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Introduction
8 Architecture in Place
On The Mother Tongue
14 Adnan Morshed
20 Sonia Nishat Amin
23 Kenneth Frampton
27 Marina Tabassum
29 Syed Manzoorul Islam
Placing Architecture
35 On Vastushilpa and the Art of Dwelling
42 Looking for America
50 From Sacred Groves to Architectural Paradigms
60 Placing Architecture, Presencing Architecture
72 Terminal Places
83 Where Is Architecture
90 The Buddha’s House
110 The Architecture of Asceticism
116 Postmortem: Building Destruction
134 Architecture’s Anxiety
Architecture in Bangladesh
148 Architecture in Bangladesh
160 Vastukala: The Architecture of Muzharul Islam
180 Land, Water, and People in Bengal
192 Wind, Water, and Clay: The Architecture of Bangladesh
204 Tropical Trysts: An American Architect in the Bengal Delta
210 What Now? The Perpetual Vigilance of Muzharul Islam
218 Building Bangladesh: From Building-Form to Landscape-Form
Waterness
236 Water as Ground
244 Wet Narratives: Architecture Must Recognize that the Future is Fluid
256 When the Ganga becomes the Padma
268 Thinking about Mud
On Louis Kahn
274 The National Capital Complex: Louis I. Kahn’s Architecture in Dhaka
288 Taking Place: Landscape in the Architecture of Louis Kahn
307 Louis I. Kahn: The Making of a Room
Architecture in India
312 Le Corbusier and India: An Osmosis
330 Geoffrey Bawa: An Alternative Architecture
336 Reincarnations: Modernity and Modern Architecture in South Asia
347 Building the Nation: The Architecture of Achyut Kanvinde and Muzharul Islam
358 Masala City: Urban Stories from South Asia
366 Raga India: Architecture in the Time of Euphoria
374 Reading the Wind And Weather: The Meteorological Architecture of Studio Mumbai
382 Sangath as a Landscape Event
392 “Sheltered Openness”: The Modern House in South Asia
Cityness
400 Fifteen Points for Making Dhaka a City: A Manifesto for a Civic Place
413 Designing Dhaka: History of a Future
434 Hometown: The City in the Postnational Landscape
448 We Are the City
455 Review of Messy Urbanism
Conversations
460 “Signs and Symbols. For Whom?” A Conversation with Muzharul Islam
469 A Philadelphia Architect in Dhaka, with Nathaniel Kahn
476 Metrophilia: A Love of the Horizon Line, with Dimitri Kim
479 Architecture in Bangladesh and the legacy of Muzharul Islam with Aurélien Lemonier
485 Legacies That We Leave Behind: An Interview with Balkrishna Doshi
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Writing Architecture: Kazi Khaleed Ashraf’s Critical Practice
Adnan Zillur Morshed
The decades following the independence of Bangladesh in 1971 were a time of uncertainty. The country was embroiled in, among other things, an acrimonious political battle about its national identity, oscillating between the ethnolinguistic identity of Bangali and the national citizenship of Bangladeshi. Challenged by the ongoing identity politics, further exacerbated by an alleged loss of national purpose, many believed that architecture as a cultural endeavor had an instrumental role to play in inspiring society.
When Kazi Khaleed Ashraf graduated from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and
Technology (BUET) in 1983 with his first degree in architecture, Bangladesh had just entered into its second decade as an independent country. The country’s only school of architecture, established in the 1960s with the technical assistance of Texas A&M University, advanced a conformist curriculum based on a technically-oriented, watered-down version of the Bauhaus. Many observers considered the prevailing architecture culture moribund, immersed only in the nitty-gritty of professional practice, unperturbed by any broader cultural and anthropological inquiries. For many members of Ashraf’s generation, there was no committed search for what he later called “place-evocative” architecture. Perceptive practitioners also felt that architecture was far removed from any shared values of Bengal’s history, modernist ethos, and broader social missions. Despite architect Muzharul Islam’s path-breaking modernist work in the 1950s and the flourishing of an architectural “golden age” in the then East Pakistan during the 1960s with the advent of such globally recognized architects as Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph, Constantinos Doxiadis, and Stanley Tigerman, the discipline of architecture continued to be viewed mostly as part of the construction industry in the post-independence period.
