"Head Quarters"
"Head Quarters" © Gautam Bhatia

GB: In a lot of recent architecture, there is a personal claim to design that is offensive and trite to an outsider. As if the invention of something new must always be staked into a kind of personal heroism. It’s an attitude of “I am the maker” and “this is my copyright”. However clever and self-hypnotic the scheme, at a public level I find such architecture miserly and self-serving. It preserves architecture from mass consumption, and isolates it into select pockets of affluence. And that’s a real shame. Because the wider interests of design as a set of shared common values gets missed. Architecture works its way behind closed doors, behind manicured hedges, back into the closet. I think the dangers of such paranoia are many, but mainly it’s the reducing influence of the profession itself. — Gautam Bhatia in conversation with Arpita Das