After the Masters

Vikram Bhatt and Peter Scriver

Lecture by Gauri Bharat

The above book written by Vikram Bhatt and Peter Scriver in 1990 is the first of its kind to discuss modern architecture in India. It features fifty two projects around India but most of the projects that are discussed are located in Ahmedabad. Delhi, Mumbai and Chandigarh, mostly because of the author’s familiarity with these cities. The projects are from 1970-1980s and the asters referred to are Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. They came to India and built buildings after independence in 1947 and the architecture after that has been described as inspired by these master builders and how they have ‘indian-ness’ to them. The reflection of culture and traditions have hence been defined as this ‘Indian-ness’

The projects described are the ones inspired by the masters. Architects discussed here are Habib Rehman, Bal Krishna Doshi, Kanvinde, Charles Correa, Raj Rewal and Leo Pereria. The book talks of modernity in India compared to the modern architecture they have experienced in America and Europe. This architecture is the architecture they consider to be real and the modern architecture in India has been referred to as  the ‘ other’ modern architecture.

The book has been structured under 5 categories, Problems and prospects, Roots and modernity, alternatives fry developing India, architecture and the market place and emerging architecture.

The book starts off with mentioning the problems in Indian construction industry, the labour intensiveness in the construction in India and the finishes of the construction as elsewhere. The coarse mix of hand mixed concrete as seen on the facades and construction and the technological backwardness in construction at that time. The book looks at India as backward and narrow minded and as a developing country, citing the problems in construction etc. The architecture here has been looked at as the regionalist modernism. The response to climate in the project bringing the indian-ness to it.

The authors have looked for examples from the master architects’ works elsewhere like the Gandhi ashram being compared to Louis khan’s Trenton bath house. The author judges how some projects are in the midground between modern and traditional, for example works of Uttam Jain and Raj Rewal.

The description if India being A third world country is something he blames the quality of architecture on. He mentions the political and economic influences of architecture in India.

He talks about Laurie baker and the part about the aesthetics and being true to the material and the emerging needs.

He ends with a discussion about how most of the government buildings are built by people of non-architectural background like engineers and how they are hence similar looking.

The structure of the ordinary

Vishwanath Kashikar

The book the structure of the ordinary is written by N.J.Habraken in 1962. It was written in Dutch and later translated to English in 1970s. The book reflects his views about modernism. The condition of post war Europe has a blaring effect on the book. The second world war, with the bombings that destroyed cities like Stuttgart and London. . His first book talks about alternatives to mass housing.. There was a shortage of housing after World War 2. The loss of cities gave rise to new cities like Manchester, Glasgow etc. that were industrial cities before. The migration into cities increased. The governments of the countries started fast construction of 50,000- 1,00,000 houses in mass housing. During this period was the industrial revolution and birth of modernization and mass production. Modernism was at a peak with le Corbusier, Gropius and Bauhaus.

Next came post modernism. Robert Venturi wrote complexity and contradiction. Charles Jenks a supporter of post modernism. Post modernism came as a strong reaction to modernism.  They were the stylistic reproductions of the past.  The symbolisms, colours and columns all came back. Next came critical regionalism. Being regionalist was a clean break from the past. Post modernism was based on context, where as in modernism context did not exist. In reaction to modernism and post modernism came deconstructivism. Then the structuralism came with Tshumi’s Parc de la villette and Eisenmann. Zaha Hadid was a stylistic architect. Modernism and its reactions looked at architecture as a finite building or an object in space. 1960-1998, he worked on looking at architecture as an object but s a process of inhabitation and change.

He writes ‘built environment resembles an organism instead of an artefact’. He then proceeds to talk about differences between an organism and an artefact.

‘Interaction between the built environment and people is the fundamental aspect of architecture’ architecture can’t stand by itself.  Architecture won’t exist if people don’t exist in it. Environment represents organisms not an artefact.

For designers and planners, he says, function is a priority, whereas in reality, use in neither static nor passive. It is dynamic and active. Use changes over time. Residential becomes commercial. The active engagement of users determines the use of space. . The idea of configuration is a combination of elements. Configuration is the understanding of elements and relation with people and society.

Configuration can be live or dead/static. Live configuration can be configured by people. Post war housing had some changes or choices that could be made. Architects like le Corbusier and Rohe made sure that no changes could be made to their buildings.

Configuration can be of different levels. The whole idea of levels of configuration or higher or lower configuration is that in higher configurations, that are better than lower configurations, more changes can be made as per the user.  It is the concept of control vs. ownership. There must be a balance between control and ownership. This becomes the distinction between standardization and mass production. Mass production reduces cost and time. Mass production with the option of customization came in later.

He talks about the concept of modular, and about facades of buildings that hide all the activities that take place on the inside of a building.

