climate: keeping the rain out, trapping the
breeze, and shading usable spaces, to list
a few. Deterioration was impeded through the
incorporation of elements that restricted
direct exposure to rainwater, often creating an
extremely rich, pluralistic vocabulary of
textures and modulation of form. Modernism
reversed this by abstracting form to the extent
of minimal modulation. The modernists
believed that the use of larger areas of a single
material tended to prolong the life of buildings.
Besides changing the very form of the structure,
this approach also detached craftsmanship
from the building process, as the level of
articulation of the different building elements
was minimised with changing attitudes
towards aesthetics. In fact, modernism in tropical
cities set up a classic duality, with one part
of the landscape consisting of “modern”
buildings and the other comprising the
collective wisdom of many generations’
building practices. For instance, the urban poor,
forced to be inventive and resilient given
their squalid conditions, built shelters using
minimal means. This gave rise to a situation
where two worlds existed in the same space,
each coexisting yet using their shared space
differently: one, a permanent world, monumental
in its presence and built of solid materials;
the other, more ephemeral — built of temporary
materials, low-key in its presence, but created
intuitively in response to the basic human
need for shelter. This representation of classes
through the built environment forms a
physical distinction and results in an acute
form of polarisation in cities. By default,
architecture plays a crucial role in the
construction of this polarity. The subsequent
question then for designers becomes: how can
this polarity be diffused and the thresholds
between different classes in the city be
softened? In cities in India, the centrifugal
force of urbanism has created unprecedented
densities where the presence of humans in
urban space is overwhelming. This is a
challenging condition for anyone dealing with
spatial arrangements, thresholds, and
adjacencies between people. As a practitioner,the question of social access and its clear
relationship to the ways in which spatial
arrangements are articulated becomes a
question to which we should be highly
sensitised. People are an important component
of the urban and architectural landscape; a
scenery in which architects are actively
engaged in arranging and rearranging
spaces and forms. Across our projects, the
aspiration has been to place our work in the
context of a democracy and the specificitiesof
our site of oper-ation: India. We have attempted
to interpret spatial arrangements as well as
building elements to meet a contemporary
sensibility as well as building vocabulary.
The attempt is to combine resources while
juxtaposing conventional craftsmanship with
industrial materials, and traditional
architectural arrangements with contemporary
spatial planning — in short, to give expression
to the multiple worlds, pluralism and
dualities that so vividly characterise the
Indian as well as the South Asian landscape.Envoi
As the world, and South Asia in particular,
become increasingly global, we have to be
cautious about accepting the idea that things
are growing more alike because they begin to
look more alike. When we engage with a deeper
excavation of the site on which we operate — an
understanding that draws on both the
objective reality as well as subjective perception
of the site — the differences emerge more
strikingly than before, when things looked
different. Thus, architects will have to find
more rigorous ways of definingthe complex
emerging cultural fabric of multiple
aspirations in the landscape of India’s
mutinous democracy — and, more importantly,
to see this cultural fabric as an ever-evolving
landscape. The highly pluralistic environment
of the Indian landscape requires planning,
attitudes, and design mechanisms that
continually negotiate between the differences
in architecture as the sole instrument for place-
making and the temporality that creates the
conditions for habitation and celebration.It must include the state and the market, the
empowered and the poor, rather than allow
one entity to prevail and remake the city in its
image. This is what makes working in the
landscape of India unique and challenging.
Here, extreme differences exist in very close
proximity — “in-your-face” — and not as distant
or abstract notions. A pluralistic society is
one that not only accepts difference but
also goes beyond to understand and even
be influencedby it in productive ways. That
is to see the simultaneous co-existence of
difference. For once, the architect and planner
see these various differences as being
simultaneously valid. Now, the challenge is
how to go beyond polarised binaries
through the making of architectures — soft
thresholds and spaces — that are visually
and physically porous, plural in spirit and
expression, and, most critically, encompassing
of context. This is truly the aspiration of both
our architecture and practice — to engage nature
and society more meaningfully.Notes:- I attribute these ideas to Neil Brenner, who
shared these ideas in our many conversations
and first challenged me to nestle the “context
in its context” into my readings of the sites I
engaged in my practice. - Eve Blau, “City as Open Work,” in Eve Blau
and Ivan Rupnik, Project Zagreb: Transition
as Condition, Strategy, Practice (Barcelona,
NY: Actar, 2007), pp. 8-25. - I attribute the articulation of this observation
to Prem Chandavarkar who pointed out the
growing sense of disempowerment in the
profession occurs because the idealisation of
the problem results in a greater inability for
action on the ground. - Bozdogan Sibel, Modernism and Nation
Building – Turkish Architecture in the Early
Republic, Washington University Press, 2001. - Martha Alter Chen, “The Informal Economy:
Definitions, Theories and Policies”.
WIEGO Working Papers nº 1 (August, 2012).
Available at: http://wiego.org/sites/wiego.org/
files/publications/files/Chen_WIEGO_WP1.pdf
Accessed on February 7, 2016.
Photo Romil Sheth
This page: The restoration
of the Chowmahalla
Palace Complex in
Hyderabad, completed
in 2007
Opposite page: An image
of the cover of Domus
India 67 (November 2017)
featuring a collage
bringing references from afaçade of the Virchow 16
building designed by RMA
Architects, and the work of
artist Seher Shah
and her ‘Capitol Complex’
series referencing Le
Corbusier’s façade
designs for key buildings
in ChandigarhThe second edition of the Cyrus Jhabvala Memorial
Lecture was delivered by Rahul Mehrotra on
19 November 2017 at the India International
Centre, New Delhi.