As an architect practicing and teaching in India, one is often asked the basis on which one can create an architecture that is modern yet authentically Indian. This question comes from clients, colleagues, and students, and addressing it demands clarity on the relationship between architecture and cultural identity.
Identity is a concern that provokes intense debate and is particularly problematic and unresolved within modern architecture. It was not an anxiety in pre-modern times when architectural identity had roots in a relatively stable tradition. From a pure perspective of identity, leaving aside wider questions of ethics and democracy, it does not matter whether this tradition came from a high art patronised by kings and priests or from vernacular production by the larger mass of society. In both cases, compared to current times, the rate of change was slow, migration and its consequent cosmopolitism was limited, judgment was based on cultural tradition rather than individual rights, power was believed to have divine sanction, and wisdom was believed to be inherited from the past rather than being a product of personal creativity. Consequently, stability of a shared aesthetic tradition that reflected cultural mores came about far more easily.
This cohesiveness of shared aesthetic identity was broken by the modern movement. Once modernity rejected, on ethical grounds, the shackles of power exerted by feudalism or dictatorship, a demand arose for a politics of democracy in which individual liberty, enshrined in constitutional rights, was sacrosanct. A claim to freedom of personal artistic creativity was bound to follow once liberty had been individualised. Architecture, along with the other creative arts, no longer saw its task as the reification of eternal value received from inherited tradition. A new ideal was established of the avant-garde artist as the cutting edge of cultural production, a creative professional driven by the revolutionary mission of breaking free from the shackles of the past to catalyse society’s trajectory toward an enhanced future.
In the first half of the twentieth century, this ethic became globally mainstreamed within the profession and formed the foundation for architectural education. The Bauhaus, founded in Germany in 1919, pioneered a curriculum that set the global mould for the professional training of modern architects, designers, and artists. An explicit goal of this curriculum was to imbue art and design with a historical and moral purpose fuelled by individual creativity. An evolutionary spirit of socio-cultural identity was claimed as ground for a free play of individual interpretation liberated from the constraint of an a priori demand to sustain a collaborative tradition. The process of radically redirecting architecture’s predominant gaze was completed: a shift from a societal focus on the past toward an individualised imagination of an anticipated and desired future. This process was lent additional impetus by two key factors: (i) the valorisation of technology as a force of liberation during a period of rapid technological innovation; and (ii) the increasing influence of a legal framework of building codes over the shape of architectural production, leading to economic and political imperatives overshadowing the earlier role that political and cultural production played.
The aesthetic nihilism that resulted did cause considerable angst, and the movement of post-Modernism that arose in the 1970’s sought to resolve this by proposing a recovery of history as a primary source for architectural design. But the underlying philosophy of design process being predicated on individual creativity remained unchanged, and the movement wound up being a set of diverse personal games played with historicised inspiration rather than setting the ground for a wider aesthetic identity.
A further derailment occurred with the explosion of satellite television in the last two decades of the twentieth century, followed shortly thereafter by the internet and social media in the early twenty-first century. A global deluge of provocative visual imagery began to impinge on aesthetic consciousness with rapidly increasing velocity. Consequently, attention spans decreased, visual novelty took on greater appeal, and one began to increasingly find thoughtful evaluation getting overwhelmed by snap judgments of optical seduction.
Many practising architects encounter acts of nostalgia hoping to mount some resistance to this perceived decline. A few years ago, when presenting a design for a university campus in South India, a member of the university’s building committee asked us why we had not included any elements of “Indian design.” His suggestion to resolve this claimed omission was to design the gatehouse to the campus as a gopuram, implying that history offers an easy and accessible solution for expressing identity. This assumption is not rooted in a thorough understanding of the source of historical inspiration. The gopuram is rooted in the concentric interpretation of the Vastu Purusha Mandala (as a model of the cosmos) that occurred in South Indian temple design, differentiated from the linear interpretation that prevailed in the north. Its meaning and identity accrue from its place as an anchoring component of a cosmological model. To place it on the gatehouse of a university that is not intended to pursue the temple complex’s transcendental quest of situating humanity within a divine universe is to reduce the gopuram to a superficial ornament of pure visuality, thereby demeaning rather than valorising it.
