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On a sunny morning in January 2016, as part of a C-MAP trip to India, I had the opportunity to visit architect Raj Rewal’s Hall of Nations and Industries in New Delhi’s Pragati Maidan. I was accompanied by Rattanamol Singh Johal, our C-MAP Asia fellow, as well as Arun Rewal, the nephew of the architect, who facilitated our clandestine visit. Getting to the imposing exhibition complex within New Delhi’s fairground was an adventure in itself: it meant passing through several rows of ubiquitous, lingering security guards in order to arrive at the complex, which had quite obviously been in a state disrepair for some time and was facing an uncertain future. Nevertheless, I will never forget the impression that the building’s vast interior made on me upon entering. The space was memorable not only for its sheer size—at 144 feet in length and up to 90 feet in height, it was, at the time of its construction in 1972, the largest concrete space-frame structure in the world—but also for the structural elegance of its space frame, which was based on the modular repetition of a tetrahedron. By then, rumor had it that the current Indian government had little appreciation for this outstanding architectural and engineering achievement that epitomized post-independence India, and that it was planning to tear it down in order to make space for a new exhibition and convention center. Letters of protest from me and colleagues from other leading museums and cultural institutions around the world, along with a number of legal battles launched by the architect himself and professional organizations in India, were unable to prevent the seemingly inevitable fate of the Hall of Nations. India’s Heritage Conservation Committee took the irresponsible and fatal position that the building could not be protected because it was less than sixty years old, and so the Hall of Nations was reduced to rubble in an overnight cloak-and-dagger operation in April 2017. Its destruction was perhaps the most powerful evidence that the modernist legacy of post-independence India is increasingly under distress. The Nehru Pavilion honoring one of the founding fathers of the modern nation, situated in the vicinity of the Hall of Nations in Pragati Maidan and also designed by Raj Rewal, has since also been demolished.

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