Henri Fanthome Office for Architecture

There are not that many Pritzker Prize winning Architects, fewer still, Architects who have won both the Pritzker and the RIBA Gold Medal. And fewer still who have won both and are women.

So when I heard Kazuyo Sejima  of SANAA, was delivering a lecture at the IIC, it was but natural to show up.

The work presented was fascinating, in all aspects. Of course the language barrier, did become a issue at many points, where Kazuyo struggled to find appropriate words to express her fine grained and very carefully imagined ideas. That were then constructed with a lightness that is hard to imagine for many of us. Each idea, built in an architectural language of frugality and restrain, that become clear with just a hint - one saw the ideas in the full glory. 

What was most interesting was, the lack of signature, or let me rephrase, the signature was the “in betweenness” - “space without program”  that wove through each project and held it together, and  also worked as thread through all the work - and a careful refusal to announce its maker.

Not the kind of architecture we are used to, not the kind of presentation we have come to associate with celebrity and awards.

But any way, that isn’t why I decided to write, or maybe.

After the presentation the floor of the house was opened to questions - in twenty minutes of fairly unremarkable questions na comments 4 smacked me, like cold water out the tap in winter. They took me a while to process, and before I go into why let me just put them here for your own reactions before I make my point. 

1. “You design in very varied geographies - from Japan to the United States, to Australia - shouldn’t you be building in local materials?”
2. Im Dr XYZ, Professor at an Architecture School in the City, my question to you is, “What about energy efficiency? You work with curves and shapes? How can I tell my students who are present here at this talk to design efficiently after seeing your work? Ok, that was joke”
3. There’s Corbusier and Kahn, and you have won the Pritzker but ( when we see you and hear you ) it doesn’t feel like we are in the presence of a Pritzker winner. Was being low key intentional
4. What are your words of advise to young architects who want to win the Pritzker.

I was aghast! Shocked, spellbound if I may.

Like Dude! Where did those questions manifest from? What was going on in your minds when you were looking at those slides. Or was that irrelevant, in the larger need to announce yourselves and be acknowledged by a audience of similar peers. 

The casual display of entitlement, and the inability to think before asking questions that seemed more like personal trumpeting and that were borderline denigrating Kazuyo and her very sensitive work, were first for me!

Any way im getting tangential, so let me come back to these spectacular questions.

Question 1. “Shouldn’t you be designing with local materials” assumes a) she isn’t, and that some how you, who design predominantly in India where building is still a very primitive almost craft like operation, local is over-simplified to “brick and stone and tiled roof” with “old masons bent over laboriously shaping stone and wood, cracking jokes and singing songs in dappled sunshine” No. And b) Shouldn’t  - like somehow your system of material choices are more relevant and correct than a Pritzker winning architect’s. Also may we remember that her presentation was focussed more on placemaking than external wall sections. And c) “ Shouldn’t” like you are talking to your 5 yr old son, or are the Head of Department at some great school of architecture giving a 3rd yr student a “crit”.  

Shouldn’t!  A little politeness maybe, a little humility maybe? She is a guest, invited, taking time out to speak. Like, who are you? Really? 

Question 2. Im sorry was that a question? Or just a terrible sense entitlement and an equally poor sense of humor? Anyone who has any understanding of energy efficient design will know shape, is not where the question is, and you cannot talk about shape without taking about climate, material choices , building skins etc. A better question would have been, “how do you address energy efficiency, and climatic response in buildings you design?” But I guess that kind of modesty is not for Professors of Best Architecture School of the Country!

Question 3 - If your idea of an architect is the self obsessed Asshole called Harvard Roark from the Fountainhead. Please wake up, smell the coffee, take a walk, and well…. 

Also Le Corbusier did NOT win a Pritzker, he died in 1965. The Pritzker Architecture Prize was established the year I was born. The Tantrum throwing, R-rolliing, American Accent talking, socialite is not the only kind off architect there is- although we do have too many of them here. But the humility, “just like you and me-ness” of Kazuyo was endearing to say the least, and should actually be an example to future generations.

