Di 38 | Suprio B - Work and Meaning | DOMUSIndia 03/2015

March 2015

Volume 04 / Issue 05 R200

domus 38 March 2015

Author

Authors AG Krishna Menon Architect Aurelien Lemonier Curator Claudia Roselli Urban researcher Karan Berry Shoe designer Leon Vaz Fashion designer

Photographers Ana Marques Annabel Elston Christian Richters Daniel Malhão Duarte Belo Duccio Malagamba Fabrizio Bergamo Fernando Guerra Leonardo Finotti Ramak Fazel

March 2015

INDIA

Kaiwan Mehta

30

Editorial The intellectual life of architecture

Francesca Molteni

32

Confetti New Narration for Design

Pietro Montani

36

A new alliance between art and technology

Toyo Ito

38

National Taichung theater, Taiwan

Ekta Idnany

42

Leon Vaz

44

Karan Berry

45

‘To find resonance from within the noise’ ‘It’s the lesser that excites me’ Talking Design

Contributors Ekta Idnany Suprio Bhattacharjee

LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO

Title

Talking Design

Ruturaj Parikh Architect

038

Design

Talking Design

Rahoul B Singh Architect

INDIA

CONTENTS 29

46 52

Suprio Bhattacharjee

60

Naya Raipur Charles Correa Foundation

Debating intervention Work and meaning

AG Krishna Menon Rahoul B Singh Aurelien Lemonier

62

Kaiwan Mehta

74

Raj Rewal Associates

Projects Building as elocution

Andreas Bozarth Fornell

96

Bozarthfornell Architects

The ceremony of shopping

Goncalo Byrne

Volume 04 / Issue 05 R200

038

Claudia Roselli Ruturaj Parikh

Jugling between spaces

Contemporary museum for architecture in India

Work, context, history

100

Rassegna Bathroom

107

Feedback Goncalo Byrne’s Lisbon

LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO

LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO

038 March 2015

Cover: In the Coal India Ltd headquarters building complex in Kolkata, designed by Raj Rewal Associates, the office wings are designed in such a manner that they enclose two curvilinear courtyards within. The workspaces are distinguished in different zones in the 11-storeyed stepped development configured within these courtyards.

Exploded view of the Charles Correa Foundation building, located in the Fontainhas precinct in Panaji, Goa.

domus 38 March 2015

30 EDITORIAL

What is the shape of things to come?

Architecture is a projective act and activity; in the act of building, one is always making that which is yet to come – a building in hope for the next building. By the time something is built, it has already projected more ideas and options for the next round of buildings.

A perpetual chain of making the ‘now’ and projecting for the ‘next’ is inherent in acts of architecture.

At one level, it is the question of education – the space and process that shape the sense of a profession and practice; not simply ready human-fodder to produce more of the same!

The other is that of evaluation through accounting – the exhibition of a body of work.

The former is the most misunderstood; it is only imagined to be factory-like – where a certain need is understood and humanproducts are engineered to serve needs and job-slots, and once placement is done, institutions feel very proud! Higher education is a broad area of discussion – one that needs delicate calibration, structuring and constant evaluation. Education structures and methodologies needs to understand the broader responsibility that human beings and professionals should have towards the socio-cultural space they operate and live within. Education systems (and their institutions) are too happy making efficient or competitive professionals, but they fail to understand that their equal responsibility is the generation of human communities of work and cultural interactions; where individuals act and interact within the space of cultural production and political exchange. Education needs to work with a vision for a future as much as it engages with the everyday reality of material conditions and political scenarios. Whether it is the space of undergraduate education or post-graduate courses, the broader sensibility in how education is approached is very necessary and seminal, to the larger outlook of a human culture and civilisation we are working towards or hoping for. Thankfully, there continue to be schools of architecture and design developed within the historical context of independent India that constantly believe in the larger context and role for design and architecture – its contribution to human endeavour and civilisational development. Curricular development within the context and history of India – its contemporary culture, as well as the crucial developments in its twentieth century history of colonialism and industrialisation – is something that certain homegrown schools are sincerely investing in and further discussions on the same will be needed.

The thoughts on education do not only come from constant investment in the field over years, but a series of interactions that one has been involved in with many new and old institutions that are currently in the

Kaiwan Mehta

process of reviewing and redrawing systems and methodologies of education in the field of architecture and design based on past experiences as well as understanding of newer conditions and locations that India is juggling with. It is the constant process of reviewing that is very crucial – reviewing the past, processes within a field, its state of affairs, its debates and confusions. It is necessary to understand in what ways a practice and its field can be constantly brought to the test of time and value. This issue in many ways is that of exploration – how does a field, and its practice and its objects, expand itself, or can be expanded into a broader sphere of discourse, ideation, and creativity as well as cultural production? In this issue, we focus on the work and oeuvre of one of India’s most important architects – Raj Rewal. We review two projects but what is very important is to look at the book and two exhibitions that put his body of work in certain contexts. Historical essays or curatorial texts bring into focus the thematics and questions necessary for a practice and a field to ask itself. At one level, it is contextualising the work of an architect produced over decades and changing historical scenarios, but it is precisely such explorations that also allow us to understand the broader field itself in sharper and more critical ways.

