India is today at the forefront of an architecture revolution that happened half a century ago. Our expectation of the future is intrinsically tied to archaic Western images of progress: the Golden Quadrilateral of highways, a signature bridge in Delhi, the sea-link in Mumbai, the new airport in Bengaluru, the BRT in Ahmedabad, the Trump Towers…
Does our own position become relevant only when models tested around the world are adapted at home? Over the past several decades, since globalisation, our levels of inferiority have increased ten-fold. In the urge to play catch-up to the West, and to China, the sense of always being behind, always second-rate, resounds in Indian ears with even louder clarity — the fear of being inadequate, and the constant pressure to conform to models, both outside India and outside the scope of possibility. When a country gets obsessed with imitating foreign ideas, unworkable and poorly implemented, it is time to look elsewhere.
Where then are we heading with large-scale public construction projects in our metros?
Delhi-based ARCOP group in consultation with Singapore’s AEDAS consortium has prepared a master plan and design for the new Pragati Maidan convention complex — a project that has already begun construction. The scale of the project is truly heroic: four million sq.ft. of construction that includes a convention centre with auditoria, multi-function halls, audio-visual and exhibition space, a massive underground car park and bus station, plus a vast assortment of kiosks, plazas and food courts.
Certainly the buildings proposed have all the elements that suggest their international stature. They are fitted with a vast average of glass that curves in bright modernistic ways. Their minimalist elevations are seductively employed to exclaim to all local residents that there is something very special on view. And yes, we are after all better than animals.
A bleak skyline
When the city’s most prominent architecture is public housing — block after undistinguished block of repeating flats, rising in spiritless wonder, peeling, stained and decaying — seeing shiny new projects on the skyline is entirely acceptable, even welcome. The presence of anything competent and complete is always a good sign. In the back of the Indian mind lives the urge to be seen as capable, and the sight of something that may be mistakenly viewed as first-rate can create an illusion of well-being, an important ideal in itself.
Excited by the mere prospect of newness, the project falls on the convenient phrases of the time: making green buildings, sustainable environments, and giving an Indian sense of identity. Promised as the largest and most technically advanced facility in the country, the plan to redevelop the 130-acre complex comes at a time when bureaucratic imagination is firmly set on the Shanghai and Dubai models of civic life, and impressing by sheer scale and size.
Sadly, the days of bigger and better are long gone. Half a century ago, the Soviet era established an unimaginably coarse yardstick on bigness, and the Americans countered with better technology and design. To continue on the same track today is altogether regressive. Making a structure Indian in character, air-conditioned, technically proficient and able to accommodate international conferences cannot be an achievement. Moreover, in a jamboree of such monumental scale, the subject on display or debate is liable to be lost in the plenitude.
What’s the purpose?
In India, to be lost in a crowd is both an indignity and an expectation. The harder task of the architect is to make every visitor feel wanted, and not be a loose speck among a multitude of other loose specks. The previous Pragati Maidan countered this by converting the place into a loose fairground. Its attractions very often were not the contents on display, but its convivial noise and friendly confusion. You ate at a snack bar, walked about aimlessly in the sun with a million others, stopped for a Coke at the cold drinks stand, even strolled through the exhibit of German machine tools, and went home. Appu Ghar, Pragati Maidan, India Gate were a convenient time-pass for bewildered families on the prowl for some form of public life.
To the general public, architecture is like a novel that stretches the pages but not the imagination; people use it unseeingly, as mere background. Concern for most buildings is parochial. People own and protect their house; monuments and historic structures are institutionally preserved by trusts and archaeological agencies. Everything else is up for grabs. Protective ownership values are bestowed not by a belief in the value of the building but by the mere application of bureaucratic regulation.
So it was hardly a surprise when architect Raj Rewal’s inventive Hall of Nations structure was torn down last year; the rallying cry to save it coming only from architects. The message it sent to a dishevelled and indifferent city was clear: architecture is no longer relevant as an eternal memorial art, but is a temporal defacement of the landscape — a product, like a branded burger, to be consumed quickly and discarded.
It will hardly be a surprise if one day Connaught Place is torn down, or India Gate sold to a builder. For this very reason, any new construction in India has to be directed to a greater, visibly different purpose.
The very nature of architectural practice needs a shift into untested territory, away from a simplistic reconciliation with stated requirements into a state of design inventiveness. Where would the new Pragati Maidan be were it to resort to altogether new solutions? What will the site be like in the absence of an international conference? How many days in the year would you expect a tally of 20,000 people to assemble in one place for a conference? How then do you sustain the presence of large empty structures in the centre of the city?
In light of the pressing need to modernise, upgrade and replace, two possible directions come to mind. First, and most obvious, is innovation along a Chinese route: Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium, conceived by artist Ai Weiwei, but embedded with new, untested technology from architects Herzog and de Meuron. Its conception of natural energy requirements, air currents and seasonal control, its approach to services, the movement of people, and material techniques were all made to an order that had not been tested earlier. However outrageous its design scheme, however overblown its budget, however uncertain its future prospect, the building was a staggering leap of ideas expressed in a singular work of architecture.
High up or underground
The second approach takes a radical view that falls outside conventional thinking altogether. To lift the building into the air, or place it deep into the earth; to establish unlikely combinations of conference with housing, a convention centre as a landscaped roofscape above a waste management plant; or as a slim tower that leaves 120 acres as a water garden. The possibilities are endless. In an urban situation of such stress where the city has begun to fall apart, with depleting water levels, high pollution, choked roads and a continual loss of green cover, piecemeal renewals of architectural faith with conventional structures make little sense.
In the cause of monumental architecture, India remains pygmy, buried under age-old problems. In a society timid and bound helplessly to regulations, the uncertainty of success should itself make us take enormous risks and place ourselves outside the current logic that strangulates life. Subversion is essential, because its value lies in the spirit to stimulate change and so generate a much-needed sense of optimism. Moreover, the radical view cannot simply be technological, but social and cultural, bringing a range of ideas, populations and economic strata into the mix. The application of diverse architectural solutions to propose dramatic change and upheaval in the city must be the only test of any future invention.
Any and all public construction proposed must extend its scope beyond the immediate site and requirements. Plans for construction should be accepted on the basis of the project’s contributions to innovative civic, environmental, artistic, or conservation causes. Only then should it be granted clearance.
A city museum in Jerusalem, for instance, places every new project within a simulation of the city itself, and local citizens are allowed to support or reject it within a given time-frame. An understanding of the city as a cohesive form with a common ownership allows everyone to participate in the architectural process. Unless similar safeguards and allegiances are also created in India, our cities will continue to fester in abject squalor — decaying and filthy, erupting like pus wounds that refuse to heal.
The writer is a Delhi-based architect and sculptor.
