Henri Fanthome Office for Architecture

And while I write, 15 is the number of human lives lost, there maybe more. We have not counted the animals and pets that were lost to fire.

So why is this fire different from the one that happened in the Hauz Rani Hotel? 

To be Honest it isnt. 

The loss of life, was for similar reasons. 1. No second staircase or escape route. 2. Inability for rescue persons to enter the building 3. Norms and Permission flouted. 4. Operating at far above human occupancy building was sanctioned for or function that was permitted.

In the aftermath of the Delhi Fire and Building collapse we had some very vocal and “pro-people” activists call for the “Demolition of Urban Village” as seems to be the solution to every problem AFTER it as occurred, in contemporary India. You see a lot of it in UP, and Delhi now.

We might have heard the same call again after the fire in Lucknow, the difference however, is Aliganj is not a Lal Dora area. 

I have roots in Lucknow, and continued to call it home throughout my years at School of Planning and Architecture, till I set up base and migrated to Delhi in 2004.

Aliganj is middle class suburb of Lucknow, developed by the LDA. Planned and plotted, with infrastructure, development controls and regulations. It has bye-laws and sanction processes put in place by state machinery. And wasmthen sold to buyers to build, in keeping with bye-laws and controls with a approval and sanctioning process in place. All of which must have been actioned to build this building, that has recently gone up in flames.

Aliganj is not an Urban village, that was co-opted, and so “exempt” of development control or process or procedure. 

And yet Aliganj had a fire. Yes we have fires in all kind of buildings, so that is not saying much.

The Aliganj, Lucknow building fire was not in a Lal Dora area; instead, investigations by the Lucknow Development Authority (LDA) revealed it was an authorised plotted development scheme where a building approved strictly for residential use was illegally converted into a commercial complex - as reported by NDTV on its online portal.

It was used for a function it was not sanctioned for. It was allowed to be used for commercial activities without requisite exits, fire escape, refuges, proper ventilation . 

And then it has a fire, 

If we go by the logic that only Lal Dora spaces are unsafe, that should never have been the case. Fires should just automatically extinguish themselves once they realise they are in a state sanctioned, municipality authorised colony. 

NO?

Aliganj is a planned colony, it has rules, I imagine, it must have an  approval process, it must have checks and balances, it has state machinery. It must also have periodic inspections? Junior Engineers Executive Engineers, Fire Officers, etc who periodically inspect and sign off on these buildings and bear witness to their following the letter of the law.  

Given all that and the legal standing of the colony, the  fire honestly had no business raging there, and killing 15 people? No that was just not on!

I am reminded of the rather amusing video of the recent fire on the 12th floor of a posh Housing Complex in Noida - Ivy County Society in sector 75, where the fire service was apparently “watering plants” on the sixth floor. 

It was both comical and reassuring to see that the rich and poor suffer from an equal indifference from the state machinery in times of distress - that soon turned a deep sadness and disappointment - these are our best cities in 2026.

Much as some people would have liked to pin this on the poor, clearly fires don’t seem to discriminate.

So the big question is - what actually causes fires? 

Me, I’ll go with- “Fires are caused by bad governance and corrupt citizens and lack of enforcement. In case you hadn’t figured that out by now!” #fire #delhi #lucknow #regulations #norms #urbanism

# posted by Henri Fanthome : 3:47 pm  0 comments

 Every summer we will have some fires - like the recent one in Malviya Nagar. Every monsoon we will lose  lives to flooding and electrocutions from naked wires or like in Mehrauli some lives will be drowned in gushing storm waters. Else where in winter lives will be lost to to Delhi winter’s.  

A few days ago a building collapse in Said-Ul-Ajaid took young lives. Videos of building collapses Elsewhere in the city are floating on Instagram and X. 

Every year there is a fire or collapse or electrocution or flooding or drowning that catalyses the emotions of the city. There is a lot of talk, people are blamed, past governments held responsible, new laws enacted, and people told to carry on. 

In some cases a paltry sum of money is offered, in a huge show of magnanimity and political posturing. The amount, usually laughably small, but justified by quoting government norms,  is never an acknowledgement of value of individual life and to me is more demonstration of how dispensable the citizens are.

We will talk about these till the next floor, or fire. 

There will be more posturing, more compensation, and life will go on. 

The legal route, to hold government and elected representatives and municipal bodies accountable are time consuming, expensive and emotionally and mentally straining, Not to mention the strong arm of the law that dissuades you directly and indirectly from undertaking such step, to stand up to the mighty of the state.

Of course you can come back at me and say, why were they living in a hotel that was clearly unauthorised and did not have sanction. 

