Friday, December 4, 2015

Without the benefit of hindsight- In conversation with Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote and Kaiwan Mehta


First published in Domus India 46 December 2015
Reproduced with kind permission of the editor


Without the benefit of hindsight
In conversation with Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote and Kaiwan Mehta

Mustansir Dalvi


Looking back to the time architectural practices first began to proliferate in India, one sees that they always operated within an ecosystem of practice, academia and association. We can trace this to the 1930’s, when the Indian Institute of Architects (IIA) was set up, which in turn emerged from the alumni of the Bombay School of Art. Teachers at the school were the most prolific practitioners in the country, and students made the easy transition from learning, to apprenticeship, to setting up their own practices. Even patrons, largely non-state (in the penultimate decades before independence) aligned themselves with the architects in a collegial association. The Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects and their annual lectures became the mouthpieces of collective praxis, as the many presidential speeches show. Everyone knew what everyone else was doing, knowledge flowed centripetally.

In the years after independence, these bonds became looser as the nation-state became the chief patron. While private wealth and industry provided steady work for architects all over the country, the IIA still continued to remain the platform of discourse and dissemination- an internal professional rumination, largely distanced from changing politics and culture in the country, especially from the seventies onwards. While students of architecture did briefly take political stances during the Emergency, practice remained unaffected.

By the end of the eighties, with the rise of the patron as aspirant or speculator, and, a few years later with the effects of liberalization made flesh, the erstwhile associations started to crumble, the ecosystem became unstable, and in some ways unsustainable. Architectural practices became myriad and diffuse, working centrifugally, aligning into various smaller constellations. The influence of the IIA waned, while the Council of Architecture, mandated to look after the concerns of practice in the early seventies through an Act of Parliament, by and large, came to focus on monitoring architectural education that had, by the turn of the millennium, boomed with colleges springing up in all parts of the country.

Education too, dispersed in the wake of overarching Modernism’s eclipse and the acceptance of pluralism fuelled both by the rise of critical theoretical positions in architecture as well as a dilution of the rigor that functionalism once imposed on its practitioners. Critical discussions on Indian architecture have since been restricted to a few conferences and the odd polemic in architecture magazines (which also proliferated since the eighties, but have mainly been showpieces of architecture for the rich and famous). Books on Indian architecture, when concentrating on the contemporary are in the form of monographs, vanity publications or, when serious, about urban change.  Vistara, the exhibition, in 1984 was comprehensive, but an overview of Indian architecture. Three decades on, there has been no serious review of the state of the architectural profession in India.

That is what the exhibition ‘State of Architecture’ (SOA) seeks to redress. Scheduled to open at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai and other associated venues the SOA exhibition will be open to the public for around three months and will take a comprehensive look at our architectural present. The curators of this challenging endeavor are Rahul Mehrotra- architect, academic, author and researcher, professor at Harvard and one of the foremost architectural practitioners (RMA Architects) in the country; Ranjit Hoskote- cultural theorist, art critic, curator and author and Kaiwan Mehta- the editor of these very pages, of Domus India, also an author, academic and urban theorist. As the exhibition reaches its final stages of preparation, the curators had a free-wheeling conversation with Mustansir Dalvi about the exhibition, its objectives and the larger state of architecture; its practice and production, in retrospect and in prognosis; covering many issues from praxis to patronage, from theoretical positions to political stances.

 

DALVI:
Why is this the right time to take stock of the state of architecture in India today?

MEHROTRA:
For several important reasons:
The first is clearly to correct or compensate for the absolute silence in the discussion of architecture in the last decade or two. For good reason, our discussions and our focus have been on urban questions, or at least we have approached our discussion about architecture through the lens of the city.

Further, the architecture that has been celebrated in India since the liberalization of our economy has been the ‘architecture of indulgence’- weekend homes, restaurants, resorts and corporate offices; and, as an extension of this limited spectrum of what is celebrated, the discussion is focused on material, craft, and texture in an almost fetishistic manner. While this is productive in its own way – it removes the perception of the usefulness of architecture away from the public. All such programs that, while they are crucial crucibles for architectural innovation, touch a very small fragment of our population.

Lastly, in India, the State has more or less given up the responsibility of projecting an ‘idea of India’ through the built and physical environment as it had done in the post- independence era when several state capitals, government and educational campuses were built across the country. Today the major state-directed projects are highways, flyovers, airports, telecommunications networks and electricity grids which connect urban centers but don’t contribute to determining or guiding their physical structure. The State is now obsessed with a statistical architecture – GDP, etc. So the idea of this exhibition, through focusing on public architecture is to bring this issue into focus and question the State’s role as patron for architecture, or more broadly the role of the architect in contemporary India society.

DALVI:
Do you project the exhibition as a historical unfolding or a critical deconstruction of Indian architecture?

MEHROTRA:
The exhibition is interestingly both a historic unfolding as well as critical deconstruction - a productive hybrid, which we believe, results from multiple curatorial hands. 

MEHTA:
The exhibition should be imagined as a diagram of the curatorial team’s own experiences as practioners, critics and theorists - at one point it emphasizes memory and history, but on the other it also makes tangible and hopefully discernable the living chaos of the present. We are at the threshold of classifying and clarifying the chaos that maybe accorded to the present state of architectural manifestations and, rather than a rush to classification, it is important to understand what the presence of chaos or multiplicity means. Naturally this creates an ambiguity in terms of our roles and our instrumentality as designers and so this is a condition that’s worth interrogating productively. In that sense the exhibition shuffles between the protocols of established histories and establishing arguments in light of dramatic historical shifts and the need for newer criteria or lenses of analysis.

