place has its unique cultural history and symbols.
Each place has its own milieu and ambiance.
Second, I realised that architecture is poetry;
architecture speaks of intangible moments
of ecstasy, resonating our deepest feelings.
My early works like the Alliance Française,
CDSA, and the Mahindra United World College
of India were all catalysed by Wright’s credo
of human scale, kinetic choreographies of
moving through space, and integration with
context. My later works drew inspiration from
what I now call the ‘culture of construction’.
In Bhutan, I wanted to use the culture of local
materials, local craftspeople and their simple
construction management, guided by monks.
In Pune, creating a large industrial pavilion, I
drew on the culture of our steel and machine
manufacturing technologies. I think it is
important that we realise that we all think,
imagine and create within knowledge systems,
and that different knowledge systems are
competing with one another. There is a
cultural imperialism trying to invade our
minds and place alien meanings within us.
Like the suburbs of my youth, we are victims of
popular taste and common wisdom.
‘Star-chitects’ are creating monumental
stunts and making dramatic follies, all yelling,
“Look at Me!” By applauding these inane
fabrications, we are succumbing to an insipid
cultural colonialism. I find it perverse that no
major architectural critic is speaking out
against monstrosities like the CCTV Tower in
Beijing, ugly urban spaces such as La Defence
in Paris, or the terrible museums emerging year
after year across the globe. In India, our own IT
giants have spread ugliness in Bengaluru,
Hyderabad, Pune and Gurgaon, missing
an opportunity to gift us a new spirit of built
form. Even the ‘high priests’ seem to have
their mouths sealed in front of their own
knowledge system!
Architecture and urban design are potential
catalysts of imagination and intellectual
friendships. They can be creators of self-
knowledge and inner awareness.Story Four: The Story of Inclusiveness
City plans are not artifacts of accident, but rather
arrangements of contrivance, with urban slums
being direct results of elite urban policies,
foreign planning models, automobile and real
estate driven concepts, and an amazing lack of
public imagination. We design cities as if
they are tinker toys, not as all-inclusive socio-
economic systems!
Yet, our cities are the unique feats of the
human brain, driving our strongest emotional
compulsions. City planning around the world
leads us to something I call the human conclusion,
wherein almost all urban societies come back
to a common set of urban crises, in an interesting
closure of the human condition. All city
plans, directly or indirectly, ironically exclude
most urban citizens.
To summarise, can I say we all are trapped
into the same urban conundrum, and the
same predictable inhumane city, be it Mumbai
or Manhattan!
In other words: life is a trap. Or, is it? Modern
city planning theory and practice can trace its
origins back through history, even to Greek
cities and Roman garrison towns, and to royal
oriental capitals. Modern city plans, campus
plans, information technology parks are just
slight variations of British Cantonment plans,
where the military area created a unique social
space, defined by one’s race, occupation, gender
and rank! The Indian jawans, at the bottom of
this socio-economic pyramid, were in factpart of an elite minority admitted into this
unique urban estate, characterised by potable
water, sewerage systems, storm drains, paved
roads and social services. The real cities of India
were left to rot!
This model is one of the precursors to
‘globalisation’ in urban planning where
gated communities and malls have replaced
the lively, informal public domains of traditional
settlements. The loss of social space is a
metaphor of the loss of community and indigenous
identity. An undeclared strategy of city
planners is to replace ‘vernacular culture’ with
institutional culture, right from the plan of the
city to the architecture of the buildings. Uniforms
have replaced pluraforms, which once gifted
personal cultural richness and identity. In 1979
I embarked upon an adventure into the Kingdom
of Bhutan, crossing the no-man’s-land from
Bagdogra to Phuentsholing, where foreigners
were forbidden! Not more than five other
Caucasians were in Bhutan when I arrived, and
I had a mission to prepare micro-level plans to
enhance the quality of life for isolated villagers.
His Majesty concluded that no one could
participate in Bhutan’s development without a
personal knowledge of the kingdom, ordering
me to head across Bhutan by jeep, over roads
cut from cliff faces, running deep into the
isolated mountain wilderness. Upon my return
to Thimphu, I quickly befriended the small
group of young officials, and we set upon a
strategy involving the deputation of students
to Pune, and my setting up a small planning
office in Thimphu.
We were fighting the global strategy to
introduce cash crops into the valleys,
creating nutritional problems as mono-
cropping replaced self-sufficient food cropping.
During this stay in Bhutan I noted the healthy