Three master architects who practiced in Modern and contemporary India – Charles Correa, Raj Rewal and B V Doshi – have all had their body of work put in the shape of an exhibition in the recent past; and this is a very crucial development for architecture in India. Even if all of us have been very familiar with the works of these individuals, their ideas and philosophies, the context of these exhibitions pushes us to now thinking afresh, and encourages us to think deeper of what these practices and bodies of work meant for India, and its relevance to the sense of architecture and history in the subcontinent.

A G K Menon’s curatorial essay for the exhibition Raj Rewal: Memory, Metaphor and Meaning in his Constructed Landscape at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi takes advantage of the occasion to raise many questions on writing criticism and history of architecture in India, as well as the perspectives that have largely driven our views on, and approaches towards reading contemporary or Modern architecture in India.

In that sense, the occasion of an exhibition, or the book does precisely this – open up Pandora’s box – instigate and churn-up questions that will feed new fuel and energy into the profession, the practice, and its larger scope in human and intellectual life.

One should remember in this discussion that Charles Correa as well as Raj Rewal were both centrally involved in survey exhibitions themselves in the 1980s – surveying the length and breadth of architectural developments and conditions in India. Menon

as well as Aurelien Lemonier, the curator at Centre Pompidou, Paris, discuss the influence of the exhibition that Rewal co-curated for the Festival of India in France in 1985; Menon also questions the curatorial approach in that exhibition and what it should make us think about. B V Doshi on the other hand, played a central role in architectural education as well as research, at Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology, Ahmedabad as well as with Vastu Shilpa Foundation, also in Ahmedabad. These crossing journeys are an important part of design histories and architectural developments in India and the way we understand what questions of identity, culture, market, and patronage, mean to our present and past. In this issue itself, we also look at the Charles Correa Foundation – an initiative set up in Goa with a dedicated focus on research in the space of humanities, urbanities, and architecture.

Correa’s buildings and writings have been intense indicators of what he thought of architecture, design and the context of working and building in India, and now that life-long endeavour and belief in the power and possibilities of design is converted into the Foundation and its activities. These and many other lives – individual or institutional – are structural in the way our current contexts are shaped, and every new biographical project will always allow us to evaluate the now and contemporary.

Education, books, as well as exhibitions have been areas/subjects that this magazine has been closely observing and reviewing with a belief that practice is about the larger discursive space; how much ever the act of building-making is central to architecture and crucial in the way architectural ideas are generated and worked out, but the discursive space focussing on the buildingmaking activity as well as the biography of architectural works and lives is equally important and invaluable. Domus India will continue to investigate these questions and spaces of action and criticism. Design practice equally exists in thinking about what we do, and how we do, and why we do it – and this has constantly come up in the brief but very pointed texts we have featured in the series ‘What we talk about, when we talk about design...’ Much like the word Art, Design today is also a much misused and misunderstood term, and architecture can easily escape definition all the time – hence activities and engagements such as writing, making exhibitions, and shaping curriculum are continuous steps towards a critical understanding of the field, a deep engagement, and shaping a ‘thick description’ such that practice has a vibrant and fertile bedrock to grow from, firm itself in, but also later grow out of it, and shape itself within newer plains, landscapes, and shifting grounds. km

CONFETTI

Charles Correa Foundation

THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF ARCHITECTURE

The work at Charles Correa Foundation follows an organic process that originates with identifying an issue or a concern that has a potential to use a design intervention for positive change

domus 38 March 2015

60 CONFETTI

domus 38 March 2015

WORK AND MEANING A monograph on Raj Rewal’s architecture makes a valiant attempt at stimulating a renewed focus on a body of work; which pioneers an approach that takes an emphatic and often polarising view on what it means to practice in a milieu that exists at the cusp of traditional craft and often, advanced industry Suprio Bhattacharjee

Left: cover of the book, Raj Rewal: Innovative Architecture and Tradition. Opposite page: layouts from the book indicate the various strands and typologies that shape the architect’s work

Kenneth Frampton, architectural theoretician par excellence, and perhaps one of the most important architectural historians practising today, sums up Indian master Raj Rewal’s tenuous position in contemporary architectural history by this opening line of his insightful essay in the most recent monograph on the Indian architect thus, “...