One cannot even locate inherent meaning in formal attributes of an architectonic element given to us by history. Domes occur across diverse ranges of history and geography, and while geometrically similar are simultaneously radically different. The dome over St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, the dome over Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and that over the Taj Mahal in Agra bear little resemblance to each other in terms of what they seek to symbolise about humankind and heaven. At this deeper level, one finds similar variation across domes built at different moments of history within the same location.
Moreover, a style from history is rooted in the needs and technology of its time, and to try and incorporate it into a contemporary context characterised by different needs and radically different technology will be to reduce style to superficial decoration. Cultural identity gets compromised rather than reinforced.
Nostalgia’s error lies in the hasty equation it draws between authenticity and style, failing to adequately interrogate history to discover the rigour that preoccupied the original creators of the style in exploring primordial and transcendental questions. Style, along with identity, is the accidental byproduct of an authentic quest for meaning, and it is facile to treat it as a predetermined shortcut by which meaning can be quickly affixed. The authenticity of the quest is more important than any question of style. An architect practicing in India is encountering a unique mix of Indian challenges, Indian climate, Indian clients, Indian sites and topography, and many other factors found only in India. If one seeks to deal with each of these with rigour and thoughtfulness, the architecture that results is bound to be uniquely Indian. On the other hand, if one starts with a predetermined style, the shortcut that style offers will render the architect disinclined to give these factors the attention they deserve, and any appearance of Indianness is likely to be highly superficial.
In looking for attributes of a project as a source of identity, one of the most fundamental attributes of a site within India is latitude, for that determines our relationship with the sun. Architectural journalism is comparatively undeveloped in India and the Global South as compared to the West. Consequently, the images of modern architecture from locations where journalism is more mature have an influence beyond their geographies. Contemporary architecture from North America, Continental Europe and Japan has a significant inspirational impact on the Indian architect. These are all locations with a latitude that is significantly further north, where the comparatively shallow angle of the sun is far closer to the horizontal, an angle that gives primacy to the way vertical planes receive sunlight and break it up into shadow. In contrast, sites in India are at a latitude where the angle of the sun is closer to the vertical, so the shadow cast by horizontal plans are more striking. Moreover, the temperate climate is conducive to a transparency of spaces with greater fusion of inner space and outer landscape, encouraging intermediate layers such as verandahs that mediate between inside and outside. We must understand and acknowledge this crucial difference whenever we examine architecture from the West.
Taking this into account, one sees that an identifying characteristic of Indian architecture is the consequent variation in light across the ground plane. For example, one can see this in the spatial transparency that allows you to look across a courtyard house in India: the room in which one is has a shadowed floor, the courtyard is sun-drenched, the room beyond it is dark again, the garden beyond is bright, verandahs offer layers that subtly mediate these contrasts, all leading to a rich tapestry of sunlight that shifts and changes in character through the day. By the time night falls, the pattern has inverted its emphasis: the spaces that had shadowed floors are now the brightest and the spaces that were bright in the day are now the darkest. This identity forming characteristic is agnostic to style; it does not matter whether the architecture is contemporary or traditional. Once it has been designed with latitude in mind, it will be Indian because, whatever its style, it will come to life only under the Indian sun.
To follow such an approach, one must develop the sensitivity to light that underlies the Hindu tradition of sandhyavandanam. ‘Sandhya’ means ‘union’ or ‘juncture’, and ‘vandanam’ means ‘worship,’ suggesting that spiritual sensitivity is greatest at dawn and dusk (the junctures between day and night) and at noon (the juncture between the ascent and descent of the sun). In this tradition, there is an awareness of how the vicissitudes of light weave a sacred aura into life. If one can build a sensitive and embodied awareness of sunlight as it is shaped by latitude, the consequent consciousness it breeds of the primordial energy of the sun, an energy that all life depends on, becomes a powerful source of identity.
It is significant to note that the word ‘latitude’ has two meanings. The more commonly used meaning is the one used thus far in the text: a geographical measure that marks where one is on earth relative to how the sun appears in your life. But it also means ‘freedom’. In his book “The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty,” the Japanese scholar of craft, Soetsu Yanagi, remarks that the greatest freedom is to be in tune with the laws of the universe, for then one’s inner core resonates with the innate energy of the universe. The dual meaning of ‘latitude’ echoes Yanagi’s observation. A refined consciousness of latitude is a gateway to an architecture that evades the cliches of style to offer an aura of transcendent identity.