How may Mumbai’s emerging architecture be described? Are we too close to be objective, or is there enough of a body of work to make a call? Let us count the ways.

In living memory, the worm began to turn in the late 1980s. The change was marked by the early buildings of architect Hafeez Contractor, who was awarded by the government with a Padma Bhushan for a mainstream practice of three decades. Can you recall Contractor’s then-iconic building Vastu, rising out of the Worli seaface like a tumescent, half-round phallus, castrated lengthwise? Now puny in high-rise company, this building spoke a pidgin that somehow made sense in a city whose urban fabric was largely mute ever since Art Deco shuffled off its ornamental coil.

During the short heyday of Deco, the city’s architecture fore-grounded iconic cinema and office buildings as gestalt figures that were exuberant against a background of residential architecture. Post-independence, however, buildings were reduced to the staid and functional, observing the Modernist credo of ‘form follows function’, losing both ornament and historical reference. As a result, nothing stood out. Everything was, to the lay-eye, grey, dull and unarticulated. We all knew the tallest building in Bombay was Usha Kiran, but no one remembers what it looked like.

Vastu reclaimed architectural ornament, a practice that would, in equal measure, be celebrated and berated as postmodernism. PoMo buildings were architecture as remix, using familiar elements like polychromy, pointy roofscapes, RCC arcades, faux Grecian Orders, all mashed up without irony. Contractor would follow up with Megh Malhar, Lake Castle, the Hiranandani estates and faraway Seawoods. Postmodern architecture in Mumbai also paralleled the rise of the builder/ developer, and valorised the apartment block as a showpiece.

Contractor’s practice would breed copycat architects who understood how to provide instant gratification to both the speculator patron as well as the aspiring end user. Pop culture edifices soon extended to the suburbs, to the very ends of the Western, Central and Harbour lines. Post-Contractor practices would make the mediocre mainstream.

Since the millennium, life seems to have passed the Contractor paradigm by. The offer of ‘free housing’, as a result of redevelopment, has and is comprehensively transforming Mumbai’s architecture. It’s making the householder a venal and acquisitive animal. Now, Development Control Rules are the de facto architects of aesthetic expression. In other words, a return to unornamented functionalism based solely on squeezing every inch out of allowable floor space. In a city where affordability and investment opportunities seem to be the only driving forces, a building’s looks are entirely secondary.

The critic, Charles Jencks, has described this architectural phenomenon called ‘late Modernism’: it’s a return to modernist functionalism; post postmodernism, but reductive and even simplistic. It uses technological advances in structural engineering, where bland glass and Alucobond high-rises are the norm.

Redevelopment renders buildings with a former, well-thought-out aesthetic to be turned into puffy tetrapaks with the thinnest walls possible. Remember, walls climatic defences and architectural ornaments occupy floor space, an anathema to the speculator. Today, with height restrictions, even overhead water tanks are a loss of profit-making space, ergo flat-roofs push the very edge of the DC rules. Luxury housing, the only type substantially being built in the city, is not really about habitation but a return on investment. Layouts rather than design make architecture.

I would not be surprised if it came to a pass that a Late Modern algorithm be given a national award, rather than an architect named Contractor.

Mustansir Dalvi is an architect and an academic, teaching in Mumbai. He keeps one eye critically cast on Mumbai in its current post-planning avatar, and another on its rapidly transforming urban culture.