The category of the Utopian, then, besides its usual and justly depreciatory meaning, possesses this other meaning – which, far from being necessarily abstract and turned away from the world, is on the contrary centrally preoccupied with the world: that of going beyond the natural march of events. Ernst Bloch, “The Principle of Hope”
Le Corbusier and Kahn are still the heroes in most Indian Architecture schools. The exact reason of why this is – whether it is because it offers the best ideological framework to approach the problems of building in India, or an ideology that owes to professors who were educated in earlier times, and still believe in a strange mix of ‘Gandhian’ morality and modernist ‘honesty’ - has evaded me. As for me, looking back, it seems that their architecture (i.e. modernism), misguided as it might have been, offered a sense of order, an ideological certainty that arose from a positivist view that the world could be changed and remade. In essence, modernism, (or at least the Indian version) offered a promise that it is possible to find some underlying rational structure - physical or metaphysical - that if discovered could magically tame the chaos that is the Indian city. Chaos, in that sense was that unavoidable part of Indian life that Architecture offered a refuge against, at least for me.
So when I applied to Prof. Kulbhushan Jain at the School of Architecture at CEPT, Ahmadabad for an internship, it was among other things to live in the city where the iconic buildings of modern architecture were located – buildings by Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, B.V. Doshi, Achyut Kanvinde and other smaller deities who still practice and teach at Ahmadabad. Oddly enough, and perfectly unexpectedly I was sent with a small team to the desert state of Rajasthan, to document Amber Palace, a UNESCO world heritage site situated in a small town close to the city of Jaipur. For a teenager from Kerala – a South Indian state that is far from paradise, but still has the highest health and human development indices in India – seeing abject poverty, street urchins and in general the average Indian’s life was as much of a shock as it would be for a Western tourist. However these things gradually became part of life, and living among ruins, walking up the winding streets that came down from the palace/fort one became sensitized to the patterns of life in that small town. A life that centered around tourism, the ‘dhaba’ (local restaurant), the wine shop, and the theatre which accommodated an infinite number of people on the floor. And one appreciated the positive effects of globalization – the young men we made friends were with were part insurance agents, part tourist guides and parts lots of other things.
I did indeed go back to Ahmadabad, and did hang around for long hours in the Millowner’s Building, Indian Institute of Management, the school of architecture and many exquisite historic buildings and was moved by many of those experiences. Throughout that time, I attended lectures and presentations of famous architects and scholars, but I would say that the seed of doubt about the certainty of change through architectural design had been planted. People indeed seemed to make everything work – they seemed to be able to adapt to any space and modify any hostile environment creatively to suit their needs, certainly more effectively than any architect had designed for them. Indeed, most of our cities weren't built by the "Architect" as we understand him/her today- they were more often than not the accumulations of a hundred thousand more or less rational individual actions and responses, harmonized almost magically within a larger metaphysical understanding of the elements, even of the ‘cosmos’. The question that arose then still remains largely a mystery to me till today – how do we create an architecture that can adapt, is economical and worthy of the ingenuity, creativity and aesthetic sense of the average Indian. And more importantly there were questions about the city. How can we in our current age harmonize those million individual actions under a structure that is more than the sum of its parts – that is indicative of our world view, our civilizational values. Can we keep some of that richness of the collision of umpteen layers of history, the morphological identity, the patina of an ancient civilization while becoming a 21st century city with adequate standards of density, sanitation, transportation and housing ? Can we achieve all of this in a democratic, participatory process in our multicultural, secular society? And most importantly, what is the role of the Architect – Urbanist ? Are we irrelevant in front of this seemingly out of scale, out of control, chaotic, teeming human problem?
To clarify myself, I do not want to pander to or champion the “common man”. To paraphrase an American president’s comment about his country’s voters, one should never overestimate the common man’s intelligence or for that matter his/her expertise. They can be as dumb, shortsighted and prejudiced as anyone else. We need to be agent provocateurs, advocates and technical experts all at the same time. Again, to be clear, I do not entirely agree with those architects who criticize the profession, talk about its irrelevance and pick up awards all while making tons of money out of their “alternate” practices. I certainly do not grudge their money making skills, but most practices seem clichéd and outdated, rather than alternate. And most importantly, we need to be rather acknowledging in our schools that Architects/Urbanists are more relevant today. We should be having a renewed focus on the core skills of architectural design – asking questions and probing under the surface of any ‘problem’, understanding what information/data is relevant, defining what the ‘problem’ is and is not, synthesizing multi pronged strategies, creatively managing multi disciplinary teams and yes understanding how form, shape and image work. We must be doing this as opposed to the existing focus on problems based on typology – memorials, low income housing, office buildings, transit station s or even a street. This is because; it is not only clear that there are hardly any strict typology based problems in our cities, but also that we are no longer facing a question of solving problems by adjusting some earlier/foreign model/paradigm to our specific geographic location. The earlier models have largely failed – but the paradigm of ‘development’ still remains overwhelmingly one-dimensional and trapped in an earlier era. The salvation of Indian cities seems to be not in building world class “infrastructure” (as the clichéd solution goes) but of questioning and determining what we “need”, and how it must be built? These are undoubtedly questions that form the core of the profession and the design process.
So, perhaps by focusing on these questions during their training, architects and urbanists might become more open to imagining alternate futures that can steer the discussion, playing the role of agent provocateur, advocate, and visionary. Perhaps then we would question the existing paradigm of “development” in India, democratize the ‘black box’ that is the design process, and rethink our idea of “formal” in a country that overwhelmingly lives and works in its informal settlements and sectors. In any case, it is certainly time for us to shed our ideological certainty, our conventional sense of chaos and order, to start looking at the reality around us, and then create new utopias for our future. Perhaps, that is where we must start.
