REVIEW

BEYOND BRICKS, MORTAR AND CONCRETE

Anuj Daga dwells critically on a show that tries to map the state of the built environment in India.

Level 0: The State of the Profession. The opening section is a quantified critical review of architecture as a profession in India. The books and magazines displayed have
become archives as well as forums of discussion. All Photo Credits: Dinesh Mehta and Tina Nandi. Copyright@ Urban Design Research Institute.

What do we exactly exhibit when we exhibit architecture: should
we be satisfied to exhibit photographs of buildings and sites, or
should we aim to put whole buildings or, if that is not possible,
fragments and models of them on display? These preliminary
questions from the symposium Exhibiting Architecture: A
Paradox1 can appropriately initiate a discussion into the curation,
agency and politics of The State of Architecture (SOA) exhibition
at the NGMA, Mumbai. Organized along with talks, allied
exhibitions and art events spread over three months, SOA
attempted to draw the attention of the public to practices and
processes of architecture in India. To elaborate upon the initial
inquiry for SOA, one may pose further, what is the experience of
time characterized by technology, media and global flows? How
does it touch ground and manifest as architecture in a country
as diverse as India? How must it be artistically displayed for a
critical review within the space of a gallery through the medium
of an exhibition?
The State of Architecture, an Urban Design Research Institute project,
curated by Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote and Kaiwan Mehta,
from the 6th of January to the 20th of March, is notably the largest
exhibition on architecture in India after Vistara that was curated
by Charles Correa in 1986. While Vistara attempted to frame a
pan-Indian identity unearthing the ancient mandala diagrams and
traditional building methods over centuries, SOA establishes its
orientation in the modern architectural profession which began
as a colonial enterprise. It serves as a resourceful guide for young
architecture students and aspirants a convenient pedagogical
tool to expose the lay audience to significant architectural
development and production in the country over the last 65 years.
ART India The Art News Magazine of India September 2016 Volume XX Issue III 95
REVIEW
Level 2: Encountering Growth. Post-1975, projects like Jawahar Kala Kendra by Charles Correa Associates and Mati Ghar by Sanjay Prakash,
promoted development while preserving the productive aspects of India's cultural legacy. Copyright@ Urban Design Research Institute.
Marking Independence, the Emergency of 1975 and the economic
Liberalization of 1991 as key moments in the history of India, the
curators lay out the entire exhibition as a timeline of architectural
and political events within the country.
One is introduced to the current state of affairs in architecture at
the entrance level. A large infographic translates data collected
from the Council of Architecture records and other surveys to
cull out seemingly urgent questions thrown all over the exhibition
space: Why is there a low architect-public ratio? Why are few
women architects practising? Why have architects become life-
style designers? Does architecture matter? Do you need a degree
to be an architect? Does capital dictate design? A selection of
popular and frequently referred books are laid out on a long
table that include monographs, surveys, reflections and memoirs,
particularly on architecture in India. The number of books in
this collection alarms us there is an urgent need for a deeper
discourse on architecture in India. Alongside is a wallpaper of
architectural magazine issue covers. A comment on the quality
of architectural journalism or reportage in India would help the
thinking community take directed action.
The bulk of the exhibition, as we encounter on the split levels
of the NGMA, is framed through canonized images pulled out
of a handful of monographs of Indian master architects leaving
behind the geo-political aspects of their work. This section talks
about Nation-building Experiments, presenting a panorama of
new cities, institutions and housing projects that were built under
state patronage over the 30 years after independence. Most of
these projects, as we may infer from the exhibition, were executed
by a handful of architects Charles Correa, B. V. Doshi, Achyut
Kanvinde, Raj Rewal, I. M. Kadri, Habib Rahman and a few
others. One wonders how the vast architectural landscape of India
become available to a select set of architects. How did they gain
credibility? Further, how did these architects interact with political
96 ART India The Art News Magazine of India September 2016 Volume XX Issue III
power in deploying their works in different geographies? The
curators state that the project of national identity was renounced
by architects over the late 1970s loosening their modernist ideals to
accommodate regional identities within their works. Whether such
a move was a result of the shift in the states political ideology, or the
architects struggle to address issues closer to diverse conditions, or
a conscious attempt to align with the (popular) ideology of critical
regionalism that emerged internationally as a resistance to the
banal post-modern style, are questions not directly addressed, but
bring out the relationship between how built form is intertwined
within a large set of political forces.
Attention given to architects like Charles Correa, B. V. Doshi,
Raj Rewal, among others, is indeed noteworthy. However, to be
sure, these architects do not adequately frame the picture of the
contemporary state of architecture in the country. Overshadowed
by the above, a whole wave of architects mediating Indias
transition into the corporate landscape have found no adequate
space for discussion within the curators schema. For example,
architect Hafeez Contractor, the recent Padma Bhushan awardee,
whose commercial architectural practice typifies much of the
architectural production in the country hasnt been a part of any
serious discussion. Contractors practice is one of the first to crudely
synthesize the inundation of global capital, imagery and ideas within
our built environment over and after the period of liberalization,
giving architecture a bold consumerist dimension. Many younger
practitioners, those ideologically lost somewhere between Correa
and Contractor, werent a part of any panel discussion.
The rotunda wall at the uppermost level was playfully animated
swelling and shrinking to reveal and hide projects essentially executed
after economic liberalization in its folding skin. These are projects that
disregard, rather, challenge our notions of indigenous architectural
aesthetics. The contemporary projects displayed right under the dome
of the NGMA begged for a sharper curatorial intervention spatially