The architect as a professional figure will also be drawn out in the exhibition and the events that surround the show, as against only talking about architecture and buildings, per se. The architect as individual needs to be recovered, not as a hero or a socialite, but as a technocrat, a social being, a political entity, a professional contributor and a public intellectual.

DALVI:
Could you briefly take us through the three parts of the exhibition you have envisaged- ‘the State of the Profession’, ‘Practices and Processes’ and ‘Projections and Speculations’.

MEHROTRA:
The first section, ‘The State of the Profession’ will present data on the profession all the way from education, to the media’s representation of the profession to issues that face practioners today.

The second section is an historic overview sliced by three milestones: the first- Independence, the second- the Emergency and the third- economic liberalization. We believe these three moments had a fundamental bearings on the DNA of the profession and a clear sway in its agenda, from one of national identity construction to much more of a regional obsession starting in the 1990s.

The third section is focused on the present generation of practioners – broadly under 50 years of age. In this section we have curated approximately 80 projects that we think signal the contemporary issues as well as aspiration of society in India, but more importantly also register the talent of an emerging generation of practioners in India.

DALVI:
What is the more significant, in your opinion- the product or the praxis?

MEHROTRA:
Clearly, what is more critical is the praxis. The modes of engagement and the forms of patronage that support these different models of architectural practice are thus going to be privileged in this exhibition. The three parts we have envisaged will take the viewer through both a historical perspective as well as confront them with the present state of the profession, while in terms of the pure data what the present generations of practioners are producing.


DALVI:
Do think that the architect today has a more muted voice and lesser agency than in the last century? To extend this line of thought- is architecture in the county driven more by the patron than the architect?

MEHROTRA:
Architecture is largely being driven by patrons and the voice of the architect, at least as we see it, is muted – far too muted, sadly so. Since the liberalization of our economy, architects are pandering to Capital in unprecedented ways – creating what we could call the Architecture of Impatient Capital.

Capital on account of its impatience creates architecture that is often whimsical, most often vendor driven, for ease of speed of construction, with new roles emerging for architects who now interface with technology but also exchange and access information in a renewed relationship, sometimes productively and often in a subservient way. This then, by extension, is a critical issue for practioners – the ideological stance of most patrons, which is largely based on and invested in Capitalisms.

DALVI:
Twenty-five years after the processes of liberalization commenced in the country, the State has loosened its stranglehold on the production of infrastructure, preferring to outsource that which it once mandated to the entrepreneur/speculator, transforming, in the process, the consumer from occupant to aspirant.

MEHROTRA:
Interestingly, in today’s world no ideological stance can be singular or clear. Through the last 25 years we have the simultaneous experience of transitioning out of socialism and transitioning, simultaneously into capitalism (or some form of it). Thus there have been other patrons, trusts, faith-based organizations, NGOs and civil society more broadly that has also supported architecture and recognized its role in the well-being of society. We hope we can celebrate this other half of architectural production in India that is, equally or if not in greater measure, altering and making the ‘new landscape’.

If the developer is playing a role in the building of our architectural physical fabric, then we will have to see where and how we can engage with that set of players. Real-estate is as much about planning, policy, and culture as much as it is economic and finance - this reality has to be elaborated, researched and explained, while as a profession we have to negotiate these forces for the larger good of our built and natural environments.

Architectural education has a massive role to play in articulating and negotiating these conditions. Building appropriate capacity and training a generation in the various modes of engagement with practice, etc. But the media more generally must also make this more central to its imagination and agenda. We don’t see enough of this discussion in the mainstream media in these critical terms.

DALVI:
The last significant exhibition on architecture in India took place in 1986. Vistara was part of the Festival of India, and brought new paradigms and a new vocabulary into the architectural mainstream.

MEHTA:
Yes, no doubt Vistara is important - it is a landmark, it is iconic, and the more we view it with historical distance it emerges as a turning point. This event has been visited at least at 3 points in the pages of Domus India. The other exhibition designed and curated for the Festivals of India, curated by Raj Rewal in 1985 called ‘Architecture in India’ was also very important.

DALVI:
Do you think that Vistara has cast a long shadow (particularly on the SOA) or was that exhibition a product of its time?

MEHTA:
We actually think that SOA will compliment what the previous exhibition did in a productive way by actually narrowing the lens to the time since independence where these exhibitions more or less stopped. In fact, Vistara was also trying deal with the confusions of its time, or dealing with the predictions of confusion in the immediate decades to come- it established concepts and narratives as a way of talking about architecture for India. Having recently revisited some archival photographs of the exhibition, it is also clear that Vistara was a manifestation of anxieties and ideas that many architects were concerned with- in some way a community of architects contributed to the exhibition, in spirit. The exhibition was possibly a manifestation of many collectively discussed issues.

