INDIA 056 LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO ACTÀDL’UOMO DELL’ CITTÀ LA 5 Oebr2016 November 056

November Volume 06 / Issue 01 2016 R200

INDIA 056 LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO ACTÀDL’UOMO DELL’ CITTÀ LA 5 oebr2016 November 056

4 NEWS domus 56 November 2016 table of contents

4 Department of Architecture – AAP Cornell University Preston Thomas Memorial Symposium 2016

6 Pune Biennale 3rd edition of Pune Biennale to commence in January 2017

6 Triennale di Milano, Antonio Marras Life of a restless man

6 Sternhagen Sternhagen unveils Artistic Bathroom Suites

8 IIA Imagining the Indian city

8 IIID / Anchor IIID Anchor Awards 2016 Department of Architecture – AAP Cornell: 10 Unica by Target Studio University Preston Thomas Memorial Colour and geometry Symposium 2016

NEWS 10 MAST, Dayanita Singh Museum of machines

10 Milano Design Film Festival The dimensions of space Currents in Indian Architecture | event was envisioned and hosted by Contemporary Practice + Discourse the Cornell Department of Architecture 10 Domotex presented to Cornell a lineup of | Mary N. Woods, Ph.D. Professor of Trend creators esteemed speakers who elaborated Architectural History, Mark R. Cruvellier, 12 Graff, Nespoli e Novara on architectural practice and design Ph.D. Department Chair Nathaniel Bathroom furniture discourse in India. Established and and Margaret Owings Professor of emerging practitioners from across Architecture, Luben Dimcheff the 12 Parsons & Charlesworth Spectacular Vernacular the country presented work of various Richard Meier Assistant Professor scales while focusing on innovative of Architecture and Apexa Patel 12 Vitra, Bouroullec, Jongerius projects transformed in part by the rich (M.Arch 2016). Flowers, clouds and blankets and often conﬂicting contexts of the 12 AA School, Unknown Fields Indian sub-continent. The schedule was as follows: The dark side of the city The Symposium keynote speakers Thursday, October 14 – Milstein Dome represented two crucial narratives Book Launch – Women Architects in

14 Marmomacc of contemporary Indian architecture: India: Histories of Practice in Mumbai and Journey into marble Kaiwan Mehta, editor of DOMUS Delhi by Mary N. Woods: Cornell AAP 14 Adele C, Ron Gilad India, addressed critical curation and Simplicity cubed architectural discourse in India while Friday, October 15 – Milstein Auditorium 14 Alessi, Marcel Wanders architect Brinda Somaya focused and Dome The circus is served her discussion on the evolution of Keynote Speakers: professional practice in the country Kaiwan Mehta: DOMUS India 14 FAB Milano over the last 70 years since India’s Brinda Somaya: Somaya & Kalappa FAB one-nighters Independence. The event opened with Consultants/Mumbai 16 Museo Mendrisio, Per Kirkeby a Book Launch for Mary N. Woods, An eclectic artist Professor of Architectural History at Saturday, October 16 – Milstein Cornell AAP upon the release of her Auditorium and Dome 16 Oluce, Vico Magistretti Pure geometric form latest book: Women Architects in India: Kaiwan Mehta – Introductions Histories of Practice in Mumbai and Presenters – Sanjeev Shankar: Sanjeev 16 Palladio Museum Delhi (Routledge, 2016) – a detailed Shankar Architect/Bengaluru; Abin In the mind of an architect feature on the same has been published Chaudhuri: Abin Design Studio/Kolkata; in this issue of Domus India. Following Shimul Javeri Kadri: SJK Architects/ the presentations, a panel discussion Mumbai; Sarosh Anklesaria: Anthill with the speakers was moderated by Design/Ahmedabad; Madhav Raman: Sean Anderson [B.Arch/B.Sc 1996] Anagram/New Delhi; Revathi Kamath Associate Curator in the Department of and Ayodh Kamath: Kamath Design Architecture and Design at MoMA, New Studio/New Delhi; Sameep Padora: York City, who practiced as an architect Sameep Padora & Associates Design and continues to research throughout Team/Mumbai. South Asia. An exhibition coinciding Panel Discussion – Milstein Auditorium with the Symposium highlighted a Moderator – Sean Anderson: MoMA series of seminal books and topical Department of Architecture and publications drawn directly from the Design/New York. collection of the Cornell Fine Arts Library – all related to India’s distinct natural beauty, vernacular architecture, and diverse cultural landscape. The Preston H. Thomas Memorial 14.10.2016 – 16.10.2016 Lecture Series is funded through a Department of Architecture – gift from Ruth and Leonard B. Thomas AAP Cornell University in memory of their son, Preston. The www.aap.cornell.edu/news-events “The LafargeHolcim Awards has become in many ways the standard bearer of the values of sustainability across the globe.”

Mohsen Mostafavi, USA. Dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Head of the Global LafargeHolcim Awards jury 2015.

5th International LafargeHolcim Awards Renowned technical universities lead the independent juries in ﬁ ve regions of for sustainable construction projects. the world. The juries evaluate entries Prize money totals USD 2 million. against the “target issues” for sustainable construction. The competition has categories for projects at an advanced stage of design, and also for visionary ideas of young professionals and students.

The LafargeHolcim Awards is an initiative of the LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction and is supported by LafargeHolcim, the world leader in building materials. The Group is present in 90 countries and is represented in India by Ambuja Cements Limited and ACC Limited.

www.lafargeholcim-awards.org

This competition is supported in India by Ambuja Cements Limited and ACC Limited. 6 NEWS domus 56 November 2016

3rd edition of Pune Biennale to commence in January 2017

Pune Biennale is a global platform for Park, ABIL Subway and likewise. In exchange of ideas in contemporary addition, more than ten galleries in the art and visual art expression in the city. city will also participate in the 3rd Pune Pune Biennale will return with its third Biennale. edition from 5th to 29th January 2017. Pune Biennale 2017 recently kick- The flagship show of Pune Biennale started its pre-cursor events which 2017 is titled as Habit_co_Habit included events such as “a dialogue which is curated by art historian and on contemporary art education by curator Zasha Colah and art critic Luca famous Indian artist Prabhakar Kolte” Cerizza. True to its participatory nature, and “Ways of Making” by Sudarshan this edition of Pune Biennale also has Shetty, celebrated artist and curator several collateral projects that are of Kochi Biennale 2016. Upcoming created around the theme of “identity months will see more of such Sternhagen unveils Artistic Bathroom Suites and self”. In these projects, the aim is to stimulating programs such as “a talk discover the meaning of one’s existence on contemporary art scenario in India in different spheres of life through by Abhay Sardesai, Editor of Art India diverse mediums and forums including magazine”; “insights on public art by Multiple award-winning designer can be instantly recognized for their displays, installations, workshops, Pooja Sood from Khoj International”. bathroom brand Sternhagen, launched uniqueness. The company aims to open dialogues and seminars. Art enthusiast can unleash their its flagship showroom in one of at least 12 retail outlets pan India, this The main show ‘Habit_co_Habit’ and creative minds through their involvement India’s fastest moving markets, includes the metros as well as the Tier other associated programmes will take in a series of handpicked participatory Ahmedabad. Imagined as a one- 2 cities. place in venues of historic importance project curated by acclaimed artists. stop solution, Sternhagen thrives to Designed by multi-awarded and along the popular J.M. Road. These provide discerning customers with internationally acclaimed Arman Emami include Modern High School, Municipal a fully catered premium bathroom from EMAMI DESIGN Berlin, Germany, Printing Press, Mahatma Phule Museum, 05.01.2017 – 29.01.2017 experience. From visually exciting Sternhagen offers the ultimate in Pataleshwar caves precinct, Sambhaji www.punebiennale.in tiles, to artistic sanitary ware, sensorial design innovation and engineering showers and matching accessories, excellence and is set to redefine the every detail has been curated to luxury bathroom segment in India and bring the Artistic Suite experience beyond. While Sternhagen concentrates Life of a restless man to life. Pushing the boundaries of a on constantly reimagining the bathroom conservative market, Sternhagen aims experience to make it more exciting at going above and beyond products, with ever evolving design concepts, it offering instead a lifestyle to clients is also paying the outmost attention wishing their bathrooms could be to details by using and inventing new visually exciting and design driven materials and technologies that ally without sacrificing quality. art to engineering. A fine example is The launch was also the occasion their own German engineered material, to unveil the brand’s unique Artistic SaniQuartz: a quartz composite that has Bathroom Suites concept. The been specially developed to ensure the showroom, designed by renown maximum resistance and precision for Swiss architect Jan Fischer of Mach the brand’s 3D faceted products. Each Architektur GmbH, and executed by piece in their award winning collection OPOLIS Mumbai, is spread across is crafted to produce an emotional 6000 sq ft of premium space in response for all who experience it. Using Ahmedabad. This is a strategic direction the perfect blend of visually striking, towards accelerating Sternhagen’s angular lines and essential contours, growth pace in the Indian market Sternhagen suites are designed to and acting as an example for their infuse your daily life with a timelessly experience centers set to open across modern aesthetic. They believe that the the country. The brand was unveiled value of high quality engineering and through the most digitally advanced artistic design goes beyond luxury to

Photo © Daniela Zedda 3D mapping presentation, made on the create an environment that elevates façade of the showroom. Committed to one’s sense of wellness and satisﬁes “Nulla die sine linea” is the title of nomadic life of fashion, cinema, art, create and enrich the daily bathroom the desire for beauty. the new exhibition at the Triennale di poetry, and his artist friends Maria Lai suite experience, Sternhagen’s designs Milano (21.10.106–21.1.2017) on and Carol Rama. are breaking all pre-conceived ideas Antonio Marras, “the most intellectual of about sanitary ware and bathrooms: Italian fashion designers”. The curator allying art to cutting-edge technology, Francesca Alfano Miglietti tells of his www.triennale.org the brand has created pieces that www.sternhagen.com

8 NEWS domus 56 November 2016

DAY 1: THURSDAY 1ST • Sheela Patel, SPARC, Mumbai DECEMBER 2016 • 4:45 pm: Keynote Lecture by • 2 pm: Registration Saskia Sassen • 4 pm: Inaugural Session • 5:45 pm: Keynote Lecture by Rahul DAY 3: SATURDAY 3RD Mehrotra DECEMBER 2016 • 9:30 am: Discussion Session on DAY 2: FRIDAY 2ND DECEMBER Resilience in the Indian City 2016 Speakers: • 9:30 am: Discussion Session on • Harini Nagendra, Azim Premji Architectural Practice and the City University, Bangalore Speakers: • Arun Jain, Urban Designer and • Alfredo Brillembourg, ETH Zurich Urban Strategist, Seattle • Neelkanth Chhaya, Architect, • Aromar Revi, Director of Indian Ahmedabad (former Dean of Institute of Human Settlements, Architecture, CEPT University) Bangalore • Tatjana Schneider, Sheffield • 11:45 am: Discussion Session on University “Designing” the Indian City • 11:45 am: Discussion Session on Speakers: Rethinking Urban Public Space • Bimal Patel, President of CEPT Speakers: University, Ahmedabad • Sunil Khilnani, Kings College, • Anirudh Paul, Director of Kamala London Raheja Vidhyanidhi Institute for • Sujata Patel, University of Architecture, Mumbai Hyderabad • Swati Chattopadhyay, University of • Franz Ziegler, Architect and Urban California at Santa Barbara Designer, Rotterdam • 2:15 pm: Discussion Session on • 2:15 pm: Discussion Session on Unpacking the Smart City Governance and Social Justice in the Speakers: Indian City • Partha Mukhopadhyay, Centre for Speakers: Policy Research, New Delhi Imagining the Indian city • Pankaj Joshi, Architect and Director • G. Sampath, The Hindu, Delhi of Urban Design Research Institute, • AN Srivathsan, Academic Director, Mumbai CEPT University, Ahmedabad • Kirtee Shah, Architect and activist • 4:45 pm: Wrap-Up Panel Discussion India is projected to reach a level inhabit an informal city that is on urbanism and housing, Ahmedabad • 6 pm: Valedictory Session of urbanisation in the middle of this intertwined with the formal city, and century where half the population will the formal city lies outside their live in urban areas, compared to a threshold of affordability. The urban current level of thirty-two percent. In poor cope in the Indian city because absolute terms, this means we will master planning, in both ideation and have about 400 million new urban implementation, is weak; and this residents over the next four to five gives them the space to operate the decades. To address the challenges informal systems of tenure that allow IIID Anchor Awards 2016 of rapid urbanisation in this short their survival. In recent times, period of time, we will have to do what globalisation has created a middle Europe and the United States did over and upper class aspiration for the The Indian Institute of Interior a century and a half; and we cannot global city: one that is clean, ordered Designers has launched the IIID do it using their urban paradigms and efficient. The resultant political Anchor Awards 2016, open to for that would be ecologically and pressure to move toward the global dynamic designers who demonstrate socially unsustainable. We need to city by increasing the reach of formal excellence in their field every year. construct a new imagination of the master planning is putting India on The awards will be presented for Indian city – an imagination that a collision course of class conflict the following categories: Residential holds the responsibility to shape the that could result in significant urban Single Dwelling – Stand-alone identity, form and character of our violence; and the first signs of this are residences incl. villas, bungalows, row cities, making them liveable for our already visible. houses; Residential Multi Dwelling – communities. The architectural community in India Apartments incl. duplex, penthouses We are not poised to do this. We tend will have to play a leadership role in in multi-dwelling residential structures. to identify Indian culture as located developing the new urban paradigms Retail – shops, showrooms, retail in the rural, and we imagine the city that the country desperately needs. outlets, exhibition spaces. Commercial as a technical rather than cultural The conference is intended as a Workplace (Small) –office space entity. Our building codes tend to catalyst that will provoke architects with carpet area up to 2000sqft; shape buildings by formulae derived into stepping into this debate in a Commercial Workplace (Large) – submitted under this category may from parameters such as road width substantive way. Keynote lectures office space with carpet area above be additionally submitted under any and zoning classification, and these on urbanism by globally recognised 2000sqft. Leisure & Entertainment other suitable category too. Award of formulae are applied across the city thought leaders will set the – restaurants, café, bars, club, spa, the year - Affordable Design for the with little recognition for the specific background for a new imagination gymnasium, cinema. Hospitality Masses: Space of any size and use circumstances of neighbourhoods of the India city. Six sessions on – hotels, resorts. Institutional & innovatively designed and executed and heritage. We insert large important sub-themes are designed Public Spaces – galleries, museums, with minimal budget as the central infrastructure elements, such as for discussion and audience airports, theaters, libraries, training project criteria without compromise flyovers and elevated metro lines, with participation. Each session will feature centers, education & healthcare. on design brief or user comfort. little thought on their impact on the short presentations by experts, Product /Furniture Design. Young Participants will be required to submit cultural geography of the city. followed by an open debate on Practice of the Year Award to young additional documentation towards More significantly, a combination of the subject. designers for consistently outstanding cost of the project. Participants must high land values and socio-economic portfolio of interior design works; apply before December 1, 2016 in stratification means that only a designer not more than 40 years order to be considered. partial and privileged percentage of of age are eligible for the award, the urban population lives within the IIA India which will require them to submit 3 IIID Anchor Awards formally planned city. The majority www.iiaindia.org projects for consideration. Projects www.iiid.net.in/anchor-awards

10 NEWS domus 56 November 2016

Colour and geometry The dimensions of space

Vibration is a new collection produced where six tiny geometrical patterns can The guest curator of the 4th Milano filmmakersgroup. The Master Class by Unica by Target Studio, a company be mixed and matched in a wide range Design Film Festival (6–9.10.2016) event features encounters between in Fiorano Modenese (Emilia of colours. is Davide Giannella, who has selected different types of film professionals. Romagna) specialised in the design films on the dimensions of space and production of decorative ceramic – urban and domestic; natural and tiles (wall and floor). The series is an inner. One of them is All Inclusive experiment in ornamental graphics, www.targetstudio.net (below), produced by Zapruder www.milanodesignfilmfestival.com Photo courtesy of Zapruder Museum of machines

On display in the photo gallery of inserts people, social groups, objects, the MAST in Bologna (12.10.2016– archives and machines, resulting in a 8.1.2017) and curated by Urs Stahel, an very personal vision of her country that exhibition on the Indian photographer surpasses geographical borders. Dayanita Singh shows 300 snapshots displayed on mobile structures that she deﬁnes as “museums” in which she www.mast.org Photo © Dayanita Singh Photo © Dayanita Singh Trend creators

Bilge Nur Saltik (Turkey), Jane Briggs and Christy Cole (Scotland), Klaas Kuiken (Holland), Hanne Willmann (Germany) and Victoria Wilmotte (France) are the young designers chosen by Stefan Diez to develop ideas for new trends in ﬂoors. Their presentation at the Domotex fair (14–17.1.2017) under the title “Young Designer Trendtable” is part of the “Innovations@Domotex” event.

www.domotex.de NEWS

12 NEWS domus 56 November 2016

Bathroom furniture Flowers, clouds and blankets

Expo is a modular piece of bathroom compartments; the mirror is circular; and Presented at the Maison & Object fair, surfaces, available in different furniture produced by Graff. Its the open shelves are reminiscent of a the Vitra home collection has received anodised colours, offer interaction designers Nespoli & Novara say that its wall ladder. new accessories by Hella Jongerius between light and shadow. Jongerius origins are “memories of old, solid-wood and the brothers Ronan and Erwan designed the Colour Block Blankets workbenches that were used for work Bouroullec. The latter made the Nuage woven in Peruvian highland wool. and display”. The rounded countertop vases (left) by uniting eight extruded sink is made in Corian DuPont; the set aluminium tubes of different lengths to of wooden drawers offers two roomy www.graff-faucets.com create a stylised cloud. The undulated www.vitra.com

Spectacular vernacular The dark side of the city

”Spectacular Vernacular” is the ﬁrst inspiration from ﬁction, science and The exhibition “The Dark Side of the of drone footage, hidden camera major show on the work of Parsons & the arts. It explores the rhetorical as City” at the AA School in London recordings and interviews; stories based Charlesworth, founded by the British well as the practical opportunities of (1–16.10.2016) is by Unknown Fields, on the city’s wants, fears and dreams. husband-and-wife team Tim Parsons designed objects that are a critical a nomadic design studio. It shows an and Jessica Charlesworth in 2014, response and essential adjunct to the imaginary city made up of fragments www.aaschool.ac.uk after years of informal collaboration. corporate design world. Their projects The layout of the exhibition is based include mass production, limited on three fundamental aspects of series, unique pieces, publications, their creative practice: observation, research, education and experiments. experimentation and speculation. Complementing the exhibition is a The display at the Chicago Cultural cycle of conferences lasting the whole Center illustrates how the two month of October. designers mix their backgrounds in craft and industrial design, taking www.chicagoculturalcenter.org

NEWS

14 NEWS domus 56 November 2016

Journey into marble The circus is served

The title of the traditional Ristorante microscope. Four star chefs have staged d’Autore at the Marmomacc fair is taken an exchange between natural stone and from the famous story by Jules Verne. food: Enrico Bartolini, Beppe Mafﬁoli, It symbolises a journey into the world Andrea Tonola and Stefano Cerveni. of marble – its geometry, molecular structure and colours, seen under a www.marmomacc.com Photo Marcel Wanders

Designed by Marcel Wanders, the Alessi Circus collection comprises 29 kitchen and table items inspired by the magic of a circus performance. Made in stainless steel, tin plate, bone china and glass.

www.alessi.com Simplicity Cubed FAB One-Nighters

TT3 (TT to the third power) is an fastened onto a metal structure (in two Prosegue il programma d’incontri The FAB space in Milan for the brands extension of the TT coffee tables by sizes) with magnets, allowing for inﬁnite organizzato da FAB Milano, spazio Fiandre and Porcelaingres is hosting Ron Gilad for Adele C. The tabletops combinations. The painted steel frames espositivo dei marchi Fiandre e events. After the video installation are rectangular trays made in walnut, are equipped with adjustable feet. Porcelaingres. Dopo l’appuntamento in September by Francesco Faccin, di settembre con le esperienze Matteo Ferroni and Emilio Tremolada, www.adele-c.it audiovisive di Francesco Faccin 13 October will be the night of Nicola (sotto), Matteo Ferroni ed Emilio Borgmann of the Architekturgalerie in Tremolada, il 13 ottobre sarà la Munich. In December, the cycle ends volta di Nicola Borgmann, direttrice with the eco-designer Luca Gnizio. dell’Architekturgalerie di Monaco. In dicembre, a chiudere il ciclo sarà l’ecodesigner Luca Gnizio. www.granitiﬁandre.it

16 NEWS domus 56 November 2016

An eclectic artist In the Mind of an Architect

The Mendrisio Museo d’Arte is hosting a cinema. On display: 33 paintings, 30 For the 400th anniversary of the death Scamozzi was the last of the great Per Kirkeby retrospective (2.10.2016– works on paper and 6 sculptures. of Vincenzo Scamozzi (1548–1616), Renaissance architects, between 29.1.2017) curated by Simone Soldini. the Palladio Museum in Vicenza and Palladio’s generation and Galileo’s This Danish artist is a painter, geologist, www.museo.mendrisio.ch the Canadian Centre for Architecture new world, and the ﬁrst to train in poet, sculptor, and a man of theatre and in Montreal (in collaboration with the his library instead of apprenticing Stiftung Bibliothek Werner Oechslin in a painter’s atelier or among the of Zurich) have organised the blocks of stone on a construction exhibition “Nella mente di Vincenzo site. On display are books from his Scamozzi” (until 20.11.2016). It collection, found and catalogued shows how this intellectual architect by the American scholar Katherine viewed his buildings – masterpieces Isard, his architectural drawings, such as the Rocca Pisana in Lonigo three-dimensional models, and video (Veneto), the theatre of Sabbioneta animation produced for this occasion. (Mantua) and the Procuratie Nuove in Venice (below). www.palladiomuseum.org

Pure geometric form

Designed by the Milanese Vico creation, Oluce is rendering homage Magistretti in 1976, the Sonora to this archetype of lighting that was suspension lamp is a cult object in one of Magistretti’s favourite projects. the shape of a half sphere, still being In collaboration with Fondazione produced by Oluce, and still able to Magistretti, the manufacturer has characterise an entire room with its made the video #40annidisonora to iconic presence. show sketches, inspiration sources and Originally a turned aluminium reﬂector curiosities regarding the lamp, narrated painted white, over the years versions by Margherita Pellino, a granddaughter have been made in Murano glass of the designer and the conservator of and opalescent acrylic. The ﬁrst sizes the foundation’s archive. Presentation is were 50, 70 and 100 cm diameter, on 6 October, Vico’s birthday. later joined by 90 cm and the more recent 133 cm. Forty years after its www.oluce.com

NEWS

DON'T MISS A SINGLE ISSUE!

November Volume 06 / Issue 01 2016 R200

INDIA 056 LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO SUBSCRIBE NOW

Newsstand Professionals subscribe Term Issues price (R) at (Discount) 1 year 11 2200 R 1650 (25%) 2 years 22 4400 R 3080 (30%)

Newsstand Students subscribe at Term Issues price (R) (Discount)

1 year 11 2200 R 1430 (35%) 2 years 22 4400 R 2640 (40%)

6 EASY WAYS TO SUBSCRIBE

1. CALL 022-2481 1010 (Mumbai), 011-4669 9999 (Delhi), 080 4161 8977 (Bengaluru), 033 2473 5896 (Kolkata), 044 4218 8984 (Chennai) 2. ONLINE at www.spentamultimedia.com/subscription.html 3. POST Send the completed form to Spenta Multimedia Pvt Ltd – Subscription Department, Peninsula Spenta, Mathuradas Mill Compound, N.M. Joshi Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai–400 013 4. A digital version of is available on , Readwhere.com and Rockstand.in 5. EMAIL [email protected] 6. Like us on at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Domus-India +91-7045220995

I wish to subscribe to Domus India for 1 year 2 years SUBSCRIPTION TYPE New Renewal Professional Student

Subscription ID (for renewal subscribers only) All fields including postal code and contact number/s are mandatory

NAME (Mr. / Mrs. /Ms.) ADDRESS CITY STATE POSTAL CODE TEL. NO. (WITH STD CODE) MOBILE EMAIL ID CHEQUE / DD / CASH / CARD CHEQUE / DD NO. (payable to Spenta Multimedia Pvt Ltd) (add 50/- for non-Mumbai cheques) CHEQUE DATED BANK NAME SUBSCRIBER’S SIGNATURE

TERMS & CONDITIONS: Cheques / DDs should be payable to Spenta Multimedia Pvt Ltd • Cheques / DDs must contain the code/address of the issuing branch. • Cash will not be accepted. • Please subscribe full name, address and signature on the reverse of the cheque/DD. • For multiple subscriptions, attach separate coupons (photocopies allowed) along with separate cheques/DDs. • Spenta Multimedia will not be responsible for postal or courier delays. • This offer is non-refundable, cannot be redeemed for cash and cannot be combined with any other offer. • issues are also available without this offer. • Subscription offer and rates are valid in India only.• Disputes, if any, will be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts in Mumbai only. • This offer is valid only till stocks last. • Terms and conditions are subject to change from time to time.

