City Centre Mall, Kolkata

This writing is an excerpt from an old essay written in 2007. The writing has been amended for brevity here.

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The City Centre, Kolkata, one of the latter projects of the architect Charles Correa (completed in 2004), was conceived as a convergence of functionality and aesthetics. The architect has tried to bring in the organic nature in the shopping mall by an innovative re-interpretation of an Indian market. Instead of bringing up a large chunk of building on an otherwise large land, the City Centre has been broken up into smaller fragments of forms interlinked by small bridges, courtyards and semi open spaces. Such a strategy not only makes the mall environmentally friendly, but also develops a character which is so typical of any Indian bazaar.

The idea of mall being an introvert, closed environment has been deconstructed and the place has been developed as porous organization of simple forms. On entering, the architect decides to give multiple experiences to the user by placing a kund and taking the user upwards through a flight of steps to create a sense of ghat, which traditionally has been a meeting place for people in Kolkata. The culmination of the experience of the entrance is its dissolution into the numerous streets of the bazaar. The public spaces within the otherwise conditioned space of the mall have been brought out in the open, which users can occupy and make their own personal zones. During larger public events, these smaller zones accrue to become one large theatre.

While going across th bazaar-streets within the mall, one is introduced to the sudden arrival of courtyards, appropriately scaled down to relate to the human level. The eateries are allowed to spread onto these ‘streets‘ as would normally happen in a khau galli. The interesting patterns of routes that the people make from between all such activities can be seen from strategically created levels which connect the inside and outside.

The City Centre does not define itself by creating boundaries, but itself goes and meets its surroundings. Different parts of the complex are taken up for various activities during festivals, seasonal exhibitions or public awareness. The City Centre thus assumes a truly public character and almost becomes an icon, not visually, but notionally, through the multiple experiences its offers to visitors. It balances the public and private interests of the larger society and dissolves class boundaries through intelligent design. People from all walks of life visit the mall without hesitation, rather it has given a new identity to the once socially relegated area of Kolkata. 

Paper Napkins

Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal

Charles Correa, Bus Stop in Ahmedabad

Deschooling Societies

The problems with existing knowledge system, noted from Ivan Illich

1. The problem of the Banking system wherein the teacher is seen as a (knowledge) bank and students come to the teacher for information.
Such a setup does not allow the creation of a new layer over the existing knowledge that students possess, rather cuts off their roots of thinking and re-base it in a new thinking tradition.

2. It builds unnecessary hierarchies which is not fruitful. The teacher, by design, has more power over the student.
It asserts and sustains power hierarchies of the teacher over the student curtailing liberal thought.

3. It doesn't really help in knowledge production, rather it reproduces existing knowledge.


-Deschooling Societies

History of modern Indian Art

Phenomenology

Why look at Animals?

John Berger asked the question "Why Look at Animals?" in 1977 wherein he mourned the loss of meaning that was once held in the gaze between humans and animals. The reading seemed to suggest that the Anthropocene debate had been realised much before it became popular and serious in recent years. All his observations still remain meaningful and relevant, and infact come to surface as I was beginning to close this post!

Here are some photographs from the drawings students made in the third year Environment studio at SEA. Architecture, for the longest has hardly bothered itself with the Environment - notice the capital E. And this Environment is comprised of the diversity of life forms that often go missing from the object of representation in our practices. We have hardly addressed the issue in our practice, for we do not even begin to document them in the first place. 

In the present set of drawings, I particularly find fascinating how animals and humans begin to appear within a single frame, beginning to seem quite normal. In the drawings below, a new empathy gets mobilized. The manner in which animals occur in our fields of sight within the frame of the drawings is particularly appealing. They begin to ask questions to themselves as well as the viewer. Their bodies suggest a state of idleness or urgency, as if suggesting to us that they were simply (and are still) minding their own business. In some frames, the humans seem oblivious, or even frozen. These are landscapes we come to inhabit today.

Last year students made drawings of the transforming landscapes of Goa quarries. The earlier camouflaging snakes, peacocks and crocodiles were revealed as the terrains were torn and tree covers were peeled off. Just as they find their ways, we find our ways too. 

(all drawings by third year students, this year) 

(Photography seemed to be prohibited - as the last snapshot suggests, but I remained unobedient).

On Architectural / Education in India

One of the questions that recurrently troubles academicians is the seeming redundancy of the educational apparatus in our country – one that falls short of producing practitioners of calibre, invent and depth. Academic infrastructure, both, soft and hard, remains acutely questionable towards its output. We may count several accomplished individuals in our country today, most of whom would not attribute their key learnings to their home academies! The most equipped state sponsored institutions such as the IITs, IIMs, NIDs and others seem to fall short of the promise that their resourceful abundance must yield. A quick survey leaves us with only a handful names whose contribution could be celebrated in contemporary India. The decadence of educational institutions in India has been statistically proven, and culturally mapped across several recent films in popular culture. These rightfully bring out the overemphasis of educative processes on science and math that resulted into the saturation of engineers and doctors by early millennium in the country. Further, their lost ground gets amply demonstrated in the proliferation of parallel education engines – the private tuitions, coaching classes and the ad hoc vocational centres. Academies, instead of furthering the methodical, inquiry-oriented tenets of scientific knowledge in educational processes have reduced learning into formula-driven process, one that lacks any interpretive dimension. To a large extent, such a phenomenon is also imbricated in the literacy-oriented delivery of education, adopted by the central government that made learning more didactic, divorced from the inherent values of inducing curiosity and knowing the world. The underplaying of humanities, ignorance of languages and the side lining of the arts within the mainstream education has left us largely with uninspiring practitioners across the spectrum of knowledge fields who demonstrate a derivative landscape that lacks imagination, contextual sensitivity or even meaningful dialogue with our environment. Academic practice and the world thus seemed to have drifted apart significantly from each other.

