Finding beauty in chaos

Photographer Rohit Chawla on the need for aesthetics in urban design

Updated - October 05, 2024 01:04 pm IST

Rohit Chawla and Manu Joseph at the Chennai edition of Imaginare.

Rohit Chawla and Manu Joseph at the Chennai edition of Imaginare. | Photo Credit: Akhila Easwaran

In a country of 1.4 billion people, where accommodating the population in its bustling cities has become an unwieldy task, the aesthetics of urban spaces are often overlooked. Speaking at the Chennai edition of Imaginare, a nationwide series of conversations with architects and designers, veteran photographer and artist Rohit Chawla and author Manu Joseph get candid about India’s urban sprawl.

In contrast to the country’s rich architectural history, newer construction leaves much to be desired, according to Joseph. He points to New Delhi’s Arun Jaitley Stadium as an example of “everything that can be wrong with a building”.

“It would be hard for anybody to deny how unattractive Indian urban spaces are,” he says. Chawla, of a similar bent of mind, adds, “It’s not just the Arun Jaitley Stadium. Where we were sitting [in Chepauk], we hardly had space for people to walk in front of us,” referring to a cricket match the two had attended earlier in the day.

Building a glass house

As a photographer who shoots with natural window light most of the time, Chawla underlines the practical aspect of using glass — which he believes is missing when used in high-rise buildings today.

Rohit Chawla’s house in Goa with frosted-glass skylights.

Rohit Chawla’s house in Goa with frosted-glass skylights. | Photo Credit: Saloni Puri

It takes us back to one of Chawla’s own early experiments with glass. The architecture enthusiast had trusted his instincts when designing his house in Goa, which features large glass windows and frosted-glass skylights. Back in 2003, he had wanted to use the sheer material everywhere in the space.

The house also features large glass windows.

The house also features large glass windows. | Photo Credit: Saloni Puri

Today, he says that the use of glass has increased, becoming more of a style statement. “Glass is difficult to maintain most of the time. It’s not particularly right for our climate,” he admits. But “when I added it as an architectural flourish, it worked because my house was surrounded by green and Goa’s rains”.

A ministry of aesthetics?

Architecture has to constantly evolve to address the practicalities of the times we are living in. But Chawla feels we “still haven’t figured out a design aesthetic in India”. He states: “I wish we had a Ministry of Aesthetics. There’s a ministry for water and forestry, but what about what we see [around us]?”

Illustrating his point, he describes how areas of Mumbai were covered up during the G20 Summit so that visiting foreign dignitaries would not see the ‘ugliness’. Despite being a global superpower, he says India has distinguished itself by having the most number of potholes. “Who needs to go to the moon? You can try landing in Goa,” he jokes, underlining how the monsoon routinely exposes our cities’ messy civil infrastructure. Most Indian cities are unwalkable, he states. Isn’t this a failure of Indian urban planning? He believes that the task of survival has overtaken aesthetics — and people are blind to the architectural mayhem around them, where “each building looks like it’s fighting with the other. There has been no such thing as urban planning, it’s about permissions and mandatory approvals now,” he says. “There is no common aesthetic that an overcrowded country like India needs. Maybe 10 years later, an elite government will wake up to it.”

Good design as an elite virtue

The disorder that he sees around him, however, is not visible in his photographs. Instead, there is a common narrative of minimalism — even when shooting urban spaces. He recalls the first picture he shot, of Jantar Mantar in 1982, when he was just 17 years old. “My visual graphic sense came from the excesses of Indian cities,” he says. “There is just too much around us, so the need was always to remove the unnecessary.”

While many architects are thinking in terms of aesthetics today, he feels good design is still considered an elitist virtue. And political parties don’t think it is important enough. “If our political figures believe that creating a new parliament or doing a Central Vista Project is enough in terms of civic infrastructure, nothing is going to change.”

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