SUBSCRIPTION RATES

October Volume 05 / Issue 11 2016 R200 in DOMUS INDIA . adornmag . www

2016 Term Issue Cover Price You Save You Pay Free Assured Gift SEPTEMBER OCTOBER

I INDIA 055 LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO 1 Year 11 2200 550 1650 N/A 100 R

PRICE

1 FREEZE ISSUE

7 2 Year 22 4400 1320 3080 N/A FRAME TRAFFIC STOPPER VOLUME NEW TALENT MODERN PURIST FASHION INSIGHT ADORN DUAL ARTISTRY OF SUNEET VARMA & RISHABH TONGYA

LESHNA SHAH CREATIVE THE HIGH CHARISMA PRIESTESS OF Term Issue Cover Price You Save You Pay Free Assured Gift DESIGN FASHION FORWARD 1 Year 6 600 150 450 N/A ADITI AMIN CUT FROM A DIFFERENT CLOTH

HIGH VARTIKA SINGH 2 Year 12 1200 360 840 N/A STREET CULT CURATORS’ ECLECTIC FINDS Head 3 Years 18 1800 630 1170 N/A Turner

HAIR & BEAUTY

TRIED A FUN FESTIVE LOOK? SHARE IT WITH US ON Term Issue Cover Price You Save You Pay Free Assured Gift www.hairmag.in V BRIGHT &V FESTIVE!! 1 Year 12 600 150 450 N/A It’s time to celebrate the PEOPLE CULTURE LIFESTYLE season fashionably 2 Years 24 1200 360 840 3 Issues Extra 2 ue3|Pauee 3 | Pages 12 6 | Vololl 10 • Iss `50 OctoOctoberOctobe 2016 SIR BADRIDAS GOENKA 3 Years 36 1800 630 1170 Half yearly subscription A KNIGHT, COMPLIMENTARY LEGISLATOR & BUSINESS 1010 LEGEND ethereal INSIDINSIDEDE BRAIDEDRAIDERAAIDEDED D R L NOLKHA SPINNINGSSPSPINNINSPINPPINPINNINPINNIPINNINGPIINNN NG A SUCCESS hairdos STORY CELEB MARWAR RAMESH AGARWALAGARWA WATCH HELPINGHHELPIELPELPINLPINGL NNG MOVE LOOK WHO HOMES WE SPOTTED! Term Issue Cover Price You Save You Pay Free Assured Gift WEDDING #NOW DESTINATIONS MAKING DREAMS COME TRUE

TRENDING WWW.MARWAR.COM

Uber cool styles

1 Year 6 900 90 810 N/A 150 to try right away ` PRICE PRICE

AN NARENDRA AND

ISSUE 5 ISSUE KESHAV BANSAL AFFAIRAFA 2 Year 12 1800 180 1620 Timex Watch free worth StylishSt li h ha hairi VOLUME 22

meets opulent jewellery R2495/-

OFF THE CATWALK • ACNE BE GONE! • MYSTERY BOX CHALLENGE• THE COOL SPICE• HAPPY SKIN, HAPPY YOU • COLOUR SPLASH—JADE • IT’S ON THE CARDS • NEWS... AND MORE! TRAILBLAZETRAILBLAZERTRAILBLAZERRAILBLAZERSRAILBLAZERAILBLAZRAILBLAZERSAILBLAZERILBLLBLAZELBLBLABLAZELAZEAAZZEERR : NITNITISHNITTISHISHSHH MITTERSA MITTERSMITTERMIMITTTERTTERTETERRSSAIIN,INN SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2016 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER

4 Years 24 3600 720 2880 Timex Watch free worth RITURIRITRITUITUU GUPTAGUPTGU UPUPTUPTTATA R2495/-

Follow us on www.facebook.com/cmaiapparel VOL. 36 - ISSUE 1 JANUARY 2016 Strategy Marketing Analysis Resources Technology SOLITAIRE

THT Term Issue Cover Price You Save You Pay Free Assured Gift ANNIVERSARYERRSARY India’s ﬁrst world-class management magazine JAN-FEB 16 VOL 15 ISSUE 1 1 Year 12 1800 200 1600 N/A 2 Year 24 3600 700 2900 N/A

MARSHALL GOLDSMITH ALEX OSTERWALDER 3 Years 36 5400 1200 4200 N/A

YVES PIGNEUR LINDA A HILL An OtiOpportunity to Grow your Business STEW FRIEDMAN FUTURE OF Curtain Raiser to the 62nd THE SMART MANAGER National Garment Fair MANAGEMENT ROGER MARTIN The Rise of the Male INSIGHTS FROM Fashionista! AWARD-WINNERS OF Term Issue Cover Price You Save You Pay Free Assured Gift Exploring the Rise of the 2015 THINKERS50, Fashion Conscious Male GLOBAL RANKING OF MANAGEMENT THINKERS RACHEL BOTSMAN 1 Year 6 600 90 510 N/A FASHIONING STEW FRIEDMAN RACHEL BOTSMAN MARSHALL GOLDSMITH LINDA HILL ROGER MARTIN THE FUTURE! ALEX OSTERWALDER ZHANG RUIMIN SCAN THIS TO STAY YVES PIGNEUR 2 Year 12 1200 240 960 N/A CONNECTED ZHANG RUIMIN OFFICIAL MAGAZINE OF THE CLOTHING MANUFACTURERS ASSOCIATION OF INDIA www.thesmartmanager.com 3 Years 18 1800 450 1350 N/A

THE INDIAN GEM AND JEWELLERY MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2016 APPAREL indian management Term Issue Cover Price You Save You Pay Free Assured Gift

1 Year 12 1200 400 800 N/A OCTOBER 2016 VOLUME 55 ISSUE 10 PAGES 92 r60

DESIGN AND DESIGN THINKING DESIGN AND DESIGN THINKING 2 Year 24 2400 900 1500 N/A EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS NARENDRA BANSAL,EXCLUSIVE INTEX INTERVIEWS TECHNOLOGIES

NARENDRA BANSAL, DR MAHESH INTEX TECHNOLOGIES GUPTA, KENT RO

3 Years 36 3600 1500 2100 N/A DR MAHESH GUPTA, KENT RO DESIGN THINKING GJEPGJEPCGJEGJEEPCC & De Beerseersrs RollRolollololl OutOOuutt $7.5$7$ Mn THE FAST TRACK GenericGGenernericericerricr c Campaignampai FOR GROWTH VicenzaoVicenzVicenzaorVVicencenzaozaorzaoao o Show S MaintMMaintaMaintainsaintainsaintnt Itss Global RRelevanceele INDIAN MANAGEMENT Millenniaillenniaenniannn lss Spentpentntt DESIGN $2525 BnnOnn On DiamoDiamondDiamamm d Jewellerywelleryelleryery In 2015201 THINKING India’India’sI ’ss Q2 GoldGold JewellJewelleJeJ lleryeryy Demandmandnd -220%0 Term Issue Cover Price You Save You Pay Free Assured Gift HOW COMPANIES ARE TRANSFORMING GahchoGahahchohchooK KuK é OOpeOpenspensens VOLUME 55 ISSUE 10 OCTOBER 2016 THEIR BUSINESSES HK Show 1 Year 12 760 265 495 N/A

OCTOBER 2016 WWheree Have All ThThe Buyerere s Gononeo ? 2 Year 24 1520 610 910 N/A 3 Years 36 2280 1025 1255 N/A

Name: Mr/Ms______DOB:______

Company name:______Designation: ______

Mailing addres:______

City______Pincode:______State: ______

Contact: Tel______Fax No.______Mobile:______

Email: ______Name ______

Terms & Conditions : • This offer supercedes all previous subscription offers • This offer is non-refundable, cannot be redeemed for cash and cannot be combined with any other offer. • Issues are also available without this offer • This offer is valid only till stocks last • Subscription offer and rates are valid in India only • For multiple subscriptions, attach separate coupons (photocopies allowed) along with separate cheques/DDs. • Please allow a delivery period of 6-8 weeks (after remittance) for the first issue to reach you & a time period of 45 days for the dispatch of subscription gift (if any) • Spenta Multimedia & Smart Manager Media Pvt. Ltd. will not be responsible for postal or courier delays. • In case of non-receipt of the magazine copy, please inform the Subscription Department within 15 days for monthly magazines & 45 days for bi-monthly magazines • Cheques / DDs should be payable to Spenta Multimedia for all magazines except The Smart Manager. • Cheques / DDs should be payable to Smart Manager Media Pvt. Ltd. for The Smart Manager magazine • Cheques/DDs must contain the code/address of the issuing branch. • Please write your full name and address and sign on the reverse of the cheque / DD • Cash will not be accepted • Terms and conditions are subject to change from time to time • Disputes, if any, will be subjected to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts in Mumbai only • We will never disclose your personal identifiable information to companies not owned by Spenta Multimedia pvt ltd who want to market products or services to you, if you refuse to entertain any mail from companies not owned by us

22 CONTENTS domus 56 November 2016

Editor and Publisher Domus Magazine founded in 1928 Maneck Davar Publisher and Managing Editor Managing Editor Maria Giovanna Mazzocchi Bordone Kaiwan Mehta Editor Nicola Di Battista Senior Sub-Editor Sharmila Chakravorty Art Director

Giuseppe Basile Art Director Parvez Shaikh Brand Manager Anna Amodeo Senior Graphic Designer Yogesh Jadhav International Director Sofia Bordone Digital & Graphics Ninad Jadhav Licensing & Syndication Carmen Figini Rohit Nayak Mangesh Rahate t +39 02 82472487 fi[email protected] The College of Masters Director, Marketing and Sales David Chipperfield 056 Geetu Rai Kenneth Frampton Hans Kollhoff Marketing and Sales Werner Oechslin Vishal Maruti Dolas Eduardo Souto de Moura

Administration, General Manager Study Centre Bobby Daniel Massimo Curzi Spartaco Paris Spenta Online Andrea Zamboni Viraf B Hansotia Special Projects Subscriptions Luca Gazzaniga Robert Gomes t +022 2481 1031 / 24 Website sms: SPENTA DOMUS to 57333 www.domusweb.it [email protected] Facebook editorial & marketing queries www.facebook.com/domus [email protected] contact: t +022 2481 1053 Twitter @domusweb

Domus Local Edition Mexico, Central America & Caribbean − China − India − Germany − Sri Lanka

Marketing ofﬁces Mumbai Peninsula Spenta, Mathuradas Mill Compound, N. M. Joshi Marg, Lower Parel (W), Mumbai - 13 Tel: 022-2481 1010 Fax: 022-2481 1021

New Delhi Faisal Khan, Narender Singh Rawat 1102, 11th Floor, Akashdeep Building, 26/A, Barakhamba Road, New Delhi – 110 001 Tel: 011- 46699999

Bengaluru spenta MULTIMEDIA PVT LTD Tina Pillai, Sandeep Kumar Peninsula Spenta, Mathuradas Mill Compound, Old No. 583, New No. 9, Sri Manjunatha Krupa, N. M. Joshi Marg, Lower Parel (W), 80 feet Road, 3rd Cross, Opp. Koramangala Mumbai - 400 013. Police Station, Bengaluru - 560 095 Tel: +91-22-2481 1062 Fax: +91-22-2481 1021 Tel: +91 80 41618966 / 77 Website: www.spentamultimedia.com

Domus, magazine of Spenta Multimedia Pvt Ltd, is printed and Kolkata published by Maneck Davar, on behalf of Spenta Multimedia Pvt Ltd. Pulak Ghosh Printed at Spenta Multimedia, Peninsula Spenta, Mathuradas 206 Jodhpur Park, Kolkata 700 068 Mill Compound, N. M. Joshi Marg, Lower Parel (W), Mumbai Tel: +91 33 2473 5896 Fax + 91 33 2413 7973 400 013. Published from Spenta Multimedia, Peninsula Spenta, Mathuradas Mill Compound, N. M. Joshi Marg, Lower Parel (W), Mumbai 400 013. Editor - Maneck Davar. Chennai The views and opinions expressed or implied in Domus are Shoba Rebecca those of the authors and do not neccessarily reflect those of 8/4, First Floor, Meridian House, Montieth Lane Spenta Multimedia. Unsolicited articles and transparencies are ( Behind Westin Park Hotel), Egmore sent in at the owner’s risk and the publisher accepts no liability for loss or damage. Material in this publication may not be Chennai 600 008 reproduced, whether in part or in whole, without the consent of Tel: +044 42188984 | 84 Cell no: 98840 55523 Spenta Multimedia. domus 56 November 2016 CONTENTS 23

Authors Mary N. Woods Author Design Title Christopher Benninger Editorial Suha Ozkan Catherine Desai Kaiwan Mehta 24 The culture of theory Bimal Patel Arindam Dutta Confetti Vandini Mehta Kaiwan Mehta 26 The purpose of writing Rohit Raj Mehndiratta Ariel Huber Women Architects in India: Jaimini Mehta Histories of Practice in Contemporary museum for architecture in India Neelkanth Chhaya Mary N. Woods 28 Mumbai and Delhi Persevering in an always difﬁcult profession Hans Ulrich Obrist Stephane Paumier Contemporary museum for architecture in India Photographers Christopher Benninger Christopher Benninger: Ariel Huber Suha Ozkan 44 Architecture for Modern India Meaning and identity in architecture Stella Snead Christian Brunner The Architecture of Catherine Desai Hasmukh C. Patel Bimal Patel Selected Projects Contemporary museum for architecture in India Arindam Dutta 56 1963-2003 A turn in architecture

Vandini Mehta Rohit Raj Mehndiratta Ariel Huber Jaimini Mehta Neelkanth Chhaya Hans Ulrich Obrist Contemporary museum for architecture in India Stephane Paumier 68 The Structure - Works of Mahendra Raj The structure of ideas

Ricardo Bak Gordon Solano BenÍtez Christian Kerez Cecilia Puga Renato Rizzi Jonathan Sergison Project Emilio TuÑón 86 Reporting from the front Feedback Shaonong Wei 102 Shaonong Wei's Shanghai Rassegna 108 Finishes

November Volume 06 / Issue 01 2016 R200

INDIA 056 LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO

Cover: The interior structure of the Hall of Nations (1971-72) designed by Raj Rewal and Mahendra Raj. The entire Hall of Nations and Halls of Industries complex at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi was designed, analysed and built in 15 months. This cover is a tribute to the engineer-designer Mahendra Raj and his monumental contribution to architecture in India, on the occasion of release of his book The Structure – The works of Mahendra Raj by Vandini Mehta, Rohit Raj Mehndiratta and Ariel Huber (Park Books, AG, Zurich, 2016).

This is a study of 3 Heritage Sub-Precincts in Chembur by Neera Adarkar of Adarkar Associates. Seen in this sketch is the Chembur Gaothan; the study included Chembur Gaothan, Old Chembur and St. Anthony’s Society precincts. Derived out of the study, is an Action Plan, which proposes strategies to conserve the existing and plan for new spaces. 24 EDITORIAL domus 56 November 2016

THE CULTURE OF THEORY Kaiwan Mehta

Domus India completed five years and now constant, ongoing story of trying to figure out marked the advent of a whole new way of with this issue begins a new annual cycle what ‘architecture’ and its extended field is looking at the world and civilisation, it marked of collecting works of architecture, visiting all about. There were words we used to talk a changed imagination with which human architectural practices, and meeting ideas in about architecture, and phrases that helped beings perceived reality thereon. The many flux, and bringing them within the pages of us discuss buildings, and their designing and forms of Brahmanical and Jain temples in this magazine. The magazine is something making... but we realise those same words and India are confluences of ideas and philosophical we have discussed in the past – as a cabinet phrases stand on a different plane of meaning moorings where human and divine established of ideas and arguments (DI_34) as well as a today! There are new words that have also terrains of dialogue – different imaginations of library with a changing format and structure entered the discourse... and we are still figuring the cosmos and human world collide to animate but always growing redrawing newer sections out what is to be done with them; but we know the shikharas and the columns. The body in and classifications, as well as a space much that they are important to the operating of the performing its circumambulatory journey like an exhibition where objects come close field. So what does a magazine do? Its primary builds up a dialogue with the material terrain together in a narrative structure, temporarily, task is to contribute to the operating field, to of walls and spaces animating the building provisionally, but the curatorial structure stays reflect on its means and modes of operation, into hyper-real geography of visual forms and embedded in its time-space context. and hold up a mirror to the way the subject ideas. The Crystal Palace in its transparency It is the space where theory draws its raw and field are shaping up – itself and the world. expanded visual possibilities allowing the eye data and new material from; as projects and It should build the ground for productive to run far up to a horizon from within material journeys are discussed, as arguments are criticism and evaluation, through means of surfaces, through a maze of designed objects discussed and debated, much of practice as well ‘thick description’ and creative drawing of the and products from the different industrial as the larger field of architecture get drawn field-network, references- reminiscence, and worlds and human- and machine-made out and detailed. Theory enhances the field understanding of resources that build up the products. The eye travelled in search of a limit of architecture and makes it available to a practice and its intellectual measure; at the for ever-expanding space – that travel was larger arena of intellectual production as well same time, it should have the courage to pull space, not defined any longer by material walls as helps a deeper understanding of cultural the ground below its feet! DI_34 but by the encounters of the eye. and knowledge practices, and their histories. — The encounters of the body, the encounters of Architectural practice is a wealth of cultural Architecture, and one could say nearly all of the eye are architecture’s primary concerns. knowledge – materials, technologies, forms human material culture, exists within the blurs But what the body and the eye encounter are and geometries, tools and systems, mediums in between science and myths, nature and the realities of a world-scape built on ideas and histories, and theory extends these into the man-made. It is primarily the structure and philosophies, within economic strategies broader realms of cultural practices as well of design – to make meaning in human life, and political dynamics. The body and the as intellectual histories. Theory nourishes and reproduce as much as reinterpret the eye stand tested through challenges that the the field and should not be seen as applied experiences and imaginations of realities and architectural landscape at all points throw knowledge; it builds the larger picture and human existence. At times, the natural is up, and at you. Architecture is the dynamic defines the universe of architecture, as much shaped into man-made frameworks, while at landscape, and the building is its arena as it helps you calibrate the contemporary other times, the man-made produces through and vocabulary. DI_43 (DI_53) and bring to attention the nature poetic imagination and story-telling sciences — and intellectual life of architecture (DI_38), the structure and cosmos of the natural. We Small interventions, missed ideas, struggling the magic of expanding imagination (DI_35) imagine the limits of science and myth are attempts, will be as important as masterpieces, as well as the life of design (DI_41) and make fairly defined and clear, but at all times we grand visions, bold attempts, and resolved sense of the landscape familiar-unfamiliar and actually have to carefully draw out the myths thoughts. The magazine then emerges as a even struggle to understand the geography within science, and the science of wonder catalogue of entries, an encyclopaedia that of things (DI_46). And this theory as an and imagination within myths. As objects is shaped over time, month after month. As expanding field of knowledge then again within human culture, especially architecture, architecture grows and groans its life and times allows us to ask – What does architecture do? actualise and realise these human anxieties will be noted in the pages of one issue after What does architecture want? (DI_45) and within material constructions and the ideas of another. As architecture produces the human importantly seek to understand Design as the form and texture – the man-made is constantly material world, it builds a sense and shape of terrain of action (DI_47) or ask why it is not producing a world of myth as well as reality. time-now and time-to-come; and it does so as so. These questions as much as universal also The crossroads and confluences are necessary much in the misses as much as in the resolved help us ask what it is like being architecture in for human civilisation to shape and further its incidents; that different pieces of architecture India (DI_48) not as a question of regionalism ideas of knowledge and human production; but are the different incidents and instances one is or national constituency, but as a context that the differences are equally important grappling to record and understand. is universal as much as oriented within context to know. Architecture and design are sites The act of recording is an important one. It of place and time that draw on confluence of rich confluences and it is necessary to may work out systems of classification, orders of histories, and exchanges of travelling celebrate these as much as it is necessary to of organisation – locally applicable than for any knowledges at times located but often as co- remember the individual structures and roles universal application. To decide what object is travelling strangers, but always embracing of each – myths and sciences, realities and sitting next to which one, what idea is sharing homes, making worlds (DI_37). fantasies, as they shape our culture and bolus space with which other idea – produces a As we sort out the many discussions this of experiences. DI_40 thought-scape, one that is reflective but only magazine has brought to the fore, we draw out — provisional. A magazine does that issue after extracts from certain editorials in our attempt Architecture is the landscape of culture, issue, connecting between its pages, but at to reiterate and remind ourselves of pending ideas, and the material world we inhabit. many times across its different volumes and questions and ongoing discussions: Architecture speaks through buildings but editions. DI_46 So what one has realised in the past few cannot be defined by them alone. The building We look forward to continuing these debates years, as one shapes and designs a magazine, exists within a landscape of culture, ideas, and discussions with every single issue, and or any other form of public discourse on the and the material world, and it is architecture every project, book, and curatorial idea we subject, is that, one is, at all points, trying to that contextualises the roles and relationships bring within these pages, this workshop, this understand through these deliberations and of built form and culture, ideas and material laboratory. km conversations – what is ‘architecture’? What realities. Crystal Palace in London of 1851 shapes ‘architecture’?How do we understand was not just a building with new technologies ‘architecture’? And this, in many ways, is a and new materials – it was a landscape that @Domus_India

CONFETTI

The Book as Archive The various publications, books and magazines, that have, for decades, served the profession of architecture as archive and forum, at ‘The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India’ exhibition curated by Rahul Mehrotra, Kaiwan Mehta and Ranjit Hoskote, a project by the Urban Design Research Institute in Mumbai. It was held at the NGMA, Mumbai from 6 January to 20 March, 2016. 26 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

THE PURPOSE OF WRITING

Writing on architecture is essentially a mode of producing meaning and attentive thoughtfulness, where writing and theory are not just ﬁnite practices or processes. They function like the space of a workshop where ideas and built histories are evaluated, measured, and analysed through critical tools, and the experiences of a workman – the maker (and practice of shaping and constructing) and the intellectual (processes of knowing)

Kaiwan Mehta

Architecture is the act and art of life to architecture, and made it clear history of intellectual traditions cultural histories merge within every making buildings, shaping the built how architecture lives within and of making and knowing, of living practice and writing tries to draw environment and the physical fabric beyond its materiality. Form was a and being. these details out without really that makes a world the human being structure of ideas, and ornaments Architecture is its own text, its own divorcing these entwined realities and societies occupy, be inside, and were the characters that made the library of references. But writing and material experiences. constantly engage with, exchanging plot richer and deeper. And yet and theory allows you to explore Writing and theory are not finite relationships between everyday life, every building was specific, and architecture as a text – a thesis, practices or processes, but function the world of bricks, mortar, steel every street corner had its own a novel, a narrative with newer like the space of a workshop and glass, as well as the civilisation chapter, but as the book discussed practices, and newer materialities, where ideas and built histories are of symbols and meanings the built these a picture of what architecture extending the practice and trades evaluated, measured, and analysed world holds within and is shaped is emerged. The building, the that make architecture. Getting through critical tools, and the by. Architecture is a complex object, neighbourhood, the city were scale a chance to study in detail and experiences of a workman – the entity, organism, system and weave of physical realities as well as levels analyse a body of work, a biography maker (and practice of shaping and of civilisation and human culture. of engagement – the book explored of architectural practice – in the constructing) and the intellectual Architecture grows cumulatively these structures and their internal process of writing my second (processes of knowing). Every always, whether it draws from relationships, making the physical book, The Architecture of I M Kadri book is in that way a rich and deep history or stands in rigid criticism of world a playground of lives, politics, (Niyogi Books. New Delhi, 2016) excavation into the life of ideas and it. And this architecture has to be and ideas - a terrain of cultural one was literally able to rewrite a objects that shape culture and are always explained and understood; interactions and fields. particular historical narrative (of processed through the travels of as architecture changes even after Writing does not then remain the architecture) largely through a study culture. And thankfully architecture it is built. Every built space has a mode of either documentation or of architectural form as a text, and in India is currently being amply life beyond what its author created, description, but became a mode of reading space as field of cultural reproduced through various and every author has a life beyond producing meaning and attentive existence as well as interpretation. publications. For histories and – before and after, every built space thoughtfulness. Architecture is the In the book the buildings were not theories to be discussed archives s/he has created. To write about field of action and these actions separated into individual objects and monographs are necessary as architecture is a complex process of are in a constant state of flux, and of study, as much as each was an the material on the working table to unearthing the nature of a practice architecture theory recognises independent entity; but the book be tested, analysed, and re-crafted that contributes to the cultural these states, or at least has the explores every building as an entity through writing. The more collective life of human societies as well as tools, the ability to understand and that exists and shares notes with and individual histories are written the processes of civilisation and discuss the states of architecture. other buildings before and after it in about, the more debates will be everyday politics. Ideas of culture and politics, the this practice that extends beyond six generated about the forgotten or lost Writing, in many ways, is a process realms within which architecture decades. The body of work is treated histories as much as about the ver akin to archaeology but also of is produced and plays its role are as one collection within a larger rehearsed narratives and dominant meditative – both processes brought into a narrative structure narrative structure and a biography themes. Cultural theory and critical of exploring the world and its through theory and writing. Books of changing ideas is excavated analysis of architecture indeed relationship to human life. But also are then the vehicle to expand through the process of writing, broaden the field of architectural both processes of unearthing and on the trade and practice of and reading buildings. Buildings as imagination by bringing forth not close study, of close reading the architecture – architecture beyond form, as texture and ornament, as only the histories of making and fabric of material world as well as architecture! As much produced structure and space often belong constructing buildings, but also the the acquirer of ideas. Writing is within its own systems of practice, to different ideas simultaneously, narrative field of culture within which also an act of intervention, a way pedagogy, and trades, architecture and rather than study each building architecture breathes and draws its of intervening within the material exists within the broader realm of as a set of ideas, many buildings nourishment from. Writing produces world as well as the world of ideas. human life and social conditions; travelling certain similar journeys and the larger field of architecture, the My first book Alice in Bhuleshwar: it then becomes a field of culture. idea-terrains. Each building is then field of architectural imagination Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood Architecture steps into another a part of two or three constellations, and an expanding materiality - the (Yoda Press. New Delhi, 2009) was realm of knowledge – another realm and it allows us to understand materiality of knowledge, and ideas. a process of discovering architecture of pedagogy and intellectual life. buildings as complex entities that and the world of spaces that share Architecture then exists beyond the come from different histories and their lives with human lives in and architect. The practice that produces multiple preoccupations. Every around it. Architecture became here that which is architectural, as well as practice grows from times present a landscape of ideas and motifs, the intellectual life of architecture and times past, and through its where many elements with their beyond its practice (or making, of vision and ambitions also with time- independent histories were coming production) in many ways co-exist future. The book rather than follow together shaping a physical fabric and are not divorced but they a chronology of projects or clusters that produced an experience of also are entities that often need of building types, explores through urbanity. As histories, stories (oral different research methodologies seven chapters the many journeys a narratives), literary narratives, and of exploration and critical analysis. practice goes through are unearthed; biographies came together the Writing is often that space that in this unearthing one begins to Every book is a rich and terrain of architecture became allows a critical engagement with the pull out of the dust the different deep excavation into the histories of a practice or culture, not life of ideas and objects became a breathing entity, it was intellectual life of architecture, where that shape culture and material beyond its materiality. the visual becomes the narrative, realised or unspoken of for long, are processed through Writing was the process that gave and practice becomes knowledge, a or simply forgotten. Personal and the travels of culture domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 27 28 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016 CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM FOR ARCHITECTURE IN INDIA PERSEVERING IN AN ALWAYS DIFFICULT PROFESSION

A recent book on the work and lives of women in the broader sphere of architecture in India, be it as designers, builders, activists or clients explores the complexities of the profession and the diverse range of practices and projects that have been shaped by the women architects of India