The structure of the ordinary talks about forms and control of built environments and buildings as a system.

 

Towards a new Architecture

by Smit Vyas.

Towards a new architecture was written by le Corbusier originally in French in 1923 and was translated to English only in 1927 advocating for and exploring modern architecture. In 1919-1922, he had no projects. He thought writing would get him a commission. He started socializing with poets, artists and writers. He has written forty seven books between 1912-1960, which includes 1500 of his own drawings. Towards a new Architecture has seven essays, three of which have three sections under each. These essays were published in L’Espirit Nouveau which was a magazine that he ran.

The word ‘new’ in the book is to signify the  monotony he saw in the architecture and to signify that he could bring this ‘new’ to architecture. He talked of the architecture to be based on function, utility and purity of form. He asks the question, is there progress? He talks about French revolution, liberty, equality and fraternity and calls it the enlightenment era. Control: contradiction of fraternity.

He proposed buildings in Paris, where there were existing buildings and he thought the buildings should be replaced by the ones that he designed. He considered himself to be an important person in history and preserved and documented every drawing he ever made.  Le Corbusier wrote ‘Towards a new Architecture’ after his journey to the west.

In the essays, Le Corbusier also talks about the engineers and architects and the relation between them.  He talks about Plans of buildings in colonial architecture and how they are so predetermined and expected. He also talks about his fascination of airplanes and automobiles. He believed that streets were meant for automobiles and not for people.

In the book le Corbusier writes about architecturally and historically important buildings and compares them with his own. He has sketches of his own buildings next to these important buildings like The Pantheon. He talks about how the first 1000 years were about pantheon, the next 1000 years people talked about Michelangelo, and the 1000 years after that they would talk about him.

He talks about how new age architects have fallen out, there needs to be a spirit of the time. It has to be imaginative and has to have a spirit within .

Genius Loci

By Gauri Bharat

A genius locus, towards a phenomenology of architecture by Christian Noberg-Schulz was inspired by Martin Heidegger. In the book he talks about the ‘sense of a place’ and how western architecture has become preoccupied by the visual aspects. He talks about how western architecture has forgotten how to sense architecture with other senses. Schulz talks about experience, the idea of an experience and spirit of a place. The intention in architecture is the significant question.

He talks about sensory stimuli, like the aroma off an old house. The mention of significance is missing , and the question of perception and senses like sight, touch, smell and memory need to be brought back. He looks at the social psychology and the cultural effects of architecture. He looks at gestalts psychology and child psychology as references to formulate how humans experience space. He talks about existential space and how humans orient themselves in space and how they move towards or away and the directions they move in and the paths that they take. He talks about the divine realm, moving towards and away from schema.  How we move, intersect, connect and how we are in space. He talks about sacred spaces, which has a connection to another world through an axis. The connection and imagination of the worldly realm and the break from the ordinary.

The concept of cosmic schema is based on which human civilizations are based. It is described to be the super human dimentions on which civilizations are based. There are 4 scales or attributes of existential space and the organization of a settlement. House is one. It represents humans, harmoniously related to the cosmos. The principles of harmonious existence, roman and Greek cities are examples to illustrate it.

What does it mean to dwell? To be in a place and be connected to it? How does a dwelling become a part of building? Architecture is Perpetrating, signifying and creating. It attempts a connection with the surroundings. A bridge acts like a connection between two sides. It creates a space. The sky and earth meet, it brings back the dimension. Modern man doesn’t have this dimension, it is impossible .

Heidegger talks about the hope of turning things around. The return to experience and meaning. The key disjunctions are mainly environmental and psychological. How a human mind works and responds. Phenomenology is what a mind responds to. Memories and associations are evoked. The experience becomes a complex whole. It becomes more psychological than phenomenological.

Schulz has a very structured approach. He talks about 4 scales: Settlement, House, Object and Landscape. He talks about Phenomenological overlap of senses, impressions and relational.

The categorization is a problem. He talks of kinds of landscape: romantic or classical. These become preconceived junctures which are described prior and not by experience. These preconceived judgements are then used in the justification and analysis of such spaces. His categorizations however fit. He talks more about the physical attributes in his descriptions of mind and matter.

Genius loci is none the less is a fantastic idea. He attempts to interpret Heidegger and he has a methodological foothold. This makes is book extremely popular.

Death and life of great American cities, Jane Jacobs.

1920s to 1960s saw a population growth in New York City. There was a migration of people coming in from Europe, India and China due to post industrialization. Robert Moses, a master builder, bureaucrat was a part of local urban development team in NYC. He was a bureaucrat and he commissioner of urban parks. His primary interest however was road building therefore creating the concept of parkways. 1910 to 1960, there was an explosion of number of cars on the road due to the expansion of the automobile industry. Robert Moses, at this point of time started taking toll payments on bridges to build parkways.