MEHROTRA:
Vistara was very much an exhibition of its time. One could say it was the last significant event in the history of architectural discourse in India that attempted, in an extremely successful way, to construct a meta-narrative about and Architecture for India, a pan-Indian identity construction. The State of architecture (SOA) is about Architecture in India not for India as an instrument of national identity construction. SOA, we believe will signal this shift and thus it consciously takes the moment of nation statehood as a starting point but unfolds its narrative to show how these deconstructs over the last few decades.

Of significance is also the fact that Vistara was a state-sponsored show as part of the Government of India’s exhibition for the Festivals of India held between 1983 and 1986.This was a nation attempting to reclaim its glory and traditions after the devastation of its image through the period of the Emergency. These exhibitions intended to show case the deep traditions of India to the world outside and presented a narrative of India’s rich architectural traditions. SOA on the other hand is clearly about internal introspection and reflection. It is a critical stocktaking of the role of the architect and architecture in India from, in a sense, within the profession. We hope it will be the first of a series of events over the next few years to interrogate the State of Architecture and the profession in India.

DALVI:
What is the state of architecture in India today? Does the exhibition offer us tools by which we can appreciate or assess contemporary Indian architecture?

MEHTA:
The precise problem is that architecture is floating in murky waters, that is indeed its 'state'- fluid and ambiguous!

From a point in the early twentieth century when architects fought to stand apart from engineers, and projected themselves as designers and thinkers, participating in the cultural landscape of society, today architecture has slipped into modes of luxury or vanity commodity - pretty houses and rich interiors! Today architects are introduced as lifestyle-producers - handmaidens to a demand for style and fancy living! This condition was the urge behind setting up tents whenever and wherever possible to discuss architecture. Lack of valuable and critical discussions on architecture and the simultaneous pressure on urban development resulted in discussing architecture as an aspect of urban studies or regional/rural studies (often as the counter-story) to perhaps symbolically embrace the social sciences and their humanizing effects.

But then, what does it mean to bring architecture back into focus - and how would we study this object-space which it is, as well as occupies? In framing programming at Arbour: Research Initiatives in Architecture or the editorial intentions within Domus India, one struggled on experiments to develop the tools and system of understanding, analyzing, and discussing architecture, and whenever necessary, to understand architecture in India!

DALVI:
Do these struggles imply that we may be chronologically too close to making useful readings?

MEHTA:
It is now important that we stand within today and talk about today!

We have to discuss our times as our experiences of political realities in everyday life - and here we draw in architecture, as one of the primary modes in which everyday life is lived and experienced. The production and consumption of architecture, as function or symbol, it is an everyday lived reality. The task is then to produce tools that will understand architecture as a material reality as much as it is a cultural topography. So in fact to ask questions of 'today' while we occupy 'today' - may indeed be the important position to adopt - to asses, and make useful readings - and make architecture realize what it is, what it has come to be, what it could potentially be, what it has missed or lost, and where can it (maybe) recover!

MEHROTRA:
Here is a counter question to your question – how do we even decide when is a good time?

We don’t believe any time is right but different distances from the present give you different readings. This is also why we have consciously constructed a curatorial team that brings different pulses to our readings – one of an art critic, architectural critic as well as a practioner. We bring different lenses to view the trajectory of architecture in India and our perspectives will offer different readings of time and distance. Each of these lenses is inherently better equipped for different distances!

Besides this multiplicity of curatorial lenses, we believe the structure of the exhibition move from an objectivity of presentation in the first section to a subjectivities reading or curatorial reading in the third section. The second section is a bridge from where we can look at the past with some distance.

As a generation passes it becomes in some ways easier to read the immediate past, while in other ways harder because even for the immediate past we do not have an adequate culture to archive, capture and reflect on the production of architecture. So the chronological proximity can be used in both ways- to construct robust links and a sense of the continuity with the past but also to interrogate it with the ambiguity that the proximity to reality allows us.

The exhibition will hopefully invite a discussion through provocative questions that will try to clarify the ambiguity that naturally fogs our reading of the contemporary and immediate past. The many events we are organizing around the exhibition are as critical as the exhibition itself – in fact they are intended to deconstruct the artifact of the exhibition so that more nuanced readings emerge for the profession as a whole!

DALVI:
What is the position of contemporary Indian architecture in the larger discourse of nation building? In the first few decades after independence there seemed to be a synchronicity between the aims of the architects and that of the fledgling nation state. Even private patronage seemed to follow a similar mindset. Now in the liberalized present, there seems to be a greater priority on the rights of individuals rather than on collective responsibility especially in the urban environment. How do you assess this transition?

HOSKOTE:
This transition in the nature and role of architecture in India clearly reflects the arc of political change in the country, from the primacy of the State as engine of social, economic and cultural transformation in the early decades after Independence to the gradual withdrawal of the State from this dirigiste position and the emergence of private capital as the source and reference point for the formation of social values, the direction of economic policy and the texture of cultural production.

In the earlier phase, architecture was clearly aligned with the utopian, nation-building ambitions of the postcolonial State, whether the patron was the State or private enterprise. In the current phase, architecture is equally clearly aligned with the aspirations of an emergent class of financiers, speculators and investors, with the State often following this cue in any projects it commissions.

The premise of the earlier phase was the Leviathan-like delegation of decision-making by individuals and communities to the postcolonial State, which would guarantee the greater good. The premise of the current phase is the contrarian equation of individual liberty with private property, and thus with the individual quest for personal happiness, with the greater good falling by the wayside.

