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4 Architectural Design
Backlist Titles

Volume 76 No. 3 Volume 76 No. 4 Volume 76 No. 5

ISBN 0470018399 ISBN 0470025859 ISBN 0470026529

Volume 76 No. 6 Volume 77 No. 1 Volume 77 No. 2

ISBN 0470026340 ISBN 0470029684 ISBN 0470034793

Volume 77 No. 3 Volume 77 No. 4 Volume 77 No. 5

ISBN 0470031891 ISBN 978 0470319116 ISBN 978 0470028377

Individual backlist issues of 4 are available for purchase

at £22.99. To order and subscribe for 2008 see page 160.
4 Architectural Design
Forthcoming Titles 2008

January/February 2008, Profile No 191

Cities of Dispersal
Guest-edited by Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel

Questioning the traditional boundaries between cities, suburbs, countryside and wilderness, this issue of
AD explores emergent types of public space in low-density environments. Cities of Dispersal describes this
new form of urbanism: decentralised, in a constant process of expansion and contraction, not
homogenous or necessarily low-rise, nor guided by one mode of development, typology or pattern.
While functionally and programmatically, dispersed settlements operate as a form of urbanism, the
place of collective spaces within them has yet to be defined and articulated. The physical transformation
of the built environment on the one hand, and the change in our notion of the public on the other – due
to globalisation, privatisation and segregation – call for renewed interpretations of the nature and
character of public space. The concept of public space needs to be examined: replaced, re-created or
adopted to fit these conditions. What is the place of the public in this form of urbanism, and how can
architecture address the notion of common, collective spaces? What is the current socio-political role of
such spaces? How does the form and use of these spaces reflect the conception of the public as a political
(or nonpolitical) body? And can architecture regain an active role in formulating the notion of the
collective? These and other issues are addressed through essays, research projects and built work by
distinguished writers such as Bruce Robbins, Albert Pope and Alex Wall, and practitioners including
Zvi Hecker, Vito Acconci, Mutopia, Manuel de Solá-Morales, Martha Rosler and Manuel Vicente in a
search for new collective architectures within the dispersed city.

March/April 2008, Profile No 192

Versatility and Vicissitude: Performance in Morpho-Ecological Design
Guest-edited by Michael Hensel and Achim Menges

This third AD by the guest-editors of the highly successful Emergence and Techonologies and Techniques titles
shifts the morpho-ecological design project into the realm of performance. Whereas the dictionary
definition of performance – to ‘carry out an action’ or ‘to fulfill a task’ – invokes a tired utilitarian
debate, Hensel and Menges inject the meaning of the word ‘performance’ with an entirely new life. In
this context form is redefined not as the shape of a material object alone, but as the multitude of effects,
milieu of conditions, modulations and microclimates that emanate from an object’s exchange with its
specific environment; a dynamic relationship that is perceived and interacted with by a subject. A
synergetic employment of performance and morpho-ecological techniques combine to create integral
design solutions that will render an alternative and entirely innovative new model for sustainability.
This issue presents the historical precursors and precedents for this approach and presents the current
state of the art of morpho-ecological design. Key contributors include: Klaus Bollinger, Lawrence Friesen of
Buro Happold, Manfred Grohmann of Bollinger & Grohmann, Aleksandra Jaeschke, OCEAN NORTH,
Remo Pedreschi, Defne Sunguroglu, Peter Trummer and Michael Weinstock.

May/June 2008, Profile No 193

Interior Atmospheres
Guest-edited by Julieanna Preston

What does one mean when describing a room as atmospheric? Does it allude to a space that has been
designed, stylised or even thematised? Is it a spatial quality conditioned by one’s perception? Does
atmosphere originate from material attributes inherent to interior finishes and décor? Is it simply the
dramatic effect resulting from skilful use of lighting and colour? Is atmosphere an immersive ambience?
How is atmosphere crafted? Does it have a critical edge, literally and theoretically?
Visually exciting and provocative, Interior Atmospheres combines contemporary projects and
interviews alongside analytical essays. Authors such as Rachel Carley, Ted Krueger, Malte Wagenfeld and
Hélène Frichot explore the distinctions between visible and invisible realms within architectural design.
The technological interface between design and atmosphere is tested through digital and creative
material works by Petra Blaisse, Kevin Klinger, Gregory Luhan, Andrew Kudless, Walter Niedermayr,
Kazuo Sejima and Ryue Nizhisawa, LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela, Joel Sanders and Karen Van
Legnen, Scott Gowans and Steve Wright and Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis Architects. Paul James, Mary Anne
Beecher and Lois Weinthal probe the physical limits of atmosphere in regard to site, 'the outside' and
interiority. Contributors and projects straddle the boundaries of design, art and architecture in order to
gain a fuller understanding of atmosphere’s elusive and pervasive presence.
Architectural Design
November/December 2007 Made in India