Mary N. Woods

Women Architects Delhi (2016) shows few women architecture have intrigued me for civil disobedience. Gandhi turned In 1958 Pietro Belluschi, the Italian- are sole principals of Indian firms. a long time. While Cornell-educated feminine stereotypes of passivity, American architect and educator, Like their western sisters, if Indian Margaret Hicks (B. Arch. 1880), morality, and endurance into new wrote he could “not recommend women are partners, it is often the first woman to graduate from and effective forms of resistance architecture as a profession for in family firms. In 1936, Perin an American architecture program, against oppression and imperialism. girls …. The obstacles are so great Jamshetjee Mistri (1913-1989), the Harvard did not even admit women Today when architecture seems to that it takes an exceptional girl to first woman to graduate from Sir until World War II had emptied its oscillate between poles of client make a go of it. If she insisted on J. J. Architecture in 1936, worked studios of male students. Despite deliverables and ‘starchitecture’, becoming an architect, I would try along with her brother in the Mumbai Cornell’s promising beginning, it did ideas about equity, community and to dissuade her.” Yet if she were office founded by their father. Meena not tenure a woman professor in sustainability at the heart of Indian still determined, he continued, “I Mani, partner in first Stein, Mani and architecture (me) until 1991 after independence and nation building would give her my blessing – she Chowfla and then Mani Chowfla, is the program was a 120 years old. need more expression in the built could be that exceptional one.”1 a rare exception. Most worrying is The women architects in India I have environment. Belluschi, who died in 1994, would that so many young women leave studied are exceptional in Belluschi’s In the global history of modernity, be astounded to learn more women the profession in India after a few sense of the word, persevering India is also central because it than men now study architecture years in entry-level positions. If in an always difficult profession, undertook after independence one in India. And they account for 40 women remain a majority of students especially for them. More importantly, of the most ambitious and intensive per cent of the country’s registered in schools of architecture and they are exceptional in aspiring programs of modernisation ever architects. As documented in the continue to disappear from practice for more than simply the design of attempted. Modern architecture recent “The State of Architecture” at current rates, the profession in iconic buildings. Out of choice or and city planning along with the exhibition in Mumbai, these statistics India, Mumbai-based conservation necessity they have found other emancipation of women assumed are more encouraging than those architect Abha Narain Lambah ways of being an architect. These privileged roles in Jawaharlal Nehru’s for the United States. There, women observes, will soon face a crisis. other ways owe much, I believe, to vision for the new nation. Almost make up 42 per cent of architecture India’s independence movement. seven decades after independence, students but only 26 per cent of Women, Modernity, and Indian During the freedom struggle Indian it is surely time to examine those registered architects, and a mere 17 Independence women of all classes, castes, and intertwined legacies for what they per cent of partners or principals.2 I met the first woman who inspired religions stepped into the public can teach us about the histories of While there are no comparable my book when I came to India in realm, often for the first time. There women architects and other models statistics for Indian women at the 1998. Since then, I have researched were leaders like Sarojini Naidu of architectural practice. highest professional level, research and interviewed women architects who inspired men and women alike. for my Women Architects in India: and their clients as well as women There were ordinary women who Across the Generations Histories of Practice in Mumbai and faculty and students. Women in participated in boycotts and acts of I soon discovered Indian women domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 29 30 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

Previous spread, left: Sudeshna Chatterjee, Behavior Map of Children, Nizamuddin, 2006. Key: 1. ﬂying kite; 2. drawing on wall; 3. playing among graves; 4. playing marbles; 5. exploring with friends; 6. meeting on steps; 7. roaming the street; 8. waiting on grave before class; 9. playing “gulli- danda”; 10. ganging up on stairs; 11. diagram of street from above. Right: Revathi Sekhar Kamath, Kamath Design Studio, Collage of West Gallery, Museum of Tribal Heritage, Bhopal, n.d. (Kamath Design Studio). This page, left: Pravina Mehta, Uma Patel at Her House, Kihim 1962 (Uma Patel). Below: Hema Sankalia, Kalidasa Academy, Ujjain, 1986 (Family of Hema Sankalia)

architects across the generations daily basis,” she continued, “every Pioneers of Architecture at Delhi’s School took exception to being called day you have one encounter that Despite female emancipation of Planning and Architecture women architects. Instead they will put you in your place. . .” being enshrined in the new nation’s (SPA), was the chief architect for were simply architects. And only a Another mantra I heard from women constitution, few Indian women the states of Punjab and Haryana. handful said they were feminists. architects and students was that it architects found public employment While Pravina Mehta (1923-1992) However, many told me with great depended on your mother-in-law or commissions between 1947 and collaborated with Correa and Shirish pride “I am an Indian architect.” whether or not you could work. 1991 when the state was the client Patel on plans for New Bombay, While women architects in the If she supported you, then you for major architectural projects. she never built for the state there West often object to being singled could pursue a career. However, Hema Sankalia (1934-2015) and or elsewhere.4 She depended on out as female too, I doubt they the Indian extended family can be Urmila Eulie Chowdhury (1923- a network of family, friends, and would then ask to be described an advantage for many women 1995), two early women architects, colleagues for the private work that as American or English designers. architects, especially once they were the exceptions. Sankalia constituted her practice. Influenced My Indian women architects, past have children. Sonali Rastogi, a designed a HUDCO housing project by Le Corbusier’s Ahmedabad and present, acknowledged they founding partner of Morphogenesis at Sanpada in New Bombay and residences, Mehta designed a home faced difficulties in the profession. in Delhi, remarked: “A lot of people several state institutions in Madhya in Kihim for Uma Patel, a single As Delhi architect Revathi Sekhar in my generation [born in the late Pradhesh.3 The rigour and simplicity and single-minded woman who Kamath observed: “gender bias 1960s and 1970s] feel that they’re of her exposed brick and concrete bred poultry there after studying is certainly not a myth. . . . The doing a favour for their parents Kalidasa Academy in Ujjain reflect agriculture abroad. vastu shastras allowed only men by living with them, but if you’re a Sankalia’s work with Charles While these pioneering women to be architects. . . Being a woman working woman, you’re being done Correa as an associate architect. architects had small practices, the architect is not an easy task on a the biggest favour.” Chowdhury, who was briefly Head building types they designed were domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 31

This page, left: Abha Narain Lambah, Abha Narain Lambah Associates, Masterplan for Ajanta Caves World Heritage Site, Aurangabad, 2009-2012 (Abha Narain Lambah Associates); top: view of the cave site. Left: paintings within the Ajanta caves. Below left: walkway connecting all the caves. Below right: Abha Narain Lambah, Abha Narain Lambah Associates, Restoration of Terra Cotta Temples, Maluti, 2011 (Abha Narain Lambah Associates) 32 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

This page, top left: Brinda Somaya, Somaya & Kalappa Consultants, Zensar Technologies Campus, Pune, 2003-2005 (Somaya & Kalappa Consultants). Top right: Revathi Sekhar Kamath, Kamath Design Studio, JSPL Gateway, Raigarh, 2006 (Kamath Design Studio). Below: Neera Adarkar, Adarkar Associates, Proposed Gandhi for Tomorrow Center, Sewagram, 2013-ongoing (Adarkar Associates) domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 33

diverse, ranging from homes to IT campus in Pune [seen on the bridge generation, their practices schools and factories to research opposite page]. Instead of importing have thrived with the booming institutes. Furthermore, women LEED’s technologically driven media, service, and lifestyle sectors like Pupul Jaykar, Kamaladevi solutions, Somaya argues for passive where women entrepreneurs like Chattopadhyay, and the American controls like Zensar’s pergolas, Sunita Namjoshi, founder of Synergy Grace Morley, called the “cultural water bodies, courtyards, thick walls, Lifestyles, are prominent. Namjoshi, czarinas” of India, were important and deep window reveals. Using who said Kadri ‘listened to her’ unlike clients in the post-independence the same elements she created the male architects she interviewed, period. They worked with architects architectural equity between her IT commissioned a showroom, factory, like Correa to build the first national campus, the building type of 21st- retail stores, and residential interior institutions for music, drama, fine century India, and the Bhadli village from her. Kadri (whose design staff arts, handicrafts, and archaeology. school destroyed by an earthquake was all female for many years) in 2001 [seen on the next spread]. says her office has “a great rapport After the Pioneers Working with her client’s NGO and and understands the problems of The next generation practiced the panchayat, she and the villagers working women.” in the decades after the heroic rebuilt their homes, dargah, temple, Place, craft, tradition, and materiality modernism of the new nation-state. and school where they originally are all important for Kadri, but she The bridge generation, as Mumbai stood to restore a sense of place insists they must be contemporised architect Brinda Somaya calls and belonging. A local trader in for architecture today. At the them, came of age during import tie-dyed woolens said this process Dasavatara Hotel she created a restrictions, material shortages, brought Hindus and Muslims five-star resort for Tirupati pilgrims and the Emergency Period. Based together in a way unknown before where the café takes the form of in Delhi, Kamath has long been the earthquake. Lord Vishnu’s lotus and floats in known for her mud architecture As an architect, planner and activist, a kund [seen on the next spread]. and eco-literate buildings inspired Neera Adarkar fought for the Here as well as in her Museum for by traditional forms and methods. mills and chawls of Mumbai textile Jain Heritage in Ahmedabad [also At the Museum of Tribal Heritage workers. When that modern industrial on the next spread] Kadri interprets in Bhopal, however, she worked heritage was destroyed, she the concentricity, orthogonality, and in steel because it was apt, she preserved its history and individual circumambulation of Hindu and Jain said, given the Adivasi traditions voices through her research writing. temples in contemporary design. of metalwork. In a collage of the Like Somaya, Adarkar was an early Open to the nearby Jain temples and museum’s west gallery, blood-red citizen-activist for the conservation pilgrim hostel, the museum is raised columns and a ceiling painted like of Mumbai’s heritage structures; on pillars above a stepped platform. the night sky create a forest grove, both women pursue contemporary Because of prohibitions against sacred to the Adivasis [seen on the design work alongside restoration electricity, galleries and storage first page]. Working with her son and repurposing of historic buildings. areas depend on a kund, skylights, Ayodh, she designed the stainless Raised in a Gandhian family, Adarkar roof trenches, and jharokha-like steel JSPL gateway at Chhattisgarh is now designing with her colleagues projections for natural cooling and as two conical hyperbolas joined a research and educational center illumination. by an ellipse [seen on the opposite of mud-block walls and verandahs Abha Narain Lambah, is a graduate page]. At 33 metres, it is the tallest raised on bamboo supports for of SPA’s architectural conservation stainless steel structure in South Gandhiji’s Sewagram Ashram department, India’s first such Asia. Inspired by the pole, swing, near Wardha [seen below on this academic program whose founding Above: cover of the book The Chawls of and ladder of Adivasi magicians, spread]. Along with a plan for professor was Nalini Thakur. Like Mumbai: Galleries the design was then refined regional heritage tourism and Somaya and Adarkar, Thakur of Life (ImprintOne, using Ayodh Kamath’s expertise economic development, this project emphasises that conservation 2012) by Neera in 3-D digital modelling. A digital demonstrates the importance of must create a sustainable future Adarkar (editor) fabrication program manufactured Gandhian ideas about tradition, for the past through adaptive the steel bars which craftsmen then simplicity, and sustainability in the reuse, recycling, upgradation, and assembled on site. 21st century. rehabilitation. Lambah established The Kamaths bridged the worlds of Shimul Javeri Kadri founded her her Mumbai office just as the city traditional building and high-tech Mumbai practice the year before enacted India’s first municipal design that Somaya claims Indian the Indian government eased its heritage regulations in 1995. Now architects are uniquely capable of restrictions regulating industry, it is one of the largest private bringing together. In her design for business, and banking in 1991. She practices solely dedicated to Zensar Technologies, Somaya used and her peers came of age in an conservation and cultural resource time-honored methods of cooling India of market economies, identity management in India. Retained as and ventilating for this contemporary politics, and globalisation. Like the a consultant by the ASI, she leads a 34 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

multidisciplinary team at the Ajanta its staircases, tombs, cemeteries, point. Blurring boundaries between Caves, India’s oldest world heritage and dilapidated buildings [seen on tradition and innovation, design site. However, her brief extends the previous page]. More than a and conservation, mainstream beyond conserving the rock-cut scholar, Chatterjee is an activist and and alternative, and activism and architecture [seen on previous advocate for children’s rights to play, professionalism, these exceptional spread] and its art to encompass nature, and the city. She designed women enrich and complicate our economic and environmental issues a mobile play cart with toys, books, histories of modern architecture and like preserving the natural landscape and even a carousel that comes to practice in India and beyond. and creating a regional heritage the children’s homes. Such home- itinerary. At the Maluti temples in based play is especially important Jharkhhand Lambah is concerned for girls given restrictions on their with grassroots conservation. Here movements. Through ACE she and she works with the minority Bengali- Nizamuddin children and teachers speaking community to preserve are designing a nature centre just and maintain its 17th and 18th- outside Rajasthan’s Ranthambore century terra cotta temples [opposite National Park for the children. Such page, left] as well as create new projects are a way, Chatterjee writes, economies of art and craft. “to shape my practice in my own Lambah, Kamath, Adarkar, and terms to fulﬁll the dream of creating Kadri all work with NGOs and a better world for children.” foundations that have spatial capital to spend on the built environment. Afterword Sudeshna Chatterjee is a social The perspective I bring to this entrepreneur with her own NGO, study is admittedly an outsider’s. As Action for Children’s Environments architect and historian Jorge Rigau (ACE). Educated as an architect has noted, however, sometimes you and urban designer, Chatterjee has can see with clarity and criticality been a partner at KCA Associates from the periphery. I cannot claim as in Delhi since 2004. Two years comprehensive a view as Madhavi later she received a doctorate in Desai in her Women Architects and Mary N. Woods, Women Architects in community and environmental Modernism in India: Narratives and India: Histories of Practice in Mumbai design in the United States. Her Contemporary Practices (2016). and Delhi, 2016, Routledge, 222 pages, dissertation focussed on the children Instead I show how certain women ISBN 978-1472473505. of Delhi’s historic Nizamuddin and architects have pushed the envelope https://www.routledge.com/Women- Architects-in-India-Histories-of-Practice- their creation of places to play, of conventional practice from my in-Mumbai-and-Delhi/Woods/p/ dream, and simply be alone from off-centre yet focussed vantage book/9781472475305 domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 35

Opposite page, top: This page, top: Shimul Brinda Somaya and Javeri Kadri, SJK Bhadli Villagers, School Architects, Dasavatara and Women’s Resource Hotel, Tirupati, 2010-2015 Center, Bhadli, 2009 (SJK Architects). Left: (Mary N. Woods); below: Shimul Javeri Kadri, SJK cover of the book Women Architects, Museum of Architects in India: Jain Heritage, Ahmedabad, Histories of Practice ongoing (SJK Architects) in Mumbai and Delhi by Mary N. Woods, (Routledge, 2016).

1 Quoted in Ellen Perry Berkeley (1989), Introduction, Architecture: A Place for Women, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, p. xvii. 2 Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote, and Kaiwan Mehta (2016) , The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India, Mumbai: Urban Design Research Institute, p. 30; Equity in Architecture Survey and Report on Key Outcomes, 2014, American Institute of Architects, San Francisco, quoted in Despina Stratigakos (2016), Where Are the Women Architects? (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press. 3 Subodh Dhairyawan was Sankalia’s partner for many of these state projects. 4 When Mehta and Sankalia brieﬂy formed what was probably the ﬁrst all women- partnership in the 1960s, it was before the latter began designing public buildings. 36 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016 domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 37

This spread: projects by Brinda Somaya of Somaya & Kalappa Consultants Pvt Ltd. Opposite page: a courtyard at the Nalanda International School, Vadodara. This page top left: a modern ofﬁce interior with state-of-the- art technology created inside the Grade II Heritage building of TCS House, Mumbai. Above: The Mumbai Esplanade Project, a proposal for the creation open spaces for Mumbaikars and visitors alike to enjoy, to rejuvenate and engage with the city. Left: new structure of the Bhadi Village School. This new school was built after the old one was completely destroyed in an earthquake 38 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

This spread: projects by Revathi Kamath of Kamath Design Studio. This page: the Museum of Tribal Heritage in Bhopal; top left: view of the entrance courtyard; left: entrance courtyard ramp at lower level. Opposite page, top: the ‘neo-jhumpas’ at Tal Chhapar boast of an articulated triangulated steel frame that holds up a bamboo roof ﬁnally decked out in concrete. Below: the 715-hectare Savannah-like grassland in northern Rajasthan domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 39 40 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016 domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 41

SKETCH – INTERACTIVE SPACES IN CHEMBUR GAOTHAN NODE

SKETCH – PLAZA CONNECTING CHURCH AND MAIN ROAD IN CHEMBUR GAOTHAN NODE

This spread: projects by Neera Adarkar of Adarkar Associates. Opposite page: view of the Chaitanya Senior Citizen Home, Jambhulpada – a low rise complex set around in the ﬂood-prone area of Jambhulpada. This page, top left: a study of 3 Heritage Sub- Precincts in Chembur – Chembur Gaothan, Old Chembur and St. Anthony’s Society. Above: YUVA Centre, Kharghar, Navi Mumbai – a multipurpose training centre for for YUVA (Youth for Voluntary Action), an NGO involved in multiple activities. Left: plan for the Gandhi for Tomorrow: Revitalization of Sewagram Wardha and Pavnar Region project. The objective of the project is to rediscover relevance of Gandhi’s vision and practices for a sustainable future of the region 42 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

This spread: projects by Kandivali, where existing is primarily dominated by page: The Nirvana Films’ Shimul Javeri Kadri of industrial sheds have the over-sailing building in Bengaluru that SJK Architects. This page, been transformed into roof shells that resemble articulates the sky and its above: The Mahindra and ‘designed sheds’. Below: fallen leaves, light into a conversation Mahindra Automobile the Leaf House in Alibaug which are held closely about the skin and the Design Stuido in where the overall design together. Opposite soul of architecture domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 43 44 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016 CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM FOR ARCHITECTURE IN INDIA

MEANING AND IDENTITY IN ARCHITECTURE

A recent monograph on Christopher Benninger delves deeper into his life and work in India – a narrative that spans over nearly ﬁve decades. It records the dynamic changes in the Indian architecture and design realm over the years, its inﬂuence on Benninger’s work, and his intuitive ability to aptly respond to rapidly transforming scenarios of architecture in contemporary India

Christopher Benninger, Suha Ozkan

Forty-Four Years in India with a shift from a supply-oriented economy to by the central government, during its four-hours This is a book about the practice of architecture a demand-oriented one. Throughout all of these nightly schedule. There were year-long waiting in South Asia and the kinds of artifacts our studio changes, there was no priority for investments lists to get a telephone connection, to buy a has produced over the past four decades. So it in urban infrastructure, and the role of cities in scooter or an automobile, even if one could is a document about intentions, strategies, and development was not recognized. For the past afford them. methods of producing buildings. It also illustrates decade, this nation has been addressing the We lived in a world of scarcity and simplicity. No how the products of these processes appear in global realities of a subcontinent trying to address fast-moving consumer goods were on the shop reality. However, an architect produces more than a world economy. Suddenly, urban development shelves and everything was made in India. Foreign just buildings; he or she practices an art, aiming has moved into the public debate, without the journals and magazines were either expensive, to create what poetically reflects their context necessary institutional underpinnings in the areas or simply not available. Our knowledge and in terms of social, economic and cultural forces. of urban finance, urban law, urban planning and wisdom were gleaned from wise people and smart Their architecture intervenes within a history of administration. As an architect with a strong bent friends. And yes, we had time to read books back urban fabric, which is often more responsive to toward human development, and a belief that then! But remained untouched by Western fads, the politics of contemporary urban planning than cities play a key role in the mobilization of human fancies and styles, driven by obscure academic to ancient prototypes. Their creations have to say resources, sponsorship of civilized debate, and theories. We vaguely heard of the overarching something uniquely lyrical about the context within fostering creativity, the national dialogue on the ideas marching through international architecture, which they emerge to qualify as architecture. roles of cities has been a long and painful wait! from Rationalism to Post-modernism, through And that unique lyricism has to read visually as a Nevertheless, the practice of architecture to Deconstructivism and onto Para-modernism, putative truth, leaving words as poor substitutes has evolved dramatically during these cycles championed by esoteric professors and mimed by for architectural content. of change. These transformations were felt dutiful practitioners. If I have a unique voice in architecture, it has through chaotic urbanization and related shifts in Yet, India was rapidly modernizing and growing. emerged from my life in India, spanning over demography. They have been especially felt in the Core industries in the power, steel, concrete and forty-four years. Beginning in the midst of the wider pallet of materials available to designers, machinery sectors were being put into place, Nehruvian era of a socialist planned economy and in the expanding programmatic scopes of erasing colonial dependencies on imports. Nuclear focused on nation building through policies projects and new functions arising. When I came power was advancing along with a nascent space and programmatic measures of the state, my to India in the late 1960s, and then permanently industry, and missionaries, colonial-era companies experiences in modern India witnessed initial settled here in 1971, cities like Ahmedabad and Anglo-Indians were fleeing the country. attempts to strengthen the agricultural base of and Pune, where I lived, had populations of just Banks, land, insurance, the sole national airline, the country, followed by the diversification of its over a million people. Now, heading into 2016, and other key sectors of the economy were economy into essential civil supplies. Early on, their populations are inching towards eight nationalized with an intention to focus their limited its national planning emphasized key industrial million! Rapid urbanization, industrialization, a resources for the improvement of the average sectors, and later in the 1980s, policy drifted into media revolution and the emergence of a solid Indian, instead of aggrandizing a small, urban elite. social and economic services, and much later still consumer base have morphed India out of New towns, educational centers of excellence into consumer goods. Import substitution was traditional cultural mindsets into a very complex and financial institutions were being created, and a key goal until the advent of de-regularization, society over a short period. Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar, Gandhinagar and Navi The India I knew half a century ago is now Mumbai were all conceived and constructed right a cloud of memories floating across the before our eyes. The National Housing Bank, the reminiscent skies of a few survivors. Over several Housing and Urban Development Corporation adventurous decades I learned that India lives (HUDCO) and metropolitan development in layers of history with different eras coexisting authorities in major cities were put in place. simultaneously. It is as if different historical time And the institutes of management in Kolkata, frames form a living palimpsest, where diverse Ahmedabad and Bengaluru were all initiated, value systems and traditions lie intimately above while institutes of technology promised a leap into and below one another in the same geographic the future. space, yet somehow remain separate in their Indeed, India was a unique mix of Nehruvian own worlds. This is the rich fabric of India or I socialism and Western democracy. This was not should say of the many ‘Indias’ I have come to China, Vietnam or Cuba. This was socialism within know, and in many ways explains how such a an active democracy, with labor unions striking, diverse society finds consensus and harmony and every political flavor screaming and yelling in within shared economic, political and physical the national debate. An uneasy ‘mixed-economy,’ spaces. Art forms like dance, painting, film and dominated by monopolies, guided by five-year architecture have to find a poetic coexistence plans, and managed by a ‘Regulation Raj’ of within this dynamic fabric. bureaucrats, moved the country forward by what My Ahmedabad of the early 1970s had no people at the World Bank called the ‘Hindu Rate television! There were very few telephones, and of Growth.’ These years brought Le Corbusier, outdated automobiles were considered great Jane Drew, Maxwell Fry, Otto Königsberger luxuries. We plied the streets on our bicycles, and Louis Kahn onto the cultural stage, and and spent our evenings walking and talking with they spawned indigenous geniuses like Achyut friends under starlit skies. Both cycle and auto- Kanvinde, Balkrishna Doshi, and Charles Correa. rickshaws were common. In the few metro-cities When I settled in India permanently in 1971, I that boasted some television, people viewed the was one of the few Caucasian inhabitants of only black and white channel available, hosted Ahmedabad. Indians had started migrating to the domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 45

This spread: cover (opposite page below) and layouts from the book Christopher Benninger – Architecture for Modern India published by Skira, Italy (2015), co-published by India House Art Gallery, Pune

United Kingdom after Independence, as laborers My early architectural works were carried out through ABD funding for the very first time. This and technicians to the Middle East, and finally in a more as an avocation, with my focus on the was also a time of relative isolation, national spirit, massive ‘brain drain’ to America. At first in a trickle spirit of the times. We thought that we could immersion in contextual development issues, and then in a flood, a large Indian community “create a new man” through transformations in and being cut off from the many intellectual settled in the land of my birth, as I sunk my roots society. Urban planning and accessible shelter movements, theories and style changes that deeper into the land of their birth! My white skin seized my imagination, and my mission was to grabbed the attentions of architects across the and degrees from Harvard and MIT were oddities build educational and research institutions which ‘developed nations.’ We had more important issues when I arrived, with only a select few Indians rationally distributed resources in a manner that and concerns on our minds. We were uninterested studying abroad. So while I migrated from the fulfilled basic needs: “To each according to his in debates about style. We were concerned with West to the East, a great wave of Indians headed needs, and from each according to his abilities,” debates about the human condition! the other way, and our paths crossed only in our was our firm belief. Our institute, the Centre for Development Studies imaginations. By the late-1970s, when I had I founded and directed the School of Planning and Activities, was pioneering decentralized, moved to Pune, Coca-Cola and other evidences in Ahmedabad and the Centre for Development multilevel planning and micro-level development. of Western consumerism had been banished Studies and Activities in Pune in their early years. It practiced participatory planning before the from India by the ruling Janta Party government. For the first quarter century of my stay in India, term earned coinage. It challenged the World Conspicuous consumption was frowned upon, ‘institution building,’ teaching, and research were Bank’s macrowatershed approach to agriculture, Gandhian khadi kurta-pajamas were fashionable, my central focus and passion. Architecture to breaking ground in micro-watershed development and western suits were considered a joke. me was at best a social tool explored through and sustainable agriculture. We analyzed ways Like the Cultural Revolution, though milder, the affordable shelter schemes, and at worst a to organize multi-level planning; bringing into ‘Gareebi Hatao’ (eradicate poverty) movement gentleman’s hobby, in the design of institutional sync national, state, district and village planning, was sweeping across the nation. Along with buildings. It was neither my source of livelihood and then turning it upside-down into a grass the western frills went advancedtechnology- nor my sense of identity. My adventures in roots planning and development system. In urban based companies, like IBM, at great cost to development lead me to advisory work with the slums, we worked with community groups and India’s development. World Bank, the United Nations Organization, the local authorities to improve hygiene and to civilize This was when I founded the School of Planning Asian Development Bank, the Indian Planning inhumane living conditions. We opened up a public at what is now CEPT University in Ahmedabad Commission, and central ministries, and took me dialogue on settlements housing half the urban (1971); I designed vast low-income shelter to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Malaysia, Nepal, population, but unrecognized by the authorities. projects for urban development authorities and Zambia, the Philippines and Bhutan. I advised This was a time of great expectations and hopes state governments (1972–86); I set up the Centre urban development authorities in Mumbai, Kolkata, for humanity. It was a time of utopian beliefs in the for Development Studies and Activities in Pune Hyderabad and Chennai, and prepared rural rational evolution and development of mankind. (1976); I prepared plans for cities in Sri Lanka development programs in every corner of India. Yes, we were sure we would be creating a ‘new (1979–83), and India (1971–96); I prepared This was a time of authoring seminar papers, man,’ in a just, equitable and inclusive society! development plans for Bhutan (1979–86); I attending international conferences, managing Christopher Benninger researched development processes, income foundations, and editing journals in India and distribution, ability to pay; and I designed programs abroad. Ekistics, Cities, and Habitat International for poverty alleviation (1971–96). Asia was were my journals of choice which published planning its resources carefully and crafting the my articles. institutions to channel those resources. India was Exciting events included writing the Theme in the grips of Socialism, planning and channeled Paper for the Seventh Session of the United growth, and I was very much a part of it. While Nations Commission on Human Settlements the West held its breath, and the middle class (1983) on “Human Resources Mobilization for fled, I was committed to the sea changes that Urban Management,” for the UNCHS (Habitat) immersed Indian society. They included measures in Nairobi, and preparing the first “Urban Policy for inclusiveness, equality and sustainability aimed Paper” for the Asian Development Bank (1986) Following are a few selected projects, pages and an excerpt from at the improvement of the masses. in Manila, opening loans for urban infrastructure the book, published in Domus India with the permission of the Editor 46 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