MEHROTRA:
There is a difference in the geographies of the location of the new patronage that has emerged. There is an explosive growth of building in the southern states of India. The traditions and cultures of building in these new geographies is very different from the contemporary building culture that had formed in what has been referred to as ' the spine of architectural awareness' stretching from Chandigarh to Goa via Delhi, Ahmedabad and Mumbai, as well as Pondicherry which had, for other reasons, a robust architecture culture developing there even before independence. Interestingly this new form of patronage comes in a post-socialist era where the individual is at the center of the decision-making through an empowerment that is the result of capital accumulation. So this is a new form of patronage but also coming out of specific cultural and physical geographies.

DALVI:
What role does the globalized/liberalized economy play in shaping the localized/socialized urban sphere?

HOSKOTE:
The globalized economy operates through a complex circulation of global goods, services and imaginaries that are threaded through a local set of conditions: the relationship between these is parsed through a variety of modes including translation, mistranslation, reflection and refraction. The urban sphere that is thus produced is characterized by inchoate and often volatile aspirations, a pursuit of images that seem always out of reach, and also a culture that emphasizes the primacy of privatism rather than solidarities of any kind.

MEHTA: 
The last two or three decades have been important times and a period that marks a turning point in not only just the history and politics of India, but the world as well. The fall of the Berlin Wall, demolition of Babri Masjid in India, 9/11 in New York, the liberalization of economic policies in India and the shift from manufacturing to service industry. These decades have also been characterized by shifts in our cultural imaginations, aesthetic decisions, and political choices as is evident in the material world we produce and occupy.

There some wonderful trends within the profession that are becoming evident, a new set of architectural practices have emerged,  and have established a critical body of work that can be evaluated for their different ideas and theoretical perspectives. At the same time, today change occurs at an escalated pace- and to understand the present and future trajectories for the profession we need to build conversations that can facilitate this process.  A nuanced, critical, robust and rigorous discourse within the academy of architecture education and more importantly the profession - we sincerely hope that SOA will be a contribution to this broader aspiration.

DALVI:
Can you take a brief overview on the quality of architectural writing today?

MEHTA:
Writing on architecture is in an abysmal state! But this statement does not take us far. Lack of writing indicates our lack of critical interest in architecture as a professional community, as a culture (national or otherwise).

To theorize a subject for a field is to indeed appreciate its value and existence beyond its mere need-to-be; and the discussions on architecture have happily slipped into rhetorics of regionalism or climate, hate-glass or love-brick and stone, outdated notes on power and architecture - in fact, they seem to be living in a time-warp! The world changed drastically and rapidly in the 1990s - and we could not as an architectural profession keep pace with it - unable to understand what had hit us. Rather than developing newer languages and idioms, and tools to asses and read the new architectural turns, we often resorted to a denial of the shape of things, to a rhetoric of rejection, and misplaced nostalgia.

Politics has become ever more complex, and architects from once being agents of social and aesthetic revolutions, now maintain a technocratic attitude, where you fine-tune your skills, but avoid addressing the very environment (social and cultural) that you ironically depend on for your daily bread and butter! Until we address the conditions of our reality, writing will not be effective or incisive - because the drive to write, argue, shape/unshape will be missing! To write is to create a world that furthers the meaning and role of architecture in a society. It should not be imagined as a skill-task of decoding some hidden meaning in an existing building; it is not supplementary to architecture, or to deliver formulas for a 'better' design - but to enlarge the existing space and terrain of architecture productively.

DALVI:
Are there contemporary texts that can potentially become canonical in the future? Does the SOA exhibition reflect upon architecture as a discourse?

MEHTA:
I am not sure if there are particular iconic essays - if we decide to identify some, I am sure we will find them - but I would prefer to say there is a good enough cluster of texts. One has also in the Domus experience got more interested in exploring the forms of interviews and discussions, parallel to the essay format - as that leads to a nurturing of many voices and many experiences - the practitioner and the theorist both are heard.

The SOA exhibition is an attempt to generate/develop the terrain and landscape to engage with architecture - to produce accounts in a way, even at the cost of repeating descriptions, to address what exists, to generate the network of dots, a set of thought-images which will prepare us for a thesis. The final thesis is the excuse to develop this density of thoughts - finely shaped clusters that will help us understand fragments that shape a history.

MEHROTRA:
Yes, of course, some of the contemporary texts on architecture have the potential to become canonical text. These texts capture the conflicts and conditions of an era today of amazing transformation and reflections of the emergent condition will become the framework for any theoretical discourse in the future. Theory, after all, emanates from insightful reflection of the conditions on the ground.

I think the quality of writing that we see today is extremely good but there is just not enough of it! There is such a dearth of writing that the few pieces being produced today will be precious records of the contemporary condition. Contemporary writing also represent the conflicts and struggles of the first couple of generations of architects in post-colonial India – which itself holds the potential to be a representation of a wider global churning. SOA will capture the state of writing and the broader discourse on architecture. In fact this is one of the core agendas of the show and its related events.

DALVI:
Is the architecture of India today reconciled with its many pasts? As an ideological position, the early Modernists could willfully reject history in the course of charting architectural futures. However, considering that a lot of buildings are part of brownfield developments, often in the heart of some of our ageing cities, what is the possible positions contemporary architecture should take about precedents and contexts?