Level 5: Charting Vectors. A dynamic paper installation highlighting the temporal state of emerging architecture in India is faced by provoking questions.
Copyright@ Urban Design Research Institute.
as well as organizationally. In laying out panels orthogonally in four
quadrants of the circular floor under the hemisphere, the exhibition
missed the opportunity of harnessing the volumetric geography of the
rotunda to spatially evoke the experience of architecture as a global
product. On the other hand, it was perplexing to see a caf besides a
capitol, a school besides a factory, a hospital besides a house losing
the viewer in projects with disparate descriptions, situated in diverse
geographies. The selection of projects clearly suggests an imbalance,
only representing a handful of cities that have been frequently
discussed over publishing platforms in recent times. It is here that
the exhibition could have offered new conceptual categories to read
and analyze emerging hybrid architecture that is otherwise lumped
as plural. Lacking actual fieldwork, SOA hardly offered insights into
aspects like the diversification of the profession, the remoulding of the
architects identity or even the reconstitution of architectural practice
in a globalized environment. A longer, sustained investigation would
have revealed the specificities of reception of global currents by often
under-represented states of the central, north-eastern and eastern
belts of India.
The State of Architecture exhibition did not sufficiently engage
with the questions I raised at the beginning of the review. It is
unfortunate that the curators could not bring in even a single
architectural model to the gallery. Rather, the only object that the
gallery boasted was a copy of the lifesize Manusha icon that
which the viewer was greeted with in the 1986 Vistara exhibition.
Its inclusion in the present exhibition was merely fed by nostalgia.
The conventional display of images within one of the most spatially
exciting galleries of Mumbai seemed undemonstrative. To be sure,
the only moving images (in the age of digital media that we live
in) were a couple of films of/by Charles Correa, nothing which
explored the (contemporary) state of architecture in India. With
such a limited collection, its non-polemical presentation and
frail engagement with multimedia or multidisciplinary inquiries,
should one be satisfied by the overall experience of the exhibition?
REVIEW
It is indeed difficult to map the state of the contemporary built
environment for a country as diverse as India with each state
having its own political tectonics. However, can the questions
asked for the built environment produced by a country of 1.2
billion be as homogenous? A more culturally relevant question to
ask would be similar to that which is often posed in the rejection
of the use of the term Bollywood by many Hindi film actors and
scholars. Brushing aside the downgraded labelling of Bollywood
as a portmanteau of Bombay and Hollywood, they maintain that
while the tools for producing films were received by India from the
West, the Hindi film industry developed its own unique method
of musical-narrative sequences in their story-telling. In this vein, it
would be worthwhile to initiate an enquiry into the sense we have
made of architecture, over the years post-Independence. How, and
to what extent, have we come to redefine our values, and whether
or not we are able to express them successfully within our built
environments? This would give an opportunity for the object of
architecture to become self-critical, contemplative and meaningful.
Much of the discussions in all fields, including architecture, are
becoming highly technocratic, foreclosing any give-and-take
about issues of culture and philosophy, thinking and making,
living and the self. If understood as an act of creative production,
this exhibition falls short in bringing forth any discussion on
the politics of design in the execution of its material. Architects
materials today have reduced to brick, mortar and concrete
no longer does poetry, literature, music or philosophy come to
shape the built environment. Likewise, drowned in mere visuals,
SOA fails to provoke the viewer into thinking deeply about the
meaning of her surroundings. The incapacity of many architects
to absorb, interpret, critically reflect and translate the cultural
zeitgeist of the country in their works characterizes both the
state of architecture in India as well as the exhibition of the state
of architecture in India.
End-Note
1. Exhibiting Architecture: A Paradox, Concept note from the symposium
held at Yale School of Architecture, 2013.
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