state review 05 _ the state of ambivalence: reflections on the state of architecture exhibition at the national gallery of modern art, mumbai

Hussain Indorewala | Urbanisation Vol 1, Issue 2, pp. 195 - 198 | First Published December 29, 2016 | 10.1177/2455747116677388

In choosing Mumbai as its venue, the State of Architecture (SOA) exhibition perhaps paid a belated tribute to the city. Bombay was the city where the Indian capitalist class first emerged. Industrial wealth in the post-independence period was ensured by state protection and subsidisation, and later by monopoly licenses bought by extending a helping hand to the political class (Khilnani, 2004). This close relationship was soon to become an important fount for art patronage and support. Mumbai would supply the institutions, the fora and the associations where new expressions and ideas were sought for a promising post-colonial experiment. New monuments and cities were to be erected. A nation was to be built.

Structured along a timeline as ‘phases’ between three important moments of recent Indian history—independence, emergency and liberalisation—the SOA exhibition, organised at Mumbai’s National Gallery of Modern Art, chose a chronological format to display the significant built contributions of professional architects since independence. The exhibition also formed the backdrop to a series of events held over three months that engaged professionals, practitioners, academics and students, but refused, rather unfortunately, to venture beyond the orderly surroundings of the city’s historic Fort precinct.

Nevertheless, the choice of Mumbai for SOA is not without a profound sense of irony. Approximately two thirds of the city’s habitations are, even today, unaided by the expert hand of any architect. The authors of our largely self-built-scape are local contractors, masons, artisans and often dwellers themselves. The statistics presented at SOA point towards the dearth of architects in the country relative to the population, but is that really the problem? If, as SOA believes, architecture is what professionals do, then the state of architecture is quite dire, making it either irrelevant, or complicit in the sack of our cities. But if our concern is the lived environment regardless of who imagines it and who builds it, there are some fundamental questions that emerge: What sort of a discipline is architecture? What is its purpose and what are its results? What is architecture’s ‘public’ (De Carlo, 2005)? Who are its ‘legitimate’ practitioners?

Significantly, architectural education still presumes practice as a technical service provided to a client for a fee. Almost always, the client who solicits the architect is imagined as someone who will manage to assemble land, materials and money. The users of this architecture are assumed to possess middle-class aspirations and tastes. It is on these presumptions that curricula, studios and exercises are designed in architecture schools. Outside the academy and mainstream professional practice, however, a whole ecosystem of environmental practitioners is beginning to challenge the very nature of what is considered architectural practice. The diaspora of trained architects have diversified and learned from other disciplines, and many non-architects have entered the arena that the profession has claimed for itself. SOA was an opportunity to map the rich possibilities that have emerged on the margins of the discipline, and prod a conservative academy to re-examine its teaching methods, the structure of standard practice, the purpose of architectural education, the nature of architectural knowledge and the social role of architects.

The Vistara exhibition of 1986, sponsored by the Indian government, had offered a pan-Indian ‘pluralistic’ account of India’s architecture, and as the SOA publication points out, presented a ‘narrative of India’s rich architectural traditions’ (Mehrotra, Hoskote, & Mehta, 2014, p. 15). In contrast, SOA, patronised by the private corporate sector, aims at an ‘internal introspection and reflection … a critical stocktaking of the role of the architect and architecture in India’ (Ibid.). The erudite curators of SOA seem unsettled by what they see around them, yet they remain elusive in their assessment of the profession. Contemporary architecture is described as fluid and ambiguous, post-ideological, transitioning and inchoate. But despite this delicious textual ambiguity—typical of much academic discourse—their despair is explicit in the design and organisation of the exhibition, and it could be expressed as follows: here is a profession struggling to come to terms with its own irrelevance as the custodian of this noble art while collaborating in the rapid degradation of the built environment. We can seek some solace in the past, where immortals grappled with the clear problems of a nation in formation, and strove to fashion the most appropriate forms to express its insurmountable contradictions. No such burden encumbers today’s glib neo-professional, deeply invested in a ‘culture that emphasises the primacy of privatism rather than solidarities of any kind’ (Ibid., p. 17). But we can find some hope in this ‘polyphony of voices’, in the young practices that have attempted to negotiate these new realities yet managed to produce socially oriented architecture.

And in this we may sympathise with the curators of SOA. Of the designed built environment, most of what does go over the professional architect’s drawing board is shaped less by his (rarely her) ingenuity, more by the wily maximisers of floor space, the deft manipulators of building codes and the dull strictures of municipal regulators. Typically, the first two of these are roles played by architects. Nowhere is this more evident than in Mumbai, where economics of land and the concert between real estate interests have made the classical architect superfluous, especially when it comes to the determination of the form and use of projects. As the humdrum workings of private and public bureaucracies shape the built-scape, architects provide the indispensable service of making projects culturally acceptable.

However, this state of affairs is far from inevitable. The recent history of the profession provides numerous examples of architect-reformers and reform-oriented associations that have made a powerful impact on building practices. Incidentally, many of these coincide with the modern movement that, despite its naive utopianism, formal determinism and political promiscuity, made the improvement of the physical environment the absolute bedrock of their campaign. The best among them were driven by the indefatigable impulse to make things a little better for everyone. But like everything else, the modernists were creatures of their time. As Reinier De Graaf (2015) points out, the ideals of the modern movement flourished on the soil of social democracy and the welfare system—an ‘entire period characterised by an enlightened belief in progress, social emancipation and civil rights’. Between the exuberant Futurist Manifesto and its triumphant obituary by Charles Jencks in the late 1970s, modernism was the period of unprecedented social mobility and improved standard of living in the developed world. And it produced some soaring architectural rhetoric (Conrads, 1999) that we all read today with a bemused antiquarian interest, an attitude that perhaps the modernists may have reserved for the Seven Lamps of Architecture.

