have any contact with the other and the fences and walls around the properties. Space flowed between peoples personal domains as a great divider in distinct contrast to being the stage, the interconnected fluid place in which peoples life was based. The need for me to see with a different ‘eye’ and to understand the way people build their spaces here was evident to me. I remembered someone once said,

I believe we all of us have many pre-conceived notions, unconscious assumptions and biases about the sense of a place, the feelings a space or a place generates in us which is entirely different from what it actually does to us. Why is it so ? Is it because of our customs, the upbringing, the tradition(s) and the context(s) in which our impressions of the world and life in general have been formed ? Jung has written eloquently about our subconscious, our dreams, their symbolism and their effect on us and our value judgements. Even though it was very controversial and not many people actually agree with it, I could see a sense in it while I was thinking about this present issue. It seems to me that it will be very interesting to shed my assumptions, my personal opinions and to try to see with a clean slate what a place means to people and to try to engage personally with it and see what feelings it generates in me.

With these thoughts, I am going forward into the encounter and the place I have chosen is the ‘Sixth Street’ of Austin between the Congress Avenue and the IH 35, an area which is historic, popular and unique (people have strong distinct assumptions about their feelings about it) . It is an important landmark of the city of Austin and most important of all has a pulsating, exuberant life of its own.

The Typical Sixth Streetscapes

The sixth street is a historic precinct and it is home to a place which has over many years been extremely prolific with creating various types of music, and thus defining today’s American mainstream culture. It is located right in the downtown Austin, very close to the Texas capitol which is the nerve center of the city of Austin, its focus and its energy.

..........to be continued

Click this for more information on Sixth Street and its urban context