MEHTA:
Both positions are a problem - excessive sensitivity to a past or a denial/rejection of it - and that somewhere is our situation today, to be oscillating between two positions. Some of the interpretations of the past have also been problematic - where often past is reduced to a monolithic imagination or simply a set of images, to be cut-and-pasted. To the credit of many architects - some in the generation that established studios in the 1970s as well as the younger ones establishing studios between 1980-1990s there has been an expression of this dilemma - where do I address the present time and its own material reality, while also caring about a history and heritage we grow up to respect; at times this has been a dilemma and it has been evident in the architecture, at times it is purposeful expression of that struggle.

The need is to struggle in these times and see what languages of architecture will work for us today, and suit or challenge our political and functional existences. Some of the younger practices are indeed doing that - they may not be able to express that all points in time - but they are intuitively struggling with the present.

There is also the shameless activity of building - which is more the real-estate end of architecture - where you binge on building and construction, where architecture is used to suit greed and some promoted idea of aspirations. Architecture in this realm can only be countered when some well-meaning and ethically-sound architects will enter this sphere of real-estate architecture, and try to push the boundaries from within these specific practices. On the other hand, one will have to work on the idea of public awareness regarding architecture. There is no discussion on architecture in non-professional forums, or the popular media; this is a big lacunae! Architecture is the most public of all arts - it sits in your face - it has a strong public presence in everyday living space - but there is no discussion on architecture in the public sphere.

DALVI:
Is Indian architecture today political? Has it ever been political? Does this exhibition have an ideological standpoint?

HOSKOTE:
Indian architecture certainly articulated a politics of rupture and compelling forward movement in its heroic Modernist phase, when it presented itself as a force that would clear away the residues of tradition and the compromises of the colonial period, and would, both literally and figuratively, build a future for the nation-state that had no precedent in what went before. Even when they used motifs and devices, or redeployed typologies from the legacies of previous times, Habib Rahman, Achyut Kanvinde B V Doshi, Charles Correa and Raj Rewal embodied this spirit in their early work. And when some members of this generation circled back to the retrieval of the embedded wisdom of regional building, architectural and visionary lineages, as they did during the 1980s, that was a political gesture as well– a gesture articulating a politics of critical retrieval.

The State of Architecture exhibition does not proceed from an emphatic ideological premise, but it does bear witness to some of these shifts and transitions. It also, in its choice of contemporary practices and projects, prefers to focus on work that is socially oriented, is informed by the relationship between architecture and other discourses such as conservation and ecological awareness, and in other ways explores manifestations beyond what is possible in a developer-driven domain.

MEHTA:
This is indeed a tricky subject- on the face of it there clearly is a lack of political engagement that contemporary architecture has today. Having said that, in many architectural projects today, one can feel the struggle some architects are going through with this divorce of form, design, and politics.

What we need is not to mourn this divorce but to try and figure out what is the current engagement that form and design have with everyday life- politics and culture. There are many formulaic references established about people and public life, living and working, and often architects are simply reusing them again and again. These are no more than rhetoric. However in some cases there are new adjustments being made, to deal with the political and cultural negotiations of life in India now. It is probably more writing, more studies that will make this new forms of anxiety clear and understandable.

DALVI:
Is it still relevant to believe, as the Modernists once did, that good architecture will inevitably lead to good society?

HOSKOTE:
All the Modernists who believed that good architecture– or noble art– would inevitably lead to a good society have come to grief.

Mondrian believed that his rectilinear, flattened paintings offered cues to the spiritual refinement of life; mass culture has reduced them to shower curtains. Le Corbusier believed that his ideal designs would enable the citizens of tomorrow to lead lives of significance; his work was flawed from the beginning by his desire to subjugate all individual will and desire to the absolutism of the plan. There is no necessary connection between good architecture and a good society– at best, the former can be an image of the latter; it can gesture towards the latter. But the best architecture can be distorted by elites bent on exacerbating the asymmetries in society.





'The State of Architecture: Practices & Processes in India' exhibition 
opens at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai from 6 January - 20 March 2016.

The exhibition will present the nature of contemporary architecture in India within a larger historical overview since Independence. It will not only map emerging practices but also discuss the aspirations they represent and stimulate a conversation on architecture among the architectural fraternity, patrons and public at large. Embodying a spectrum of positions that characterize architectural production in India, the content is intended to be provocative and make explicit the multiple, and often simultaneously valid, streams of architectural thought and engagement that truly represents the pluralism of India.

Saturday, July 4, 2015

The Agency of Architecture: In Conversation with Rahul Mehrotra

Rahul Mehrotra and Friend
credit: RMA Architects
This conversation was first published in 
Tekton: A Journal of Architecture, Urban Design & Planning; 
Volume 1, Issue 1, September 2014; pp. 106 - 119

Published with kind permission from Tekton.
www.tekton.mes.ac.in
All images published with kind permission from Rahul Mehrotra and RMA.
www.RMAarchitects.com


The Agency of Architecture:
In Conversation with Rahul Mehrotra

by
Mustansir Dalvi

It is inevitable that any interview with Rahul Mehrotra is going to be multi-disciplinary in nature. In his person and in his practice Mehrotra straddles several spheres with ease- architecture, planning, urbanism, history, conservation, research, social concerns, socio-urban activism, writing and pedagogy, all this with a critical eye on the present. He has been an initiator of the architectural conservation movement in Mumbai that set an example for the rest of India and (with Sharada Dwivedi) the primary narrator of the history of Mumbai. In his work, Mehrotra explores beyond the obvious, ‘beyond binaries’, as he puts it, making each project a transformative one for the users and the immediate physical context. He has been teaching full-time for the past decade and his practice and research come together and are forwarded by his pedagogical interests. This conversation covers many of his interests and becomes a dialogue of ideas and possibilities.


