Most persons ought to have wondered what the fuss more than demolishing some dormitories in IIM, Ahmedabad, was all about, why the move to replace them with new buildings was getting opposed at all. The answer is, architecture.
The issue is that most Indians do not know what architecture truly is, possessing lived and worked in drab, cuboid buildings all their lives.
Architecture is more than just the constructed atmosphere, it is a representation of how we see ourselves, as properly as how we see the globe.
We even look to have forgotten our legacy from the Sun Temple at Konark to the Meenakshi temple of Madurai, to stepwells such as the Rani ki Vaav in Patan, Gujarat, to magnificent Rajasthani areas and forts to the Taj Mahal.
Inhabited sculpture
Architecture has been described as frozen music, an expression of values, a quest for the truth and inhabited sculpture. But how are we to appreciate it if even apartments costing Rs 5 cr do not have the fundamentals, such as cross-ventilation. Cross-ventilation, in reality, has gone out of the window.
Coming back to IIM, Ahmedabad, which is universally recognised as a single of the very best institutional buildings. Designed by acclaimed American architect Louis Kahn, its cylindrical towers, vaulted corridors and geometric play of light and shadow make it a masterpiece.
In reality, the red-brick campus, with its spartan residential dorms with a play of light and shade, mass and void, the constructed and the open have been likened to the monastic cells of Ajanta and Ellora. The interplay involving architectural style and human psychology, entirely ignored today, had been utilized by the early Buddhists who created these rock-reduce monasteries.
Place of pilgrimage
Architect Narayan Moorthy of LokPATH India, a citizens’ collective of architects, urban planners, environmentalists and social activists that seeks proper transformations of habitat, says the IIM-A campus displays the uncanny intuitive capacity of a foreign thoughts to respond to India’s one of a kind light, climate and social mores and hence remains a location of pilgrimage for architects and aesthetes.
One only has to examine it with other college campuses to realise what is incorrect with Indian architecture today. In reality, the proof is all about.
Just appear at the hideous buildings in the small business hubs of Mumbai at Nariman Point, BKC and Lower Parel. Is there a single creating which stands out or which is a landmark? Are the buildings arranged according to a strategy?
Look at the ugly tower which is house to the richest Indian. And to feel of all the cash and work that has gone into producing it so spectacularly ugly.
A pay a visit to to our public hospitals is adequate to convince any one that the buildings themselves are sick. Absolutely no believed is offered to aesthetics or even objective though constructing schools, government offices, courts and small business complexes, all of which appear alike.
Lacking context
Even our malls, multiplexes and airports lack imagination. Architecture has lost its enriching sense of objective, all that matters is milking every single square inch of FSI. In the words of celebrated architect B V Doshi, Indian architecture today lacks context, content and a message.
Incidentally, he is from Ahmedabad and had worked with Kahn when he was designing the IIM-A in the late sixties. Doshi went on to style the IIM Bangalore, IIM Udaipur and NIFT Delhi as properly as the ‘Amdavad ni Gufa’, an underground art gallery, and the Tagore Hall in Ahmedabad.
India is at danger of losing its architectural identity, he feels, for the reason that our style schools are not teaching students to respect regional heritage and traditions.
The doyen of architecture also says that a lot of Indian architects are also concerned with aping the aesthetics and practices of other nations. For instance, the glass façade buildings, which are very good for trapping the scant sunlight in European nations but not in India which has a harsh sun. They may perhaps appear vibrant and shiny but it requires a lot of electrical energy to cool them in tropical nations.
Iconic buildings
It is ironical that this insensitivity to architecture was getting shown in Ahmedabad. This is the city exactly where the renowned Le Corbusier, who made Chandigarh, created 4 iconic buildings. This is the city which has the country’s foremost architecture college, the Centre for Environment and Planning Technology, and the premier style college, the National Institute for Design.
Ahmedabad was also the location exactly where Prince Khurram, to be Shah Jahan who gave us the Taj Mahal, acquired a taste for architecture. As governor of Gujarat, he was impressed by its architectural marvels such as the Jama Masjid in Ahmedabad, the magnificent structures of Champaner, the Adalaj stepwell and the Modhera sun temple.
Dull, repetitive buildings are not only boring, they also have been clinically established to induce pressure. In some cities, citizens have voted to retain out such buildings. The Tour Montparnasse, a black skyscraper looming more than the wonderful Paris cityscape is an instance. Parisians hated it so a great deal that the city was forced to enact a law forbidding any additional skyscrapers larger than 36 metres.
On the other hand, it has been shown that persons who work in properly-made spaces take significantly less sick leave, are more focused, and commonly contribute more to their corporation.
It may perhaps take us ages to rectify our blunders in concrete but a straightforward paint brush can liven up items on the street, as the group St+art India has shown. The non-profit group engages the public by means of large, eye-catching murals painted on street corners, intersections or apartment buildings. It has produced the country’s initially art district in Delhi’s Lodhi Colony.
Mumbai’s heritage buildings
Coming back to Mumbai, you could possibly be shocked to discover that it has the world’s second biggest concentration of Art Deco buildings, characterised by streamlined types and geometric motifs inspired by new technologies — ocean liners, airplanes, automobiles and so forth.
It has more than 200 such structures such as Eros Cinema, New India Assurance Building, Empress Court and the buildings lining Marine Drive. These are now component of a World Heritage internet site and therefore, have escaped redevelopment.
Redevelopment, coupled with philistinism, have led to the current demolition and removal of the iconic Hall of Nations in Delhi’s Pragati Maidan, which ranked in the major one hundred of the world’s most considerable buildings of the final century.
Bad architecture and style is not only robbing Indian cities of all character and charm, it is choking them at a time when the Covid pandemic has underlined the want to place persons initially and build livable cities.
The writer is an independent journalist primarily based in Mumbai.