Chetana Study Group, founded in Dhaka in 1981, was an exception. Spearheaded by Muzharul Islam, and involving a multidisciplinary group of architects, artists, writers, poets, journalists, and historians, Chetana advocated a discursive conversation on architecture, art, and history. The study group offered a critical vantage point to examine the roles of architecture in building a new nation, while analyzing history as a crucial repository of knowledge and addressing such immediate problems as resource constraints and urban conditions. In many ways, the early 1980s was a Dickensian “best of times … worst of times” moment for architecture in Bangladesh.
The architect, researcher, and writer Kazi Khaleed Ashraf took shape in this context. Committedly participating in the activities of Chetana from 1983 onward and perhaps inspired by Muzharul Islam and his intrinsic ability to prod young architects to look at life from alternative angles, Ashraf not only understood the urgency of integrating Bengal’s history with modernist architectural thinking but also sought to expand the very definition of architecture beyond an utilitarianist view. An awareness that architecture needed to be more than mere construction gradually became an impetus for Ashraf to research and write. The theoretical foundation of a lifelong researcher was laid, for whom critical historiography was not merely an investigative task or an academic obligation but a necessary intellectual
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activism. Ashraf’s interest in reimagining architectural pedagogy in a crossdisciplinary panorama and an informed professional practice that could result from it received much boost from Chetana’s intellectual programs during the 1980s, as well as what was happening theoretically within architectural circles around the world. The critique of modernism’s alleged positivistic worldview, the advent of postmodernist criticism and semiotic interpretation of buildings, and a phenomenology of embodied place-making led to much curricular rethinking in architecture schools. These “radical” ideas have been percolating in the humanities studies since the 1960s. The cultural theorist Frederic Jameson wrote: “The 1960s are in many ways the key transitional period, a period in which the new international order (neocolonialism, the Green Revolution, computerization, and electronic information) is at one and the same time in place and is swept and shaken by its own internal contradictions and by external resistance.”1 Kenneth Frampton related the situation to architecture by noting that “there is little doubt that by the mid-sixties, we were increasingly bereft of a realistic theoretical basis on which to work.”2
Postmodernist “nihilism” notwithstanding, for Ashraf, one of the key contentions in these developments was how architecture and place interfaced. Architecture’s promise of being situated in a place and embodying its essential “spirit” as potential antidotes to modernism’s purported homogenization of the building culture across geographies appealed to new generations of architects in Bangladesh. A search for “regional identity,” “critical regionalism,” and “genius loci,” among other theoretical concerns, motivated their architectural pursuits. In this context, in Asia, one cannot overlook the pedagogical impact of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (established in 1977) and its advocacy of building practices invested in local norms, customs, and traditions, without being atavistic and sentimentally vernacular. Founded in 1981, Mimar: Architecture in Development, the only international architectural magazine that examined and championed the built environment of developing countries, inspired architects in Asia, including Bangladesh, to seek what was dubbed variously as “indigenous or hybrid modernities.”
1 Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Hal Foster, ed., The AntiAesthetic, (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), p. 113.
2 Kenneth Frampton, “Place-form and Cultural Identity,” in John Thackara, ed., Design after Modernism: Beyond the Object (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), pp. 51-52.
