Mehrotra, along with cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote and designer Isabel Oyuela-Bonzani, is presenting Loops of Practice, Thresholds of Habitability.
The exhibition uses the feedback-loop as a leitmotif to re-examine various aspects of architecture, design, research, writing, advocacy, and pedagogy that form the basis of Mehrotra’s practice. Sited in the historic Arsenale in Venice, it emerges out of a configuration of screens, large video presentations, displays and vitrines filled with documents, providing a chiaroscuro experience quite in keeping with its Italian setting. Edited excerpts:
Lesley Lokko’s central provocation is that the practitioner is an ‘an agent of change’. How did the three of you curate a response to this?
Hoskote: I believe quite strongly that the architect is well placed to be an agent of change in an unpredictable world shaped around shoals and currents rather than stable centres. They must address shifting patterns of policy, ecology, migration and livelihood. The [Marathi] saint-poet Tukaram speaks of building his house in the sky. In this spirit, contemporary architects must practice as a dynamic response to constant instability, rather than turning away into safe zones of patronage. Mehrotra’s three-decade-old practice achieved this, in a period beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall and India’s move towards liberalisation, through globalisation and emergent totalitarianism. My approach was to develop a many-sided portrait of this productively hybrid practice, to regard it through multiple lenses, and see the connections.
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You have dismantled an idea sacrosanct to architects and planners — that of the permanence of the built form. You re-envision materiality as ecology rather than construction, where ephemerality is significant to understanding new urban milieus. Could you expand on these themes?
Mehrotra: The provocation I recite to myself when starting a project, or to my students is: are we making permanent solutions for temporary problems? Embedded in this is a call to examine material life cycles, ecological footprints, and even the relevance of building. The architecture profession today is sharply polarised — where we speak of a moratorium on construction and where we believe that building as a state of permanence continues to be relevant. I believe there is an in-between space of reversibility and of touching the ground lightly. My attempt is to infect the debate with this middle ground.
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