Response: Architecture for Emergent India

9:11 AM 9/14/2006

The following - an edited version of an attachment sent as a response to an article a friend had sent for publication in the August 15 issue of the New Delhi Outlook magazine - has been updated especially for Shri Sunandan Prasad, President-elect, RIBA, after I heard his thoughts aired this morning, in a BBC-Hindi interview.

This piece on “Architecture for Emergent India” has the word deliberately spelt with an ‘h’ tucked in it to emphasize my opinion that unless it is informed by technology appropriate for India, one might as well classify the discipline in the hocus-pocus category with Astrology, Palmistry, Creationism etc. as companions. The first two paragraphs deal with educational migration as it impacts upon ekistics and the form and ambiance of urban architechture. It is assumed that the reader is aware that all cities began as logistical nodes for the transcation and movement of goods; that those that didn’t were exceptions; and finally, that all the paraphernalia of state management, including utilities and services (education, enteratainment etc.) were add-ons

08/09/2006

Education, especially if it aims to be jobs- and skills-oriented, ‘adds value’ to the “Human Resources Product” In India, this value-added ‘product’ (aka he/she) then moves “up” the so-called “value chain” - and begins migrating away from villages to towns, and then on to cities and metros - where, in search of the so-imagined “good life”, it isn’t happy until it has jetted out to melanin defficient areas (aka the West, aka Europe, Australia and the Americas). In the process, all that value is really added to, is to its ego; and all that has really enhanced is this ‘value-added’ product’s consuming capacity on a per capita basis - these two are doubtful measures for what a “good life” is. (In the next few days I shall send you my non-Western-based understanding of what education is all about, and for this I shall have to choose the Hindi language.)

The metrofied, educational-value added product, even as it becomes anti-social, also laterally broadens the State’s tax-base. It enhances the State’s power, particularly its policing, regulating and controlling powers. As power increases, so does the nuisance value of - and opportunity for - corrupt, unresponsive, unaccountable, extravagent, inefficient, wasteful and vested behavior of its minions and ministers, whose essential job is to multiply problems by imagining and implementing more man-&-machine-power needing anti-solutions that complicate the problems. This outward spiral of complicated problems geographically expands into a megalopolis, which is a gargantuan that excels in generating ever-larger volumes waste - as witness the broad-banded, open-air dump-ring that encircles all Indian cities, parallell to their ‘ring roads’ and ‘by-passes’ - and criminal behavior.

~ The authors of the book, Natural Capitalism observe, “Too often, cities find that the cause of their problems is prior solutions that have either missed their mark or boomeranged, like the bigger road that invites more traffic, the river channelization that worsens floods, the homeless shelter that spreads tuberculosis, and the prison that trains criminals in more sophisticated techniques.”

~ Which brings me to address your essay on architechture appropriate for an emergent India in this century for the August 15 Outlook magazine.

Against the Kenneth Clark quote with which you concluded it - it speaks only of the historically retentive capabilites of architechture - I have this one from Hugh Kenner* that illuminates its more pervasive influence, and even ends with a question that hasn’t yet been satisfactorily addressed by anyone I know of, although Kahlil Gibran and Kabir have reminded me of the enduring nature of the question. In the preface to his book, “A Guided Tour Of R. Buckminster Fuller”, Kenner says, “We get our everyday language, hence our criteria, from what we understand of the visible environment, especially from what we understand to be the successful human gestures, the structures that last…. Buildings seem Man’s most successful creations and the idiom of architectural success seeps into our minds… But what if we have been misreading architechture…?” While I have changed the sentence-order here, a fuller version from which this is extracted is at* below.

~ While on Bucky Fuller - and as your article speaks of appropriate airports for India - I also recall that he had been invited to advise the Indian Government’s International Airports Authority. The denoument bore out our mutual friend the late Member of Parliament Piloo Mody’s about corruption. The impatient minister came to meet Fuller and asked to make sure that the cement contract went to his son.

~ And speaking of airport design, I was living in Los Angeles at the time “Ayodhyaa” happened and, for a few weeks I toyed with the idea of suggesting how, with structural/architecthtural knowhow then existing, it was possible to position a Raama Temple at exactly the same spot as desired, regardless of what Baabur may have built there. I was taking inspiration from the landmark Airport Restaurant, built several years earlier, that perches on the flat landscape, spiderlike, on four arching legs. It had its 360º surround-view hub suspended several meters above air.