During this time, as a young researcher and architectural practitioner, Ashraf developed an empathy for what he termed as an architecture of place. But his notion of place was neither regionalist nor nostalgic. His place transcended the immobility of the ground, without undermining the primacy of its rootedness. He always carried his place with him, in his imagination, in the choreography of his peripatetic self, and in his steadfast commitment to the multiplicity of the meaning of place. Since 1988, when he went to MIT to pursue his master’s degree in architecture and, in the early 1990s, a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, he has been in and out of Dhaka, the city in which he grew up and for which he developed a lifelong interest. His relationship with this city was somewhat existential. Every time he would return to Dhaka from the US, his mother would ask, “When are you coming back?” Ashraf would reply, “I never left.” This spartan mother-son dialogue offers a poignant foil for a metaphysics of affiliation, attachment, and detachment. In many ways, Ashraf’s ability to dwell in his city became possible only when he left it. Paraphrasing cultural theorist Edward Said, one may argue that his very departure enabled his introspection into the city he grew up. Ashraf’s pithy answer to his mother highlighted his conceptualization of place through the tension of a severed, unsevered, and unseverable umbilical cord, revealing an intriguing tapestry of maternity, place, and human conditions. The title of Ashraf’s anthology—The Mother Tongue of Architecture—should be understood in this context. As Ashraf would argue, mother and place share an ontological bond by a common thread of nurturing. When architecture speaks in the mother tongue, it is possible to truly inhabit a place.
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exile, enlightenment, wildness, ascetic renunciation and erotic indulgence.
In a primary sense, the forest is wilderness, the domain of things afar and set apart from human society. These ideas cohere strongly around the ancient Greek goddess Artemis. If any deity represents best what lies outside humanity, and what is truly uncultivated nature, it is Artemis. She is beyond regular reason and control, and enigmatically, both a virgin and goddess of sexual power. She is also the pre-cultivation aspect of the great goddess. Earlier to agriculture, the forest is a space that both provided and threatened. It is this tension-filled aspect that characterizes Artemis, or Diana, as she was known to the Romans.
The forest is a space for the outcast and the outlawed. Roman historian Tacitus mentions the grove of the Asylum, where Romulus wishing to gather foreigners into his new state made a sanctuary. At the famous sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis, the high priest, called the king of the grove, was a fugitive slave who always obtained the position by killing his predecessor. While in any sacred grove, the breaking of a branch was sacrilege, at that sanctuary a runaway slave was allowed to break a branch before he engaged in a combat with the incumbent priest.
As a site for metamorphosis, the forest appears in fictional forms, as in fairy tales, when the protagonist goes off into the forest seeking adventure meeting dragons and other antisocial creatures. This can happen in a mythic sense when the Pandava brothers in the epic Mahabharata, and Rama and Sita in the Ramayana live in the forest a life of exile but fulfilment. The forest can become an actual space for “spiritual transformation” as it happened for the Buddha and many other sages in ancient India.
Invoking an oppositional orientation, the forest harbours both asceticism and eroticism. Indian tradition is replete with the figure of the hermit and the world-renouncer, who in almost all occasions takes up abode in the forest. It is in the forest that various Vedic texts were composed; a key Upanisadic text was named after the forest. The art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy argues that the hermit’s hut in the forest provided the constructional and notional paradigm for built temples. The hut in the forest epitomized the secluded hermit, who in turn served as the approximation of the divine. In Indic traditions, the hut in the forest and the body of the hermit coalesced into a singular connotation of the sacred.
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The forest also is the site of “play,” a space of tryst and divine revelry. This can be seen in a variety of forms in Greek and Indian traditions: in the charming sexual encounter between Radha and Krishna in Vrindavana, the frenzied sexuality of the Maenads in Dionysism, and the eroticism of the women in the cult of Adonis. Indo-European mythologies are filled with sexual encounters, chases, and consummations in the forest. A host of godly figures participate in this theophanic sexuality: Siva, Krishna, Dionysos, Adonis. The gods are not alone. The gods are
Scene of a forest hermitage, from Sanchi, India.
often accompanied or emulated by various forest spirits; in India by yaksas and gandharvas, and in Greece by satyrs, centaurs, nymphs, pans, and silenus.