4 Guest-edited by
Kazi K Ashraf
ISBN-978 0470 03476 7
Profile No 190
Vol 77 No 6
C O N T E N T S

4
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All prices are subject to change The ‘Background’ in Bangalore:
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A Trip to India
Michael Sorkin
 4+
90 130+ 148+
BANGALORE ARCHITECTS Interior Eye McLean’s Nuggets
Mathew & Ghosh Architects Boston Institute Will McLean
Hundredhands of Contemporary Art
Chandavarkar and Thacker Jayne Merkel 150+
Mindspace (Sanjay Mohe) Userscape
InFORM Architects (Kiran Venkatesh) 134+ Sensible Objects for
Building Profile Digital Environments
110 Casa Kike, Costa Rica Valentina Croci
Sharifa’s House Jeremy Melvin
Dr Adnan Morshed 154+
138+ Unit Factor
114 Practice Profile Forming Climatic Change
This is Not a Building! DSDHA Steve Hardy and Werner Gaiser
Hand-Making a School in a Helen Castle
Bangladeshi Village 158+
Kazi K Ashraf 144+ Site Lines
Spiller’s Bits Gods Are in the Details:
118 Good-Natured Stuff The Ambika Temple at Jagat
SUBCONTINENTAL Neil Spiller Adam Hardy
PANORAMA
Kerry Hill Architects 146+
Piercy Conner Architects & Designers Yeang’s Eco-Files
Shatotto: Architecture for Green Living On Green Design (Part 2)
(Rafiq Azam) The Basic Premises
Ann Pendleton-Jullian for Green Design
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Tsunami Design Initiative (TDI)
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Editorial

‘A fairground of monsters and miracles, India-town is different from other boomtowns. Don’t be fooled by
the plethora of cranes and confuse it with China.’
Ramesh Biswas, ‘One Space, Many Worlds’, p 25

The current economic excitement over the Chino-India region has meant that India’s development has in
recent years been all too readily identified with that of China. The figures produced by analysts to describe
the ‘Chindia effect’ reflect this buzz; it has been projected that if the current growth persists in China and
India, by 2050 the two nations will account for roughly half of global output. Encompassing a third of the
world’s population, this greater Asian region has the potential of not only huge domestic markets, but also
cheap, highly skilled labour and governments that pursue capital-friendly policies. The impact of this will be
to effectively position the world at a tipping point in terms of economic and political power. When the full
realisation grew over India’s potency as an economic powerhouse, both as a nation and in the greater
context of Southeast Asia, two or three years ago, like any other editor my antennae were out. My
motivations for wanting to commission an issue of AD dedicated to the subject were admittedly, in the first
instance, simplistic. I was in no doubt that the confluence of a booming economy, globalisation and a rich
cultural tradition – both historic and modern – rendered it fertile territory. The potential of a publication that
could deal with contemporary architecture with acumen and insight – beyond the current treatments of
China – only transpired when I saw Kazi Ashraf present the subject of current Indian culture and
transnationalism at the Architectural League in New York for the launch of Sara Caples’ and Everardo
Jefferson’s issue The New Mix: Culturally Dynamic Architecture, for which Ashraf was a contributor.
Ashraf has configured an issue that is able to deal with all the complexities and contradictions of India and
the greater subcontinent: a region that is experiencing unprecedented prosperity, while much of its
population remains stuck in a cycle of destitute poverty; it is an uneven urban landscape of decay and
opulence, slum dwelling and emerging middle-class townships of pastiche mansions. While the majority of
the population are embracing new technologies with alacrity, the new media is also effectively heightening
anxiety and awakening superstitious beliefs; as a nation, India has for the past 60 years often been defining
itself through its break with its colonial past, but with globalisation could, in Sunil Khilnani’s words, be in
danger of losing its ‘self-understanding’ in terms of its culture and architecture. According to Ashraf, India is
a nation of ‘messy cities’, ‘transmogrificatiton’ and ‘blanketing landscapes’. Through a set of fascinating
critical essays, Ashraf and his contributors adeptly define the many layers and simultaneous developments of
a nation and its greater region. Threaded through this in contraposto is the work of some 25 architectural
practices who are designing buildings for India from at home and abroad. Diverse in approach, style, type
and context, they are in a sense the material evidence of the shifting, multilayered landscape of India in the
present and the future. 4
Helen Castle

