Thursday, March 26, 2026
Questions you might want to ask a RIBA GOLDMEDAL and PRITZKER PRIZE winning architect but shouldn’t.
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.
- “You design in very varied geographies - from Japan to the United States, to Australia - shouldn’t you be building in local materials?”
- 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”
- 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
- 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!
Monday, March 16, 2026
In Which Annie Gives It Those One - a revisit of sorts
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.
Restored by the Film Heritage Foundation
Written by Arundhati Roy
Produced and Directed by Pradeep Kishen
Film poster taken from the Internet
Thursday, May 07, 2020
The Pandemic and the City
The city is not just block and buildings with roads, and traffic. The city is also lives, livelihoods, opportunity, economic opportunity, but more than that the city is hopes and dreams and futures.
And the one thing we have figured out in the course of the last 3 months of a pandemic is that the city is woefully inadequate in most of these respects.
The city scarcely recognises those that live on its fringes
do the work that keeps it going.
And when all this is done, it will put the weight of the future on a vaccine and "better" healthcare and carry on like it has always done - mostly indifferently.
A lot is being said about social distancing being the "new normal", but that isn't possible when scores of nuclear families own multiple tenaments with more than 4 bedrooms (as investment, for the future et al) and 65 percent of the city lives and uses possibly less than 30 percent of the city.
It is also not possible as long as norms of FAR are linked to number of dwellings per acre, and developers and policy do not go back to the drawing board and reimagine the city based on densities and provision of resource based on community health and livability.
To make any real difference we need policy changes and new models by which the city is imagined and realised. We need policy that looks at housing and infrastructure as guaranteed democratic rights, not as speculative investment for economic gain. Our cities have too long been controlled by the super rich! You need only to go over to NewGurgaon, or closer home, places like Vasant Kunj. You don't need to go near Lutyens zone that reeks of this to a point of sickness.
Also we have forgotten, there are natural cycles, 100 years, 50 years, 20 years, for floods, for disease, we have chosen to ignore these.
In a sense this is opportunity. But it will require braveness to explore and re-imagine a future that does not build on the errors of the
Labels: architecture, cities, citiesindecline, city, community, density, FAR, fringe, future, health, infrastructure, model, policy, reassess, reimagine, urbanism
Sunday, February 02, 2020
Of Informality and Opportunity, and cities in Post-Colonial Hangovers.
It struck me as odd, back then, that the metro station for Mehrauli was over a a kilometer of a walk from the outer edge of Mehrauli and possibly another kilometre from dead centre. More interesting was the fact that elsewhere, whereever it was needed to cross a busy thoroughfare a Foot Over Bridge (FOB) was integrated into the design of the station. This was not so in Mehrauli - the Metro Station is on the other side of a National Highway designated road, and a pedestrian crossing with a largely non-functional red-light was the only way to cross until, 2018.
Yes, 16 years after the metro services started in Delhi.
But that is not why i sat down to write this, the issue is bigger than a station and the lack of a pedestrian bridge.
It goes back to a few days ago, riding in the back of a cab from a site visit, those special occasions, when i get to observe what is on the side of the road, the edges, the changes of the city scape.
It also connects, a little unexpectedly, to a walk in the Mehrauli Archeological Park, where i regularly walk my three fur children, where i crossed a group of vendors, and another time chanced to overhear a conversation of one the security guards with seller of Ram-laddu, telling him how it was not allowed for vendors to sell their wares in the park, and how he could impound his things.
What was interesting, was that immediately after this conversation on the possibility of impounding, and the illegality of the selling, the security guard asked the vendor to serve him a plate of those Ram-laddus, and then paid him the 20 rupees that was the regular price of a small plate.
Immediately a few thoughts flew through my head -
The first, that the guard actually paid the vendor, he didn’t even suggest they be given free, or negotiate a price or anything. There was no demand for free service in exchange for allowance of passage.
A second, that there are possibly lacs of people who come to their city in search of a better life and better earning opportunities, who work and exist in an informality that provides much needed services to the city at prices that keep them both affordable and relevant.
And the third, and possibly most important, that Policy may not register this, but even the enforcers of policy, and the public at large understand that there is a need for them and without such people and the varied services they provide, our city and many of privileges we enjoy would not be possible.
The city is an economic entity, there is little that can be said to refute that. The nonsense around art and culture etc doesn’t really apply to a vast majority of the people in the cities we live in. One could argue that geographically, less than 5% of the city is actually given to these functions, and accessed by an even smaller percentage of cityzen.
In our post colonial reality, the city remains an opportunity, for better - education, pay, standard of living, employment and possibly an escape from caste / and employment structures that are very limited in the reaches of rural India.