This array of attributes of the forest may be summed up in the idea of the “other.” Etymology supports this. The Latin foris, meaning “outside,” out of doors, provides a perceptual polarity between the city and the forest. Being constructed and as a pure human inscription, the city is artificial; it is “invented.” The forest is found, where significances reveal themselves to human experience – the nature of the forest spatiality is ‘discovered,’ so to speak. This oppositional nature is also confirmed by the Roman dual term domi-fori, in which domi implied in-dwelling and fori “outside.” The spatial meaning of domus as home and forum as a public space is also derived from that duality. Another term for sacred grove, lucus, also implied “outside in the field.”
Vana, the forest in Sanskrit, does not imply the explicit insideoutside polarity of the Roman domi-fori. For ancient Indians, unlike the Greeks, the forest was not really an “other;” it was an “another,” an another existential space that could be inhabited. In India, the idea of another is codified in the doctrine of four asramas of life: being a student, householder (grhysta), forestdweller (vanaprastha), and renouncer, in which vana, the forest, is considered the space of a necessary stage. The horizon of the “world” includes both the city and the forest.
It is because of the many shades of “otherness” that we can term the forest a heterotopia, to appropriate something from Michel Foucault. “Heterotopia” are those sites which, Foucault writes, “have the curious property of being in relation to other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect. ... There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization,
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Mehran Karim Nasseri at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Photo: from internet.
Terminal Places
Unpublished text, Philadelphia, 2004.
The airport is a strange place. Dixon, airport manager in the film The Terminal.
“Unhomely” is a term urban sociologists, and literary and architectural theorists sometimes use to describe the alien and unsettling nature of certain aspects of contemporary life. The architectural historian Anthony Vidler, who has written about the modern unhomely in his book The Architectural Uncanny, notes that such a phenomenon did not exist prior to the nineteenth century. Instances of the unhomely or uncanny, the terrifying and anxiety-filled are now quite routine and are often actually designed for experience. Something as ordinary as being stuck inside an airport terminal could become the closest experience of the unhomely or the uncanny.
Viktor Navorski was stuck at JFK international airport for a year. Mehran Karimi Nasseri was trapped at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport for eleven years. Navorski, from an unknown Eastern European country of Krakozhia, arrives at JFK to find that his country has erupted in a civil war and incredibly does not exist anymore, and neither does the validity of his passport. Nasseri flees Iran in 1988 with the intention of seeking asylum in London, but on his way, in Paris, has his documents stolen. A man without papers is a man without a country. Immigration officers at London airport send him back to Paris, and officers in Paris will not let him enter the “official” soil of France, and since Nasseri has no papers and therefore no valid country to send him back to, he is stuck at the airport. For over eleven years.
Navorksi, played by Tom Hanks, is from the fictitious country of Krakozhia in Steven Spielberg’s recently released film The Terminal. Mehran Karimi Nasseri is a real life refuge seeker from Iran whose strange plight has inspired a number of documentary and feature films (Sir Alfred of CDG Airport by Hamid Rahmanian and Melissa Hibbard, Waiting for Godot at de Gaulle by Alexis Couros, and the French film Tombés du Ciel by Philippe Lioret), and in the latest rash, into a Hollywood film. The difference is that the new terminal citizen is east European, his terminal duration is for one year, and he gets to fall in love with the lovely Catherine Zeta-Jones. Clearly, Nasseri’s terminal life is a tad bit more tragic than what Spielberg can make of Tom Hanks latest cast away.
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At Bangkok Airport, date unknown. Photo: Ashraf.
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The Buddha under a distended lintel with bodhisattvas in pavillions, Gandhara.
The Buddha’s House
Published in RES: Aesthetics and Anthropology, Vol. 53/54, Spring/Autumn, 2008.
