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The Empathetic Architect by Mary N THE EMPATHETIC ARCHITECT BY MARY N. WOODS, CORNELL UNIVERSITY “As architects, we should create space for people to speak, not to speak for them…A good architect is empathetic to the needs of her users.” —Neera Adarkar, 2014 THE ARCHITECT’S IMAGE Empathy is not a quality traditionally associated with architects. In the popular imagination, they are usually associated with arrogance, wilfulness and uncompromising belief in their own design ideas. Ayn Rand cast an architect, Howard Roark, as the hero of The Fountainhead, her 1943 novel celebrating individualism regardless of the costs. And Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra each claimed that they had inspired Rand’s fictional character. Today, the Roarks of the profession are “starchitects” like Rem Koolhaas. Master of Architectural theatrics, Koolhaas once reassured a staff member, nervous about meeting a resistant client, by saying: “Don’t worry, I will throw a quick tantrum, and then we will proceed as planned.” In 2000, Koolhaas won the Pritzker Prize, known as architecture’s Nobel Prize, for what the jury cited as his “bold, strident, thought-provoking architecture”. Sixteen years later, the Pritzker jury, however, did not choose another starchitect like Koolhaas. Instead, they honoured Alejandro Aravena. The jurors now lauded the 48-year-old Chilean for epitomising “a more socially engaged architect”. In response, Aravena (who pointedly used the pronoun “we” to include his partners) said: “No achievement is individual. Architecture is a collective discipline.” Their practice was, he explained subsequently, “fuelled more by public service than aesthetic design”. Adarkar’s empathetic architect, who listens to, collaborates with, and works alongside others was now recognised at the highest levels of the Western architectural establishment. In yet another part of the global south, Brinda Somaya has quietly and steadily been building such an empathetic practice for the last four decades. EMPATHIES OF ARCHITECTURE Founded in 1975–76, Somaya’s office is substantial in size and production. While most architects practice on their own or with a handful of assistants, her staff roster has long hovered around 75 members. Since its early days, the practice has produced a wide variety of building types and worked at different scales. Projects include not only interiors, hotels and private residences but also biscuit and electronics factories, bank and corporate headquarters, IT and IIT campuses, primary and secondary schools, and museums and exhibition galleries. Masterplanning, along with new building, is also part of the firm’s brief. Long before there were academic programmes for conservation in India, Somaya focused on older buildings. Her commissions have included such historic structures as the Rajabai Tower and modern masterpieces like Louis Kahn’s Institute of Indian Management in Ahmedabad. Such buildings are, she says, “real resources in terms of materials, energy, and labour expended”, especially because “we cannot build everything anew in India”. While she empathises with the past, she does not fetishise it. Somaya realises the past has no future if it cannot adapt to new purposes and functions. And this is equally true for her own work. Thus, she had many of her buildings, like the Jubilee Church at Sanpada, re-photographed for this monograph. She wanted to underscore the changes they have undergone over the decades since they were first built. The shed that the Sampada congregants erected on the church terrace to house another worship service would horrify most architects. They would never publish or lecture about it. Yet, Somaya feels this addition demonstrates the viability of her original design and the users’ ongoing engagement with it. Empathy is about the ability to listen. It is also why architects ranging from Adarkar and Damyanti Radheshwar to James Polshek and Tod Williams and Billie Tsien have collaborated with Somaya on public and private projects. Williams told me he and Tsien could never have designed and built the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Banyan Park campus without her. Such collaborations always teach and challenge, Somaya emphasises, both her and her staff. Because she listened to their ideas, clients for NRK House and Nalanda International School told me they chose her to design their buildings. But Somaya also attends to those who simply use and even labour on her buildings, like the villagers of Bhadli. The 2001 earthquake in Gujarat destroyed Bhadli’s homes, dargah, temple and school. Instead of relocating the villagers to modern concrete structures elsewhere, Somaya heard what they wanted: a rehabilitation programme using traditional forms and materials (reinforced by seismic-resistant construction) on sites where the buildings had originally stood. The NGO sponsoring the project paid the villagers to construct their own buildings. Together, Somaya and the villagers also worked to rebuild identities rooted in their sense of belonging to particular places. This project, one villager told me, brought Bhadli’s Hindus