The modernist zeitgeist carried even the architects of the subcontinent during the nationalist movement. The Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects (JIIA) published articles that passionately prescribed the standard palliative for urban blight: light, air and green space. As Claude Batley scorned the Development Directorate chawls during the ‘Nationalist Architecture’ phase of the 1930s and early 1940s, his colleague P.P. Kapadia urged Mumbai to adopt Corbusier’s towers within parks to solve its perennial problems of housing, traffic and open space. Soon after independence, however, Mariam Dossal points out, JIIA’s focus would drift towards the possibility of large-scale contracts and profits from luxury housing, and the Institute would transform into an influential real estate lobby (Dossal, 2003). But architectural publications still played an important role in ‘thought production’ in the early decades of post-independence India, one of the best examples being the 1965 edition of the Modern Architects Research Group (MARG) magazine, largely responsible for the wide acceptance of the idea of New Bombay (Correa, Mehta, & Patel, 1965). The 1965 manifesto was a timeless piece of visual design, part persuasion part propaganda, a pleasure to behold even today.

As SOA illustrates, the mood in the architecture profession is ambivalent. Gone are the collective efforts towards progressive social change. Often individually boisterous, architects have become collectively meek (except when acting as commercial lobbies). In an age where conviction is quickly dismissed as authoritarianism, they make no bold proclamations. But they do come together to mourn the loss of significant patrons.

Shifting attention to the arena from where most of the exhibits of SOA were picked up, we are but looking at a tiny fraction of the built environment that can employ considerable financial resources, as projects built either for public or private organisations, or for wealthy individuals. In the hands of the tastemakers and custodians of cultural and aesthetic distinctions—curators, critics, editors, juries—some of these acquire prominence. Architectural journals, books and magazines play a crucial criterion-setting role, both in shaping how architectural work is viewed and consumed, as well as in establishing what is considered architecturally significant. The reward structures for the professional involve coverage in visual media, approval of critics and peers, and satisfaction of clients (rarely users), making it necessary for projects to be justified in visual terms; even architectural writing is concerned most often with how buildings ought to be ‘seen’ (Goodman, 1971, p. 160). Since every architectural event is a complex interplay between place, social relations, material resources and aesthetic expression, the publishing industry is a clumsy device to assess architectural merit. By choosing projects predominantly from the pool of already published work, SOA provided a very partial picture of what may be considered important as interventions in the contemporary built environment.

SOA chose to tell the story of architecture in India as recorded by its various chroniclers over the decades (see especially, Lang, Desai, & Desai, 1997; Mehrotra, 2011; Shah, 2008). Unfortunately, the timeline of projects seen in conjunction with socio-political events could not be accessed analytically. Ambitious in scope and immaculate in execution, it provided a useful accumulation of facts but little in the form of insights; its questions floated through the event as intermittent provocations but could not guide research outcomes. One would expect from such an event not just the choice of what is best in architecture, but the criteria that can enable critical public engagement, the criteria that can test a profession’s claim to validity in our public culture today. Urbanist and architectural critic Michael Sorkin insists that architecture, as a concrete proposition about human activity, ‘must be weighed on the scales of survival and equity’ (Sorkin, 2013). The growth of our cities, their infrastructure and their buildings, are all implicated in the two greatest externalities of our time: climate change and social inequality. To address these, we will have to virtually reinvent the way we think about the world and design in it. SOA could have been the site for such a new beginning.

References #

• Conrads U. (1999). Programs and manifestoes on 20th-century architecture (17th printing). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Correa C., Mehta P., Patel S. (1965). Planning for Bombay. MARG, 18(3), 30–56.
• De Carlo G. (2005). Architecture’s public. In Blundell-Jones Peter (ed.), Architecture and participation. London: Taylor & Francis.
• De Graaf R. (2015, April 24). Architecture is now a tool of capital, complicit in a purpose antithetical to its social mission. Architectural Review. Retrieved 10September2016, from https://www.architectural-review.com/archive/viewpoints/architecture-is-now-a-tool-of-capital-complicit-in-a-purpose-antithetical-to-its-social-mission/8681564.article
• Dossal M. (2003). Eating up the sky: Private greed versus public need in Mumbai’s housing. In Kamat Manjiri (Ed.), Mumbai past and present (pp. 161–63). Mumbai: Indus Source Books.
• Goodman R. (1971). After the planners. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Khilnani S. (2004). The idea of India [Reprint, with a new introduction] (pp. 137–38). New Delhi [u.a.]: Penguin Books.
• Lang J., Desai M., Desai M. (1997). Architecture and independence: The search for identity—India 1880 to 1980 (1st ed.). Delhi, New York: Oxford University Press.
• Mehrotra R. (2011). Architecture in India: Since 1990. Mumbai: Pictor. Mehrotra R., Hoskote R.,, Mehta K. (2014). The state of architecture: Practices & processes in India. 6 January–20 March 2016, National Gallery of Modern Art & Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI), Mumbai.
• Shah J. (2008). Contemporary Indian architecture. New Delhi: Roli Books.
• Sorkin M. (2013). All over the map: Writing on buildings and cities (1st ed.). London: Verso.

the text is archived as part of a project assembling various documents produced during and as a reaction to the Exhibition titled THE STATE OF ARCHITECTURE, PRACTICES & PROCESSES IN INDIA | 6 JANUARY - 20 MARCH, 2016, NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, MUMBAI