1I am in pursuit of a house that does not exist per se. No single literary, archaeological, anthropological or epigraphic account – the tools of reconstruction – can fully build this house. By the “Buddha’s House,” I am referring to the wide-range of architectural references made in the context of Buddha’s habitation, from purely pragmatic ones to those that play more than domiciliary roles in the Budhhist cosmos. The sources of this architectural image are literary descriptions and commentaries, pictorial and three-dimensional representations, and ritual texts. The house starts to appear through an hermeneutical treatment of the materials, and for me that also includes the so-called secondary literature, that is, comments and essays written in our times, for I consider that many of the essays significantly hinted at the plan of the house, so to speak, but none attempted to erect it in toto I am aware of the discrepancies in the account of Buddhist past where often literary accounts do not match with archaeological or epigraphic ones, as Gregory Schopen demonstrates in his essays in Bones, Stones and Buddhist Monks (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), on the one hand, and where sometimes epigraphic accounts are held to be unreliable, as commented upon by Maurizio Taddei, “Recent Archaeological Research in Gandhara: The New Evidence,” in Pia Branacaccio and Kurt Behrendt (eds.), Gandhāran Buddhism (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006), on the other hand. I cannot quite participate in that debate as I am not writing with Buddhistic scholarship but as a historian of (architectural) ideas adopting, I am admitting, certain latitude.
2 While it might appear that the Buddha might have distanced himself from asceticism at the moment of his awakening by adopting the so-called “middle-path,” he was actually rejecting the extreme forms of practices prevalent among various ascetic groups at that time. The Buddhist monastic tradition can still be described as a combination of renunciatory and ascetic practices.
The Buddha’s house is an enigma. Even though there is no clear, single image of the house, and Buddhist traditions do not describe it with any precision or unanimity, the shadow of the house exerts a tremendous influence on pragmatic, didactic and symbolic deliberations of the various tenets of Buddhism. If the Buddha’s house acquires a larger than life status, it is not because of the house itself, but because of the stature of the dweller of the house, the Buddha. The purpose of this essay is to draw the outline of that house.1
Why should one be interested in the Buddha’s house other than the reason that the house belonged to a world-moving teacher? If Buddhism and its various practices are ascetical in nature, dwelling is a key locus in that tradition.2 If an architectural exegesis is sought in that ascetical culture, it must begin with the house of the Buddha.
The Buddha’s house appears in manifold ways within the Buddhist traditions, depending on the various schools that emerged since the First Council held immediately after the passing away of the Buddha, and the various accounts and concepts of the Buddha that developed soon after.3 Conversations in the traditions are not so much about the literal architecture of the house as much as employing the architectural structure for a deliberation on asceticism, on describing, explaining and encoding the dimensions of renunciation. This is the principal reason for an elementary structure as the Buddha’s house to emerge with a kind of paradigmatic value. Joseph Rykwert, in establishing the significance of Adam’s House, writes how the image of a clearly imaginary house becomes the locus of a compelling religious, sociological, and philosophical imagination.4 The aim of the production of such a paradigm is the reform of society that is envisioned in a kind of “purer” architecture which society somehow would follow as a model.5 It seems many cultures assign reified properties to a certain architectural image that will charge the lives of people, forming expectations broader than prosaic architecture.
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3 The term “Buddha” has acquired multiple meanings in conjunction with the emergence of various sects, schools and traditions, the principal ones that have continued are the Theravāda and Mahāyāna. While the notion of the Buddha is not limited to the historical figure of Gautama Śākyamuni as it took on a universal aspect in most conceptualizations, the proliferation of the idea is still predicated upon the known life-story of Gautama. In elaborating the idea of the Buddha, from an historically specific Buddha (Gautama) to nonspecific Buddhas, texts in all schools adopt various methods whereby legends
The Buddha’s house becomes a significant site for reflecting on the scope and limits of renunciation, on its existential, ritual, and aporetic dimensions. After all, the Buddha – Gautama Śākyamuni
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Scene of the burning house from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Offret (1986).
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pervading order, as in Jahangirnagar University and the housing for Jaipurhat Limestone Factory, is an a priori geometry, the concern is to generate an ‘urbanised’ order by the formation of communal spatial enclosures, streets and continuous facades, qualities which are not explicit in earlier projects. Individual buildings are clearly of masonry, where spaces and voids seem to be carved out of masonry solids that, despite their often curious geometrical purity and unlike the skeletal nature of his earlier projects, form a more earth-hugging ambience.