Robert Moses followed the philosophy ‘cities are for traffic’ and ‘a city without traffic is a ghost town’. He had ideologies similar to Le Corbusier. One such example is Villa Radieuse in which the idea of road/transportation. Ribbon Windows in Villa Savoye were designed to look at cars go by. He was fascinated by roads and Automobile. He was in power from 1924 to 1968, for over 40 years, during which he constructed roads, bridges, parks and playgrounds. Roads at that point of time were under the purview of State Highway Department and federal Bureau of public roads. Moses however called roads- parkways, and gained popularity for building them.

Philosophy: the essence of modernist, industrial buildings and as antitheses to most liveable streets principle he initiated ambitious road building projects while cutting mass transit funds. His projects destroyed vibrant urban neighbourhoods as he removed and destroyed slum areas and replaced them with huge building projects.

He created unrestricted expanses for automobiles. Moses despised public transportation and built all his highways without a railroad link. Meanwhile he also destroyed the underground rail system so that they could never be used again. He changed shorelines, built bridges, tunnels, roadways and transformed neighbourhoods forever. Robert Moses’s ideology was explained by terms like ‘For the greater good’ and ‘urban renewal’ which made NYC a virtual maze of urban highways and arterial parkways. While appearing utopian on the face, the critics contend Moses’s vision of towers, cities and parks linked with cars and highways in practice to the expansion of wholesale ghettos, decay, and middleclass urban light and blight.

Jane Jacobs was an American born, Canadian Urbanist, writer and activist. She was writing at the peak of Moses’s stranglehold. Her thinking was seen as the major reaction to the urban environment that Moses had shaped. Jane Jacobs was a woman who took great joy in everyday life and she had a voracious intellectual curiosity. Jane Jacobs’s idea of urban planning included: mixed primary use including housing, shops and offices, high population densities and shorter blocks with a mix of old and new buildings. He was against public housing. She believed that diversity was natural to cities and essential for growth (homogeneity in diversity). In 1963 she was protesting the destruction of the Penn Station.  She coined phrases like ‘social capital’, eyes in street’ and ‘sidewalk ballet’. On concentration: she talks about the fact that districts need to be sufficiently dense in concentration of people for whatever reason they might be there. She talks about how dwelling densities need to be high to stimulate maximum potential diversity in a city.

When she confronted Moses, she changes the way Americas understood the city. Jane Jacobs defined a wholesome neighbourhood from a perspective of a normal citizen.

 

On the Muhammadan Architecture of Bharoch, Cambay, Dholka, Champanir, and Mahmudabad in Gujarat and Amdavad No itihash

By Jigna Desai

 

Amdavad No itihash is written by a citizen of Ahmedabad, Maganlal Vakhatchand Sheth who wrote it at a very young age. He was a college student of Gujarat Vidya Sabha (Gujarat Vernacular Society) . It was an initiative by the British to bring in progressiveness in India. They were soft colonizing and looking at the world from an English perspective.

 

Amdavad no itihash believed in the Sudharavan movement. The book was funded by the Gujarat government and the British to be written for the locals. On the Muhammadan Architecture was the British, the way in which historians wrote history. They followed historicism which was an objective way of writing history. The book talks about Bhadra with plans and describes it like on plan. They use words like clerestory, which are a different perspective of looking at the architecture and its elements.

 

Amdavad no itihash starts the description of how to access the mosque, by road. On the Muhammadan Architecture on the other hand talks about the location first. Amdavad no itihash talks about the ornamentation, jharokhas, minarets, staircases and the views around the city of the 12 villages located nearby. The complex is described as one. The book is written to experience the place and the history in one.  On the Muhammadan Architecture talks about buildings, dynasties and the political influences that created the city the information was taken from an outside source and was not experienced by the writers. The way of writing hence showed this disconnect.

 

Amdavad no itihash talks about the city, how the sultanate came and how Ahmedabad was established. It is much more real and the way politics was described was the way the writer experienced it.  On the Muhammadan Architecture talks of facts and demographics. They talk about the principles of architecture with nothing written about the significance of the spaces and their analysis. They look at the architecture of mosques and step wells the way they look at European architecture. They miss out on describing the essences of architecture of these buildings with respect to their surrounding contexts.

 

Amdavad ni itihash gives the sense of the place. How people lived there and the way they looked at the spaces. The author wrote about the place the way he experienced and from the incidents he had heard about the place. It had more of a human way of writing.

The context and audience for the book must always be kept in mind while writing a book. The two books have different purposes and different audiences. The first talks about the place as a real city. On the Muhammadan Architecture talks about the place like it is only a record of history and the place at that time.