DALVI
In your architectural projects at RMA, you have frequently gone beyond the conventional limits of site, even immediate context. You have tried to incorporate the intangible, addressed socio-cultural immediacies, and sought new significance, whether in projects like Hathigaon in Jaipur, the more globalized offices for corporate houses or even single-family dwellings.

MEHROTRA
For me understanding the ‘context of the context’ is the starting point. I think the physical excavations of a site are the more obvious parameters to extricate – climate, geology, materials availability, local craft and building practices etc. The more challenging, but perhaps far more nourishing excavation is making the relationships between this obvious set of excavations from the site with the more intangible, the deeper histories, implicit cultures, the broader contemporary flows etc.

Kala Ghoda Art District
Constructing new significance for historic public spaces - the evolving Kala Ghoda art district.
credit: RMA Architects
DALVI
Could you tell describe the processes that allow you to, as you say 'localize the global and globalize the local'? How do these impact design?

MEHROTRA
This establishing of the ‘context of the context’ allows one to go beyond simplistic binaries and, sort of, invert categories in an exciting way. For me the questions of significance, identity etc. are not found categories – these have to be constructed and the only way one can do that as a designer is to situate the site and its reading within the larger, ever evolving context. In this same way the global and local as a binary is not productive and the challenge then is how we invert them, because by localizing the global you get these flows to be more invested in the local. Inversely, the local as a caricature of itself is less useful in comparison to when the local resonates globally or is at least networked globally. Thus for me the exercise of writing, research and teaching in that sense are completely part of the practice as they become the forum for this kind of excavation and research which becomes the basis for practice.

SPARC Public Toilet Prototype
A prototype for public toilets in Mumbai slums - project for SPARC and SDI.
credit: RMA Architects
DALVI
Can you elaborate on the idea of ‘inverting categories’?

MEHROTRA
At the urban level, an example of this inverting of categories to blur binaries is the case of the Kala Ghoda Art district. Situated within a historic district this zone was never an art district. If one had approached the problem using the narrative of the culture that created this environment – such as the canons that determine conservation practise in the UK – we would have frozen this space in time – probably written up its significance and been rather dogmatic about what we should allow there or not. However, when the custodians of an environment are another culture – we have to find other ways of engaging with this process – especially in the post colonial situation of Mumbai. 

By constructing a new significance of the Kala Ghoda are as an Art District allowed the historic and contemporary to blur. The symbolic and ideological significance of the space was drained in a sense to allow the occupation of new use– ones that ultimate drove the process of conservation. In this condition the responsibilities that rest on the architect are even greater as they have to walk the thin line between constructing a new significance and keeping the illusion of the historic built form intact!

Another example is the Slum Dwellers international (SDI) where its very local experience through its international networks resonates globally in terms of lessons, approaches and attitudes emanating out of something that is such a specific condition - life in a Mumbai slum! One could have fetishized and caricatured the local as it is seen as specific, but the moment it is ‘globalized’, in this case through a network, its resonance amplifies in productive ways.


DALVI
The millennium is now almost a decade and a half old now. Do you see trends/tropes in Indian architecture that will have a long-term impact on design, beyond quotidian practice?

MEHROTRA
The kind of architecture we are seeing perpetuated by an infusion of footloose capital is resulting a hardening of the disparities that exist in our society. The built form manifestations of these inequities actually create deadly polarities. Perhaps these inequities have always existed but were less evident in the past. Sometimes the just the illusion of equity is perhaps more productive in the long run in terms of how different parts of society slip into each other’s domains in space. But when architecture begins to play a role in dissuading and perhaps even preventing that blur, that transgression– I think we are setting ourselves up for a highly polarized society.

It is a condition where architecture becomes the instrument to create forms of exclusiveness. In this condition, as architects we have to be mindful of how we create expressions of form and spatial arrangements that don’t get co-opted in a process that is exclusionary. If we have to maintain our relevance to society as practitioners we have no choice but to press architecture to the service of society in more rigorous ways. I think questions of inequity and the role of architecture: place making and dealing with orchestrations of the built environment more generally will have to once again become the focus of both the teaching and practice of architecture.


DALVI
Are you optimistic about our architectural futures, or has 'impatient capital' overtaken us completely?

MEHROTRA
The architecture of Impatient Capital is brittle – its fault lines are already becoming evident – its obvious detachment from place and its unsustainable consumption or resources. Surely as human being we are more intelligent that to be seduced by this paradigm.

I think the greatest role architecture can play in the coming decades in India is to resist strategically the remaking of our cities and built environments in a singular image (like China has done). Instead I think architecture will and should remind us in our daily lives about the richness in India of the pluralistic society we live in.


DALVI
We seem to have opted for this singularity ourselves, as in this current election. Overwhelmingly, or so it seems, those aspiring impatiently for capital, or those impatiently wishing to  express themselves through their capital have elected a government that will attempt to re-jig Indian plurality into a single image.

