Tuesday, April 25, 2017
The Value of Architecture is the Architect - No wait!
On my Facebook feed, instagram and twitter, I read the unfortunate news
that the Hall of Nations has been brought down.
It is no difficult argument that it should not have been, or
that there are far ugliers, more ungainly and completely un-celebrate-able
buildings in Pragati Maidan (the Irony of the name does not pass me at the
moment!) that should have met this fate long before Hall of Nations perished to
it.
So the question comes to mind -How? Or why?
As a young upstart of a practice, and a young architect trying
to make headway into the world of design it is formidable kind of future to
ponder.
But I think the answer lies probably, not in architecture or
its value or how its value is perceived, but in the nature of discourse on
architecture in the country. Which even now is yet to come of any kind of age.
I happened to attend an event at IHC discussing the proposal
of National Museum of Architecture, a small group of architects and people from
allied disciplines.
Before long the discussion wound its way from architecture
to architects, and the value of keeping a repository of works of the who’s who.
And it suddenly became quite apparent how little discourse
there was, and if there was any it was more like Name-Dropping.
The discourse on Architecture is not the Discussion of
Architects. And the Value of Architecture is not in the name of the
Authorship. They are separate. The Architect may be important by a symbiotic relationship to the
Value of the Architecture, the reverse is painfully untrue.
But in that small realization I believe the discourse of
architecture may be carried out in earnest. The value of architecture is not the
name of the Architect who designed it. Its value is (and should always be)
quite clearly distinct.
Labels: Architects, architecture, design, discourse, hall of nations, indian modernism, modern architecture in india, modern india, national museum of architecture, pragati maidan, raj rewal
Friday, May 27, 2011
Nostaliga
The uncomfortable serpent raised its head again.
The question of an Indian-ness, or an absence of it surely will raise itself time and time again as architects discourse or rubbish the work of contemporaries and past masters. Some of us will lament it, and others will justify the absence as a direct consequence of the hand-me-down “modernism” we were schooled in at the highest alters of architectural education in this country.
A large part of the reason, I have come to believe, is political or more correctly rooted in the politics of the making of the modern India. Our own industrial revolution, green revolution and the great Nehruvian idea of Modern Indian Nation.
India has never had a modernism. It never could : thought, public opinion and judgement were schooled to us on deliberately substandard education system designed to keep colonies as colonies. Men are colonized in the mind. And we are standing proof to that idea even today. That however is another debate, but it has consequence in the act of the making of a modern India.
It has consequence in the fact, that great politics believed that by bringing “modernisn” to India, India would have no choice but to turn modern. Or so we all, as architects, believe it did. So we believe. But what is this modernism? Where did it come from? Where does it go to? The Indian modernism and its edifice, that still stands many decades after its many siblings have either died or mutated into various new creatures still carries on. But it is an odd sort of modernism that has a vacuous space both before it and after, and no one quite seems to know how it was arrived at. Although there is not one architect who doesn’t know what it is or more correctly what it looks like.
And then there is the vernacular, systematically schooled out of our intellectual awareness (and reduced to a token of apologetic homage to the land we are born to) in schools across the country. A whole way of thinking, making and imagining, and purposing is all but erased. The backward ideas of craft and hand held tools, and the imperfection of the artisan, seemed all too embarrassing for an “in- the-making industrial super-power”. A thing to be shunned, and disavowed in the posturing and political correctness of a new independent India.
And so too today, we must have our postmodernism now, and what ever else it is they are doing in all those places we so wish we were but just are not. We are not to be left behind.
And often the uncomfortable serpent raises its head and asks the same question again.
I see us living a life with two laments, or two nostalgia.
I see us living a life with two laments, or two nostalgia.
The first nostalgia for an Indian-ness we had (a richness , a humanity and craft) and the second nostalgia for Modernism that we never will.
Labels: architecture, craft, indian-ness, moderism, modern architecture in india, nostalgia, search, vernacular
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Not So Long Ago
Not so long ago in the plains of the great nation of India, there lived some very educated Indian people. They had travelled far and wide, spoke many languages, and some of them had even had tea with the queen of England.
It so happened that at that time, the great nation had just liberated itself of the clutches of the British empire. A man in a white dhoti, of home spun Indian cloth, and wooden staff and wire framed spectacles had swayed the subcontinent. A very good thing, most people said, so now we could finally be the nation we were always supposed to be, but were never quite, before the british took us over and hammered us into one shape on a map.
I am not sure when, but one day, some of these people,(sitting around sipping their freshly brewed tea-pot tea), were having a conversation. Some one asked, so what do we do now that we are free, what do we build as the Symbol of the new India.
For a while every one was flummoxed. They sipped a few sips of tea, and when it had gone cold and needed refreshing they began thinking in murmurs, in a bit they turned quite audible and the conversation got on in true earnest.
Lets build a grand railway, said one. Another was quick to point out, that the British had already done that. Well, how about a great great road, that cuts across India and links across it to the great sea ports. The same gent very politely pointed out, that Alexander(was it Sher Shah Suri? I can't recall but that is besides he point!) had done that long long ago. A small silence followed. Then someone said let’s build a new capital complex. There was huge sign from almost the whole audience. So that was dropped before even a word could be uttered! Just then a freshly brewed pot of tea was carried in and the conversation ended there.
No one really gave it thought after that. Except one man, he kept thinking of the problem. How were we to tell the world we had arrived, that India was a free nation. What could be the face of the new modern India? , he thought. He scratched his graying head, adjusted his Gandhi/ Nehru topi (that now only peons in government office seem inclined to wear!) and cried out loud in dismay.
And then it struck him, before the reverberation of the dismayed cry could subside. The symbol of the new India would be a city like a no other. A modern city for a modern India. And the world would sit up and take notice as the land of snake charmers and dhotis would thunder through centuries of history and stand abreast with the torchbearers of the first world. India as he saw it would have arrived. This would be no mean city, not like the ones the brits or their halflings had spawned across Delhi or DC, no this would be different.
And so the next evening he invited the great gathering to tea, with a promise that he would unfold to them the great vision he had had.
It was a nice autumn evening in Delhi, (so at least I wish it was, Delhi looks it best in that season, with the million rust coloured leaves strewn on the sidewalks),when they walked in and sat about the well appointed drawing room.
And then he gave it to them, the many wise men, his great vision. A vision to herald in the New India. The India free, of oppression, of rule, of empire. An India for its teeming millions, that could do as it wished.
A new India. An India with no one to tell us what to do, who we are, what we should do. An India that could make its own future, and carve its own place.Give itself an identity that the world would stand up and take notice.
And in the great wisdom of his grey hair, and the many many years of travel and higher learning. In that great moment, of people defining history…..
He chose French!
Labels: chandigarh, contemporary architecture, modern architecture, modern architecture in india, modern india, n new architecture, new india, post-independance architecture
