KOLKATA: The Calcutta Architectural Legacies (CAL) took its first significant stride on Monday by launching a website that will act as a meeting ground between buildings owners keen to sell and potential buyers interested to put them into re-use. CAL is an initiative mooted by writer Amit Chaudhuri and supported by activists who are architects, conservationists and prominent city residents to preserve aesthetic buildings that dot neighbourhoods, particularly in south Kolkata. 

Members hope the website, cal-legacies.com, will halt the rapid destruction of houses that defined Kolkata's paras as developers purchased the land and demolished the two-storied houses to build high-rises. 

"In May 2015, we had embarked on a journey to look beyond heritage and landmarks to Kolkata's architectural legacy and modernity. Houses that had certain features in common — red cement floors, high ceilings, slatted windows, ornate wrought iron grills, semi-circular verandahs, square ventilators with floral cast iron meshes but were architecturally distinct from each other — were being demolished in localities like Hindustan Park, Lake Road, Purna Das Road, Fern Road, Jodhpur Park and New Alipore. These buildings had been home to upper middle-class and middle-class Bengalis, many of them professionals, and defined the essence of the neighbourhood. But the homes were being sold off for the price of the land. We never got to find out the value of the houses. We hope this website will be a meeting ground for a community that loves Kolkata and wants its essence preserved," said Chaudhuri. 

Art historian and director of Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Tapati Guha Thakurta, rued the disappearance of paras from certain parts of the city while attempts were being made to create them anew at others. "The paras are architectural and cultural spaces defined by the homes. There is a particular form of Kolkata's paras. There is a need for historians to actively document these neighbourhoods that, and through them, tell the history of the city before the paras disappear altogether," she said. 

It was this sense of loss that had led to Chaudhuri writing an open letter addressed to the CM, mayor and other administration functionaries in 2015. The letter, signed by chief economist Kaushik Basu, MPs Sugata Bose and Jogen Chowdhury, architect Partha Ranjan Das, MIT professor Esther Duflo, Presidency University V-C Anuradha Lohia, G M Kapur of Intach and Bonani Kakkar of NGO Public, had raised concerns over the rampant destruction of buildings in Kolkata. 

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