3/16/2023 0 Comments Subverse gifts![]() Indian willingness to take design leaps meekly follows well-tested ideas in other places. The modern steel cable bridge was built in New York in 1900 the Bandra Worli Sea Link appeared a century later. Cities like Bogotá and Jakarta created BRT systems for their roads a decade later, the system was tried in Delhi and Ahmedabad. In the 1950s, American kitchens began using the electric mixer in the 1960s Indian kitchens were fitted with the Sumeet mixie. The electric car appeared in California a decade ago, it is visible now on Indian roads. ![]() So far the Indian approach has been wholly adaptive. This proposed forest house engages with its surroundings, in a gradual opening up, as it moves upwards towards the sky ![]() The initiative was so heroic in scope and rife with such possibility, it was only natural for it to be rejected in a country consumed by self-doubt and lacking public confidence. Drawings came off architectural shelves and out of office computers in so varied a range, it was enough to give a complete makeover to India’s thoughtless and desperate cities. An overwhelming response from students and professionals gathered a vast array of designs: from constructing high-rise parks in dense neighbourhoods, covering roads with vegetable gardens, reviving water sources in drought-hit areas, inserting housing for the homeless under flyovers, pedestrianising polluted urban centres, designs for tree houses, and stacked tunnel houses saving city land, among others. Why then is today’s architecture and design mired in such demoralising anonymity? Given the great mass of creative talent available in the country and rising number of reputable design schools, what would it take to rethink architecture as a social science that emerges from local situations, rather than an isolated object of art?Ĭould parked public buses be used for housing the homeless at night?Ī couple of years ago, Rajesh Advani, a young architect, reacting precisely to such a call, advanced an elaborate initiative called Unbuilt India - an active search for a collective of architectural ideas that could change the country. The choices are so many, they escape across rooftops, down the street, never to be noticed. Building smart, building stupid, building on site, building pre-cast, building on demand, building without will, without constraint. Even architecture is being marketed and sold as a large urban product with new consumer features and finishes: glass wall, curved wall, leaning wall, cantilevered wall, wall masked in hand tile, wall with brick veneer or steel panels, perforated with louvres, covered in traditional jalis, reshaped in movable grilles, framed or frameless, shaded or exposed. Today, it has crossed further from genuine uselessness into utter redundancy. Without much effort design began to cross the threshold into irrelevance in the 90s, the moneyed era of globalisation. ![]() The BMWs that pulled in regularly made clear the high demand for it.Ī multilevel garden crosswalk proposed over one of Delhi’s busiest roads in the commercial district near Connaught Place Her house was recently refurbished with a mirrored glass façade announcing a clinic for aesthetic dentistry. A perfectly good professional dentist for many years, my neighbour chose to abandon fixing teeth to creating fake smiles - a specialised advancement of which she was particularly proud. Application of aesthetics is no longer just a convenient foothold in architecture, but appears everywhere and every day in whatever we do design is like a hungry termite let loose in an old wooden warehouse. However muddled and mismatched the titles of the various presentations, all day in meeting rooms and conference halls, a steady drone was heard with slide displays of new shopping centres, nursery schools, office buildings, and spas in the hills - the celebration of a profession that had created its own false language.ĭesign, of which architecture is merely a small part, is today testing the impatience of the designer and attempting to set new standards of irrelevance. The large audience of designers, students and practising architects filed in dutifully behind meeting room banners that proclaimed in bold type, ‘Urban Transformations in Regional Contexts’, ‘Biospheric Conservation’ and ‘Ecological Constructs’. Bimal Patel: Criticism of the Central Vista can be put to positive use ![]()
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