Raj Rewal remains, despite the wide scope of his work, the least well-known Indian architect of his generation. This may be due to the way in which he seems to have distanced himself from the received, Neo-Corbusian line which was once so characteristic of modern Indian architecture.” This monograph, published by Om Books International with essays by Kenneth Frampton, Peter Davey and Dr. Suha Ozkan, some of the most influential thinkers and commentators in the discipline, along with project descriptions by Suparna Rajguru, in many ways, attempts to fill this void in current discussions on the works of the Indian master. Along with an exhibition on the architect at New Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art, held coincidentally at around the same time this book was released, this sumptuous volume, through its broad ambition of providing a new generation of readers a full overview of Raj Rewal’s prodigious career, makes a valiant attempt at stimulating a renewed focus on a body of work that has, through its persistent defiance of succumbing to a generalised view of ‘modern architecture’ managed to pioneer

an approach that takes an emphatic and often polarising view on what it means to practice in a milieu that exists at the cusp of traditional craft and often, advanced industry. For the architect, this ‘forced abstinence’ has been a conscious decision, resulting from years of conscious study and engagement with the historic architectures of the Northern parts of the country, a region where we find almost all his works, baring a few. Perhaps this absence of a pan-Indian presence has also contributed to the not-so-fervent interest in his works (as when compared to his contemporaries).

In many ways, one can see how, while working at the confluence of disciplines from a theoretical stance, yet committed to working within the space of mainstream public commissions, Rewal has managed to build a formidable and pathbreaking oeuvre, that has challenged perceptions about traditional practices, and their relevance in a contemporary society driven by technological innovation and the assumed benefits of hi-technology solutions at the expense of identity and continuity. Quoted in Frampton’s essay, this extract from a writing by the architect dating back to 1992 provides an insight into the architect’s stance, “Traditional Indian architecture based on craftsmanship, always respected and exploited the nature of materials such as stone, bronze and wood, and made no distinction between the functional, the decorative and the symbolic. All three aspects were woven together

to create a rich fabric of design.

The constructional methodology of utilising large panels of stone and assembling jaalis at Fatehpur Sikri provides ample proof that there was an active collaboration between the architect, the craftsman and the artist. This resulted in an aesthetic, less concerned with arbitrarily added ornamentation than with the requirements of necessity, good sense and reason without ever rejecting the poetry of building or space-making.” Thus, consciously avoiding Modernism’s blatant rejection of the past, and refusing to separate the aspects of structure, ornament, emotion, craft and technique, Raj Rewal attempts to achieve the syncretic view of what he describes in his introductory essay to the book as that of the Sanskrit ‘Sthapati’ – literally meaning ‘master of space’. Dr Suha Ozkan, on his part, describes Raj Rewal’s pioneering work as “a sublime and distilled ‘Abstract Regionalism’.... (wherein) he generates an architectural idiom of his own, and at the same time, benefits from the regional context where he belongs.”

In his foreword to the volume, Aurelien Lemonier provides an overview of what this context would have offered in terms of challenges and teething questions, as part of the generation of architects beginning work in the late 1960s, wherein Raj Rewal’s work was “at odds with the functionalist ideology that spearheaded the construction programmes of the fifties since the building of Chandigarh, (... and

thus... ) is a possible synthesis of rapid industrial development and the awareness of one’s secular cultural roots.” But more importantly, what the foreword points out, and eventually the two critical essays hint at, is the challenge in reading a body of work that refuses stereotyping and easy categorisation and hence, accessible discussion and convenient assessment. Perhaps it is this aspect that the book brings out most emphatically, and also highlights the gap in our critical understanding of Raj Rewal’s work.

While much of the discussion surrounding Rewal’s work has revolved around the morphological analysis of his projects, there is that space of discussion that has yet to fittingly assess his work from a position beyond the formal and its obvious (or not so obvious) influences. This book, while through its essays, manages to brush upon this aspect, it eventually only manages to provide a mere overview or documentation of a vast body of work. What is missing is a more detailed analysis and representation of each work in question, beyond the descriptive, and the weaving of a cohesive narrative that puts the reader at the centre of the architect’s working methodology and design process. Until this is achieved, the real origins of the prodigious and pioneering oeuvre of Raj Rewal will remain to be an enigma, and so will be the gap in the production of new critical material that looks intently at the work of one of India’s greatest living architects.

Raj Rewal: Innovative Architecture and Tradition.

With foreword by Aurelian Lemonier, essays by Kenneth Frampton, Peter Davey and Suha Ozkan, and text by Suparna Rajguru. Co-published by the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi and Om Books international (New Delhi, 2013) in conjunction with the retrospective exhibition ‘Raj Rewal: Memory, Metaphor and Meaning in his Constructed Landscape’ at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, organised by Prof Rajeev Lochan, Director, NGMA, New Delhi and curated by AG Krishna Menon and Rahoul B Singh.

CONFETTI 61