Architecture isn't always reckoned as a nation building enterprise, but a new exhibition shows us exactly how our identity can be 'constructed'
At the entrance of Fort's National Gallery of Modern Art, a hoarding in Devanagari scripts is attention stabbing. It reads, 'Architects ko gussa kyon aata hain?' The two-month-long exhibition titled The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India which opens on January 6 may not precisely answer that question, but its curators — cultural theorist and poet Ranjit Hoskote, architecture theorist and editor Kaiwan Mehta and renowned architect Rahul Mehrotra — chew over many such subjects, which invites the provocation.
Inside the rotund gallery, walls are dotted with info-graphics — the ratio of architects to people in India is 1:24,480; two in every five architects are women — and various confrontational questions like 'Is the smart city a dumb idea?', 'Have architects lost touch with society?' and 'Is contemporary architecture just urban wallpaper to most people?'
So, what is the state of architecture today? "Terrible," says Mehrotra and continues, "Good architecture is of course dependent on architectural talent. But more than anything else, it is dependent on patronage, articulation of aspiration, which it comes to represent. And the state of patronage is terrible."
His colleague Mehta concurs, "it is in murky waters."
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The display, chronologically, is mapped across three big events — India's independence, the Emergency and liberalisation — which had certain consequences on the country's architecture. In the first phase, the pan Indian identity was crucial. "We were building a Nation-State, so we had to build an identity for it in a unified way, and not allow divergences to happen," says Mehrotra.
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The first section is about national identity and using architecture as an instrument to construct the identity of a new nation. "It is also about how the architect was a collaborator in the nation-building project," adds Hoskote. Architects such as Habib Rahman, Charles Correa and Charles Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, can thus be viewed as equal partners in the nation building movement.
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The second phase largely talks about connecting with the past, and how architects began to respond differently. This obviously had an aesthetic impact.
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The hetrogenising effect of globalisation, on the other hand, is counter modernity. "For example, the Akshardham Temple in Delhi, fundamentalism at large like the rebuilding of Ayodhya — is the reaction to the homogenising effects," says Mehrotra. Those are the two aspects the current generation of architects are dealing with and has various impacts. "When architects graduate from schools and find themselves in this profession, there's already a relatively globalised and metropolitan-centric discourse in what seems to be the norm," says Hoskote. "It takes a lot of courage to stand apart from that."
Eighty projects have been selected from around the country and displayed at the top level of the gallery. They not only stand out, but also respond to these extremes. As Mehrotra reckons, "Every democracy produces messy cities and messy architecture because contestation plays itself out as multiple expressions."