Nevertheless,1 the new Parliament House is disappointing on the aesthetic and symbolic levels. The interiors resemble those of a pretentious hotel while the exterior façades provide skin-deep imitations of Baker’s elegant plinth and colonnade. Patel’s version is a postmodern pastiche without authenticity or expressive depth. It would have been fashionable for a brief period 35 years ago but is already outmoded. Besides, monuments should not be bound by fashion and should transcend time. That is certainly not the case here. Nor is there any evidence of the craftsmanship manifest in Baker’s design. The details are stilted and schematic. The overall form is ponderous and has inevitably been compared to a wedding cake, even to a Soviet era monument clad in stilted classical clichés. The new building is crowned by a sort of spire formed from a column with four lions, a reference to the columns of Ashoka (c. 280 BC) in the Mauryan Empire. But even this topknot looks as if it has been stuck on.

....

• 1.

  There is no doubt that some existing ministries and other public works along the edges of the Rajpath needed restoration and upgrading in terms of new technologies and interior layouts. But to demolish all of them completely seems excessive and wasteful in the extreme, especially at a moment of national economic crisis exacerbated by the coronavirus hitting India (critics in the national press assert that the budget for the Central Vista could create dozens of hospitals and vaccinate roughly three quarters of the population). None of these buildings, dating mostly from the 1950s and 1960s with their vague historical references is a “masterpiece” as are Lutyens’s outstanding works. But they are part of the architectural heritage of the evolving cityscape, and they record moments in post-Independence history, starting with Jawaharlal Nehru’s tenure in 1947. Surely they could be updated to do their job without the expense and ecological impact of destruction followed by new construction? Some of them—the cultural buildings and museums in particular—should be preserved with their contents intact.
   
  What Patel is erecting instead is a solid phalanx of grim, identical, and repetitive rectangular office blocks, each 490 feet long, 443 feet on the sides, and 130 feet tall, with vast interior courtyards. Each unit will contain enough offices for 6,000 workers. These blocks, ten in all, will march relentlessly down each side of the Rajpath in a manner that encroaches on existing public space and establishes barriers between the Rajpath and the neighboring areas, like a controlling wall. With their bland exterior façades and their fully glazed atria, these behemoths could have been yanked directly from an office park on a highway somewhere in the U.S. in the 1970s. This is an odd way of signaling a “new Indian Identity” for the 75-year-old democracy. The overall effect of this symmetrical and regimented array of banal boxes is curiously dictatorial.
   
  The Central Vista project implies an extreme bureaucratic centralization precisely at a moment when modern communications systems permit work at a distance. Roughly 16,000 cars will be coming into work and leaving everyday, in a city that already suffers from nightmarish traffic jams and one of the worst levels of pollution in the world (despite “official” aerial views suggesting a luminous and limpid green arcadia). There is a metro system and there will be underground tunnels with fast links between ministries; nonetheless, there is already discussion of plowing wider traffic arteries, even double-level roads, through the verdant carpet of low-rise New Delhi, with further negative impact on quality of life, air, buildings, and vegetation. The Central Vista project is a retrograde and anti-ecological urban plan which, in social terms, is liable to turn an entire stretch of the Rajpath, once so free and easy, into a surveyed security zone.