Supreme Court of Bhutan Thimphu, Bhutan – 2006-2014 The Supreme Court of Bhutan is one of the critical components of the Bhutan modernization project, centered on the transformation of the monarchy into a constitutional democracy. The design problem was to create an iconic structure reflecting the importance of the Constitution and the culture from which the essence of the Constitution emerged. The design conundrum was to find a new building typology within the regional, yet speaking within the architectural language of the society. This language is based in a vocabulary of iconography, symbolic colors and the employment of culturally appropriate motifs that are cultural signifiers. The campus also spatially addresses the ancient Trashichhoe Dzong where the studio had completed an important extension, in the form of the National Ceremonial Plaza. Finally, a very important part of the problem was the limitation of building resources, craftsmen and technology. Prior to this design there had been several attempts by foreign architects, whose employment of highly processed materials, requirement for technical construction equipment, and need for construction management, obviated implementation. Their alien appearances were incongruent with the visual language of the people. Programmatically the problem was to create one full bench court and four single bench courts, supported by administration and archives, in the form of an Administrative Building. There This page, from top: the picturesque surroundings was also to be a Judicial Library, a Registrar’s of the site; traditional Building and Lawyers’ Chambers. Perhaps most Bhutanese architectural challenging was the site selected by the architects elements on the Justices’ as part their earlier urban design for the National chambers as a reflection of integrated cultural Capitol Precinct that slopped heavily from west context; details of to east, perpendicular to the north-south axis Bhutanese traditional addressing the Trashichhoe Dzong, within which woodwork. Opposite lies the country’s most sacred temple, the twelfth page, top: model of the Supreme Court Complex century Utsi. The completed campus is the result of strategies addressing all of these factors: site, cultural contextual, technological and functional issues. Early strategic decisions were to use local materials that could be sourced from the immediate region. Local craftspeople were to domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 47

be employed and the technologies that they are familiar with used. All of these decisions carried the implication that the Bhutanese fabric of build would be employed, as the craft culture followed patterns of dimensions, iconography norms, color and motif signifiers, and fabrication methods unique to the culture. For example, there is a vast unwritten catalogue of details, motifs, joinery, column designs, etc. that the carpenters and masons know ‘by heart,’ and carry out by instinct, and not through ‘measuring and building.’ This craft system could be catalyzed, something like a Logo set, to assemble various building typologies, within the same language of build. The second strategy was to address the urban design issues of the National Capital Precinct through a site plan that centered the structures on a Judicial Plaza, aligning the full bench Supreme Court chamber at the far north of the plaza with the Trashichhoe Dzong, and specifically the ancient Utsi, to the south. The third strategy was to organize the arrangement of functions and activities in the complex in a matter that separates the profound from the mundane. Put simply, the judges, their archives and support staff had to have their own circulation in the complex, separating them from plaintiffs and visitors. Finally, the strategy for the site addressed the slope coming down across it, perpendicular to the north-south Trashichhoe Dzong axis. This height variation was exploited to bring the judges into the site from the higher western elevation, one floor above the public entry, cutting a terrace, creating the lower plaza level. This allowed for secure circulation within the administrative area and courts, via bridges, from the west, with the public coming into the courts from the lower east side. Several heritage structures in the form of small chortens were also integrated into the site plan. This work rejects the strategy of importing an alien, new style, while creating a modern building typology in the Himalayan context. The campus is a manifestation of regional context, culture, lifestyle, climate, topography and a design philosophy that is conscientious of, and responsible to, a living civilization’s’ traditions. SITE PLAN 48 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

Center for Development Studies and Top, from left: a ceiling Activities, Pune – 1986-1994 mural in concrete reflecting a man in the The Centre for Development Studies and cosmos seeking meaning; Activities (CDSA) is a place of exploration, pitched tiled roof over reflection and analysis on the great laboratory parallel stone walls create that is India. It was built by the architect for his connecting courtyards, or ottas that also display own trust activities whose focal concerns are the traditional artifacts at study of development processes and the role of the Development Centre; planned interventions in societal changes and a statue by Indian artist transformations. Professor Benninger was the Piraji Sagara. At the institute, it is called founding director of this institute in 1976, and ‘Karuna’, wisdom tempered remains the president of its Governing Body. by compassion – the The campus is perched on a hill terrace, two guiding spirit of the Centre hundred meters above sea level, along the slopes of India’s Western Ghats Mountains as they meet the great plains of the Deccan Plateau, providing vistas up into the mountains, or down into valleys. The mild climate allows the Institute’s activities to take place out-of-doors and under semi-enclosed spaces within the fifteen-acre garden site. The academic quadrangle reflects the podium of Greek gymnasia that were also perched on the brow of a hill slope on the fringe of Athens. The ‘groupings’ of buildings around this platform, SITE PLAN focusing on views and statues, also draws its domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 49

roots from classic Greek traditions. A fabric of interior balconies and two-storied interlocking platforms known as ottas are used for rising up build has emerged from the assemblage of three spaces. An interesting play of spaces has been statues, or as a base for an antique bird feeder. generic elements. Stone, which has been cleared created with the studios opening out into their These mechanisms are in fact used to attract off the land, where terraces are planted with own intimate landscaped courtyards, which the mind away from the core of the institute, orchards, forms a strong pattern of east-west again visually connect to the main central where daily tasks, and the details of work, could parallel walls. These stone walls create a fabric of podium through square apertures. One can overpower one’s creative energies. built form achieving a rustic sense of rural space. see what activities are taking place, yet one The materials, finishes, detailing and spatial The spaces enclosed within these basalt walls can claim authority over one’s own privacy. This design, attempt to consolidate wisdom of the open to views of the mountains in the west and openness reveals the deep-rooted meaning past while attempting to articulate original the growing metropolis to the east. Transparent of the Institute, in which the liberated mind spatial experiences. sliding glass panels form the second element; searches for the resolution of specific problems, The residential village of the institute, set back in shaded by verandahs, they act as screens that often through teamwork, or through the the campus gardens, is composed of twenty-four can be adjusted in individual spaces to regulate exchange of opposing ideas. rooms, each having an attached toilet and the breeze, avoiding the need for electric fans, The three elements are held together by a system private courtyard. and providing energy-free lighting during the day. of courtyards, stone walls, stone stairs and paved This design developed in the mid-1980’s draws The third element is that of tile roofs, which slope pathways. Staggered steps, with sitting blocks, its spirit, use of materials, and language from the more steeply towards the west, from whence and lotus ponds all reflect local forms of space Alliance Francaise in Ahmedabad. strong winds blow, bearing the heavy monsoon making, common in the village squares, mosque rains off the Arabian Sea. Facing east, they courtyards, and temples of this mountainous slope more gently against the delicate morning region. The silhouette of a sculptured bust by the sun. This asymmetry, which is used throughout famous artist Piraji Sagara greets ones approach the fabric, reflects the thoughtful mind, which into the raised podium courtyard. Falling on is always wondering. The sloping tile roofs laid two levels, the stone paved podium is planted on marine ply boards, supported by steel rafters with great restraint, while giant earthen pottery accommodate mezzanines connected through provides storage of rainwater. Traditional seating 50 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

TYPICAL FLOOR PLAN

Left: the facade of the hostel building has been broken down into modules of exposed pebble stone panels, glass fenestration, precast concrete ﬁns and concrete jaalis, lending privacy to the women’s dry balconies

Hostel and Lecture Halls at College of residential rooms above. The strategy for the large glass windows look out into a garden. Engineering, Pune – 2008-2012 women’s residence is to situate two bedrooms Several ancient trees shade the site, and the Initiated in 1854, the College of Engineering at on either side of a wet core, accessed through building shape was arranged to accommodate Pune (COEP) is one of the oldest engineering a dry balcony lent privacy by concrete jaalis that them. Thus, there is a single loaded passage to colleges in Asia. Over decades the campus filter views. Each of the two rooms houses three the south of the elevator core on each level and a lands have been encroached upon for expanding students, with the six clustered students sharing double loaded corridor to the north. highways, railway lines, arterial roads, and two washbasins in the dry balcony and a shower An Academic Building was constructed, facing a recently flyovers, resulting in five fragmented land and a toilet. With the ground floor dedicated river, to accommodate all of the first year students’ parcels, one of which is covered by low income to common facilities, and the roof garden level course work. The entry of the academic building squatters. Over the years the campus, located devoted to a gym, clinic, laundry and apartments is a through a double height, open lobby with on thirty-six acres, had grown indiscriminately for mentors, the remaining ten floors, of twenty coffered ceilings, merging with the surrounding while constructing low-rise structures and rooms each, accommodate six hundred women landscape and views towards the river. The allowing vehicles of various types to enter and within the college campus. ground floor accommodates a large three hundred park at as hoc locations. A new management in The ground floor level of this structure hosts a capacity auditorium for common lectures, and 2006 formulated a vision to double its student cutout-porch, through which the planned stem, a computer sciences laboratory. The top floor intake, enhance its facilities and to increase its or campus street, will later pass. To one side of of this five storied building houses offices for residential hostels, especially for women. Realizing this porch lies a coffee shop, and on the other the professors. Classrooms and laboratories are that the future lay only in vertical growth, and in side is the hostel entrance lobby, with elevators located on the middle three levels. better utilization of their limited land, the institute and vertical stair. There is also an entry into the A simple language was employed composed of decided to prepare a campus master plan and to large dining room, with cooking facilities behind it. exposed concrete, coffered ceilings in double initiate construction of new facilities. This structure is wedged into a corner site of the height entrance floors and common facility areas, The women’s residence was the first initiative residential campus with one side opening onto a murals cast in concrete walls and pebble stone in this campus development program. This narrow garden promenade, shared with a hundred panels between fenestration panels. hostel is envisioned to anchor a pedestrian stem year old, ground and two floors, boys’ hostel that of four, twelve-storied structures, positioning has been renovated into a postgraduate women’s common spaces on the ground level and locating residence. On the other side of the dining hall, domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 51

This page, top right and above: model and view of the Forbes Marshall building. The structural system of this large industrial pavilion is composed of steel trusses, columns and latticed horizontal GROUND FLOOR PLAN OF THE BOILER PAVILION mechanical passages

Forbes Marshall Green Field Industrial like power supply, transport, security, health care, architect, over this volume. Skylights running Campus, Chakan – 2010-Ongoing energy management, storage and an extensive parallel over these triangular trusses illuminate the The Forbes family, doyens of modern industry Vendor’s Park feed into the production units from pavilion floor. The south facade is composed of in India, have been working out of antiquated, a lineal corridor along the southern belt of the site. a vast aluminum jaali, filtering sunlight through a inefficient and chaotic structures, that grew The first phase of the campus is composed of secondary glass wall. This filtered light, combined according to need in an ad hoc manner over two large manufacturing pavilions supported with the skylights, ensures minimal use of artificial decades. Typical of the industrial landscape of the by utility structures and linking roads. Each light over the entire workspace. The north edge of Pune metropolitan region, this dulling grey urban production pavilion has its integral supporting the boiler workshop is composed of ground plus landscape arose across the industrial belt, which office spaces facing the garden views in first level office units, sanitary facilities, break- houses a mixture of Indian and multi-national the central garden spine. The work areas out areas, cafes, training areas and amenities industries. Sensing the need for change the are conceived as creative studios, mirroring overlooking the pavilion’s working spaces, on one clients and the architects conceptualized the idea production flow channels, bringing daylight from side and facing the green campus spine on the of factories turning into creative work-studios of vast skylights onto greenery on the working floors. other. A playful curved glass wall tempers the highly qualified thinker-doers, using high-tech The intentions and strategies of the design fall edges of these human scale, working areas. manufacturing. Natural light and trees growing within several inter-connected layers of purpose. The architects’ ambition was for the most on the workshop floors were amongst the new At a very basic level, each pavilion on the site is unskilled worker and the most senior manager initiatives employed. a machine for creating national wealth in its own to feel a sense of pride in their place of work. To The concept of pollution free, efficient work right and, as such, must be functional, efficient, quote, “ Positive emotions of pleasant anticipation pavilions, set in a green garden ambiance, was durable and easy to maintain. At another level, should swell up as team members approach their jointly conceived by the architect and the all of the structures are players within an overall place of work each morning. A visitor should feel clients, who emerged as patrons of the arts in campus and they have to be situated within they are within a vast garden precinct when they the process. that campus system in a manner that optimizes reach the Forbes Marshall campus. While knowing The Forbes Marshall Industrial Park, at the new synergies amongst the various parts. On another it is a global enterprise, signifiers must inform Chakan industrial city in the Pune Metropolitan level the experience of the individual worker them that they are in a place called Pune.” Region, was conceived to mirror the Forbes and their team members was conceptualized as Marshall group’s ambitions for high technological something green, light and human. and global standards. It was also envisioned as At all times the strategy was to create an urban a testament to a social commitment to safety, landscape that is lively, green and welcoming. hygiene and sustainability. Spread over fifty acres, The boiler workshop is the first structure to be the industrial campus focuses on a central green completed, covering a footprint of over twenty-six spine of gardens, water bodies and breakout thousand square meters, and reaching twenty- areas. A new corporate headquarters structure three meters in height, materializing as a cathedral anchors this large space to the eastern entry for manufacturing processes. The roofing of side, with production units in the form of vast lightweight aluminum composite sheets, floats pavilions aligning the gardens. Ancillary activities, on lightweight steel trusses, designed by the 52 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

Left: model of Kirloskar Institute of Advanced Managements Studies

Kirloskar Institute of Advanced the long sloping interior as a dedicated central site where a water collection pond and cisterns Managements Studies, Pune – 2008-2014 pedestrian garden. store rainwater. The Kirloskar group of industries is one of the Further it was decided to keep the academic Set at the top of the hill between the entry- oldest family owned industrial establishments functions near the entry, and step these down administration, and the executive hostels, is in Western India. Over the past two decades the hill on one side of the elongated, slopping the extensive catering facility with kitchens off they have transformed into a cluster of global plot, with the formal entry and the Administration the service road, a server, and four dining halls companies requiring new strategies and Building at the top. From here a series of opening onto terraces, affording views into the production processes. They aim to create courtyards step down onto subsequent lower distant valleys and mountains. These views run an appropriate managerial style, suitable to terraces, and each terrace is devoted to a core down a central garden mall to the recreation this new business environment, and hence function focused around a courtyard. The entry facilities at the lower end of the site. promoted the Kirloskar Institute of Advanced and the administration were kept at the top; mid- The materials language is that of exposed Management Studies. career executive training on the next lower terrace concrete structural components, white rough Located on the periphery of the Pune courtyard; masters in business administration, plaster on brick infill walls, natural Kota Stone metropolitan region, the site slopes down the hills first and second years, on the next two lower level floors and sloped copper aluminum roofs, of the Sahyadhri mountain range, from a major terraces, and the library at the lowest terrace. In mirroring the mountainous terrain. arterial road. The sloping elevation, from this each of these courtyards, one side is devoted to Like the Centre for Development Studies and higher entry point, was exploited to break the faculty offices and the other to classrooms. Thus, Activities, the Mahindra United World College fabric of the campus into descending terraces the lower floor at the higher courtyard becomes and the YMCA Camp Site this composition is that structure the built fabric into a long the upper floor in the next lower courtyard. conceived as a vast, green landscape, bringing stepped section. On the other side of the site the residential area in the borrowed, dramatic landscapes from afar. The clients’ requirements included three basic begins with an residential entry for executive Up close there are gentle steps, ramps, and functions, further articulating the stepped terraces management candidates on the higher terrace, natural stone walls and walls with cast mural into specialized parts. These three major parts are and subsequent dropping terraces dedicated to reliefs in them. the Academic Area; the Residential Area; and the accommodate postgraduate student hostels and Dining and Recreation area. commons areas, in clusters, from one higher level The strategy of the design was to encircle the down to the next lower level, on down the hill, site with a vehicular service road on the edge, off reaching a recreational area at the lower end. This of which parking nodes were located so that no recreation area has changing areas, a swimming one would walk across moving traffic. This would pool, and multi-purpose halls for yoga and a gym. create a buffer from nearby sites, allow utility These are near tennis courts and other out- and emergency vehicles easy access, and leave of-doors sports areas, at the lower end of the

CONCEPTUAL SKETCHES domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 53

Suzlon One Earth Global Corporate Headquarters, Pune – 2006-2009 Suzlon Energy Limited is a leading wind energy company based in Pune, India. With sustainability as their product they pledged to create the greenest office campus in India. Living the motto of the company, ‘powering a greener tomorrow,’ the design exclusively employed non-toxic and recycled materials. Water, energy, air, sewerage and trash are all sustainably managed on site. No sewerage, wastewater or trash is removed from the site and all are recycled within it. Covering about one hundred thousand square meters of built-up area on ground plus two levels, on a 10.4 acres urban site, the project achieved international LEED Platinum and Indian TERI GRIHA top certifications, with 8% of its annual energy generated on-site through photovoltaic panels and windmills, at an incremental cost of about eleven percent. At the time of completion there were no other campuses in India with this level of certification, on-site renewable energy, at this level of cost efficiency. With an off-site wind This page, from top: the energy farm supplying ninety-two percent of the deepstambh, a traditional potential four megawatt energy consumption, the pillar of oil lamps is campus is a net zero energy project! set in the centre of the The only instructions to the architect were to reflecting pool; the pool create a high technology, global campus, in which visually interconnects the campus, also the visitor would feel they were in India. The creating a pleasant strategy derives its inspiration from historical microenvironment; campuses like Fatehpur Sikri and the Meenakshi photovoltaic panels from Temple complex in Madurai. The concept took the the roof of the atrium in shape of a land scraper, opposing the idea of a the Excellence Academy over the traditional pool skyscraper! It is a counter blast to “the glass box.” with kund-like steps. Next A series of served and server spaces were spread: sketches and conceptualized, allowing adaptability, suitable layouts from the book to the transformational nature of evolving business patterns. The served spaces cover a major share of the campus, where people work accommodating flexible modular walls and furniture systems. These are served by more static cores housing wet areas, vertical utility ducts, fire stairs, elevators, entry and reception areas, that will not change over time. “Modules” were employed, like the silo fire stairs; the benchmark glass cylinder ventilation chimneys, 54 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

CONCEPTUAL SKETCHES FOR SUZLON ONE EARTH

and the 8.4 by 8.4 meter structural modules that the Deepstambh, making it the focal element South Asian Identity in Architecture could be used like a Lego set, and moved about of this organic composition. The central garden In the 1970s Charles Jencks was perhaps the in one’s mind to create internal and external plaza, on a podium over parking and utilities, most widely influential architectural critic, historian spaces. Aluminum louvers act as a protective skin encourages interaction and discussion amongst and theorist in the UK. In his book Language allowing daylight and cross ventilation. A generic the 2,300 colleagues, providing an iconic memory of Post-Modern Architecture he dismissed his strategy was to provide seventy-five percent of point for all who visit the campus. The building commitment to Modernism and declared his the workstations with daylight and external views employs a complex building management system support for what he called a “Post-modern idiom.” making the inhabitants sensitive to seasons, that monitors energy, lighting, temperatures, Post-modern architecture rejected most of the weather conditions and the time of day. All work and occupancies of various areas and the theoretical and ethical themes of Modernism and areas have operable fenestration allowing cross efficient running of systems. The project strategy introduced a new medium of design, challenging ventilation when desired. included a mandate for standard sizing to reduce almost all the values promoted by the Modern Photovoltaic panels form the ceiling of the construction wastes, achieving a ceiling of three Movement. Aldo Rossi from Italy and Charles learning center atrium, sheltering a traditional percent wastage. Incorporating green principles Moore from America were among the pioneering reflective pool, tempering the microenvironment in the planning and design stage of the campus, architects who supported this new movement, of the center in addition to soothing aesthetic strategic investments in high-tech energy efficient cherishing meaning and identity over any other sensibilities. Throughout the landscape, traditional technologies, and overall optimization of materials governing principles of contemporary design. channels carry water to the Crescent Reflecting and resources has confirmed that it is possible Post-modern architecture gave designers a free Pool, resting at the lower basement level, around create green buildings in a cost effective manner hand to build in any expression, employing any which the curved dining area opens visually onto without compromising on features, finishes, material that conveyed meaning and identity. the cascade of water falls feeding the pool. A or utility. At the same time a parallel movement, Classicism, traditional stepped wall gives rhythm to the water emerged with a stronger commitment to what movement. This large water body in the central could be considered ‘genuine,’ which implied court gifts evaporative cooling to this central the use of authentic materials and methods lower court. All the external landscaped areas are of construction in their historical continuum. visually integrated into the indoor spaces along Classicism claimed historical continuity. the perimeter of the building bringing fresh air, Accordingly, it sought a true historical reference greenery and natural light into the work areas. and became retroactive. Pioneered by Quinlan The design process started with a premise Terry, Leon Krier, and Demetri Porphyrios, of creating a central gathering space, or among others, this movement found growing Brahmasthan, with the sky as its ceiling, offering support in its aim to revive genuine evolution visual access to extensive gardens from and lineage as opposed to mocking and imitative everywhere. The fabric of the green spaces and styles. A confusing architectural debate emerged, water elements is interwoven into the built fabric creating momentary turmoil when Kenneth so one’s sight lines continually meet the out of Frampton, Alex Tzonis, and Liane Lefaivre doors. The anchoring visual element is the stone advanced a logical discourse that has since Deepstambh, a traditional Indian pillar of oil lamps, been summarized as “Critical Regionalism.” As set in the center of the Crescent Reflecting supporters of Modernism, they showed a rational Pool. Sight lines from all directions converge at approach to validate local cultural values and domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 55 culturally sensitive architecture, while employing basic principles of the Modern Movement. A wide spectrum of regional architects, ranging from Luis Barragán, Charles Correa, and Ricardo Legorreta to Kamran Diba, enriched this discourse through their sophisticated works, bringing the discussion into a positivist realm. Christopher Benninger belongs to the group of architects who search for cultural identity without compromising the modernist ethics, social commitments, and positive values of Modernism. From this point of view, his work may be associated with that of Rafael Moneo in Spain, within the milieu of the Indian subcontinent. Like his mentors Charles Correa, Balkrishna Doshi, and Achyut Kanvinde, working a generation before him, and very few of his contemporaries, such as Romi Khosla, Christopher executes his designs in terms of meaningful spaces, as opposed to drawing kitsch from folklore. Obviously, this attitude demands the power of abstract interpretations of space, and in doing so his architecture engages a wide spectrum of solutions. Indeed, his approach in India House celebrates the Indian courtyard, open to the sky, with a light covering as found in Chettinad houses in Tamil Nadu, Southern India. The multiple functions, typical of South Asian habitats, bring people together in the salubrious environment of an enclosed courtyard. India House encapsulates Benninger’s ideas for a regional identity. It is a relatively small building complex compared to his large campus projects, however it deserves to be considered his opus magnum, given its spatial configurations, passive climatic solutions, and the warm colours of abundant native building materials. The founder and curator of the India House Art Gallery, Ramprasad Akkisetti, sees the project as “synonymous with the creative energy of the metropolis of Pune; a city of great cultural heritage.” When it comes to fundamental architectural values Benninger is not one to compromise. And his approach recognizes and responds energetically to the technological developments in present-day India. The workplaces he has created, such as the Kochi Refinery Headquarters in Kerala, the Bajaj Corporate Headquarters in Pune, and the Forbes Marshall Green Field Industrial Campus, outside his city are manifestations of the technological efficiency which such buildings demand. They clearly belong to contemporary realities, celebrating technology, simplicity and elegance, each with distilled, quality spaces in the context of expansive work environments. Pune itself is a global automotive and information technology hub, and from this setting Benninger has drawn his own unique craftsmanship. Similarly, his Tetrahedron Bridge for the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata, and his exposed concrete columns at the Centre for Life Sciences, Health and Medicine in Pune, represent his commitment to Modernism in the most resolute sense. Suha Ozkan

The book Christopher Benninger: Architecture for Modern India is published by Skira, Italy (2015). The book includes texts and essays by Christopher Benninger, Ramprasad Akkisetti, Rosa Maria Falva (Editor), Fumihiko Maki, Suha Ozkan, Liane Lefaivre and others. All excerpts and images featured here are used with permission of the Editor. 56 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016 CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM FOR ARCHITECTURE IN INDIA A TURN IN ARCHITECTURE

A recent book outlining the oeuvre of Hasmukh Patel’s practice documents and analyses his most iconic buildings; each as a built manifestation of India’s drastic, transformative modernisation efforts in the post-Independence era. The book is an important attempt at documenting one of the long-standing practices that produced a critical body of work, contributing towards India’s physical fabric as well as its intellectual history