The shift is most explicit in the National Library project (1978). It is here that “distortion” of the idealized form itself becomes the generator of architecture; the final form acknowledges more explicitly the contradictory conditions of the place and the programme. Gone is the stark clarity of his earlier skeletal work, there is now a ponderous massive presence accentuated both by the centralized form and the use of brick. The building presents a convincing response to the neighbouring ensemble by Kahn which has by now formed an important context in the north of Dhaka. While geometric abstraction and a consummate skill for crafting constitute a continuity in all his work, the iconography of National Library is a world removed from the Public Library of 1955. The Library is a surreptitious triumph, almost against Muzharul Islam’s own rational rigor, of the empirical over the rational, of the accidental over the planned, of the a posteriori over the a priori. Moreover, what has been a materialist constant in his work, that is, the privileging of reason that has lead to a suspicion of mystery and the “unconscious,” is somewhat undermined. One can begin to talk now of the reification of the mysterious, and of such anti-Marxist stuff as wonder and amazement.
Thinking the City
All along in Muzharul Islam’s work there is a thinking or rather a rethinking of the city. This is implicit in the typology of the early houses and projects, present analogously in the plans for the Polytechnique Institutes and the universities, and then directly in the sketches for the future of Dhaka city.
The concern for the city has deep roots. In the post-colonial situation of most Asian societies, two interconnected conditions have become crucial: the collapse of the structure of generally self-sufficient rural communities, and the institutional vacuum of burgeoning cities. It is too simplistic to think that the moral responsibilities for one should supercede the other despite the demographical tip towards the village. If the rural situation demands visions for retaining existing institutions, the urban situation requires new models, a totally new setting for an unprecedented urban condition. In social and political leadership, Gandhi represented the former, Kemal Ataturk and Nehru the latter. The Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, in his experiments at New Gourna, provides an architectural example of the Gandhian variety. Still, what of the city?
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The question is: What is the Bengali city to be? Also, what has been the nature of the city in Bengal (before it was destroyed in
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Hostel, Jahangirnagar University, 1967. Muzharul Islam Archive.
Bengal Institute, Rendering of the transformation of Dhaka’s Buriganga riverbank.
Bengal Institute, Rendering of the transformation of Surma riverbank in Sylhet.
At a more speculative and projective level, Kazi Khaleed Ashraf and his team at Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes and Settlements are engaged in large-scale operations with water as a structural and organizational presence in the delta. Involved with urbanscape plans for Dhaka as well various small towns, Bengal Institute is defining the scope of the urban task as well as reassigning new significance to small towns.
With its aquatic-geological formation – in flux – and projected consequences of environmental changes, the organization of land, water and settlements takes on an urgency that is unique to Bangladesh. Settlements patterns, architectural types, and socio-economic life-world, that are dynamically inter-connected, also confront new conditions raised by accelerated economic, environmental and social transformations. It is frequently heard that: “Dhaka is the toughest city in the world.” “Bangladesh is symptomatic of the gravest environmental challenges.” It is in the neighborhood of such pronouncements that the Bengal Institute team finds necessary to rethink the scope of environmental design, and its pedagogy and practices.
With Bangladesh as a theorem for ecological actions, Bengal Institute thinks that the architectural agenda needs to go beyond problem solving and form creation in which the architectural task should extend its sights to the intellectual, ethical and creative issues facing the futures of human habitats. The question of systemic and integrated “landscapes,” whether as habitats or place-forms, agricultural fabrics, flood plains, or natural wetlands, is at the center of new investigations and imaginations at the Institute, and form the theoretical core of a new design intelligence.
Motivations for this new architectural agenda are more about “place-form” rather than spectacular objects. It also becomes evident that developing this design intelligence requires a new kind of knowledge base, training and orientation that will uncover the original intimacy between architecture, habitation and landscape. In a sense, this new approach considered at Bengal Institute reveals a deeper coupling of the pavilion-form and landscape-form conflating the conventional boundary between architecture and landscape.