Question 4 - Oh well you got the attention you were looking for! And to her credit, she really didn’t bother answer the question. But the Theatrics! Gosh! And who becomes an architect to win the Prizker? 

These left a kind of jarring note to the whole talk.

Unless you are familiar with an architects work, and im saying this as someone who is NOT familiar with her work, you do not ask questions that come from a point of judgement. And if you are familiar, I imagine questions are ways to widen the discussion- have a more nuanced discourse on certain aspects that need deeper delving into. Or ideas that were fleetingly touched upon and sparked a curiosity.

Not questions that were more like announcements for attention, and notice within the gathering.  With no desire for any useful enquiry into process, work and the empathy that guides it.

Of the many unnecessary questions, those four were particularly unnecessary. Is the tech age, and the need to be constantly in the public eye, visible and noticed, really impacting everything we do? Even in more intimate and private gatherings?

The lack of any real conversation in the Architecture Circles, and especially in Delhi, is legendary. But we didn’t  need to make it so evident!

Also, had I been in Kazuyo Sejima’s place would I have just been nice and smiled! I think not!

In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones - the restored and remastered film was released in theatres this week. A film about architecture school and the loss of idealism in the wake of rising capital, a profoundly human story. The film is set in a simpler world than we are used to now. Almost 40 years old now the film seems so much more poignant today than when it was made. Has our world actually got better since then?

The first time i saw it was 1998, the year i joined architecture school, at the very same buildings the movie is shot at, in the same art studio. I attended classes in the same design studios, Aside from the very badly kept hair, It was much the same life. The same kurta, the same shorts and kholapuri chappals, the same jholas and rolls of sheets and models, the same Dylan, (and Zeppelin and Tull), Indian Ocean was still not known as a band. The same idealism, the same craziness, the same innocent belief in architecture, that brought what was then considered the brighest creative minds in the country from every corner of India to what was argued to be one of the best architecture schools, not just in the country but in Asia.

Nation Building was still an ideal in the late 1990s, and the 5th year Design Thesis project still looked at institutions and infrastructure as benchmarks of creativity and respectable design. The hotels and luxury resorts, and house for the rich were still scoffed at. It was still a world where the rich man’s architecture was not celebrated.

It was a world where design education, was not considered a means to get rich, but opportunity to change the world. Design education was about optimism, and dreaming, even the absolutely ridiculous, like the one that come out and unfolds from Annie's back pocket, carefully drawn on a sheet of butter paper- where the hope of brilliance and excitement are not dimmed by the need for expensive paper, and carefully assembled perfection.

In the next 20 years from its making though, some of those things would change, and in the next twenty, that brings us to this decade a lot more has changed. it almost feels like this is a make belief world, until you walk into the School of Planning and Architecture, at the ITO campus, and have your dejavu!

In my 6 years, yes i was one of those lucky few, at architecture school i witnessed similar moments a few times.

I remember talks of starting a political party, or moving to the hills and working with communities, of riding motorcycles and being free.

But by the time i had done my thesis, you could see it was on its way out, giving over to a new age.

It is a different world now at architecture school, so different, that they have a placement cell. From hope and possibility and dreaming, design education has become jobs, pay-packages and suits. I'm not sure if the students seem to have changed, or the teaching has changed, or the purpose has changed.

Or is the present an expression of another kind of disenchantment?

Have cities fallen from their pedestals? Has architecture lost its purpose? Are architects now truly agents of the rich and powerful? Have the Star-chitects destroyed the last remaining sanctuaries of hope and dreaming? The questions the film raised almost 4 decades ago, seem way more important and relevant now than ever before.

In it’s very casual and lighthearted manner it asks deep and far reaching questions at so many levels and of so many things - questions to ideas of value, of education, of purpose and of course, of architecture in a still developing nation.

Questions one hoped would have been answered in the 4 decades that have elapsed since its making. But questions that seem to have become even more critical in a nation grappling with capitalism, social and cultural inequalities, and an increasingly market driven profession.

#inWhichAnnieGivesItThoseOnes

Restored by the Film Heritage Foundation

Written by Arundhati Roy

Produced and Directed by Pradeep Kishen

Film poster taken from the Internet