The course of architectural education in India unfortunately fits the above narrative neatly. Instituted as a service-oriented counterpart for the colonial building apparatus, the discipline of architecture has remained a drawing-oriented profession until today. Largely placed within the domain of engineering, the architect is unfailingly supposed to aid the functional and technical requirements for building, with design as a slap-dash insert. After independence, architectural education becomes a function of the regional engineering colleges across various states in India, limited into a problem-solving discourse. In contrast, if one were to consider the architectural institutions set up by architects, the possibility for countering colonial hegemony in spatial education seemed unidentified, and hence fuzzy on the horizon. Of the few architectural institutions primarily founded by architects in the country post-independence, two stand out clearly. The Academy of Architecture in Mumbai started in 1955 by late S. H. Wandrekar, Prof. C. K. Gumaste and late V. G. Mhatre as a part time course primarily aimed to enable students to pursue architecture as a professional career; whereas the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT), founded by B V Doshi in Ahmedabad in 1962 with the infrastructural support of industrialists Kasturbhai Lalbhai aimed to develop an architectural sensitivity for building in India, yet remained deeply rooted in the principles of Bauhaus. Other latter architectural institutions within the country largely established by networks of developers, builders or politicians until the 1990s often grooved in architecture as a function of the market. Thus, the three tendencies that set the tone for architectural discourse in India have respectively remained embroiled in (a) bureaucratization and professionalization of the practice to match global delivery standards, (b) producing contextual responses (read “Indian” response) by principally applying European methods, or (c) attuning education to the intermediate emerging demands and forces of the market. Architectural academia in India has struggled thus, to have a voice of one’s own, free from geopolitical academic hegemony or the mere exigencies of demand and supply of the market.

Architectural theory in the South Asian region, wherein indigenous methods of spatial imagination were overlooked and restrained for around two centuries with the advent of colonial occupation, have largely followed narratives and imperatives initiated by the West. In the meagre presence of indigenous discourse on space, fresh architectural ideas were further asserted through the consumption and regurgitation of the Indian modern architects like Charles Correa, Achyut Kanvinde, B V Doshi or Anant Raje, who were themselves either trained or exposed closely in the western idiom. While they served as the key “institutions” for the curious minds within the field back home beyond the descriptive accounts of James Fergusson or Sir Bannister Fletcher, their voice too was only validated principally through the western academic spheres. Academic papers presented at conferences across the world have seemed to be imbricated in the larger world-views pre-framed by the economically powerful as a means to foray into new markets. Keywords like “vernacular”, “sustainable”, “critical regional” or “global”, around which most international conferences were designed, were subsumed as a derivative appendage for indigenous architectural discussion in the absence of design and architectural academies enabling discourses in space-making or spatial practice. In the conundrum of yet making sense of modernity, architectural academia in India too, now, seemed to be slipping in service of the new global order of economic and cultural hegemony. Studied and spoken primarily in English, the discourse of space in India hardly finds an expression in alternative native languages, regulating narrative structures for architectural thought, which could otherwise offer new orientation into spatial logics and inhabitation. Assimilation of modern thinking has thus ironically distanced us from spatial logics that could offer alternatives to contradiction-ridden landscapes we come to occupy today.

With the above preface, it is critical to consider the role of the academy and the academician – both, as a producer and consumer of the world we eventually come to inhabit. In this frame, the world is necessarily a construct, in other words, here we concern ourselves with the produced world and the terms that the academy sets for engagement with its environment. It is after all, the academy, that extends physical and intellectual infrastructure for the production of such world. Academic practice, which operates within such a framework is responsible for remaining relevant to its immediate and extended context. To be sure, academic practice is not simply the delivery of information within a classroom, rather it consists of a broader set of activities concerned with the production of knowledge and processes of administering, disseminating and furthering educational programmes. Therefore, it simply does not resolve into the creation of a bureaucratic institution, but relies on sustaining an active environment of discourse, debate and exchange of ideas. Academicians choreograph interaction of different disciplines, moderate the impact of thoughts on society, mediate relationships between objects of knowledge and potentially formulate critical and contextual ways of engagement with the emerging environment. Teaching constitutes only a small but significant part of an academician’s responsibility – one that is a space of rehearsal and / or performance of ideas. Rather it is expected that the academician will push the boundaries of the way one knows and thinks of the world through extended modes of contemplating, writing, theorizing and enabling experiments for new ideas to emerge. Moreso, academic environments must orchestrate cross pollination of ideas, meeting of interested minds through which an alternative world beyond the prosaic everyday, may be crafted. Do our institutions promise an enthusiastic environment for learners who may have the interest and potential for envisioning or pursuing such a reality rigorously?

First Questions Exhibition at Nehru Science Centre

In Process