and Muslims together in ways that would have been impossible before the earthquake. Yet, empathy is not simply listening to others. It is about perceiving needs and dreams that are not necessarily even recognised or articulated. Working closely with traditional artists and artisans, Somaya challenges them to think about creating designs at a larger scale for the contemporary world. Thus, her metal craftsman had never designed copper lanterns the size of those needed for the TCS Banyan Park campus before Somaya commissioned him for work there. The weavers of Women Weave needed to have new handlooms built to create the large-scale textiles for the partitions and wall hangings at the campus. Somaya argued for a new women’s resource centre alongside the rebuilt Bhadli school; this facility now attracts women from the surrounding villages as well as Bhadli. Empathy is about advocating for the voiceless too. Thus, Somaya has long required that her building contracts include provisions for proper toilets, water, lighting, crèches and schools for workers and their children on her sites. Here they labour and live for projects lasting, she notes, two, three, five or even eight years. Compliance is never easy, she admits, and requires vigilance. She also encourages women head-loaders, who earn the least, to learn skilled trades such as welding and masonry. She stands in stark contrast to starchitects who typically remain silent about the plight of migrant workers on their building sites in Asia and the Middle East. When the late Zaha Hadid was queried in 2014 about working conditions on the construction site for her World Cup Stadium in Qatar, she said it was the government’s responsibility. “I cannot do anything about it,” she insisted, “because I have no power to do anything about it.” Empathy entails seeing the potential of a south Mumbai garbage dump to transform into Colaba Woods: a garden with play areas, jogging track, readers pavilion and an amphitheatre. Somaya’s project was the first public–private partnership to develop an open space in Mumbai. Because it occupied a site with slum dwellers on one side and wealthy residents on the other, she had to fight to make the garden free from any admission charge. Thus, it became a truly public space accessible to both communities. Amidst global aspirations for a car-centric Mumbai of flyovers and expressways, Somaya and her young colleague Shivjit Siddhu advocated for the rights of pedestrians to the city in their Mumbai Esplanade project. Here, they envision lakhs of commuters, residents and visitors streaming into the plazas, gardens, and pathways designed to connect the maidans, commercial areas, and cultural and heritage districts for all pedestrians between Churchgate and Chhatrapati Shivaji stations. Empathy for the Indian environment entails an understanding of what kinds of forms, materials, finishes and construction methods can thrive over time in the country’s remarkably varied climates. Somaya relied on traditional Indian methods such as pergolas, thick walls, water bodies, courtyards and deep window reveals to passively cool and ventilate the Zensar IT Campus in Pune. Here, she shunned the extensive glazing, aluminium cladding, and extensive air conditioning associated with such global architectures. She argues that the mechanical and technological fixes of Western-devised LEED standards, which she notes are incredibly costly just to certify, are unnecessary and inappropriate for India. The Indian designer, she has said, must be both a barefoot architect and high- tech professional. The rebuilding of Bhadli was about more than the built environment. It also meant resurrecting the ecosystem that once supported agricultural livelihoods. Thus, rain harvesting, drip irrigation and reforestation were also essential for the rehabilitation programme. Sustainability, Somaya understands, must also be about calculating social and economic costs and values for particular communities in India. Thus, the china mosaics she has extensively used in projects such as the TCS Banyan Park campus and the Club Mahindra Kumbhalgarh Fort resort provide ongoing employment for local artisans because of the need to repair and maintain them. DREAMING IN THE MAINSTREAM Despite Aravena’s Pritzker Prize, Adarkar’s empathetic architect is still associated with practitioners working on the fringes of the profession. Called alternative architects, they are seen as limited in terms of their scale and reach. “Dreaming in the mainstream” is how architect Shimul Kadri describes the difficulties and challenges of doing good while building a sustainable practice in the contemporary world. Thus, Somaya’s ability to dream in the mainstream makes her an especially important role model for architects in India and beyond. Her mother once told her that she would have to learn “how to pay…[her] rent on earth”. That is, how to give back for what she would receive. Brinda Somaya has amply repaid us all as an architect, preservationist, educator and citizen. REFERENCES “A good architect is empathetic.” KU Leuven News, 2014. www.kuleuven.be. Accessed 7 July 2016.
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