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Model photograph, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, New York, 1973-74 (unbuilt). Louis I. Kahn Collection, Architectural Archives University of Pennsylvania. Photo: George Pohl.
Site model, National Parliament Complex, Dhaka, Bangladesh (May, 1963). Louis I. Kahn Collection.
Taking Place: Landscape in the Architecture of Louis Kahn
Published in the Journal of Architectural Education, November, 2007.
Vincent Scully describes when he and Louis Kahn were visiting Moscow in 1965, and were walking around the Kremlin, he pointed out towards some of the famous towers in the area and said, “Look, Lou, how they point to the sky.” To which Kahn replied immediately, “Look how they bring the weight down.”1 In Peter Kirby’s documentary on Kahn,2 Richard Saul Wurman talks about the AFL-CIO building in Philadelphia, and narrates how Kahn was overly fussy about the “look” of the foundation and was giving inordinate time to it by actually designing and making models of it. When some of the office people inquired about it, Kahn admitted a concern for how the building will look as a ruin.3
I think these and other visual and literary narratives, but more than stories, the buildings themselves, and what can be extracted from what Kahn said aligns him with a sensibility that cannot be easily located within what we commonly call modernism, and provides a more complex reading of his work than the predictable Platonist, mystical, genealogical or structural interpretations. While these interpretations are immensely relevant in the context of Kahn’s work, I want to say that Kahn was also profoundly interested in the relationship of building and land in a very particular way. Provisionally, I would like to say that there is a recurrent and heightened notion of the intertwining of form and, for a lack of right word, landscape or environment in his thinking. This is what I would like to unravel in this essay.
1 Richard Saul Wurman, ed., What Will Be Has Always Been: The Words of Louis I. Khan (New York: Access Press and Rizzoli, 1986).
2 Louis I. Kahn: An Offering to Architecture, film directed by Peter Kirby (Media Art Services, 1992).
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3 The ironic fact is that the AFL building was demolished, and one wonders about the concern.
When it comes to locating landscape in the context of the work and ideas of Kahn, there is however expected ambiguity. Although Kahn himself provides openings towards the realm of landscape, it is a-systematic and sporadic, and is superceded by a more persistent meditation on “Form.” In any case, different notions of landscape could be posited from Kahn’s work, from the conventional to more conceptual, from what Kahn himself remarks upon to what I extrapolate from my own orientation. My intention is two-fold that intersects: one, to recover from this diversity a distinct idea of landscape in Kahn that is generally bypassed in the scholarship on his work, and, two, use that understanding to propose a notion of landscape that I argue is inherent in architecture, that building in its essence is a landscape event. The second point may be seen as expanding the idea of landscape and at the same time revising an
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Old landscape, new typology - farmhouses sans farming. Rajeev Kathpalia, Vastu Shilpa, Arjun Farmhouse, Ahmedabad, 2004.
Masala City: Urban Stories from South Asia
Published in Architectural Design, September/October, 2005.
Even on wintry mornings, Anurag Tripathi cycles through the virtual decay of Varanasi. Slicing through the thick fog, he stops at a brand new hotel on the Ganges, one built around a temple and brightly lit with Christmas tree lights, and parks his rickety bicycle there… The he goes down Assi Ghat below, ignoring teeming hordes of beggars and sadhus. He makes a bundle of his white shawl and unwashed clothes, keeps it on his books and plunges into the filthy, toxic river. Shivering and humming Hanuman Chalisha, he emerges from the water, puts on his clothes and pedals down to the Benaras Hindu University Campus. Tripathi spends the day on experiments in the physics laboratory, reading science journals, making notes, and dreaming of going to the MIT one day… When the evening mist begins to blanket the sprawling campus, he leaves the lab, cycles up to the Lanka Gate and orders a burger at a small, squalid roadside hole. Hundreds of flies buzz around him as he eats his burger – a thick, greasy potato chop in a droughty bun with some rotten onion and a thin slice of stale tomato. Finishing his grub, he picks a ‘Miss Lewinsky’ ice-cream from another vendor and moves into a narrow lane where they teach you to speak English in the American way. As darkness thickens, Tripathi gets out of the institute and moves into a damp, cold cybercafe, assumes an oxymoronish identity – coolfire21- and begins chatting with ‘serenesoul80’, a 24 year-old girl in Scottsdale, Arizona.