MEHROTRA
Thank you for this– an incredibly important as well as complicated question!

Whether we have opted for a singularity or not only time will tell. In our system even a majority like this in terms of seats in parliament does not indicate a popular vote of more that 35 or 40%. But yes, it does indicate a singularity of power and its deployment. How this power will be manifest in the built environment we can only speculate about for now. Clearly the rhetoric of the elections has caught the imagination of the vast portion of the country – where aspirations of stability and an increased role of the state in delivering services is clearly what created such a majority for the new government. I think this is more pointedly driven by middle class aspirations for more stable and predictable services – all the way from education and healthcare to mobility and employment.

Thus as a response to this, I believe in this case, with a BJP majority, it will be the deployment of centralized forms of infrastructure- which will support the creation of these crucial services that people aspire for in their daily lives. Completion of ongoing highway projects, perhaps railways and other modes of communications, hospitals, Universities etc. It will be the Chinese model of centralized power structures and the infrastructure that supports that kind of operation.

The effects of this will be two fold. Firstly, the destruction of many existing urban fabrics and also the natural landscape. This will perhaps make cities efficient in terms of mobility and basic infrastructure like water and sanitation but will create many social disruptions. The second will be through the new networks that will open up the vast hinterlands of our many urban centres in the form of small towns growing rapidly and new towns which will be fuelled by the rampant liberation of capita deployment through real estate development in the these fragile locations. This sort of development model can be transformational for a majority of the country’s population but has some obvious disruptive tendencies – the trade-offs and the contestations that involve these trade-offs is what will characterize our politics in this coming decade.


DALVI
Do you think architecture has a role of resistance in this current dispensation? How should it function?

MEHROTRA
Naturally, the question for us is- what is the role of architecture in resisting or facilitating this process? It is here that the role of education becomes critical. Erasing the plurality of our landscape can be resisted at many levels – local and national. So more than ever before we are going to need the profession to simultaneous play many roles: of practitioners, of well organized large scale practitioners, of activists, of community organizers, of inter-disciplinary facilitators, etc. Pluralism can only be reinforced through architecture by encouraging multiple modes of the practices of architecture through a spectrum of scales across the nation. The several hundreds of small town across in India, for example, don't have architects even living and working there– if at all we have any influence currently on these places, it is through professionals in our megacities – this will have to change if architecture has to have any agency as an instrument to resist the rampant remaking of our cities in one image.


DALVI
You have lived, researched and practiced out of Mumbai for several decades now. You continue to be Mumbai's foremost architectural and urban chronicler. In our complex and complicated present, is it possible to effectively preserve its urban integrity, and to function as a cultural custodian of our city?

MEHROTRA
It is. I think the challenge is to not worry about the parts of the city but focus on how one facilitates connections between the parts – makes the adjacencies of disparities and of plurality to cohesively coexist. It is this in between spaces of connections that will lie the most fecund possibilities and potential.

These spaces also become the site of the construction of new cultures and this where the role of architecture and that of the construction of new cultures, new significances in our society and finally identity is formed.

The spaces that I am alluding to more particularly in Mumbai are the post-industrial landscapes, the public spaces that we are reclaiming and safeguarding (all the way from the green spaces in the city and waterfronts to the spaces around our railway stations and public institutions) and more importantly in the interstitial spaces that approximately half our populations resides.

Hathi gian- Elephants and keepers
Image from Hathigaon - Project for Elephants their Keepers. View showing a mahout arriving home to his family after a day of work with the elephant.
credit: Rahul Mehrotra
DALVI
Where is the place and relevance of memory in the post-industrial city?

MEHROTRA
It is scattered and fractured, but it does exist. The form and space takes in this post-industrial condition in Mumbai is at two levels. One where the fracture becomes more acute – work and living gets situated in multiple locations and this is not a neat category. Memory takes on a more temporal form in this condition– not necessarily through architecture only. That’s why I believe festivals have now an amplified role in the life and identity formation process of the city of Mumbai. The second (and probably polar opposite) is the  creation of exclusive gated communities in the city, sometimes in the form of extreme imaginations that have been facilitated by the cluster development idea and at others just as vertical gated communities in the heart of poorer neighbourhoods. In both cases, it is about the occupation of interstitial space within the city, not at the perimeter.

Hathigaon- Home
Image from Hathigaon - Project for Elephants their Keepers. The intimate relationship of the elephant and mahout drives the scale and layout of each home. One of the many considerations to balance was to accommodate the elephant's requirements, while providing a safe environment for children.
credit: Rajesh Vora
DALVI
Your current research is focused on evolving a theoretical framework for designing in conditions of informal growth. In a city like Mumbai, which seems to be slipping into a 'post-planning' phase, what strategies emerge to deal with such conditions?

MEHROTRA
I believe the State cannot absolve itself the responsibility of planning. Planning in fact is intrinsically a state subject. Having said that the question is how can state reengage and at what scales? Naturally the obvious scale for the state’s involvement would need to be infrastructure and facilitating the governance structure that make possible urban form at local levels.

However the state’s imagination about what the city should be limits any effective intervention at any scale. Essentially our narratives about the city set up non-productive binaries – the rich and poor or formal and informal city etc. These force us as designers to ally with one or the other imagination. I think for design to be effective it must consciously dissolve these binaries and I believe design can play a crucial role in doing this.