~ Not many architects know that it is possible to economically elevate whole communities up in the air, needing the ground only for the kind of anchors that ships use. What price an earthquake? Or, a Tsunami? Most Indian architects I have met are chicken-hearted, not daring even to suggest anything “outlandish” that might ’scare away’ a prosprective client. Whether it is rammed earth homes - that cost a fourth of of brick and mortar stuff - or, the energy efficient building in hot Harare that cuts down on electricity bills for airconditiong by close to 90%, you won’t find them in urban India. When I built a mosque with an aluminium dome that needed no frame and fastners and was up in just 5 hours, guys in New Delhi wouldn’t even believe their eyes when they saw detailed pictures. Come to think of it, I don’t know of any such structure even in the United States - one that interlocking panels I had designed that needed neither frame nor fasteners.

~ A rather extreme but helpful view on architechture says it is still little improved since the stone age; that buildings are fancy nozzles on sewer mains and they have been likened to a patient in the I.C. Units, needing conduits and wires to hook up to various utilities. The highrise ones have been called “vertical slums” with the laundry drying on their umpteen balconies. And those edifices that remind us of the past have been described as “Tombs made by the dead, for the living”

~ Jagat Singh Chawla, a deceased friend who had a refugee-background, lived most of his life here running a furniture shop. Once he spoke of how, back in those days in undivided rural Punjab, the smart farmer would deliberately build just a small two-room house on his large plot of land. As the kids grew and got married - and the couple grew advanced in age - they were cleverly and slowly crouded out. Needing a separate roof, the obvious place would be to build another two-roomed house on the plot. This ensured )a) that the children would have to work hard for it and not become useless wastrels had their fathers provided for them by building a large home with several rooms and (b) they would still be near their parents in their old age. Now, that is the native intelligence that the exhibitionistic novou riche in India seem to have lost.

~ Which reminds me that Jhagadu Shah, circa second century A D, who was probably the richest man on earth at that time, lived in a simple unostentatious hut with just his wife - and no retinues serving them. Mr. Shah of Kathiavaad, Gujarat, bankrolled, among other things, the construction of the Naalanda and Vikramshilaa universities, in far away Bihar. ——————-

* ~ As professor of English literature at McGill, Kenner had felt the need to write a series of ‘Guided Tours’ aimed mainly for his students. One of them was “A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller”; To make up for the stupidity of throwing him out a couple of times, your ‘gurukul’, i.e. Harvarrd University, had, at that point in time, made him a visiting Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry - Poetry, of all things!

The complete quotation from Hugh Kenner’s “A Guided Toir of R. Buckminster Fuller” and a couple of extra comments are as follows: “…We talk be unspecified analogy, especially by intuitive analogies, with architechture. Buildings seem Man’s most successful creations and the idiom of architectural success seeps into our minds. A poem may be a little ‘gem’ but a novel or an epic is like a building. It has ‘structure’ sometimes even ‘foundations’. The writer ‘designs’ a ‘framework’ and also works with ‘surfaces’, which are less important. It is filled with ‘perspectives’ emanating from ‘points of view’. If it really claims attention then it is ‘weighty’…Could a policy be stated in Washington without the word ‘basis’? …School supervisors ask for ‘lesson plans’… (These architectural analogies) locate the conditioned reflexes by which we value…not just literature but virtually all human behavior and, in fact, Reality…We get our everyday language, hence our criteria, from what we understand of the visible environment, especially from what we understand to be the successful human gestures, the structures that last. But what if we have been misreading architechture, misreading the human effort?….” So completely integrated is architechture to our everyday language that even its grammar speaks of words as ‘building blocks’. Outline, plot, preface, scenario, etc. are all visual, architectural words. Kenner seems to be saying that the roots of our perceptions and thoughts, reflexes even, lie outside of us in the architechture, artifacts, and the audio- visual environment the species creates and spins around itself. If he is right those roots may be extending all the way back to a guy called Euclid. They do. The great architect-philosopher, R. Buckminster Fuller, described in a 1964 TIME magazine cover-story as the Leornado da Vinci of the 20th century, agrees. “…Major reflex conditioning of Society,” he points out, “Springs from the universal elementary education with Greek Geometry…”

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11:42 AM 9/14/2006