—Shobhan Saxena, “America in Our Lives,” Tehelka, The People’s Paper (January 15, 2005)
“Amar, Akbar, Anthony”
Mix, in urban configurations and architectural syntactics, is not new; it is an evident reflection of social and cultural formations. Hovels and havelis, domes and shikhara spires, nuclear reactor and pyramidal forms (the roofscape of Le Corbusier’s Assembly in Chandigarh) emblematize the tenacious hybrid nature of architecture and urbanism in South Asia/India, indicating an inherent resilience to the making of economic, religious, and cultural monoliths. While Anurag Tripathi, like millions of young subcontinentals, gets a high dose of Americana now, history attests to various forms of inadequacies to unitary formations.
Mix can take on different profiles, from the cinematic sense of collage and montage, to the obvious culinary concept of masala and chutney (as well as melting pot and salad bowl), and from the biological idea of miscegenation and hybridity to the pharmaceutical techniques of concoction and amalgamation. What ideas of “mix” inaugurate in the contemporary context, since Homi Bhabha’s seminal discussion of hybridity and
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Hiremath House pool.
monsoons, largely in the region of Mumbai, he has developed a typological vocabulary (the pavilion-like disposition) and a refined language of materials and details. House pavilions are woven through coconut groves (Palmyra) or mango trees (Belavali House, 2008, and Copper Houses). In a kind of apostolic succession to Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa, Jain has invigorated the promise of tropical architecture, taking its ecological ethos towards a new poetic prospect.
Few architects in India seem to have patience for either the phenomenology of situatedness or the care of crafting. The former requires a listening to the wind, so to speak, and the latter a tactic of delay best relayed by that wonderful Latin phrase festina lente, ‘make haste slowly.’ Jain emphasises an attention to the process of making and the patient evolution of things. He speaks of riyaz, the practice or discipline of doing architecture every day with both attentiveness and repetition.
These are best represented in his workshop practice, placing craftsmen and artisans in the middle of the process, doing lifesize mockups and prototypes, and material innovations, and eventually weaving a tapestry of sensorial experiences out of the constructed materiality.
Jain’s close collaboration with artisans and craftsmen recalls what noted Egyptian architect Hasan Fathy developed with the master mason Aladdin Mustafa, or what Bawa and British-born Indian architect Laurie Baker practised with their builders. In the highly disciplined practice of Studio Mumbai, there is also room for instinctiveness. Jain lets the building ‘respond to the instincts of the craftsmen and the evolving challenges of construction, with predictably surprising results.’ It is this combination of the tactical and instinctual that will produce an empathy for the language of unauthorised architecture from the niches and interstices of Mumbai’s official fabric and their plastered reincarnations at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
In maintaining a consistent sense of situational particularity and tectonic poetics, Jain’s architecture approximates the act of resistance that Kenneth Frampton put up as a provocation in an environment of devastating sameness. Delicately poised between the contemporary and the traditional, and Zen minimalism and delightful elegance, Jain’s work cannot be described as regionalist either. Not avowedly staged as a resistance, Jain’s work nonetheless represents an alternative to lndia’s double trouble: the raucous architectural phantasmagoria serving the neoliberal economy and the hyper-aestheticized extravaganza surrogating for tradition. Jain tiptoes towards a more precious and patient position. Like a farmer, he scans the sky for a meteorological intuition, treads the earth for secret semaphores, and then gathers with carpenters, masons, architects and artisans for cultivating the building-tree together.
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