Catherine Desai, Bimal Patel, Arindam Dutta

The Architecture of Hasmukh Patel of people within them could be made most insular communities. And, as the projects Hasmukh Patel’s architectural practice spanned efficient and their layouts most coherent, and presented here show, his designs were a major four decades, from the early 1960s to the mid- how the use of space could be best economised. contribution in this direction. Patel’s designs 2000s. During this period, he designed over When designing mixed-use developments also explored how architectural features such as 300 buildings of many types: private bungalows, for real estate developers, he explored how double height spaces or verandahs, or art, could theatres, speculative office buildings, apartments, newly emergent needs for commercial and enrich life in his buildings. When designing public banks, schools, religious buildings, factories and retail spaces could be met in a functional and buildings, he attempted to expand the public realm many others. Many of his buildings are well known commercially viable manner. In his row houses by providing publicly accessible plazas and many and deeply admired, and Patel’s architecture and apartments, he explored how developers community facilities in his buildings. Regardless is widely acknowledged to have helped define could supply comfortable housing that met the of whether resources were ample or constrained, modern architecture in post-Independence India. aspirational needs of middle-class households at or, whether he faced unforgiving commercial This book presents 51 of Patel’s most significant an affordable cost. In all his projects, he kept in considerations or enjoyed the freedom that typical projects. The drawings, photographs, project mind how good construction, climatically correct public sector commissions of that time allowed, descriptions, contextual information, essays and building orientation, adequate natural light and formal rigour and restrained aesthetic play his own recollections are intended, first of all, ventilation and other such features could be used remained the mainstays of his architecture. Patel’s to provide a record of this work. They also help to make buildings comfortable and economical. unspoken commitment to architecture’s formal elucidate his architectural style, situate his work in Skillful resolution of practical problems was at the and civic ambitions was central to his work. the social and economic context in which it was heart of Patel’s architectural endeavour. Patel also never articulated his social or political produced, and assist in interpreting its meanings Patel rarely, if ever, discussed his aesthetic philosophy. Even now, when he looks back, he and significance. quest or his architectural style. Yet, his designs, does not speak of his work in such terms. Yet, Patel did not often speak about his architectural besides being explorations in pragmatic problem when one views his body of work it is clear that philosophy. When he did speak, he preferred to solving, were also investigations in aesthetics and his practice was undergirded by a strong social focus on how his buildings pragmatically solved style. They explored how complex programmatic commitment and guided by a clear mission—that the practical problems that client requirements or requirements could be cleverly met by plans that of helping people in India’s emerging middle class the technicalities of building construction posed. were strikingly clear, highly rational, aesthetically to invent a new, modern, cosmopolitan, urban way Perhaps as a consequence of this, he is admired spare and geometrically elegant diagrams. They of life. His practice was not a boutique pursuit first and foremost as a conscientious and skilful investigated how form, proportion, placement, and his architecture was not meant to enhance professional, and his architecture is applauded colour and other such devices could be used elite pleasures. Neither was architecture, for him, for being deeply pragmatic and well constructed. to make the austere and abstract language of an indulgent, self-absorbed artistic pursuit. It was As the projects presented here show, Patel modern architecture intuitively understandable also not an instrument of state policy meant to relished exploring how the many programmatic and aesthetically pleasing. Like many architects aggrandise the state and to further its cultural or and technological challenges that his widely of his generation, Patel was highly committed political missions. As the projects presented here differing projects posed to him could be creatively, to the rationalism and abstraction of modern show, Patel’s architecture was an enthusiastic and deftly and economically tackled. In his designs architecture and preferred to stay away from empathetic response to the needs of the gradually he explored how, by providing the right facilities the use of vernacular idioms. They all seemed prospering, urbanising and modernising middle- and appropriate layouts, traditional Gujarati to want to develop a locally rooted but secular, caste and middle-class Indians. These were families could be made comfortable in their new universal, modern and internationally recognisable people like him, who came from a background modern houses. In his banks and office buildings architectural lingua franca that could replace the similar to his. Often, they were first-generation he explored how they could be functionally many historical, vernacular or formal architectural city dwellers, people who had experienced hard and logically organised, how the movement languages of India’s numerous aesthetically or harsh living conditions. Patel’s architecture was domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 57 58 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

Previous spread and this spread: the Dena Bank building, Ahmedabad (1974). Previous spread, left: Members of Hasmukh Patel’s office in the 1980s when the practice was located in HK House. Ravi Hazra can be seen on Hasmukh Patel’s right in one of the pictures; right: the north facade of the building. This page, left: the skylit banking hall within the building. Below: the dramatic entrance of the Dena Bank building as seen from Ashram Road, during its final stages of construction. Opposite page, top: the sitting area of the banking hall, with its skylight; below: drawing from the book – ground floor plan of the Dena Bank building

a part of the project of gradually transforming India to be a more comfortable, secure, industrial, modern, secular and conﬁdent society. Almost all his projects dealt with enriching life for them: their houses, row houses and apartments; their schools; and the places where they would work, shop, entertain and relax. It is perhaps this aspect of his practice that makes it particularly relevant to the architectural profession in India today as it continues to grapple with the urgent and important problem of inventing a new way of life for millions of people who are moving into cities. The modernising zeal implicit in the social and political orientation of Patel’s practice went hand in hand with his enthusiasm for technology. He viewed technology as a force for good. It could liberate people from drudgery and discomfort and therefore it was a force to be harnessed for solving problems and enriching life. He was not averse to letting technology lead architectural decision-making. Many of his projects explored the use of new technologies such as precast concrete, slip-form construction, advanced theatre projection systems, advanced acoustic systems and space frames. However, the advancements in technology that his projects explored were made in the context of India’s considerable technological backwardness. The problem of technological backwardness was compounded, throughout a large period of his practice, by the government’s autarchic trade polices and India’s stagnating growth, which practically halted the technological development of India’s construction industry. One can only wonder what turn Patel’s architecture would have taken had the context in which he practiced been more favourable for technological advancement. Bimal Patel

Following are a few selected projects and pages from the book, published in Domus India with the permission of the Authors domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTICONFETTI 59

Dena Bank, Ahmedabad, 1974 The stark massing and generous volumes of the Dena Bank suggest the power of its client, while its detail, both programmatic and aesthetic, is often engaging. It is a curious and powerful combination. The building takes as its starting point a simple tower, podium and terrace organizational strategy. Its plan is logical, simple and largely symmetrical, however this strategy is broken in a few deliberate places. A good example is the dramatic entrance to the building. The front face of the podium is steeply sloped; it is broken into a series of massive, narrow concrete fins. The entrance doors to the banking hall are set back into the shadows between the divisions, with the main door on the central axis of slab and tower. At the right edge, the fin and void are replaced by a single steep stair which is set into a solid mass. This leads to a second, upper plaza, in front of an office tower and auditorium which sits above the banking hall. The symmetry overrides the orderly logic of the greater plan, bringing a picturesque overplay to the otherwise logical composition. Like Newman Hall, the Dena Bank uses narrowly spaced, repetitive structural elements from which the building derives much of its impact. Inside, these are fine and beautifully finished. Externally, they are robustly proportioned. The side façade was perhaps the most iconic element of the building. Now unfortunately over-clad, the narrowly spaced concrete piers stretched from ground to sky, neatly banded and plain, save where they touched the ground. Here they rest on hollowed- out neat square ends. Standing besides this side elevation the building appears to soar above its actual height. The project architect, Jayant Gunjaria, who meticulously drew the project’s precise and elegant construction drawings, described the process of achieving this effect. “Actually, the regulations at this time required that the plinth should be expressed all around the building. We were adamant that the side walls of the office tower should

5 4 be carried to the ground instead and we applied for an exemption in the centre of the side elevation.” 8 7 7

9 1 2

mt 02 5 ft 0 515 Ground Floor Plan 1.Public Entry 2.Banking Hall 3.Agent Room 4.Store 5.Telephone Exchange 6.Strong Room 7.Toilet 8.Electrical Room 9.Staff Entry

204

ELEVATION AND GROUND FLOOR PLAN - DENA BANK 60 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

This page: the house for Bhakti and Hasmukh Patel, Ahmedabad (1966). Left: the entrance verandah of the house. Below: Hasmukh Patel descending the staircase to the living area. Far below: drawing from the book – ground ﬂoor plan of the house for Bhakti and Hasmukh Patel, Ahmedabad

13 12

14 12

12 11

10 10

4 3

6 2

7 5

mt 02 5 mt 02 5 ft 0 5 15 ft 0 5 15

Basement plan not shown | Ground Floor 1.Entrance 2.Living 3.Dining 4.Kitchen 5.Store 6.Studio (added later) 7.Toilet 8.Verandah First Floor 9.Bridge 10.Bedroom 11.Dress 12.Toilet 13.Utility 14.Terrace

32 33

SECTION, ELEVATIONS AND FLOOR PLANS - HOUSE FOR BHAKTI AND HASMUKH PATEL domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 61

This page and next page: Newman Hall, Ahmedabad (1963). Above: the front facade and entrance of the Hall when newly constructed. Left: the first floor colonnade. Following page, below: drawing from the book – ground floor plan of the Newman Hall; far below: in the 1970s, a chapel was added to the Newman Hall 62 CONFETTICONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

Newman Hall, Ahmedabad, 1963 When the Jesuits commissioned Newman Hall, it was Br. Martin who briefed Hasmukh Patel on the few requirements of the building. Patel said, “So I was thinking what could be the simplest solution? I told Br. Martin that I would like to do a brick exposed building. I think at that time there was a shortage of cement. Br. Martin agreed, he had seen and liked some brick buildings in Ahmedabad, including some of B.V. Doshi’s work. He said he would do the contracting job. I had no objection to that arrangement but I knew that it would be a difﬁcult building to construct. The reason for this was very simple. The columns I imagined were 9-inches wide, the same width as a brick and as they were freestanding, all four sides would need to be fair-faced. How could we build these columns perfectly? So we both thought carefully. These columns were required because of the morning sun, but we could not decide whether they could be constructed. Finally, I suggested that we make a formwork of 2 or 3 feet which could be used to align the bricks and moved up one section at a time. We decided to build a trial column. If it was not successful we would have had to revise the design, but it came out so beautifully.” The narrow faces are stacked alternating courses of stretchers and headers and the sides are Flemish bond.

ELEVATION AND GROUND FLOOR PLAN - NEWMAN HALL domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 63

This page: the Reading Centre, Gujarat University, Ahmedabad (1975). Top: entrance to the reading centre; to the right of this entrance lies the Gujarat University Library. Above: interior of the lower level of the reading centre. Right: from the book – axonometric drawing of the Reading Centre

SECTION AND AXONOMETRIC – READING CENTRE 64 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016 domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTICONFETTI 65

St. Xavier’s Primary School, Ahmedabad, 1967 Through this experimentation, an organisational rule emerged. Patel arranged the classrooms in groups of three. Each group could share an open covered space A and each classroom would have two or three external walls to increase ventilation and reduce the transmission of sound between spaces. Each cluster was also linked to a courtyard which was open to the sky. The basic module could be combined to provide halls or larger classrooms. The 25 x 25 10 feet pattern was also used for the linking

7 corridors, which were covered but open 8 2 2 on the sides, and for the courtyards. The module worked fundamentally, functionally 7 and architecturally. This grid system shared 2 11 common ground with Charles Correa’s Gandhi Ashram and Aldo Van Eyck’s 10 6 orphanage in Amsterdam and was superbly 13 2 9 adapted to meet the practical needs of the A school and to realise the shared vision of 12 2 the architect and the client. This is perhaps

13 3 best demonstrated by the location of the principal’s ofﬁce. A neat square, identical to all the modules, it sits like an island within 13 B 2 2 2 the corridors and courts, its doors aligned 2 to encourage its use as a shortcut for noisy, 4 2 10 excited pupils. This more resolved plan was well received

5 and Fr. Zavala became interested in developing the design for the corridors and courtyards. In a large space adjacent to the

1 kindergarten area he suggested creating a green area with small mounds where children could exercise, draw or sit out in the winter. In another of the courtyards, Patel

mt 0510 suggested creating a pond. “I wanted one of ft 010 30 the courtyards to have water and I suggested Ground Floor Plan 1.Entrance 2.Courtyard 3.Principal’s Office 4.Staff Room 5.Health Room 6.Arts and Crafts 7.Toilet that if we kept a pond 2 feet deep, the 8.Library 9.Pool 10.Classroom 11.Kidergarten 12.Multipurpose Hall 13.Corridor students could walk and play in it. Father must have thought that I was mad, but he 70 agreed that it would be fun for the children. I wanted this water court to have a staircase SECTION AND GROUND FLOOR PLAN - ST. XAVIER’S PRIMARY SCHOOL This spread: St. Xavier’s going up from the pond and a mural on one Primary School, wall. We engaged the artist Himmat Shah to Ahmedabad (1967). Above: drawing from the cast this out of concrete panels and it was book – ground ﬂoor plan based on all of the geometric shapes that of the St. Xavier’s primary the pupils would learn about up to grade 8. school. Left: the courtyard with the pool and mural. Seeing this mural being installed, Fr. Zavala Below left: courtyard felt that we should also ask the children to with a water fountain; make a mural and contribute to the building. right: students at one of the many converging They made 2 x 2 feet plaster tiles which corridors and courtyards were transferred into concrete.” in the school 66 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

Mixed Signals: A Research Mandate The problem could simply be the unlikelihood that one speaks both Japanese and Gujarati at the same time. Some 30 years ago, in both India and the United States, it was quite the received wisdom that the reason that Kenzo Tange’s buildings looked the way they did—monumental, large-spanned, systems-driven, as if seeking to contain entire cities within themselves—owed to the large energies unleashed by Japan’s rapidly industrialising and modernising society. This sense of an unmediated relationship—between a particular historical moment and its manifestation in cultural form—was quite common in how most architects and architectural critics thought and wrote at the time, and perhaps continue to do so today. Take the following statement: “In the aftermath of independence, for architects yellow doorknobs were a preferred material of expressing the national search for modernity.” If this sounds absurd, simply substitute “yellow doorknobs” with “reinforced cement concrete,” and you will find the landscape of architectural writing strewn with such reasoning, a kind of intellectual gibberish that stands in for explanation. And so Tange’s buildings were explained away as “natural” expressions of a country’s rapid modernisation. The monumental plasticity of the built buildings was routinely conflated with the cartoonish outlines of the unbuilt work (the Boston Harbor work at MIT, Tokyo Bay, c. 1960), and all that remained was to cap this inscrutability with the word “Metabolism”—we didn’t really know what that was either—and one had had done with explanation, free to gawp at the monumental, sculptural “magic” of the architecture. It didn’t, and doesn’t, help that the architects themselves enthusiastically play into this kind of exoticisation, nourishing a kind of aesthetic mystique and inspiration by this or that zeitgeist. In most architectural writing everywhere, and certainly so in/on Asia, scepticism remains sorely lacking, and taking the architects at their word was, and is, perhaps even the toll exacted for entry into some very jealously guarded salons. I start with this Japanese digression simply because modern architecture in India, too, has been written and talked about through a few pat formulas, not quite with the qualifier “yellow”, but other platitudes that leave you not much the wiser. Just read any of Kenneth Frampton’s many forewords to books or William Curtis’s monographs and you will be provided with sundry such rationales for aesthetic motivation: tradition, culture in transformation, tectonics and craft, the weather, modernisation, the economy. To return to the Japanese case, it was only after the waning of the economic phenomena that had subsidised the first generation of post-war architects that architectural scholars started delving into the client networks and forms of patronage, particularly with a view to the cronyism between the Japanese state and the large industrial cartels or keiretsu (replicated in the South Korea chaebols). That Japanese architecture was linked to this cronyism in very particular ways—as it was in Ahmedabad, with the Nagarsheths—was highlighted only very recently, when a conference at Harvard, and the subsequent publication, brought together Japanese and American scholars to confront this legacy. The clients that Tange built for, it turned out, were not the industrial conglomerates per se but rather the large media and advertising corporations, dependent on the keiretsu for patronage and whose worldviews they were enjoined to broadcast, or at least not contradict. Tange’s bold modernism, expressed in these media headquarters, in that sense, spoke more domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 67 to a complex social, disciplining compact being the post-war Japanese architects’ embrace of rudiments of what a disinterested research forged by government, industry and media the hyper-modern: the obfuscation of discreet programme might look like, in confronting this about the fidelity, labour and dedication owed networks of patronage by conferring on to them history. Further monumentalisation of an era by everyday Japanese people to their leaders. grand-narratives of national genius, a form already given to monumentalisation would do In a manner of speaking, this monumentality of inoculation against the quibbles of those these doyens little justice, and it is important is through and through mediatic, with no more less-than-ardent defenders of the faith. Indian that these archives be seen not just as ornate weight than a billboard. We are not so far from architectural institutions fell into line: the critical tombstones where one would lay worshipful Venturi here. A direct line can be drawn between rigour that humanities programmes and their bouquets, but as spurs to some tough-minded and the “modernism” of a Tange and the iconological study of societies that were developing elsewhere agnostic discussion. “postmodernism” of his acolyte Arata Isozaki; in the world passed as if ships in the night, easily Arindam Dutta likewise, a similar postmodern/“mediatic” line can parried as symptoms of Western self-indulgence be drawn between the early, brutalist Doshi and and over-compensated, elite hobby-horsing. As the later, symbolist Doshi, the early Correa and a consequence, buildings such as those you may the late Correa, between the early corpus such find in this book appear today like the beached as Premabhai Hall and Gandhi Ashram, and the flotsam of some lapsed, global brutalist endeavour, ersatz “narratives” of the later, 1980s’ outputs as inscrutable and enigmatic today as when they such NIFT or Bharat Bhavan. were first built. Since talking-too-much was not Here in this book one will browse through an what architects did then, one is at a loss to say astonishing diary of Hasmukh C. Patel’s prolific anything now. life and career. What strikes one is the formal That the institutional derision against historicity clarity of each of these buildings: crisp geometries and critical thinking may have come back to that wrap around clearly delineated programmes; bite Indian architects was starkly revealed when deep, evenly-spaced beams flying across large Charles Correa jolted the general architectural expanses of uninterrupted space; compositions scene in India when he bequeathed his archive to that invoke the heyday of rationalism; spacious the RIBA. Given the lifelong pietisms of the “Third foyers are marked out by the intricate play of World” architect, the bad faith, if that is all it was, light and dark on concrete; swirling, sculpture-like was rich: a little bit like the “license-raj” stratagem staircases punch through slabs; sciagraphies that of pushing for trade tariffs at home while quietly etch out the white Ahmedabadi sun like a scene parking one’s assets in offshore locations abroad. out of de Chirico. After decades of inveighing against historical scrutiny, and against institutional mechanisms — All excerpts and images featured here are from the book The that support historical scrutiny, Indian architects Architecture of Hasmukh C. Patel – Selected Projects 1963- of the first generation today suddenly confront 2003 by Catherine Desai and Bimal Patel, published by Mapin Of the triad that represent the modernist vanguard a potential passage into oblivion. It appears Publishing in 2016. The book includes texts and interviews in Ahmedabad—Balkrishna V. Doshi and Anant that no homegrown institutions exist that can by Christopher Charles Benninger, Rahul Mehrotra, Arindam Raje being the others—Patel perhaps is the most fully take on either the material or the narrative Dutta, Bobby Desai, and Ismet Khambatta, among others. All sachlich of the three, the least given to mawkish responsibility of properly curating their work. If it excerpts and images featured here are used with permission of the Authors. gestures towards iconography, preferring rather is a signal ignominy that their stories will be told a prosaic, purpose-driven formalism of a sort. now more as alumni of foreign institutions rather Both the garrulous Doshi and the taciturn Raje, than critically reading into the story of Indian apprentices to Corbusier and Kahn respectively, modernisation, then this ignominy is well deserved. This page above: cover were novel at that time consciously cultivated charismatic personas Looking again at this portfolio, this oeuvre of the book. This spread: in Gujarat – the water whose desired effect on students would be an complete, comprised of buildings and layouts from the book. tower and installation of admiring, awestruck silence. Patel, more reticent surroundings that I am well familiar with From top: archival plans pre-cast T-beams; Site on the pedagogical front, never attracted or since I was a young Gujarati-speaking boy in for various row houses; plan (left) and Restaurant (left) pre-cast details Floor Plans (right) of cultivated that kind of guruvaad. Nonetheless, it Ahmedabad, I am, therefore, tempted to ask a and elements from the Chinubhai Centre was quite the manner of all three, and generally of few questions. Questions that are perhaps similar St. Xavier’s Technical and Patang Restaurant, this generation, voluble or not, to tend to speak in to the ones that those Japanese and American Institute, Sevasi, Baroda Ahmedabad (1978). This (1968) and construction page below: State Bank tongues—obliquely and defensively—intended to scholars were asking about Tange at Harvard, in images (right) showing of India building (1964), as ward off doubting Thomases should they have the that they are less interested in commemorating modern site practices seen from the Lal Darwaja temerity to ask questions. Very few did. a set of masterworks than in sketching out the and equipment which bus terminal, Ahmedabad In discursive terms, architecture in India was John Wayne territory: one “did” things, not “talked about” them. Most execrable of all was the vocation to write, particularly when it approached something close to critical rigour. This mix of defensiveness and insecurity of India’s first generation of architects against critique was also a reflection of their good fortune, gifted as they were, by the historical circumstances of new nation-building, with commissions for and control of a cornucopia of public and semi-public institutions that most architects today can only dream of. Derision served as a great instrument for discursive control and institutional gate- keeping where patronage networks were only too visible. In India, if you want to find out who made who, look rather at the marriages, or the children’s marriages: the modern is profoundly etched by the sinews of the unmodern. In modern Indian aesthetics, or whatever passed as “theory,” in the writing/talking of a Kapila Vatsyayana or a Stella Kramrisch or a Balkrishna V. Doshi, orientalisms are rife, and architects tend to eschew questions about technical and technological sophistication to cultivate instead a primitivist, craft-driven image for what they do. The intended effect of this grasping for the pre-modern may have been exactly the same as 68 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016 CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM FOR ARCHITECTURE IN INDIA THE STRUCTURE OF IDEAS

Calebrating one of the most proliﬁc careers in architecture and structural engineering, ‘The Structure’ – a book chronicling the vast and critical body of work produced by Mahendra Raj – brings together a selection of his projects that provide a deep insight into his ideas and philosophies. Designed at a time when nation-building and modernity were expressed through innovations in architecture, structural and engineer prowess despite scarcity of both material and technology, Raj’s iconic buildings were not just visionary and pioneering, but also inspired generations of newer architects and designers

Vandini Mehta, Rohit Raj Mehndiratta, Ariel Huber, Jaimini Mehta, Neelkanth Chhaya, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Stephane Paumier Photo Ariel Huber

The poetics of engineered forms available technology. Its dramatic When one looks at the entire body yet graceful projection successfully of work produced by Raj in the interprets, in technical terms, the six decades since Independence, intentions of Le Corbusier as what is striking is the consistency expressed in his early sketches. of the structural narratives in It is worth mentioning that between all the projects. Looking for the his experiences as a civil/structural structural logic and its essence engineer in Chandigarh and starting in the architectural form, and his own independent practice in India, not just the utilitarian task of Raj spent five years in the United supporting the building concerned, States pursuing focused studies in is what has driven this engineer structural design to bridge the gaps throughout his career. Thus, in his earlier training. This included a the roof of Le Corbusier’s High four-year association with the firm of Court in Chandigarh, one of his Ammann & Whitney founded by the first assignments as a structural Swiss-born bridge designer Othmar engineer, becomes a series of Ammann and the American, Charles conodial shell-like structures, though Whitney, who was at that time slightly modified to suit the available actively developing his plastic theory means of construction in India. Raj of reinforced concrete including confesses to never having learnt thin-shell structures through his about conoidal shells during his path-breaking collaboration with training as an engineer, but once Eero Saarinen. The association the logic of the form became clear, resulted in iconic buildings such he found a way to engineer it and as Trans World Airlines (TWA) also build it within the limitations of terminal at the John F. Kennedy domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 69 Photo Ariel Huber

(JFK) International Airport in New work exemplifies. The stadium design plate found expression again in the Opposite page, top: York, the Dulles International Airport posed a twofold problem of designing Tagore Hall, also in Ahmedabad, exterior view of the Hall of Industries; in Washington and the Kresge the stands to support the spectator in collaboration with architect BV below: cover of the Auditorium at the Massachusetts seating as well as a large cantilevered Doshi and fifteen years later in book The Structure – Institure of Technology (MIT). This roof that would keep the stand free of collaboration with Kanvinde, Raj & works of Mahendra constituted significant exposure for any obstruction. Chowdhury for the sports complex Raj. This page: exterior view of the Municipal the young Indian engineer. It provided To this, we may add a third issue- in Shrinagar, Jammu and Kashmir. Stadium, Ahmedabad him the necessary intellectual tools the need to involve an appropriate The latter is actually a bold variation to realise his already present sense architectural language for an of the logic of folded plate. The of structural order. important public urban marker. It took narrative was a giant bubble made This search for structural order with at least five alternative engineering of huge concrete plates that were more confident understanding of the proposals from Mahendra Raj and folded to make them self-supporting. usages of concrete is most evident several model studies by the architect The plates themselves were too in few project of Raj where the initial before the realisation that folded large to be left unmediated. This architectural design did not hint at an plate offered the clearest structural was resolved by stiffening them with obvious structural logic (unlike the logic. The plasticity of concrete a equilateral triangulated skeleton High Court in Chandigarh), but had hinted at the possibility that it could of concrete bones covered with to be painstakingly arrived at. It called be a self-sustaining structure when pre-cast concrete or glass skin. This for active and mutually supportive moulded into a folded planer plate. project illustrates that it is hard to collaborations with architects. The The design of the stadium that finally say where architecture ends and stadium in Ahmedabad, designed in emerged from this collaboration engineering begins and vice versa. collaboration with architect Charles successfully expressed this. The A building tells the story of its Correa in 1963-65, is a good resulting architectural order making through a narrative the example of the non-fragmentary was indistinguishable from the retains this ambiguity. relationship between architecture structural order. Jaimini Mehta and engineering which much of Raj’s This familiarity and facility with folded 70 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

