[Gautam Bhatia's] new book, Blueprint, is a sort of heavily ill­ustrated biography through buildings that Bhatia has designed across his career and plans that were built and not built. At the same time, it is a meditation on what separates architecture from mere design and building, on the life of buildings, on the graph from conception to realisation to eventual, inevitable ruin-the full life-cyle of the process of architectural conception.

Bhatia's text moves from the dense to the supremely lucid: 'What you make is not just part of you, but has been part of your history, your background. That is the critical diff­erence between architecture and other construction arts like engineering or interiors.' For anyone who has struggled to come to terms with the current velocity of spiritual implosion of Indian cities, an insight such as this will, at least, help nail the problem: 'the city is a place bereft and deprived of participatory lifeA purposeless citizenry will do little but use that space for its own private purposes-selling, hawking, encroachment, privatisation and more crime.'

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