If you are the 8 members of the family that was staying int he hotel, because their aging grandfather was admitted at max for a few days of treatment, you are going to look for the closest hotel, a short walk from the hospital, a place relatively budget friendly since we know ho expensive private medical care is, and maybe make sure the toilets are clean and the beds comfortable so you get good sleep when you come back from your shift of staying with your near or dear one at the hospital.

You don’t ask for a Fire NOC before checking into a hotel or guest house.

THAT IS WHAT WE PAY OUR TAXES FOR.

For the government to ensure a basic level of infrastructure, and safety and standard of living to all citizens irrespective of class, gender, race, shin colour, ethnicity and earning spending capacity.

The last one becoming increasingly the measure of your importance to the state in recent years.

Now if in stead of this small hotel in Malviya Nagar, DLF Select City Mall, (which rumour has it was supposed to be the Saket District Centre as per an old MPD, but that is another discussion)- If DLF’s Select city walk were to burn down, I dare say the scenario would be different.

We can talk about politics, and social justice. About how change is hard, and other enlightenments.  What is clear is, whatever the government may be, the brunt of the suffering will always be borne by those with little means, who have no choices, no options. The cost of systemic failure will always be borne by the invisible millions who keep our cities running? 

One gets a feeling there is an unspoken difference between the Poor Man's Bharat, and the Rich Man's India!

And we all know why.

# posted by Henri Fanthome : 10:02 am  0 comments

The recent collapse of a 5 story building in Champa Gali, the now upmarket area of Said ul  Ajaib, is sad, but also inevitable in a sense. 

Any one familiar with the city of Delhi is possibly also familiar with its many novelties called Urban Villages. Some of Delhis most popular and celebrated addresses are found in these. It started with the famous designer ghetto of Hauz Khas Village popularly called HKV. In the 2000s it was the place to be. Designers stores, Art Galleries, and Pubs and restaurants. Designed by by some of the bigger Architecture practices of the city. Stores like Ogaan, Delhi Art Gallery, Restaurants like Gunpowder, OTB, Yeti and Naivaidyam made it a place to be seen. A great space for young creative and small business owners to make a start and grow.

My initial fascination with the suburb, and its growing popularity, was slowly replaced with a utter fear of the possibility of a fire event, with pubs and cafes on the 3rd  with barely 3 foot wide staircases for escape. I did not fancy ending my life there, and completely stopped visiting the area. I cannot recall, but i do remember some fairly fancy pubs there going up in smoke some years later. I have not been there since.

Over time HKV got posh, upmarket and expensive and chocked, space became hard to find, and rents prohibitive. Other similar villages then found their chance at prosperity - Shahpur Jat, Nizamuddin, Chattarpur, Mehrauli, and Said ul Ajaib among them. Easily accessible to the Fancy South Delhi crowd. Cafes, Restaurants  and Designer stores started showing up. 

Mehrauli - accessible from both Delhi and Gurgaon, with great road connectivity for your fancy luxury car and with a sprinkling of some of Delhis biggest names in hospitality dotting the spaces between designer labels, became a destination for the most expensive and sought after Bridal wear in the country. 

Near by in Chatterpur, the humble Dhan Mill, complex that started off as an alt destination, with interesting cafes, and stores, has been building itself into a full fledged mall for the ultra rich, slowly going form “Design-led” to “Money- driven” in its choices of outlets or should we say its command of rental.

All urban villages were not so fortunate. Ayanagar for instance remains potholed waterlogged and fairly un kept, low rental accommodations for staff and working populations who cannot afford rents in Gurugram. Ghitorni and Sultanpur.- on the MG road, a market of factory outlets, and  furniture and home decor stores, 

There are others too, that transformed much like Kotla Mubarakpur, into very large hardware and building material markets of south Delhi, long before fashion and food were talking points in Delhi.

There is also Humayunpur, that has now transpormed into the undisputed Food Capital of the Delhi and enjoys a reputation with the Genz

And then there are still others like Khanpur, and Said-ul-Ajaib. On the fringes of South Delhi, that could have become rich, expensive , and gentrified areas, but did not. The exact reasons are hard to arrive at. 

Designer destination or not, what is common to all these urban villages is a lack of any kind of regulation. The absence of building controls, applicable bye-laws and most of all life and safety regulations. 

Building  activity in most of the country, is at best a craft exercise - a learned on the job mason becomes a self styled contractor and takes on building work. It is not a regulated profession, with training and licensing. There are no engineering norms, no safety norms and no checks from local authorities. Our urban villages function in a similar manner. In Mehrauli for instance there are apartments blocks with excess of 20 apartments, without any fire fighting provisions and dead ends that would not pass municipal sanction anywhere in the country.