Understanding a practice Mahendra Raj’s career began at a time of momentous change in Indian history. He had graduated as a civil engineer from Punjab College of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, in 1946 and had taken up a position as Assistant Engineer at the Public Works Department (PWD) in Lahore when the decision to partition India and Pakistan was taken. Raj chose Indian citizenship and was transferred to Shimla, the temporary capital of the state of Punjab in the newly formed India. Despite the erupting violence in Lahore he managed to reach Shimla safely and worked there for a couple of years, first overseeing the maintenance of what he describes as a ‘200-kilometre mule track’ that was the Tibet-Shimla Road. Later, he was given the task of maintaining all government property in Shimla and the road between Shimla and Kalka. In 1949 plans were made to build Punjab’s new capital in Chandigarh at the foothills of the Himalayas and the PWD appointed Raj as the first Resident Engineer of the city. With the internationally famous architect Le Corbusier at its helm, Chandigarh was arguably one of the most important planning and construction projects in post-Independence India, and the position gave the young civil engineer, with just five years of experience, the opportunity to work on a project of international significance. It was also here that he began to learn the art of designing in concrete and about the intricacies of structural design. Raj’s career may be said to have really taken off in 1951 when he was appointed as the Design Engineer for the construction of Chandigarh’s High Court, now known as the Palace of Justice. Le Corbusier had conceived of it as a complex building using concrete to create monumental plastic forms, many elements of which were difficult to realise into actual physical structures. A particular challenge was the geometric parasol roof, consisting of shells that presented the engineer with both and functional hurdles. Other unconventional features such as the ramp and brise soleil also demanded departures from norms of the time. Working with other engineers, Raj proposed modifications in the design which made the construction of the building possible. One cannot imagine a more difficult test of an engineer’s skills, but by the time they finished the project, Raj had become, in his own words, ‘a reasonably good structural engineer’. In 1953 Raj was promoted to the position of Executive Engineer and given the responsibilities of completing the High Court and designing the Secretariat. Seemingly a simple frame structure, the Secretariat was actually an exercise in the extremely detailed articulation of the building’s façade. Raj took the bold step of presenting alternatives that would circumvent some of the problems with the structural requirements of the façade domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 71

in the original design. Although somewhat resistant to the idea of adapting his design at first, once he examined Raj’s proposal, Corbusier accepted them. By mid-1955 Raj had completed both projects. Feeling that despite his experience he needed to learn more about the formal discipline of structural engineering, he headed overseas. He obtained a Master’s degree in Structural Design from the University of Minnesota and subsequently moved to New York City to work for Ammann & Whitney, a firm of consulting engineers where structural design formed an important part of the architectural concept. Raj worked on several projects using large- span folded plate as well as arched structures and developed a fluency in visualising the behaviour of forms, which he would use to great advantage in the future. During this period he also honed the ability to work with unconventional forms, for example, in the sculptural framing of architect John Johansen’s US Embassy building in Dublin. In 1959 while visiting India to work on an exhibition pavilion for the US Government, Raj was persuaded to consider moving back to set up a practice. Eventually he did make his decision and in early 1960, together with his friends, he established the firm ‘Raj and Vakil’ in Bombay. The 1960s were an exciting time in post-Independence India, energised by the emergence of a new generation of professionals in every field eager to make their mark. It was an especially important juncture for developments in Indian architecture and engineering, with a whole generation setting up new practices. Many architects, among them AP Kanvide in Delhi, Balkrishna Doshi in Ahmedabad and Charles Correa in Bombay, who set up their practices in the late 1950s and early 1960s, appointed Raj as their structural consultant. Eventually they would all come to recognise him as an equal collaborater in design. Neelkanth Chhaya

This spread: layouts from the book. Opposite page, from top: drawings and images from the Hall of Nations and Industries, New Delhi (1972); detail drawings of columns and view of the central atrium looking at the corridors, the columns and the service core of the NCDC Office, New Delhi (1980); view of the exposed post-tensioned cable ends on alternate floors of the NCDC Office building’s facade and the drawing of the sequence of stressing of cables. This page, from top: detail drawings and images of the NDMC City Centre, New Delhi (1983); rear view of the LIC Jeevan Bharati building, New Delhi (1986) and the space frame and curtain wall as seen from the plaza level; drawings and images of the Vidhan Bhavan, Bhopal (1994). Following spread: the Indoor Sports Stadium, Srinagar (1982) 72 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

ENGINEERING A NATION in Chandigarh on Le Corbusier’s than steel. I worked on Louis Kahn’s it could be made, and told him yes. It building. I used to see these drawings Indian Institute of Management in would require some modifications, but Hans Ulrich Obrist Your trajectory that came from Le Corbusier’s office Ahmedabad, for which Doshi was it was feasible. Kuldip Singh submitted has led you to redefine the history in Paris — they were very stylish, with a consultant and I was a structural his entry and the jury thought it was of Indian engineering. How did you things that we couldn’t decipher. We engineering consultant. It was around very impressive, but they wanted to become an engineer in the first place? thought some Frenchman had drawn 1962. When Kahn came to India, he know if it could be built. So I went with Mahendra Raj I always wanted to them, but then we found out it was wanted to work with brick. We were him to the jury members and explained be an engineer. Both my father and Doshi making the drawings we were contrary to the idea, but he felt that how it would be possible. Then he two older brothers were engineers, receiving. Doshi didn’t stay in France we didn’t know the art of working with won the competition. We used post- and I was really fond of mathematics. for long because Le Corbusier had concrete. He underestimated us. He’d tensioned concrete with cables. It’s I graduated in 1946 and started offered him a job, working on his been working in Islamabad (Pakistan) quite an interesting structure because working in the Punjab Public Works buildings in Ahmedabad, so he moved and Dhaka (Bangladesh), and there he it leans on both sides and the columns Department, so I began my career there. When I came back to India from had chosen brick as his construction also twist and turn. with the government service. I studied America, I renewed my contact with medium. He was still in that mental in Lahore when India and Pakistan Doshi. At the time, Charles Correa had make-up. When he came here and HUO Has an architect ever come to were still one country, but then the just started his practice. He made a looked around, of course the old you asking if a design were possible Partition took place and I came to point to seek me out. I liked him very houses were made of brick and stone. and you’ve had to say no? India. In those days there weren’t many much. He lived in Bombay, so I started But concrete was there too, so we had MR I think that whatever it was, it avenues for young men. Architecture my practice there too, because at long arguments with him, because we could somehow or other be done! In was not known. Engineering and the time, in 1960, there wasn’t much knew that the Indian Institute would that sense, the only one with whom medicine were the two most sought- going on in Delhi. My very first project require large spans, big buildings, and I had many an argument was Louis after disciplines, along with the Army, was with Charles. you can’t make them with brick. He Kahn, because of what he wanted to and it was not easy to gain admission was insistent, and as you can see, he do with bricks. into engineering colleges. After the HUO India in the 1960s felt very won in the end. But brick buildings are Partition, I soon became involved in the modern. Were you aware of belonging hard to maintain. His dream was to HUO It’s fascinating that the construction of Chandigarh, and the to a particular brand of modernity that create brick buildings on stilts, but in building’s aesthetic is an integral part first structural project I worked on was was distinctly Indian? How did you feel an earthquake area that’s very difficult. of its engineering. That’s a specific Le Corbusier’s High Court. Jane Drew, about the idea of the local versus the Eventually, he employed the concepts element of your buildings: one cannot Maxwell Fry and Pierre Jeanneret global? Did you consider yours to be a we offered him for achieving wide separate the engineering from the were stationed there at the time. Le universal or local language? arches. It was very educative to work aesthetic appearance. What is the Corbusier used to come twice a year, MR My first exposure to architecture with Kahn. building you’re most proud of? and I was lucky enough to be working was through Le Corbusier, because I MR That’s a difficult question. The on his projects — the High Court and worked on his buildings. His language HUO Once the initial problem of greater the challenge, the more I enjoy the Secretariat Building — so I met was both local and global. Eero concrete versus brick had been working on a building. At one time, all him twice in the early 1950s. After I Saarinen also deeply influenced me resolved, what was it like to collaborate the projects were challenging, but not had worked in Chandigarh, I thought when I met him in New York. When with him? anymore. Now things have changed I should further my studies, and so I I came back here, both Charles and MR We had to devise the means completely. These buildings were done went to America in 1955 to pursue Doshi had worked abroad. All of us to make it safe against earthquakes. before the age of computers. Life for a Master’s degree in Minnesota, and had had the option to stay overseas Horizontal elements of reinforcement a structural engineer has become then Columbia University for a post- but we had chosen to come back were all made in concrete. Vertical much easier now. Everybody has Master’s. After that, I went to New home. Our common objective was to elements were brick. To me, for sophisticated computer programmes. York and took a job with Ammann and set up practices here, find our own any building or creative urban form When I started working on projects Whitney, who were doing the most roots and rise to the same stature to be successful, there has to be in Bombay, there was one single forward-looking large-span structures that other countries had attained. We intense collaboration between the computer in the university, at the Tata at the time. sought an Indian idiom that expressed architect and the structural engineer. Institute of Fundamental Research, HUO Who were your heroes in those our ancient culture but was in tune Some young architects feel that and it was only available to private years? with modern times. For us engineers, the structural engineer’s only task is people during the night. When I moved MR Foremost was Pier Luigi Nervi. there was the exposure to the new to fit in the structure, and that they to Delhi, there was no computer The best-known structural engineers materials of concrete, steel and themselves are the creators. My available at all. There was one in at the time were Eduardo Torroja, precast concrete. We were all idealists stand is that in order to create great Kanpur, so I went to the IIT (Indian Félix Candela and Othmar Ammann. when we started out. Not that we works, an architect has to honour the Institute of Technology) in Kanpur and As I said, I worked with Ammann and aren’t any more! requirements. Le Corbusier was an made arrangements with a professor Whitney, and it was Whitney who égoïste absolu: once the line had been there. A professor and his wife would devised methods for analysing folded HUO As a pioneering master of drawn, you couldn’t tell him to change take on private work, so we gave plates. I also had the pleasure of concrete, you have invented many it. If you did, he’d tell you to get lost. them assignments. meeting Nervi when I travelled to Italy unexpected and innovative ways of But there were cases where we, as and introduced myself. I worked with shaping this material. In Europe, they engineers, had to argue with him, and some well-known architects in New called this use of concrete brutalism, a he would agree to make changes. York, too, such as Minoru Yamasaki, style that is currently enjoying renewed who became a good friend. That’s how interest among young architects. What ------I went from being a civil engineer to made you use concrete in India? Was a structural engineer. In 1960 I came the decision yours, or the architect’s? HUO Tell us about the 1961 back to India, resigned from The British architect Peter Smithson Hindustan Lever Pavilion for the India my previous position and started my spoke of the “poetry of concrete”. Do International Trade Fair. It’s another own practice. you also perceive that poetry? truly visionary design. MR Yes, I agree with him. Concrete MR That’s a project by Correa. It’s HUO 1960 is about the same time is a man-made material that you like a crumpled piece of paper, and that Cedric Price opened his office can mould, shape and form. In our I had to engineer it. We used the in London. Many things happened projects you can see that we exploited folded-plate concept in this project, but in 1960. It was also the beginning concrete’s mouldability to the extreme. in quite an ingenious manner. Plates for extraordinary architects such as I became very fond of concrete as were made into valleys and ridges. Extracted from Mahendra Raj’s interview with Charles Correa and B V Doshi, with a consequence of working on Le After that exhibition, we didn’t do many Hans Ulrich Obrist published in the book The whom you have a common history. Corbusier’s buildings. Back then, pavilions. Another interesting project Structure - Works of Mahendra Raj is edited by They would not have been possible concrete was far more economical was the NCDC (National Cooperative Vandini Mehta, Rohit Raj Mehndiratta, and Ariel without you, and vice versa. than steel, and it still is in India. So as Development Corporation) office Huber (Park Books AG, Zurich, 2016). Hans MR Yes, we were complementary. far as India is concerned, that was building in 1978, with Kuldip Singh. Ulrich Obrist interviewed Mahendra Raj at his house in New Delhi, where he currently lives and Both Correa and Doshi became good an issue. When you want to create It was a competition, and he showed works. The interview was first published in Domus friends of mine. large spans with different shapes and me the design and asked me if it was 952 – November 2011 and Domus India 29 –

I knew of Doshi when I was working forms, concrete is more amenable possible. I looked at it, ﬁgured out how May 2014. Photo Ariel Huber domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 73 7474 CONFETTICONFCO ETTI domusdomuss 56 NoNovNovemberemember 20120166

ENGINEER’S NARRATION, SP And while everyone was living where he describes this complex ARCHITECTURE CAN LISTEN together, was there a feeling of relation he had with Kahn. companionship? They would often have arguments. Stephane Paumier We have MR Yes, there was indeed that He is the one that is helping Louis known each other for 13 years — I feeling. Kahn rationalise his ideas, the first came to you on the morning of structural system. He reassures September 11th 2001, a strange SP But I have a feeling that the client that the drawings would date to meet a structural engineer this companionship or generosity happen, that the project would go since by the evening, we would is something that you have kept forward, because they sometimes hear the news that the twin towers and fostered all your life. Because were really doubtful that Louis Kahn were brought down. We had just working with you — other would deliver the project, deliver won the competition for the Alliance architects, I am sure, too had a the drawings etc. Louis Kahn was Française of Delhi. We came with similar experience — I have had known to change his projects all the model. The whole idea was to this generous exchange of working the time. But Komendant seems to see if you would accept to be the towards a goal, of mutual respect. I have been his backbone to actually structural engineer for the building. am not sure if it was the case with make projects happen, convince the The huge steel roof of the building Le Corbusier, but I am sure it must client, and speak to the contractors. was supported by 16 columns; you be the case with other architects! He seems to have been an interface looked at the model and remained MR While I was in Chandigarh, between the dreamland of Louis silent for a tense three-minutes I went to Le Corbusier’s buildings Kahn and the actual construction of before coming up with the verdict and one or two buildings by other his work. that the roof could be supported with architects. But what I learnt working Do you have an impression from merely four columns, if they were for Corbusier is that even if you the experience of working with Raj cruciform! I knew at that moment don’t understand or if you feel what Rewal, Balkrishna Doshi, that we found our man! you have been asked to do can be and Charles Correa that you had to The focus of this interview is on the done in a better way, speak up. Don’t be a mediator between the architect relationship between architect and be shy or don’t be afraid. At the and the construction process, or engineer compared to the previous most your ideas would be rejected, is it that they didn’t need you as a two interviews of Sanjay Prakash but there is nothing to lose — so, mediator? and Hans Ulrich Obrist that focussed speak up. That is what I wanted to MR That is a very interesting on other aspects of your “oeuvre”. prove. Firstly, I was not in touch with question and a very long one; can How does this relationship work with Corbusier directly as I was a junior I split it into different parts? You other architects, and how do you get engineer; it was the chief engineer know, I had this chance or fortune involved in the process? who was in touch. The High Court of interacting with Louis Kahn for Mahendra Raj I got into the canopy, shells, I didn’t know how the IIM, Ahmedabad and I also met profession of structural engineering to design these, and I suggested Komendant in New York, and I met by accident; I was working for the that if we hang it. Ultimately that’s him at a time when his relationship Punjab government as an assistant what happened, and Le Corbusier with Louis Kahn was not good. As engineer. When you work as an was upset. you have put it, although I haven’t assistant engineer or an engineer read that book, I must complete my for the government, you get involved SP Had he foreseen a different story. Louis Kahn would change his with various tasks, overlooking the kind of structure? Had he visualised design all the time, and when I met construction of buildings, roads, something or was he relying on Komendant, he had already worked highways etc. I graduated before engineers to design it? with Kahn for a long time. He was Partition in 1946 from Lahore. As MR Everyone knows Corbusier’s a brilliant engineer who had the everyone knows, Punjab had lost way of working; he sketches what reputation of making impossible its capital, and Shimla was the he wants. It is very clear in his mind things possible. He was also the one temporary capital. When Chandigarh about what he wants, and then it who worked with Moshie Safdie. was happening, I was selected grows. See his books; there are to work there on Le Corbusier’s series of sketches of how he has SP I have a question about Delhi, buildings; till then I had no idea on thought of something, from where I have been working and living in what architecture was about. we could develop something. Delhi for 17 years. You started your career in Lahore, then you SP Why? Because that was not SP Yes, it is a thought process. went to Chandigarh, then to the taught at MR So, yes, he had definitive US, Minneapolis, New York then the University? ideas. to Bombay and finally to Delhi to MR I was taught structural establish your practice as we know design, but there was no course on SP But that is about the result and it today. Few years ago there was an architecture. So, bang! It was straight not the way to do it. exhibition of Madan Mahatta, Black to Le Corbusier. So it was my first MR The way to do it, if something and White photographs of Delhi in exposure to architecture. is difficult, and that is where you are PhotoInk, the exhibition showed the concerned. He had this problem; photographs of Delhi, of buildings SP (Jokes) So it was a kind of even when Le Corbusier was and construction sites of the 60s crash course? hired, he wanted his own team of and 70s, most of them done by you! I MR (Chuckles) Yes, it was a very architects and engineers. have a feeling that Delhi at that time intensive crash course because his was a territory of experimentation buildings are not easy buildings, they SP French engineers? for architects and engineers, are very difficult structurally. MR Yes, but the team of engineers where everything was possible as I got interested in parts of was denied to him. He said OK. But compared to Bombay and Calcutta buildings, drawings, to see how when we told him that it was not which had a legacy of a framework the construction was happening. possible, he said French engineers of streets from 19th century Europe. This really interested me towards would have done it! Delhi had two things that were structural engineering related to different — first a very strong legacy architecture. It was very exciting. I SP The best account that I have of Islamic architecture, the weight This interview by Stephane Paumier was specifically had some interactions with read so far of the architect-and- of history and second, a lot of space conducted for Domus India and was published in the Le Corbusier as well. engineer relationship is by August for expressing structural imagination, May 2014 issue (DI_29). It has been reproduced here from the archives of Domus India in context of the The point is, at that time, Chandigarh Komendant, who was the structural for designing a new India. What is recent book The Structure - Works of Mahendra Raj was a city of only engineers and engineer for Louis Kahn. It is called your memory of the 60’s and 70’s in is edited by Vandini Mehta, Rohit Raj Mehndiratta, and architects, to begin with. 18 Years with Architect Louis I. Kahn, Delhi? To me, that era is the richest Ariel Huber (Park Books AG, Zurich, 2016). domusdomuss 56 NoNovembervembmber 20120166 CONFETTICONFETTI 75 part of modern Indian architecture that was full of commitment — question of using the same building have to go (laughs), because it is with Chandigarh. Ranjit Sabikhi, Morad Chowdhury, again and refurbishing it. There are quite the end of my 90s MR I came back from America in Raj Rewal, Kuldeep Singh and a a few buildings that are preserved this year. 1960, and started my practice in number of others. They had all come because they have contributed and Bombay. In 1960, there were no back and they had to make a mark signified an achievement of a certain SP Last question on posterity, opportunities in Delhi, though when I with the first building they got. So time. Every unique building creates there is a renewed interest on your started my practice, I had the option opportunity was there, the difference history. It captures something of work from France with the Pompidou of re-joining the government etc. was that in Delhi whatever came up that era; only to then bring it down centre, the Societe Francaise des But anyway, the private-practice was noticed. Bombay was more of a for a reason like it can’t be air- Architectes and from Switzerland. possibility in Delhi was discouraged vast conglomerate. conditioned. Of course it can be air- People have realised your because there was not much work. conditioned fully or in parts. These contribution to Indian modern At that time, Achyut Kanvinde and SP Most of your buildings of the are non-sense arguments. Of course architecture: don’t you think it was a Walter George of Lutyens’ Delhi 70s and 80s were done for the every building that is more than 50 bit overdue? Do you think it should were there. I met these people to try Indian government, or its related years old has concrete that starts have happened a while ago? and get work from them. Then there bodies. If we compare government crumbling the building starts to have MR I am surprised that someone were also the Bose brothers. They all buildings of that time like the Hall cracks, seepage etc, but everything started! (laughs) It’s a bit delayed, said, ‘if you want to start, then start of Nations, the NDMC HQ building can be taken care of. It’s not coming well, I don’t know. I hadn’t realised, in Bombay or in Ahmedabad’. At that with the MCD HQ building of today, down provided it’s maintained quite frankly. Perhaps the first time time Gujarat was part of the Bombay there is a massive shift. What’s your properly. The main reason that the I realised I had contributed Presidency, it was not a separate perception? Is the Indian government authority has is that the Hall doesn’t something was in the 80’s. Ram state. But everyone anticipated that interested in architecture anymore? generate money; but not everything Sharma had put together a book with Gujarat becoming a separate MR How would I know? has to generate money. Now this on contemporary architecture. state, Ahmedabad would grow, (Chuckles). As I said, the client of Indira Gandhi National Center for bringing in a lot of work. yesterday gave more freedom to the the Arts (IGNCA) doesn’t generate SP Wasn’t that the publication for In the 70s, things became architect than the client of today, money. Doesn’t mean it has to come the Festival of India in France? A interesting as there was a revision basically young chaps with a lot of down too? very good book indeed. of the masterplan. They started money, the developers etc. But let’s I don’t know if you have knowledge MR Yes, the first time he called allowing greater FAR for buildings. get back to the government — the of this, but there was a stamp of the me to say, ‘Raj, I have put together As a result, there was a spur of Hall of Nations was competition Hall of Nations and every newspaper your book’. I said, ‘what do you mean buildings coming up along Kasturba which nobody won. Did you know logo, and even Delhi was identified by my book?’ He said ,’your name Gandhi Marg and Connaught Place. that? I am going to tell you a secret! by the Hall of Nations. Then Baha’i appears on every other page’. It’s At one point, the FAR went up to The jury of the Exhibition Grounds Temple came and it became the then that I realised that I have made 4. As a result, a lot of bungalows had Stein, P R Varma and a senior image. The thing is, the Indian a contribution. See, recognition, were demolished. There were also government official. So all the young government as a client is still the when it comes, is nice; it is gratifying. new developments like the Pragati architects, Raj Rewal and Kuldeep biggest client, its officers are more Apart from devoting time to work, I’ve Maidan Trade Fair with the Hall of Singh were together at the time, all aware and they also go with time. tried to devote time for uplifting the Nations, the Hall of Industries and of them competed and none of them profession and the engineers’ guild. the Asian games in the 80s with won. But there was a deadline in SP I have a question about the I’ve been a founding member of the stadia like the IG Stadium. Then which it had to be constructed. Raj amazing longevity of your career. I guild which is also very satisfying. I the process of industrialisation had Rewal’s design was a huge hollow still remember in November 2002, I should have retired much earlier but started and India had a Licence Raj. space frame, a large rectangle or was working late in my office on the you see, I have some commitments Every big industry wanted to have square, inclined building; so inclined Alliance Française project. We were which I feel I must complete. a presence in Delhi to get their that the jury found it the most doing it together and I remember licences. Gradually Delhi started to attractive, but they thought it was calling you for your birthday. You become a very important industrial not workable. So they had to find an asked: How old you are you? I said, and commercial centre, interesting architect. I was in the picture. I knew ‘I am 31’. Then you said: ‘Listen culturally and architecturally and the the background of the project, and I Stephane, you have fifty years to go, population started growing. knew Varma very well. They started so why don’t you drop your work and having conversations with various come over for a drink’! SP To be more specific on architects. We then made a joint You have so far 68 years of practice, architecture and structure, Delhi with proposal which was more buildable. maybe the longest in the world after its legacy of Islamic architecture, the That is how he was selected. This Niemeyer. How do you do this? Qutub Minar or Humayun’s tomb, was not the proposal that was given What drives you to go to work every has a specific character, an identity in the competition. So the two of us morning? What is there inside? You of ruggedness, of solidity and gravity developed this and it somehow got are made of steel? that you can also find in people! built. The building is perhaps unique; MR (Chuckles) God knows! I have Before anything else these buildings it cannot be repeated, and will not been both lucky and unlucky at are structures. Delhi of the 70’s saw be repeated. times. I have been very unlucky to the emergence of a new generation SP But there are now talks of lose my wife Shukla recently. of architects and these historical demolishing this building (the Hall I am basically a Punjabi, and Punjabis buildings seem to have had a of Nations). Could there be a plan normally are quite disciplined and strong influence on their practice between you and Raj Rewal to fond of the outdoors. In my early when you look at the early work of propose an adaptive re-use in a life, I started jogging early morning, Raj Rewal or Kuldeep Singh. Their way like Nervi’s CNIT building in led a simple life, without much early projects are sculptures or La Defense in Paris? The building material ambition. What has kept pure structures without decorative was supposed to be demolished in me alive, I don’t know. I had a fall in patterns. Ornament came later in the 80s owing to high maintenance the summer, and I was confined to the late 80s when architects like Raj cost but then in the 90s there was a the bed. I had to give up everything. Rewal and Charles Correa moved to proposal to renovate it, refurbishing I thought I was not going to survive, a more post-modern idiom based on it from the inside without touching but I came out of it. I don’t know signs, symbols and imagery which is the structure. Instead of asking how long I have to live, but I’ll keep in a way more two-dimensional. the government just to preserve it, practicing. MR In a way, it was a worldwide could you propose something of an My wellbeing was to go have a round move from modern to post-modern adaptive reuse whereby the building of Lodhi Garden every morning. I to glass-cage architecture. Delhi could still be used for the convention have started going again for a month has this environment of Mughal centre, or any other use? now. That makes me very happy! architecture that does create an MR The talk between me and Raj Following are a few selected projects and pages impression on the mind, but then is that they should not demolish it. SP It’s a renaissance! from the book, published in Domus India with the there was stream of young architects We met the chairman. It is not the MR I don’t know how long I still permission of the Editors 76 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

Hindon River Mills, Ghaziabad, girder, 3.5m x 1.5m, carrying 1973 humidified air is suspended from the This unique textile mill resembles twin arches. High tensile cables are a series of elegant bridges on used to post-tension the box girder the horizon and, as with many of that also acts as a tie for the arches. Mahendra Raj’s designs, presents an Each girder is stressed by 12 cables aesthetic solution which coordinates made of 12−7mm wires, using the a host of functional, structural and Freyssinet system. Pre-cast double-T constructional requirements. units of 12 tons each are supported Textile mills typically require on the hollow girders to provide enormous quantities of humidified roof covering. air in a column-free space of The twin parabolic arches have a minimum possible enclosed volume 9m rise and a cross section of 38cm to economise on the costs of air- x 75cm at the crown, gradually handling units. Seven alternative increasing to 38cm x 113cm at the structural schemes were made for springing point. The arches, 3.5m the initial flow diagram and layout apart, are interconnected at all which required a 21m x 18m bay. five hanger points. Lateral stability Subsequently, the client revised and for the building is provided by enlarged their requirement to two interconnecting the twin columns sheds of 49m x 223m each. At this supporting the two arches with a stage Raj conceived of a totally new folded-plate gutter element running structure–a twin-tied arch system along the length of the building. The spanning 49m. This modification foundations of the structure consist allowed a simplified layout with a of spread footings tied together larger uninterrupted area without with grade beams. Three different interior columns, and reduced the methods of analysis were used to overall span requirement to 48m. cross-check the design since in the The twin concrete arches span 48m early 1970s the use of computer and are placed at 15m centres. A was very limited.