The city is lorded over by policy makes, bureaucrats, politicians and lawmakers, who ricochet between their various bastions of power in high fancy cars, with a battery of sycophants , support staff, servants and security detail. You won’t seem them step down on the sidewalks, or for that matter use a bus stop or board the metro. Our notions of achievement, development, and progress are hung over from the days of the Raj and an internalised Imperialist aspiration.
Again this thought is not what sparked the idea of this piece. I was riding back in a cab from site crossing the many stations of the just completed Magenta Line, the most recent of the DMRC’s additions to the vast network on Metro that has done wonders to change mobility and the city scape ( of course there are really stupid ideas like the TOD floating around, but we shall not digress) and as i passed each station, i was surprised by the number of sellers, crowding the alighting points - water and nimbu-pani, sellers of cigarettes, boiled eggs and bread-omelette sellers, momos, mobile screen protectors, and parathas, the list gets longer and more interesting at some stations with chow mien carts, chaat, chole-kulche, and litti-chokha.
It also strikes me as odd, that the metro stations, where you could easily have an end to end commute in the region of 90 minutes or more, are devoid of water fountains, have negligible restroom facilities (that are invariably outside if the exit gates, requiring you swipe your card or drop your token to access them, which is even more inconvenient if the station is not your destination station and you are using a token).
So while the network is a transportation boon, in its now 16 years of growth and development, it has sadly remained just that - a conduit for the transport of people across the city.
The Metro has failed to recognise its own agency, and its own transformative potential. it has now become the venue for dates, for meetings, and is slowly, but without any design intent, morphing into a quasi-social infrastructure out of sheer need. And it surprises me how these aspects have been completely blindsided. I could accept that the first time around when the station at Kashmere Gate opened, with the inclusion of a McDonalds, and some other fast food places, there could have been a lack of clarity.
But 16 years down the line the omissions are disappointing,(possibly deliberate), point towards an intellectual laziness, and represent a huge opportunity that is lost. One would have expected to see last mile connectivity, street food and vends, and social activity transforming the landscape around the interface of the metro stations with the city they are an intrinsic part of.
The way things stand even now, one can see the design and thus also the intent behind the design is opposed to such a possibility. A stance that comes from, and i conjecture here, policy makers who themselves do not use the metro and deem it to be for the “working class.” Or from a deep rooted class divide, that recognises cultural activity, social exchange, and food to be of value to only a certain economically advantaged section of the city that would not engage in such at “transport infrastructure”. It would be too pedestrian (pun intended!)
One must recognise informality, in its many avatars as both economically necessary and infrastructurally vital to the existence of the city. Informality posses an ability to organically grow and change to suit demand, space, season (and climate)and ever-changing taste and so possess a quality that is unmatchable by the more formal and much more resource intensive models of commercial and consumer enterprise the economic powers that control the city wish to encourage. There is a certain dynamic property that guides the informal, that cannot be replicated by the large corporate, multinational / big brand business entities.
While it is encouraging to see a Cafe Coffee Day and Wow momos, or Burger King at metro stations, or kiosks selling bottle water and drinks, it is also necessary to address a changing usage pattern and the needs of a far larger population that drives the metro and keeps it viable. A population who's needs if recognised and integrated into the wider plans of the city and its infrastructure, we should have a safer, more seamless and more pleasurable public space.
It is time we recognised that transport and infrastructure will be the New Democratic spaces of the city, and i could argue, its future monuments. Mobility, and the access to information and digital communication have altered the way we use and interact with the city. But design and design practitioners, especially architects, planners, policy makers and the government have yet to acknowledge it.
I see in the metro and how it interfaces with the city of Delhi as a massive, untapped opportunity - financial, cultural and social, that could multiply the already large impact the metro has had on the lives of all city folk, working, retired, young, old, disabled or otherwise.
Yet when i see the latest of the metro stations to be opened, one cant help but be sad,
That the city and its infrastructure is still being designed with a colonial Sahab’s gaze, that lives in a nostalgia of being driven around New Delhi in the back seat of imported car, with a saluting driver, who handles the steering wheel with white gloves. Who’s idea of the city is a sanitised, inch perfect, picturesque and poor-free space.
Not only would that be undemocratic, but it would also be absolutely unsustainable in every aspect - energy consumption, urban services, last mile connectivity, domestic services, food, the list just goes on. It is tiresome to see the same mistakes and same assumptions being repeated again and again. Opportunities for livelihood and ownership of the public space are not only for the rich, and the economically advantaged. Our cities need to be reimagined, our cities need to be designed by people who live, eat, work and most importantly WALK in them (and use its public transport systems!)
Labels: archeological park, Architects, architecture, city design, Delhi, dmrc, informality, infrastructure, integration, magenta line, Mehrauli, metro, policy, transport, urbanism, vendors
Wednesday, December 25, 2019
IT LOOKED LIKE A GRAVEYARD
Labels: Afghanistan, children, death, design, earthquake, education, graveyard, hills, poem, questions architecture, school, seismic, Uttarakhand