What was one day a 2-floor house, suddenly disappears  gets replaced by a 6 floor apartment block of pigeon holes. Built on matchstick columns by a local building hand who now calls himself a contractor. In other places, floors are added on floors, with reckless abandon, to get rents from warehousing, coaching centres, PG accommodation for the thousands of young children hoping to make a a future in the big cities of Delhi. I was one of them in 1998 - staying in Bed Sarai, preparing for my entrance to Architecture School. 

The building that collapsed in Said-ul-Ajaib, and forgive my saying so, is not an anomaly. No, whatever you might make of it from the news, from sound bytes and much circulated videos of people talking about having raised alarms and informed authorities - this is how they function and why they are viable places for business. 

The lack of regulation and sanctioning, no real landuse definition, and of course huge electoral clout at local levels are part of the equations that keep these places viable. Buildings and  lands, like in the case of Mehrauli’s most posh addresses, are owned by well connected, extremely rich and socially important people.

So while the building collapse, and the loss of life is sad, and avoidable, it is just another event in the life of Urban India. And given the age of these villages and their buildings, and growing pressure to make money, I would wager, these will become more frequent in the coming years. And no one is going to do a damn thing about it.

My condolences go out the families that lost so much more than just one fo their children that evening. But in a nation of 1.4 billion 5 lives is a blip on Hashtag Amritkaal and its 5Trillion Dollar economy.

# posted by Henri Fanthome : 8:15 am  0 comments

 Kate Wagner in one of her recent podcasts @kategwagner was talking about design and tech  and im quoting snippets here - “Architecture has been de-skilled in a lot of ways, they don’t teach drawing anymore” further she goes on to say, “ buildings are now the built version of a spread sheet” explaining that all the elements are plug and play, and if you wanted do a curve it would takes a huge amount of labour”  

Years ago, when I had just started out as an independent architect, I was asked to design a garden canopy from the gate to the entrance of door of a very reputed dentists clinic in Sunder Nagar. 

This was Dr Anil Kumar’s Clinic, visited by among others, the President of India, and of course Ashish Ganju, Architect and my Guru, who had recommended me for the job saying I was the “perfect man for the mission”.

The Dentist wanted this elaborate set up that would be motorised, like the Wimbledon Centre court, and could retract or extend on the press of a button. On the face of it money was not a question, and im inclined to believe it never was. 

The Dentist had a lovely garden that received beautiful sunlight in winter, and being a huge lover of his carefully nurtured garden, he was loathed to think of columns or any obstruction to both the view of the garden as you walked to the entry or to sunlight when then canopy was retracted. He did not want shadows- from a frame, columns , anything - “It should just disappear” 

Now that was a tall ask.

Somewhere in this whole conversation I did begin to feel we were going a bit overboard - a shading canopy 6 feet wide and about 30 feet long should really not need anything more than one reasonably fit human to stretch or retract at the beginning and end of each winter. So why were we even discussing motorisation? 

Towards the end of this long discussion I tabled the same thought, and got a “If you can make it work, sure - but you have to demonstrate it to me yourself”. 

So we did!

We built a canopy- every metal part fabricated by hand by Brijlal and Sons, including lathed pulleys with Royal Enfield Axle bearings for butter smooth rolling, Stadium Canopy Grade Tensile Fabric from Mehler Technologies, strung up on a 3mm Stainless Steel cable anchored on a new Gateway Arch at one end and the House at the other. All fabricated off site and installed in 2 days flat. 

And it all worked - and worked for years.

Back then, and much more so now, one wonders, is the need for luxury so much that human interaction with the spaces we inhabit must be removed altogether. Must need for human action removed after being labelled as inconvenient? 

So we can exist like cozy couch potatoes, priming ourselves for strokes and heart attacks - everything in out buildings from taps to lights to curtains is operated by voice commands?

Is Automation making us lazy human beings? Why cant you walk up to a curtain and draw it to reveal a breath-taking view?

Which brings me back to Kate’s observation. And its a real thing, I sometimes see glimpses of, when I work on larger projects. 

Is software actually making us lazy designers? Why are curves going out os style? Why is the hand drawn, carefully assembled vision of place and space slowly giving way to the 6 hour sketch up or Revit plug and play model that is increasingly becoming the idea of architecture?  

Not quite apparent, but to me they appear as flip sides of the same coin - 

The Architecture of Lazy-ness, and the Laziness of Architecture.

Ps.- We still haven’t motorised a single thing in any of the work we do! Wait we Motorised a 150  kilo steel gate to a estate in Almora, but im sure that isnt what we are talking about here!

# posted by Henri Fanthome : 8:27 am  0 comments

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!

# posted by Henri Fanthome : 2:50 pm  0 comments