Ganesh Immersion in Mumbai
Architecture is not the ‘spectacle’ of the city nor does it even comprise the single dominant image of the city. In contrast, festivals such as Ganesh Chathurthi shown here have emerged as the spectacles of the Kinetic City.
credit: Rahul Mehrotra
DALVI
Has your research given fresh directions to address issues of inclusivity, and to redress the polarization that is the consequence of the state outsourcing those processes that we traditionally associated with welfare or socialist governance?

MEHROTRA
My current research looks at this condition of dissolving or blurring these binaries and I describe the current condition of urbanism in India as the Kinetic City. This Kinetic City framework has the potential to allow a better understanding of the blurred lines of contemporary urbanism and the changing roles of people and spaces in urban society.

In most Indian cities, the increasing concentrations of global flows have exacerbated the inequalities and spatial divisions of social classes. In this context, an architecture or urbanism of equality in an increasingly inequitable economic condition requires looking deeper to find a wide range of places to acknowledge and commemorate the cultures and environments of those excluded from the spaces of global flows. These don’t necessarily lie in the formal production of architecture, but often challenge it.

Here the idea of a city is an elastic urban condition, not a grand vision, but a grand adjustment. The Kinetic City obviously cannot be seen as a design tool rather a demand that conceptions of urbanism create and facilitate environments that are versatile and flexible, robust and ambiguous enough to allow this kinetic quality of the city to flourish. Architecture and design more generally play a massive role in how this happens.

In fact we should not use the word ‘inclusive city’ – what we should ask is how through design we can make our cities less exclusive or excluding of people and especially the poor. I am hoping to capture and articulate these observations and approaches in a way that it might useful for the next generation to intervene in these spaces more effectively.

Inequalities in Mumbai
As can be seen in Mumbai, architecture and urban design can heighten inequalities that exist in society.
credit: Rahul Mehrotra

DALVI
The state seems to abhor elasticity, and, as you say, is comfortable within binaries. Will architects therefore have to go beyond their current limitations as interveners in the urban landscape, and establish new roles for themselves?

MEHROTRA
Absolutely! 
Architects will have to find new modes of engaging with influencing the built environment. Naturally this will depend on if architects are motivated to change the polarization that might occur with the state perpetuating the binaries. It will depend on how idealistic we want to be. In a boom economy architects can also get very comfortable with lots of easy projects and a general affluence which is seductive. So as a community we have to construct the correct narratives that will keep us engaged, responsible and connected to the realities that will evolve around us. I believe society invests in us to safeguard and imagine the best spatial possibilities for a society to exist and thrive in. So it is contingent, if we are concerned about our relevance, to not forget this essential role we play in society.


DALVI
Could you give us a brief history of your career as an academic? What are your main concerns in architectural pedagogy today?

MEHROTRA
I entered academics rather accidentally through a chance meeting with the Dean of the University of Michigan who offered me the opportunity to come teach for a term. I loved it! Essentially could not believe I had not done this before and I subsequently returned a couple of years later to the University of Michigan and one thing led to the other and brought me to my current position.

In retrospective my 11 years of teaching have been the most satisfying moments in my career as an architect. In some ways I am glad I went into the academy after a good 15 years of practice as this besides giving me some experience to talk from also allowed me to reflect on a body of work. And in fact this has been the single most valuable thing for me – that is reflect on my practice as I teach. As a teacher you have to make your talk walk.

But more critically, coming from India after 15 years of practice also gave me a different perspective on pedagogy. Coming from a highly pluralistic conditions where many cultures, ways of doing things and many times exist simultaneously, made me think critically about the simultaneous validity of this difference. The way this extended itself into my approach to teaching was to think about different models of engagement and practice and how one might actually build that into a curriculum. Of course this is a complicated and an ongoing project and I do hope I can share this when it’s evolved a little more.


DALVI
How do you approach the teaching of architecture and urban design in India, as opposed to teaching abroad, as in the Harvard Graduate School of Design?

MEHROTRA
In today’s world I think we see similar challenges whether it’s in India or the USA. In fact in India, you see the same conditions in extreme form and thus testing these Ideas in India would actually create better or at least more extreme conditions. I believe theory comes from action on the ground and it is in places like India, China, Latin America and Africa that the action is today.



credit: RMA Architects
RAHUL MEHROTRA
Rahul Mehrotra is a practising architect and educator. He works in Mumbai and teaches at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, where he is Professor of Urban Design and Planning, and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design as well as a member of the steering committee of Harvard’s South Asia Initiative.

His practice, RMA Architects (www.RMAarchitects.com), founded in 1990, has executed a range of projects across India. These diverse projects have engaged many issues, multiple constituencies and varying scales, from interior design and architecture to urban design, conservation and planning. As Trustee of the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI), and Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research (PUKAR) both based in Mumbai, Mehrotra continues to be actively involved as an activist in the civic and urban affairs of the city.

Mehrotra has written and lectured extensively on architecture, conservation and urban planning. He has written, co-authored and edited a vast repertoire of books on Mumbai, its urban history, its historic buildings, public spaces and planning processes.

He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture and currently serves on the governing boards of the London School of Economics Cities Programme and the Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS).