Indeed, at times, the exhibition’s ambitions appear to struggle under their own weight in trying to tie together such conflicting priorities. What ends up is a crowded miscellany of projects rather than a precise, intellectual focus. Sure enough, the limits of such efforts are clear, for example, in the exhibition catalogue, which inaccurately clubs Pakistan among the region’s “predominantly secular nation-states”.

The search for a remote unity of purpose across such political divides also lends itself to a lack of engagement with the keywords that the exhibition is organised around. The words “independence”, “modernity”, “decolonisation” and “self-determination” are used interchangeably without seriously considering whether such ambitions conflicted with and undercut one another in the pursuit of new built environments.

Rather than self-determination, in Pakistan, built modernity after 1947 was embedded into the itineraries of American power. Take Korangi, the Karachi township designed to house post-Partition refugees, strongly highlighted in the exhibition. Historian Markus Daechsel reminds us that US State Department and USAID deputies lent a helping hand in seeing through the township’s development in order to demonstrate the value and social significance of American foreign aid.

That the project was enthusiastically promoted as a matter of public relations spectacle but ultimately left unfinished spoke to the Ayub Khan regime’s reluctance in promoting new forms of living, mobility and circulation in Karachi. Daechsel reminds us that the reality of such circulation threatened to promote autonomy rather than dependence on the state on the part of new citizen-refugees.

Ayub’s regime eventually backtracked on the project and left many of Korangi’s plots unfinished. They were cut off from Karachi’s public utilities and transport networks, leaving refugees in the lurch.

In India, the promise and impress of exposed concrete came up against climate considerations and labour regimes to produce buildings sharply alienated from the surrounding landscape. Building upon Corbusier’s efforts in Chandigarh, local architects such as Rewal, Correa, Achyut Kanvinde, and others kept up the French master’s preference for exposed concrete even when the material’s heat-trapping properties militated against generous use in tropical and subtropical settings.

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