Photo Stella Snead cast-in-situ, hollow post-tensioned Photo Ariel Huber

This spread: Hindon River Mills, Ghaziabad (1973). This page, top: landscape of the twin arches as viewed from the roof. Above: the uninterrupted factory ﬂoor space. Right: the folded-plate gutter system that runs perpendicular to the twin arches providing lateral stability. Opposite page: drawings from the book – detail (top) and details of main columns of the Hindon River Mills (below) Photo Ariel Huber domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 77 78 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

Shri Ram Centre, New Delhi, wall that also supports its balcony. 1968 The hollow wall is pinned at the The Shri Ram Centre stands for bottom on the circumferential beam an expression of structural and and at the top to the parasol slab programmatic integrity. Cast-in- creating a balancing couple that situ pure forms for an auditorium counteracts the cantilever moment and rehearsal hall are resolved generated by the balcony. through two distinct structural The final product that we see is quite systems. Although supported on different from the designs originally circumferential and radial beams brought by architect Shiv Nath cantilevering out of six columns, the Prasad. For instance the floating 650-person drum-shaped auditorium effect of the building, now its most appears to be floating above the notable feature, was introduced by ground, anchored in space by the the structural changes suggested parasol roof, which houses the 31m by Mahendra Raj. x 31m rehearsal hall. In Raj’s words, ‘Shiv Nath Prasad The hall is supported on four was a very appreciative man. When independent cross-shaped columns given the suggestion of the balcony placed at 19 metres centres with 6 and the separation of the structures metres cantilevers all around. The on the four columns, he was very auditorium is 21 metres in diameter happy and integrated these ideas in

Photo Ariel Huber and is enclosed by a hollow concrete the design.’ Photo Ariel Huber

This spread: Shri Ram Centre, New Delhi (1968). This page, top: street view of the theatre. Above: the radial beams visible in the foyer. Right: exterior photo of the beams ﬂowering out of the cross-shaped column and the delicate ribbed structure of the cantilevered rehersal hall above. Opposite page: drawings from the book – balcony ﬂoor plan and details (top) and rehersal hall roof framing plan (below) Photo Ariel Huber domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 79 80 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016 Photo Ariel Huber Photo Vastu Shilpa Foundation Photo Vastu Photo Ariel Huber

This page: Tagore Memorial Theatre, Ahmedabad (1965). Top: the southern facade of the building expresses a rigid frame structural system. Centre left: the building during constuction. Above: interior view of the vertical and roof trapezoidal folded-plate structure in the foyer. Left: drawing from the book – the folded-plate systems. Opposite page: interior view of the three-storey entry foyer of NDMC City Centre, New Delhi domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 81 Photo Christian Brunner 82 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

Flower Market, Madras, 1989 The relief on the umbrellas that form the flower market in Madras is a testament to Mahendra Raj’s engineering and aesthetic acumen, which brings immense value to any project. He explains, ‘As we have these cantilevers, which require more thickness in the centre and as it is a flower market, and also, as Kuldip Singh wanted to use exposed concrete, we thought of generating this in the image of a flower–a flower over flower that becomes thinner towards the edges.’ What followed were explorations of patterns by Raj to finally arrive at the diamond-shaped petals that stagger and recess back to the edges. An engineering resolution that brought forth an idea of floral relief and the architect’s mastery over shuttering systems endows the flower market structure with tremendous elegance and richness. The relief on the cantilevers fulfils structural and aesthetic intentions and the plates supported on a central column create a module that repeats itself in the design of the market. Eight umbrellas, 12.9m x 12.9m in dimension, form the main spaces, and smaller umbrellas of 6.3m x 6.3m line the outer ring of the courtyard. Photo Ariel Huber

This page, top: view from the mezzanine of the central courtyard of the Flower Market, Madras (1989). Left: detail of the umbrella roofs at the Flower Market. Opposite page: Vidhan Bhavan, Bhopal (1994). Top: the doubly curved shell roof of the multipurpose hall during construction. Below left: interior view of the lobby showing the corbelled column capitals. Below right: the hemispherical roof with a circular skylight during construction. Next page, top: framing plan and details of common hall of the Vidhan Bhavan, Bhopal. Below: detail of the dome domus 56 November 2016 CONFETTI 83

Vidhan Bhavan, Bhopal Parishad has a composite space structure in concrete and steel Built on the undulating terrain of covered by a 14m x 14m roof. Two Central India, the Vidhan Bhavan main lobby areas have impressive of Bhopal, with its circular form, large-span spaces of 30m x 30m, represents architect Charles Correa’s one of which is supported on only move toward prioritising materials four columns. and narrative over structural These large-span structurally expression. Still, this building’s main challenging forms punctuate a programmatic spaces, with bold circular plan of 140m diameter structural forms that create a circumscribing an area of about roof-scape of domes, shells and 29,000 square metres, which is a tower, bear Mahendra Raj’s divided into nine sectors. A grid, of distinctive stamp. 10m x 10m with two-way beams and A doubly curved shell roof for secondary ribs at one-third points the Multipurpose Hall is set on a in both directions, forms the basic triangular base of 43m x 43m x structural system of the rest of the 36m with a thickness of 15−20cm; building. It is worth noting that the the main Vidhan Sabha hall is a construction of the complex took 31m-diameter hemispherical dome more than a decade to complete in concrete with thickness varying because of various administrative from 10 to 20cm; and the Vidhan and other challenges. 84 CONFETTI domus 56 November 2016

The Structure - Works of Mahendra Raj is edited by Vandini Mehta, Rohit Raj Mehndiratta, and Ariel Huber and published by Park Books AG, Zurich, 2016. The book includes texts and interviews by Mark Jarzombek, Abba Tor, Sanjay Prakash, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Neelkanth Chhaya, Jaimini Mehta and BV Doshi, among others. All experts and images featured here are used with permission of the Editors.

PROJECTS 86 PROJECTSPROGETTI/PROJECTS domus 1004 Luglio–Agostodomus 56 / July–August November 2016

For our report on the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, we approached seven leading architects from the middle-generation international scene for their opinions on what they had seen. The result provides a personal and highly diversified picture of the event. At the same time it presents a clear-cut and compact idea of what our profession represents today, as seen from its active practitioners. It is an idea, moreover, that confirms the assumption by the Biennale’s curator Alejandro Aravena that “Architecture is about giving form to the places that we live in.” That is what we, too, think and therefore fully endorse. It is what Domus seeks through its efforts to offer its readers. The image of the German archaeologist Maria Reiche, surveying the territory covered by her research, the symbol of this Biennale, was adopted by Aravena as the right metaphor to masterfully convey the essence of his exhibition: the vital need for architecture to seek new points of view, plus an appeal to architects to assume with the greatest sense of responsibility whatever risk those viewpoints may entail. Thus we are offered a portrait of the scholar standing on the highest rung of her simple REPORTING ladder. Precariously balanced and heedless of danger, she intrepidly scours the land. Her head FROM wrapped in a scarf for protection against the sun, she leans out perilously, in defiance of the THE laws of statics, to gain a few extra centimetres of FRONT view, just a few but enough perhaps to make the difference to her efforts. RICARDO Now that we have seen the exhibits and BAK GORDON appreciated the intentions of their exhibitors, which can also be perused in the admirable SOLANO catalogue, we turn to our reflections on the BENÍTEZ passage from the more excited action of putting CHRISTIAN thoughts and forms on view to the more placid KEREZ task of understanding, analysing and judging their results. CECILIA So what better occasion to return to our PUGA formidable archaeologist, as dusk falls and she RENATO descends her ladder. After a hard day’s work RIZZI spent trying to catch sight of what others cannot see, she puts a jersey over her work suit, takes JONATHAN off her scarf and steps back onto the ladder – SERGISON this time with completely different intentions. EMILIO She stops, however, before reaching the top rung. TUÑÓN The ladder is now a convenient reading stand which she can use to reflect on and to think about what she has found and what remains to be discovered. So, if the moment of action is violent and also dangerous, the moment of meditation is calm and peaceful. Aravena needed the former to present his exhibition whereas we, to offer our readers the reflections published here, needed the latter. The task remains the same, as does the witness. It is only our portrait of the scholar that changes. ndb domus 56 November 2016 PROJECTS 87 Photo © Bruce Chatwin / Trevillion Images Photo © Bruce Chatwin / Trevillion 88 PROJECTS domus 56 November 2016

Architecture To me, Alejandro Aravena’s the Spanish pavilion, Iñaqui ten years ago, when superstar Biennale is very different from Carnicero and Carlos Quintans, architecture was dominant, doesn’t stand the previous ones. have done a wonderful job. where the trend toward fantastic on its own; His particular geographical Indeed, they have received the architecture was totally removed origins in South America have award for best foreign pavilion. from the problems of the city it tells us a little created different cultural One only needs to remember what and the people. With regards about how the conditions and a more human Spanish architecture was like to the pavilion of my country, rapport with people. in the 1990s, how it influenced Portugal, I really appreciated the world is going. His is an attempt to examine who the cultural debate in Europe, content of the exhibition “Where It is positive that benefits from architecture and and how by 2000 it had become Álvaro Meets Aldo,” as well as the if it is really necessary, what it exaggerated and over the top. opportunity to work on the idea of at least a moment’s can do for the people. The title of Aravena has pushed all the participatory architecture, to open reflection his Biennale, “Reporting From stars of architecture from that a debate with the people who the Front”, is in itself almost a period aside. Instead, he has have experienced this exercise is dedicated political statement. It underlines sought architecture by lesser- in social architecture. to these issues. that architects sometimes find knowns, less flashy forms, However, I also feel somewhat themselves on the front line of a silent architecture that offers bitter about the Portuguese battle, fighting for the common regenerated sensibility. pavilion, because I think that good and not just for themselves, We could perhaps define it as the choice to look back instead as was the case in the past with architecture’s new political of toward the future was a lost “starchitects”. attitude. In this regard, the opportunity. It would have We also find this spirit in the work of another award-winning been right to take advantage various awards presented during architect, Solano Benítez, is of such an important moment the Biennale. This year’s Golden exemplary for its focus on social at the Biennale to stimulate Lion for lifetime achievement aspects. Although diverse, I feel looking ahead. went to Paulo Mendes da Rocha that these choices are all moving I have nothing against the work as a way of acknowledging the in the same political and social of the maestro Álvaro Siza, but generosity of architecture towards direction, which aims to bring new this event could have given people, public spaces, and the architecture closer to the people. the entire country a chance for territory of the city, which belongs Architecture doesn’t stand on its renewal, to understand how to to everyone. Architecture has own; it tells us a little about how make Portuguese architecture no need to be ultra-celebratory the world is going. It is positive dynamic again with the same per se, as there are other more that at least a moment’s reflection enthusiasm that Spain was able important values, ones that touch is dedicated to these issues. to impress upon its pavilion. the community. We are all aware that we In my opinion, the curators of experienced a phase of deviation REPORTING REPORTING FROM THE FRONT

RICARDO BAK GORDON Photo Patrizia Di Donato Photo Patrizia domus 56 November 2016 PROJECTS 89 Photo Francesco Galli. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia Photo Francesco

Opening spread, right: installation “Unﬁnished” adaptations and the the archaeologist Maria at the Spanish pavilion new appropriation Reiche. Opposite page: in the Giardini at the of buildings; below, the Brazilian architect Biennale won a Golden the Spanish pavilion Paulo Mendes da Rocha Lion for the best national displays 55 projects, (on left) receiving the participation. On view 7 photographic Golden Lion for lifetime are design responses series, 12 entries for achievement and Álvaro. to the recession, an open competition, This page, above: the including conversions, and 11 interviews Photo Francesco Galli. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia Photo Francesco 90 PROJECTS domus 56 November 2016

The Biennale The Venice Architecture Biennale Corderie with a project called is an institution based on the “Viva la Resistenza.” offers a view, point of view of a carefully As I wandered through, I came a vision, along selected curator, so it represents across Snozzi in person, sitting the highest level of development in front of his installation. the lines of of the discipline at a certain point I couldn’t believe my eyes; interesting in time. I begged him for a photograph, It offers a view, a vision, along because my admiration for this themes, developed the lines of interesting themes, man is absolute. by architects from developed by architects from all Another reason to be thankful to over the world. him was that fact that he was at all over the world. Thanks to its formula and its the disposal of visitors to explain Thanks to its continuity, the Biennale is where his strong ideas come from. currently a very lively entity, Seeing him participate in the formula and its to the extent that it is a global Biennale like that, just one of continuity, it is reference point. the many taking part, made me

In my view, the previous editions love the work of others even more. Photo courtesy of Gabinete de Arquitectura currently a very have been sufficiently varied This is the wonderful aspect lively entity, to by exploring diverse aspects. of being able to take part in the I find it fitting at this moment that Venice Biennale. I felt that the the extent that Alejandro Aravena demonstrates presentation of reflections with it is a global that not everything in the world highly different backgrounds to be is marvellous, not all countries brilliant. Iwas impressed by Rahul reference point. are equally developed, nor do Mehrotra and Felipe Vera’s project all populations have access to for an ephemeral settlement the conditions necessary for a for 7,000,000 people during the dignified life. It is important that Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival our discipline begin to advance held in India every 12 years. The in a way that offers its experience celebration sees a pilgrimage of to all of society. 19,000,000 people in 3 months. If we accept that the most we It is exciting that Paulo Mendes can do is limit our work to what da Rocha is participating. has already been established, I think he is in the position of despite knowing that it does being able to dedicate his life to not respond to the needs of what he loves the most. everyone, then our contribution Yet he came to Venice to underline to society is insignificant. that the discipline is important If, on the other hand, we think it is and that we need to contribute. important for everyone to reach a I think that’s a truly commendable better state, then it is obligatory to thing. This is a great lesson from create an attitude that leads to a the maestri. new dynamic, to a better quality of When I see the presence of

REPORTING REPORTING FROM THE FRONT life for everyone. ﬁgures of the calibre of Souto de I found some very interesting Moura, Álvaro Siza or Mendes da considerations on display at the Rocha, I can only feel enormous exhibition. One thing moved me pride in participating and most of all, leaving me astounded collaborating in my own little by the strength of the Biennale: way with this institution.

Luigi Snozzi in the centre of the Khan Photo Lewis SOLANO BENÍTEZ Photo Francesco Galli. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia Photo Francesco domus 56 November 2016 PROJECTS 91 Photo Lewis Khan Photo Lewis

Opposite page: views of the installation “Breaking the Siege” by the Paraguayan ofﬁce Gabinete de Arquitectura at the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. The spectacular arch in bricks and wood is an example of how simple materials can be combined with unskilled labour to “transform scarcity into abundance”. This page: top and right, the display by Eduardo Souto de Moura on the marketplace he designed in the 1980s in Braga, Portugal, and then converted into a music and dance school in 2011; below, the “Viva la Resistenza” installation by Luigi Snozzi Photo Lewis Khan Photo Lewis Photo Lewis Khan Photo Lewis Photo Lewis Khan Photo Lewis 92 PROJECTS domus 56 November 2016

Many people say that the title over the last 4 or 5 years. The question is how and subject of the Biennale, “Reporting From the Front” is a you can change “Reporting From the Front”, is very metaphorical title: Alejandro about the social engagement Aravena has chosen to show it the perception and social responsibility of with the picture of a woman, the of architecture architecture but how I, at least, German archaeologist Maria personally understood it from the Reiche, standing on a ladder through a writings from Alejandro Aravena, looking at some signs in the powerful series of is that it is rather about the fact desert which she could not have that our world now has to face seen from the ground. challenges. It’s not totally different challenges than The project we showed in the about solving the those faced by other architects Swiss pavilion is more about this many more than 20 or 30 years metaphor of the ladder than the problems of the ago. And the question is now abstract title itself… In general, world. It’s about beyond any engagement, what do it is about the question of how you get out of these new problems one can imagine architecture questioning how to solve, what can you learn from today, and how one can present this involvement them, how can you change the it, how one can build it. But

Photo Lewis Khan Photo Lewis perception of architecture through besides that, we wanted to insist can make any this powerful and different series on the media of architecture and changes in of challenges? build a real space. The project on the Brazilian We raised general questions understanding favela Jardim do Colombo regarding the space.The architecture. could be considered as a social Swiss pavilion shows political engagement but the way that engagement in a different sense. we present it mainly shows It insists on the freedom of our the impact this project has own profession, of our own work, had on my own perception and which is a political act. understanding of architecture REPORTING REPORTING FROM THE FRONT Photo Clara Lopez

CHRISTIAN This page: “Incidental Space” by KEREZ Christian Kerez with Hugo Mesquita at the Swiss pavilion, curator Sandra Oehy. Opposite page: top, the German pavilion “Making Heimat. Germany, Arrival Country”; centre left and below, project for Brazilian favelas by Christian Kerez; centre right, work in war zones by Eyal Weizman – Forensic Architecture Photo Lewis Khan Photo Lewis Photo Lewis Khan Photo Lewis domus 56 November 2016 PROJECTS 93 Photo Francesco Galli. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia Photo Francesco Photo Francesco Galli. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia Photo Francesco Photos Lewis Khan Photos Lewis Photo Lewis Khan Photo Lewis 94 PROJECTS domus 56 November 2016

The Biennale shows Architecture has always and efficient response to the been the result of numerous most urgent social needs, you can empathy with a interacting forces – from the innovate in a technological and certain sensibility technically specific drawing, to typological sense, or you can give the participational processes a more personal proposal that that is found all of programmatic organisation makes a significant contribution over the world. and of the generation of the to the discipline and our quality architectural and urban form. of life. It looks to the Every time, the scope and quality Another interesting topic of present and future of the participation and the discussion is what the editorial requirements are different, so industry does with these themes, with pragmatism architectural production has never or rather the prerequisites and worry after been divorced from negotiation – associated with these initiatives with economic forces, with and the way in which they having left behind technical and material resources, determine (by limiting or the excesses of with cultural, social and political amplifying) the speculative structures, and more. potential of architecture. lustful optimism The point is that architecture I enjoyed the British pavilion. of the 1990s. does not have just one single In a context that is socially and interpretation, and the same economically critical, where the piece of work can be observed and giant lack of housing defines the weighed from different points agenda of British architecture, of view. We can look at its social the exhibit offers food for thought. benefits, and its participational With a delicate sense of humour and collective processes pertaining and subtle references, it shows to the definition of the built world. domestic life and what could be The Biennale directed by Aravena the new habitative configurations, is focused on this aspect, making incorporating the changes sure that the account and above currently underway, in Europe all the communication of that at least. account is organised around The famous base unit on which themes with a collective character housing policies calculate the and of social interest. deficit is called into question. Along these lines, the Biennale The need to give space to multiple shows empathy with a certain programmatic, spatial and sensibility that is found all over cultural configurations is taken the world. It looks to the present and into consideration. future with pragmatism and worry The Swiss pavilion is also very after having left behind the excesses stimulating. of lustful optimism of the 1990s. Christian Kerez has conducted The title is pertinent and a fascinating exploration that provocative, besides being broadens the limits of how we

REPORTING REPORTING FROM THE FRONT sufﬁciently broad to contain experience space by building a proposals whose fronts are not complex and seemingly out-of- necessarily or manifestly social in control reality. Contemporary character. I like to think that there digital technology is placed at the is space in the world for different service of this exercise, and used ways of approaching the discipline as a tool that enables an abstract

– you can give an appropriate work of architecture. Galli. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia Photo Francesco CECILIA PUGA Photo Francesco Galli. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia Photo Francesco domus 56 November 2016 PROJECTS 95 Photo Lewis Khan Photo Lewis Photo Italo Rondinella. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

Opposite page: “Home Economics” at the British pavilion, curators Shumi Bose, Jack Self and Finn Williams. This page: the installation “Where to Look” by Cecilia Puga, where seven clay models made using ancient techniques by the Chilean artist Lise Moller are accompanied by three photos by Gonzalo Puga. In a concise and abstract way, the models recount a series of built and unbuilt projects that have in common their use of iconic constructions such as the vault and the curved slab, elements that give distinction to the space while leaving its use open Photos Lewis Khan Photos Lewis 96 PROJECTS domus 56 November 2016

To talk about this Biennale, I I believe that this would start from its title question of the “Reporting From the front”: so what is the architectural front? front raised by the It is a front easily confused with Biennale comes all the events that surround us, with today’s history, the as an outstanding actuality of our time. Migrations, opportunity for mega-cities, poverty and hunger are not issues peculiar to architecture. debate. Architecture by definition ought The reference (always) to reflect on these contents. But its only real battlefield is that of to Maria Reiche form. Here an enormous problem is intended to arises: when people begin to distinguish the container from its remind us that contents, a vast front is opened up. the architect Separation has led form to empty itself of its contents and to change today is alone, into formalism. Form no longer always at risk and exists, and content, left by itself, permits and legitimates any forced to gaze into vulgarity in the field of architecture.

the distance to So we could say that architecture Galli. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia Photo Francesco does not exist any more: which is a interpret signs. tragic truth. I believe however that of the arcai, or arché. This means They form an inclined line which this question of the front – or better that we have separated two fields: rises from the subsoil. This means still, fronts – raised by the Biennale the technico-scientific, applied to that the ground of the comes as an outstanding the controllable areas; and that of foundations, or the ground of soil opportunity for debate. the arché – which refers to the on which we rest our feet, is not Moreover, the reference to Maria uncontrollable spheres of always only the neutral plane of Reiche is significant, and one on knowledge. We can say therefore the land, but can be found below which few have reflected: that that the container cannot be ground, on the surface, in the air solitary archaeology, in a separated from the content, just as or in the sky. precarious condition on the form can never be separated from These sections show precisely ladder. I believe that image is its image. The image is always that the sinusoid (of possibilities intended to remind us that the invisible, form is always visible. Not and necessities) is very wide and architect today is alone, always at only is the image always invisible, crosses a thousand different risk and forced to gaze into the but it is the uncontrollable power. planes. Therefore our ground distance to interpret signs. And I The title of my installation, cannot be only technique, the am not talking only about “Orphan Ground”, does not only regulation, but also has to involve individualities, about ourselves, mean that we are orphans of the all the knowledge that belongs to

REPORTING REPORTING FROM THE FRONT who live in a time dominated by land, but that we are in reality many other disciplines: techno-scientiﬁc knowledge orphans of foundations, of the philosophy, literature, history, whereby all things are isolated. arché that is also in each one of music and poetry (just to mention Our discipline, too, architecture, us. I wanted to show, among the that it means “to produce”). favours the technico-scientiﬁc other things, four projects in sphere, while forgetting section – Naples, Parma, Gdansk everything belonging to the sphere and Florence. RENATO RIZZI Photo Bruce Chatwin / Travillion Images Photo Bruce Chatwin / Travillion domus 56 November 2016 PROJECTS 97 Photo Lewis Khan Photo Lewis Khan Photo Lewis

Opposite page top: the installation “Evidence Room” by the University of Waterloo, showing full-scale models of the gas chambers and incinerators at Auschwitz. Below: the announcement for the 15th Architecture Biennale shows the German archaeologist Maria Reiche, who studied the Nazca earth drawings. This page: the installation “Orphan Ground” by Renato Rizzi at the Central Pavilion in the Giardini Photo Lorenzo Sivieri Photo Lorenzo 98 PROJECTS domus 56 November 2016

For me there is one The Biennale is the most many years, and I thought it was and beautiful account of four important international event a bold move to invite him to direct housing projects that shows how absolute highlight: dealing with architecture, and the this year’s edition. Some spaces they can be understood in terms of travelling by opening is always a wonderfully inevitably feel a bit like an end- their architectural intentions and intense occasion for architects to of-year student show. There are relevance as ideas of social housing. vaporetto to come together in this incredible rooms where exhibitors seem to be I spent two hours there and left Giudecca to view city. There are moments of trying to put every good intention feeling rewarded. sharing and debate, and often into one space, and there’s far The videos in the Siza exhibition Siza’s contribution. profound discourse on aspects of too much to read. Often, the best are all equally good. He talks It benefits from the contemporary architecture. Rival exhibits take into account the fact about the project in Venice, an international events exist – the that many of the visitors inevitably interesting story in itself. This choice of location, Triennales in Milan and Lisbon, the form an impression that is based was a competition he won with a housed as it is São Paulo Biennale – but Venice on a sort of “drive-by” viewing. master plan, and he later involved retains a special status. It was For me there is one absolute Aldo Rossi. Siza is very careful in in an incomplete built on a foundation established highlight: travelling by vaporetto the way he explains how Rossi was project of his. by the Art Biennale, and the to Giudecca to view Álvaro Siza’s a little bit upset for not winning existing infrastructure is a campus contribution. It benefits from the the master plan, but he felt that for hosting the different national choice of location, housed as it is in he was rewarding him in a way by pavilions, while the Central an incomplete project of his, away asking him to make a building. Pavilion and the Corderie at the from the circus of the Biennale I remember becoming fascinated Arsenale feature contributions itself. Showing a collection of films by Siza’s work when I was a dealing more specifically with the is risky, especially if they are as student at the AA. I remember a overall thematic investigation long as they are, but seeing them is lecture by Yehuda Safran, where proposed by the Biennale’s director. absolutely compelling. I sat down he explained that he’d had an As for this year’s Biennale, I’ve and watched one after another. appointment with Alvaro Siza known Alejandro Aravena for There is the particularly sensitive in Porto, to which Siza arrived REPORTING REPORTING FROM THE FRONT

JONATHAN SERGISON Photo Massimo Curzi domus 56 November 2016 PROJECTS 99 quite late. The reason he gave as an apology was that he’d been visiting a house he had completed 20 years before. He wanted to see what it was like 20 years later. This anecdote reveals a level of investment in architecture and the sense that you can learn from your own production throughout your working life. This is important, because most architects lose interest in their projects even before they’re done; they’re already on to the next thing. With Siza there is a sense of openness to the lessons that the physical, built work can hold in the way it performs, its social intentions, but especially its physical aspects. This Opposite page and this page, below is a lesson many would beneﬁt and right: views of the installation from learning. “Neighbourhood – Where Álvaro meets Aldo” at the Portuguese pavilion by Nuno Grande and Roberto Cremascoli on the island of Giudecca. This page, top: the inauguration of the Portuguese pavilion (on left) and Siza on site in February 2016 (on right) Photo Massimo Curzi 100 PROJECTS domus 56 November 2016

I believe the At the Spanish pavilion I presented “Reporting From the Front”, it is the work on the Hotel Atrio in intriguing to see how different territory of Cáceres, a construction from architects view the problems of architecture is wide a few years back, built at the architecture, starting from the height of the economic crisis. The battlefront that the profession enough to give space pavilion explores the theme of represents. I find Solano Benitez’s to architecture the “unfinished”, meaning the arch fantastic, and Kazuyo incomplete, that was produced Sejima’s project with the islands that concerns the during the recession but never and all of the construction is very primitivist sphere, terminated. interesting. If I had to find one What is even more interesting fault in the Biennale, it would the disciplinary is the theme of the unfinished be that it shows excess in its sphere and the as a mechanism. It expresses response, and an obsession for clay, the concept of architecture as straw and wood. Everyone ends up academic sphere, as something intrinsically incomplete, fuelling this obsession in a rather well as other types that is on its way to becoming insistent manner, sometimes something, and that in a certain neglecting other proposals that of approach. sense is adapting to what is have more strength. happening while keeping an eye on Antón García-Abril’s installation what is yet to come. with the sculptures he is building The architect no longer works as in the desert in the US is a celebrity, an artist, or a figure enormously intense to me. I also who is independent from his like Christian Kerez’s installation surroundings. He ends up working on the favelas, where you see the on things that already exist, models in person. I believe that previously built by others, by better everything that has to do with an or worse architects. Thus a kind actual material condition ends up of working community is created, being more attractive, because it in which architects not only think isn’t what one is shown through the of the future, but act upon the media. In this sense I think that existing, meaning the past, in Aravena has achieved great results. order to construct the present. On view are moments of great The result is a sort of affiliation intensity and moments of lesser between the present, the past and intensity such as the obsession the future, where architecture is of today’s architects for a return made with minimal means, because to a certain primitiveness, and a it’s an attempt to construct as little glorification of this primitiveness as possible on previously built as a condition that excludes other structures and buildings. types of architecture. The title “Unfinished” is imprecise, I believe instead that it is clear but it is precise in being a response that architecture is a wide to the title of this year’s Biennale, enough territory to give space to

REPORTING REPORTING FROM THE FRONT “Reporting From the Front”, architecture that concerns the because fundamentally these 50 primitivist sphere, architecture projects have the character of being that concerns the disciplinary records and accounts of what is sphere and architecture that really happening on the battlefront concerns the academic sphere, as of Spanish architecture. well as other types of approach.

With regards to the theme Khan Photo Lewis EMILIO TUÑÓN Photo Lewis Khan Photo Lewis domus 56 November 2016 PROJECTS 101 Photo Italo Rondinella. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

Opposite page: Inujima Hotel Atrio designed Landscape Project by by Mansilla y Tuñón in Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Cáceres, Spain. Top and Nishizawa / SANAA below: the project by on show at the Central Antón García-Abril and Pavilion in the Giardini, Débora Mesa Molina is the regeneration of a (Ensamble Studio) for small village on an island Tippet Rise Art Center in the Seto Inland Sea. in Fishtail, Montana on This page left: in the view inside the Corderie Spanish pavilion, at the Arsenale Photo courtesy of Emilio Tuñón Arquitectos Photo courtesy of Emilio Tuñón Photo Italo Rondinella. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia Photo Italo Rondinella. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

domus 56 November 2016 FEEDBACK 103

FEEDBACK SHAONONG WEI’S SHANGHAI 104 FEEDBACK domus 56 November 2016

FEEDBACK: SHAONONG WEI’S SHANGHAI 033 SHANGHAI

Shanghai is a legendary construction miracle Today, the Old City contains some ancient but among modern cities in China and the Far renovated features, such as the Yuyuan Garden East. It was from Shanghai that China, complex, made in the traditional style of the as an ancient and traditional agricultural Jiangnan area (the southern part of the Yangtze civilisation, began to move towards the ocean, delta) and the Confucian Temple. Nowadays, towards the world. they are the most popular tourist attractions One thousand years ago, the biggest part among both domestic and foreign visitors. of Shanghai, the part that is now the most Facing the North Pacific Ocean, Shanghai is prosperous, was still immersed in the located on the East China Sea. Situated at boundless ocean. As silt floated downstream 31°14’ northern latitude, Shanghai is right in from the upper reaches of Yangtze River the middle between North and South China. and accumulated at the Yangtze estuary, Politically, Shanghai has held a relatively the territory of Shanghai grew slowly marginal position in being controlled by the toward the east. central government, and this made it the best Shanghai became a city in 1291, when five landing point in China for Western countries villages were amalgamated to form Shanghai for a very long time. County on the site of the modern city centre. After China’s defeat by the British in the In 1553, a city wall was built around the Old Opium War (1839-1842), Shanghai became City to defend it from Japanese pirates. Inside one of the five Chinese trading ports where these 4.5 square kilometres, Shanghai life British businesses could enter China. British was born. Apart from two small preserved businessmen received approval to live in sections, the walls were demolished in 1912, Shanghai and to build their own residences. and a broad circular avenue was built in place In 1845, the British signed a land-deal with of the wall and moat. the Chinese government. Photo courtesy of Shanghai Municipal Archives domus 56 November 2016 FEEDBACK 105

Shaonong Wei was born in 1963 in Shanghai. He took his bachelor degree in History at the Fudan University in 1984. Since 2006, he has been the dean of the School of Design at the East China Normal University in Shanghai, China.

Opening spread, left: the This regulation later became the legislative occupied for one-half by Chinese industry, Lujiazui financial district basis that allowed Western countries to one-fourth by trade and one-sixth by finance, in Pudong; right: map of establish concessions in Shanghai. Shanghai became the most prosperous and Shanghai from 1927. After the establishment of the British fashionable metropolis in the Far East. Opposite page top: the Bund (seen on right) and concession, a French concession and an Shanghai entered her summit of modern the Pudong district (on American concession were also signed and urban construction in the 1920s and 30s. The left), east of Huangpu continuously expanded. Consequently, main architectural styles were 19th-century River, which crosses Shanghai began its development of modern British and American vintage style, Spanish the city. Opposite page bottom: view of the urban construction. Mediterranean, and the art deco style, which Bund in 1930. This page: When Shanghai refused the British request had just become popular in Europe. the Bund to establish a deep-water harbour and Due to the lack of historical background settlement at the Wusong River delta, the in Western architectural culture and British chose the Bund as their beginning the limitation of building materials and point, from where they expanded gradually construction techniques, these Western towards the north and west. styles became localised in Shanghai, making This is why the Bund became the birthplace architecture of that period a comprehensive of modern urban construction in Shanghai. hybrid. This multicultural and multi-style The British got busy making money through mix forged the unique appearance and the construction of many banks and financial special glamour of Shanghai’s modern urban buildings, while the French were enjoying life construction. It belongs to the world, but in their own built apartments and villas. it belongs even more to Shanghai. More Within a few decades, Shanghai became importantly, the architectural styles of this the wonderland of Western adventurers, period had a deep impact on the architecture a flourishing Oriental Paris. In the 1930s, of other Chinese cities. 106 FEEDBACK domus 56 November 2016

Shikumen is the typical, symbolic style of Shanghai was almost silent during the next modern Shanghai architecture. half century. The birth and development of shikumen The city suddenly woke up in the 1990s. is almost contemporaneous to that of the In less than 20 years, Shanghai has changed concessions. Originally, it was used in quickly entirely. Across the Huangpu River from built temporary residences during the rapid Bund, the new city district of Pudong was growth of the population, and for businessmen born with the construction of Lujiazui and the middle class, who swarmed into Finance and Trade Zone. Shanghai in order to avoid World War II and The historic centre of Puxi has also witnessed look for business opportunities. a big change: the roads have become wider It combines traditional siheyuan style with and the buildings have become higher. Western residential functions and decoration New buildings have been constructed at a styles, and later became the most typical crazed and rapid pace. residential architecture of Shanghai. Shanghai is like a child who stopped growing Shanghai is the birthplace of modern Chinese after childhood but then suddenly entered industry. middle age overnight. The two banks of the man-made Suzhou Without doubt, this kind of growth has River, which runs through the downtown brought problems, for example a lack of area of Shanghai, became the best location transition and integration between the old for factories and transit storage thanks to and the new, which leads to the fragmentation transportation convenience and low cost. of urban textures. These factory sites witnessed a great part of There is a fast-moving disappearance of city the history of Shanghai’s modern industrial memory, and indistinctive features of the city development. Although this important and its architecture. industrial and urban heritage was massively We have reason to be proud of today’s demolished due to its faulty urban planning construction achievements, but we have more concept, fortunately the government and the reasons to think about what the city means to society have begun to realise how important it the people who live in it and come visit it. is to the memory of the city. It is time to reﬂect upon and discuss what we This has allowed some of the important have done. industrial heritage along the Suzhou and in Until now, Shanghai has not been strictly other districts of Shanghai to be preserved planned or designed. It has grown naturally. and renovated into different kinds of creative What decides this city’s development is its spirit parks and museums, integrating them and unique cultural genes: freedom, openness, into the process of urban development and tolerance and the pursuit of the exquisite, and a function improvement. The modernisation fashionable and high-quality lifestyle. of Shanghai ended with the outbreak of The Shanghainese attitude toward life, taste World War II. Because of the inﬂuence of and temperament is what is forging this wars, political changes and other reasons, unique city. domus 56 November 2016 FEEDBACK 107

Opposite page: the located in the old French former headquarters of Concession area of the Hong Kong Shanghai Shanghai. Today it is a Bank Corporation is a populous entertainment neoclassical building district. Below: built from 1923 located in in the 1930s, the area the Bund. It now houses called Tianzifang is the Shanghai Pudong the artistic heart of the Development Bank. French Concession, where This page, above: colonial-era shikumen- old houses in the style buildings combine Huangpu district, which both Chinese and encompasses the Bund. European elements Left: an alley in Xintiandi,

All photographs by Rong Yao 108 RASSEGNA domus 56 November 2016

RASSEGNA FINISHES Photo Elisabetta Carboni domus 56 November 2016 RASSEGNA 109 Photo Giovanni Nardi and Andrea Martiradonna

Opposite page: detail The term ‘finimenti’ – decoration – comes up in association of the cladding, in with various contexts and materials in some of the most timber panels and slabs of travertine, of ancient treatises on architecture. It is already to be found the Pavilion built by in De Architectura libri decem, written between 35 and 25 Francesco Venezia B.C. Vitruvius talks about the art of decoration, describing and Ettore Spalletti the proper way to apply layers of plaster. Leon Battista for the project “Arch and Art” promoted by Alberti instead defines it as those parts “that communicate Assolombarda and to the whole wall, the outer layer and the inside”: in curated and realised his De re aedificatoria, written between 1443 and 1452, by Domus (2 April – 12 he underlines the importance of working with strong September 2016); top: overall view of the stones for ensuring the “eternal duration” of the wall. A pavilion located at century later, Sebastiano Serlio, in the third book of the the Triennale Gardens Treatise on Architecture, published in 1540, to describe in Milan the absence of ornamental elements above the cornice of the arch of Pola, underlines that the ‘stones’ above ‘have no decoration’. Then in the Institutions of civil Architecture by Niccolò Carletti from 1772 decorations on buildings are “architectural works founded in beauty and strength for reasoned effect”. Decorations then, are the elements and interventions that finish a building and can be intended as either ornamentation that enhances the surface and as a construction solution that protects it, on a par with clothing and accessories that are worn both to adorn and protect the human body. The same parallel between clothing and housing is made by Gottfried Semper, for whom architecture has a textile origin that finds in colour and cladding the essential aspects of its qualification. It was actually Semper’s analytical theories that inspired Adolf Loos to address problems linked to finishes, going on to establish the concept that is still determining today, that it is necessary to avoid any possible ambiguity between a covered material and a finish: “Wood can be painted in any colour except one: the colour of wood […] With stucco any kind of decoration can be made except one – that which imitates the construction of brickwork […] Iron can be tarred, painted with oil paint or galvanised but cannot be painted in a bronze colour, in other words the colour of another metal”1. An admonition that has stayed with us. In recent years in fact, elements of finish – plaster, fabrics, panels, tiles, wallpaper, laminates and mosaics – present ambiguous forms while the expressivity of new materials is controversial and the use of increasingly advanced technology causes an altered perception of these elements and thus the space in which they are placed, giving rise to suspicion and misunderstanding. Each material possesses its own formal dignity. Wood, stone, aluminium, ceramic, glass, leather and concrete – but also plastics, resins and new materials – have to be able to speak their own language, each revealing with dignity its function and potential, presenting itself as Loos would have it, “without lies”. The job of the architect has to be to exalt the laws of materials and formulate the rules of construction: it is within this condition that the evolution of architecture and architectural language sits with regards to the principles of cladding, the concept of decoration and 1Adolf Loos, Parole nel vuoto, the significance of finish (or finimento). Adelphi, Milano 1972 Francesco Maggiore 110 RASSEGNA domus 56 November 2016

ÉPURÉ materials that combine tradition and PERFECTSENSE GLOSS particular smoothness of the surface Élitis modernity with natural elegance. In the Egger and depth that distinguishes so photo: Shirakawa, a pattern made with clearly the final result from other In this collection of wall-coverings, an artisan papers and contrasting stitching. Used in a black gloss version to clad glossy products. artisan feel is introduced and translated walls of the Babermann butchers in into wallpaper by incorporating the use of Preetz (Germany) the painted wood raffia fibres, fabrics and silks, abaca bark ÉLITIS panels in the Premium PerfectSense EGGER and metal thread. A wealth of exquisite www.elitis.fr Gloss range are striking for the www.egger.com

MAXFINE: IRON FMG Fabbrica Marmi e Graniti

The extra-large format (up to 150 x 300 cm) with reduced thickness (6 mm) of Maxfine porcelain stoneware tiles has enabled the boundary to be crossed between architecture and furniture. Ideal for covering floors and walls, Maxfine tiles also provide a suitable solution for creating fixtures and finishes, worktops and surfaces for drawers, door-fronts, cupboards and tables as well as bathroom tops, including the cladding for sinks or shower-trays. The Maxfine collection has now been GLOSS GREENBELL extended with the introduction of the Stone Italiana Iron range – suitable both for indoor and outdoor applications – with a new, Part of the Gloss collection, Greenbell is textural effect that reproduces metallic a quartz stone with inlaid recyclable colours, faithfully reproducing oxidation components. The highly-technological and marks of time. Four versions are characteristics of the product – a available: Iron Bronze, Iron Black, Iron quartz base with silicon inerts – make it Grey and Corten. suitable for many applications.

FMG FABBRICA MARMI E GRANITI STONE ITALIANA www.irisfmg.it www.stoneitaliana.com

IN&OUT PERCORSI EXTRA: PIETRA DI COMBE Ceramiche Keope

For the external and internal finishes of the Sport Hotel Prodongo (PV), the designers specified porcelain stoneware tiles produced by Ceramiche Keope. In particular, a ceramic series was selected that is characterised by a graduated effect that reproduces the atmospheric nuances of natural stone. The floor in the wellness area (in the photo) has been made with Pietra di Combe from the In&Out Percorsi Extra collection, alternating the structured formats of 30 x 60 cm with those measuring 60 x 60 cm.

CERAMICHE KEOPE www.keope.com domus 56 November 2016 RASSEGNA 111

DIGITAL NATURE overlooking the Grand Canal. The ten Karim Rashid new designs in the collection offer an original interpretation of the nature Experimentation breathes new life that is all around us, crystallising it into design, expands its range of into biomorphic geometries. Shown action and pushes the boundaries of in the images: two details of the the imagination. A perfect example colourful, shiny laminates used of this is presented by the decorative to clad the curved volumes of the richness that can be seen in Abet’s Venice installation. collection of laminates in which, working in partnership with Karim ABET LAMINATI Rashid, they have achieved a tangible www.abet-laminati.it synthesis between art and design. It is the result of ongoing investigations into forms and materials, drawing on the talent and craftsmanship of De Rosso, a manufacturer able to give shape to ideas through the use of laminate, a material that combines high resistance to wear, characteristic of smooth surfaces, with excellent aesthetic results. The latest range of decorations created by the Israeli designer for Abet were originally conceived for the Digital Nature installation at the 15th International Exhibition of Architecture in Venice, inside Palazzo Michiel, a historic Venetian building

I CLASSICI DI REX natural world, evoking the warmth of POWDER three warm – Sand, Crete and Mud – Florim wood and the authenticity of stone A Marazzi and three cool – Smoke and Graphite wide range of formats are available: – and in three formats: 75 x 150 cm Florim presented at Cersaie 2016 from 30 x 30 cm mosaic to 150 x Halos and graphic marks, light and rectified, 75 x 75 cm rectified and with their stylish and sophisticated, 320 cm, with intermediate formats volatile like the powders that play on hexagonal 21 x 18.2 cm. Decorative high-end range, Rex Ceramiche (160 x 240 cm and 160 x 320 cm) the ceramic to create refined, options also include suggested Artistiche, showing new versions of also available in a handed version. contrasting effects in an infinite layouts such as Deco, a composition the I Classici di Rex series. Varied The style and sophistication of these gradation of subdued, unusual neutral of hexagonal tiles in a warm and a and highly versatile, this collection collections is further enhanced by tones that give rise to unexpected cool version, Liberty in a 75 x 75 cm of claddings in full-body, coloured, the extra-large formats offered with and changing colour performances. format in two warm and cool versions porcelain stoneware is the result of Florim Magnum Oversize porcelain Powder is a reinterpretation in – and a 30 x 30 cm mosaic available a creative drive to give environments stoneware. In the photo: a shower porcelain stoneware of urban in all colours. Powder can be used a strong personality, adapting to with cladding in Calacatta gold chain concrete, with a soft surface and for both floors and walls in either architectural spaces with solutions in a 120 x 120 cm format. random patterns characterised by residential or commercial situations. and contrasts that declare a natural subtle and graduated haloes that bring inclination towards beauty, with FLORIM out the irregularities in the material. MARAZZI shades and tones that recall the www.florim.it The collection comes in five colours, www.marazzigroup.com 112 RASSEGNA domus 56 November 2016

MIRRORS BAR COLLECTION The Great Eastern Home Inhabit

Mirrors, apart from being a necessity Inhabit has recently launched an for every home, have also played an innovative and stylish collection of Bar integral part in enhancing home décor Units and Chairs. The collection fares with their grace and elegance. high on its commitment to great Mirrors are not only functional in a design and visual aesthetics. Easy and home, they’re decorative, too. One sectioned spacing with wood shelves can express the home’s personality and dim lights make the bar user- on a mirror’s frame. The striking new friendly giving the unit an elegant look. range of mirrors introduced by The The bar can hold stem glasses on the Great Eastern Home are beautiful and left side while other glasses can be their delicate design elements give a places on the right. Special low height majestic feel to the space they inhabit shelves are provided for stocking with their uniqueness and inimitability. bottles and other amenities. Each and every mirror in this collection has been handcrafted in brass, bronze and wood adding distinction and exclusivity.

THE GREAT EASTERN HOME INHABIT www.thegreateasternhome.com www.neetakumar.com

THE BOUQUET COLLECTION characterised by a freedom of spirit. A JUNGLE-INSPIRED COLLECTION matching tropical colours – liane and Hands melding of art and contemporary style, Marshalls Wallcoverings eucalyptus green, colours of the bird these carpets are bold, statement of paradise such as bright orange and A handmade carpet by Hands is at pieces. Each is hand tufted and made Marshalls wallcoverings has launched violet, pastel lilacs and purples of wild once a systematic methodology and a of the finest silk and wool. Known for its all-new Jungle Wallcovering orchids, pomegranate, mango, blue great freedom of execution enjoyed by their fine handmade carpets, and a Collection, inspired by the abundant and amber crystal of butterflies, tiger the artisans crafting them. It holds craftsmanship that has been passed beauty of nature and its explosive or jaguar yellow and black etc – to the power to endow whatever space down from generation to generation, colours. This collection narrates a offer discerning customers a ideal mix it inhabits with life and soul. The Hands is a one-stop destination for beautiful story of the Jungle and its of aesthetics and functional designs. Bouquet collection is one such unique premium carpets, both hand knotted elements – right from tiger motifs expression. The collection, as the and hand tufted. With a valued legacy to mosaics of bakbak (bark of the name suggests is inspired by the of creating art that is timeless and banana plant) – that have been joy of flowers. Be it a bouquet the inspires joy, they display a mastery composed in tone-on-tone shades bride holds exuberantly or flowers of design and skill that borders on a of beetle blue/green, tropical wood, in a field fluttering in the breeze, or precise science. hibiscus red, equatorial haze, milky a lone wildflower or a pretty pot of coconut white. Once the theme flowers adorning a balcony in the city HANDS CARPETS is set, delicate weaves of natural MARSHALLS WALLCOVERINGS - the designs from this collection are www.hands-carpets.com fibres (sisal and jute) are added with www.marshallswallcoverings.com domus 56 November 2016 RASSEGNA 113

NIKOO INTERIORS having access to world-class furniture, Studio CREO Nikoo Interiors also provides design assistance to select and customise the look one aspires for. These furniture Nikoo Interiors by Studio CREO is a pieces double up in usage according very carefully curated selection of to the needs. For example, a dining furniture from Italy. The products are table for 4 seats 8 when extended, designer pieces from reputed brands or a study desk that becomes a full such as Le Comfort, MAB, Calligaris, size bed by the night, or a pouf with Ditre Italia, Tumidei and Midj, storage, etc. Diemmebi, O&G amongst others. The BAM BAM BY ALHAMBRA numbers, ﬂowers without forgetting quality promised by each brand is to RR Decor classic stripes and polka dots in many reckon with for a luxury experience. NIKOO INTERIORS sizes, combining into similar shades, or In addition to easing the process of www.studiocreo.com Alhambra Internacional was founded in breaking away with daring and cheeky Alicante, Spain, in 1977. It is present in colours. Fabrics range from linen to more than 100 countries within the cotton, with or without embroidery - textile sector for interior design and because each child’s world is unique home decor. Their latest collection, and those worlds need creativity, Bam Bam caters to young, demanding, happiness, motivation, but also serenity, and indispensable customers, because gentleness and relaxation, depending the decoration of their rooms requires on the age of the child. The freshness a meticulous selection of shades, and gentleness invoked by the Bam motifs, textures etc. For this, Bam Bam Bam collection, its colours and prints, offers the best of classic childhood together with the quality of its fabrics, images in fabrics including patchworks have been prioritised by Alhambra in and embroideries, in traditional the creation of this collection. colours and appliqued by hand. The collection offers motifs such as little BAM BAM BY ALHAMBRA houses, boats, stars, Matryoshka dolls, www.rrdecor.com

FRENCH OAK natural look and feel besides making it Square Foot feel more wood-like. This special range BLUE POTTERY perfection. With patterns and designs of delightful flooring, which can be used Room Therapy so unique and fresh, the vases & Square Foot, a premium flooring at homes, offices or any light traffic jars collection in a refreshing blue company, announced the launch of its areas, includes Avignon, Vercors and Vases are an integral part of every colour matches with all decors styles, new scratch resistant laminate flooring Orleasa. All three variants are scratch household, and the latest collection of making them ideal for all types of range ‘French Oak’. This new range resistant and very easy to maintain. Blue Pottery by Room Therapy, home decors. of flooring will add a touch of luxury comprising of vases and jars, is and help one achieve a desired look made of the finest quality porcelain that instills character and charm to and is available in a plethora of the living space. The unique feature contemporary styles with each piece ROOM THERAPY of French Oak is the ‘Embossed-in- SQUARE FOOT being an embodiment of elegance and www.roomtherapyhome.com register’ process which gives it a very www.squarefoot.co.in 114 RASSEGNA domus 56 November 2016

STOF, FRANCE these days where one can give free Zynna rein to their imagination. This new collection offers versatile range of Zynna has launched a lively collection textile composition in cotton, linen, of upholstery from STOF, France. The jersey and polyester in varied subtle collection is a fresh contemporary tones of pink, off white, grey, peach, assortment which comprises of green and blue further adding a lively stylish colors, rich textures and pretty and phenomenal touch to the interiors. patterns that can transform a room, for a more digniﬁed look. Floral collection accompanied with digital technique is ZYNNA a new and promising trend in interiors zynna.in

DUCHESS COLLECTION patterns that includes classic damask Rumors Fine Furnishings embroidery, a trailing modern damask jacquard, a lost and found jacquard Complementing the festive season pattern, small patterned velvet and a ahead, Rumors Fine Furnishings has multicolor stripe, all of which are made come up with their lavish Duchess with special attention to the details. Collection to accessorize interiors to The collection also includes some the core. Duchess is an elegant and evergreen sheers to give a break to the classic damask design that has been heavy patterned designs. Available in given a fresh feel with the usage of variety of classic shades of Lilac, Soft diverse colors. The premium collection blue, Ivory- Beige, Gold, and Emerald SEA KICTHENS specific way of life which expands is inspired by the period of artistic green adds all the more royalty to the SEA the horizon in what is possible. Each style and Baroque. The collection collection. The machine made range of SEA Kitchen design is unique. Clear consists of beautiful embroidery and fabrics follow classic traditions by using Based on a 99 year old legacy, SEA form language, straight lines and jacquards which is fabricated on blends contemporary colours and modern stands today for unique modular focus on functionality and individual of Polyester, Cotton and Viscose. embroidery techniques further giving it kitchens and wardrobes. Combined requirements are characteristics of a The resplendent range of fabrics is a fresh and stylish look. with an impeccable customer service SEA Kitchen design. SEA is worldwide available in all leading home furnishing and highest German quality standards, the first Company to offer PLYFORM – stores across India. The Exclusive RUMORS FINE FURNISHINGS SEA has entered into the Indian Plywood Kitchens Made in Germany – Duchess Collection comprises of five www.rumorsindia.in market in 2013 with the clear vision a product, which withstands easily the to become the leading design brand extreme Indian climatic conditions and for kitchens and wardrobes. Within is also prepared for a rough usage. It is three years, we have established 13 100% water proofed and has a thermal mind-blowing showrooms across stability up to +150°. Until today SEA is India. The “Expand your horizon” idea the only brand who can offer Plywood drives SEA in every aspect of work. Kitchens Made in Germany. Out of handpicked materials, SEA designs products, creating unique living spaces. Out of living spaces SEA GROUP GERMANY SEA derives the fascination of a www. sea-group.de

MARMOKER stoneware, the series brings to ceramic Casalgrande Padana the tonalities, grain, transparency, brightness and precious colours of The transmutation of characters and quarried marble. Marmoker comes in properties from one material to another 20 kinds of stone to which is added a is one of the most fertile and stimulating ceramic white, available in two ﬁnishes aspects of contemporaneity. The most (natural and lapped) in large formats 60 signiﬁcant feature of the Marmorker x 120 and 60 x 60 cm. series is precisely the fusion of properties that in nature belong to raw materials that are different in terms of their physical characteristics and appearance. Made by applying state-of- CASALGRANDE PADANA the-art digital technology to porcelain www.casalgrandepadana.com

RNI NUMBER MAHENG/2012/45937 Regd No. MCW/ 305/ 2016-2018 3RVWHGDW0XPEDL3DWULND&KDQQHO6RUWLQJ2I¿FH Mumbai-400001 on 26th & 27th of Previous Month Published on 26th of the Previous Month

116