Rahul Mehrotra Associates, Rural Campus for Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Tuljapur, Maharashtra, 2004
Maintaining a small practice in Mumbai, while also teaching internationally, Mehrotra focuses on culturally specific design
solutions, such as this one for a rural campus that is clustered around internal courtyards. These sheltered spaces
respond to the local climate while also encouraging social interaction between students.

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Image © RMA, photo Rajesh Vora

5
Introduction

Raga India
Architecture in the Time of Euphoria
As India celebrates the 60th anniversary of its independence, guest-editor Kazi K Ashraf
introduces this special title of AD by holding up a barometer to the nation’s cultural identity.
Can architecture be best understood through a local sense of place or globalisation? What
are the driving impulses behind India’s chaotic urban landscape that is simultaneously
‘messy’ and utopian? Can Indian culture be best understood as a national entity or through a
more elusive subcontinental substance?

6
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The Pickle Factory
In a setting of an allegorical pickle factory – the pickle or
chutney is a virulent Postmodern trope and decisively Indian –
Saleem Sinai churns another story of national and
autobiographical destiny in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children. Rushdie’s alter ego both refigures the present and
prefigures the upcoming India in clairvoyant pickle jars. There
are 30 bottles on the factory shelf. Twenty-nine bottles are
full, and each one makes up each chapter/episode of the
tumultuous and fabulous history of India after its
independence in 1947. The thirtieth bottle is empty, waiting
to be filled and written in. What will the next vessel contain?

Vritra’s Ghost
The Husain-Doshi Gufa in Ahmedabad, which houses the work
of the irrepressible artist MF Husain, was built in 1994 as a
collaborative project between the artist and the architect
Balkrishna Doshi. The undulating structure of the Gufa, dug
cave-like into the earth, blurring the edge of building and
landscape, has the unmistakable physiognomy of a terrestrial
creature with its vertebras, ligaments and eyes (Husain also
painted a black serpent on the wall). The Gufa is also Doshi’s
counter-homage to Corbusier’s paean to the right-angle. With
every square foot, including the floor and columns, warping
every other way and without a horizontal plane of repose, the
Gufa is a perceptual tour de force. It marks a departure from
the rational, technocratic modality represented by crystalline
and cubic forms, upraised in the sun, towards reviving
suppressed depths of the unconscious, as it were.
Vritra lay very dead, and not unlike Vastupurusa upon
whose dismembered body a new episode and edifice might
rise.1 Vritra, a terrestrial dragon, held on to the waters of the
Balkrishna Doshi, Husain-Doshi Gufa, Ahmedabad, 1994
world, as the story goes, until the celestial and luminous Terrestrial architecture and fabulous mythologies.
Indra (‘smasher of enclosures’) arrived to destroy the 99
fortresses of Vritra, kill the dragon, and release imprisoned
rivers. On the destroyed ramparts and ligaments of a telluric collective will – except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a
structure arose a brave, new world. And in Ahmedabad, in a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi,
resurrected moment, a contrapuntal architecture arises Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and
uncannily from the ground, coinciding with India’s increasing renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood. India, the new
embrace of the fabulous and metarational. myth – a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable
rivaled only by two other mighty fantasies: money and God.
From Raga to Ragas — Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 19802
August in Bombay: a month of festivals, the month of Krishna’s
birthday and Coconut Day; and this year – fourteen hours to go, The pan-Indian edifice for whose mythical soul a French-Swiss
thirteen, twelve – there was an extra festival on the calendar, a new architect wrote an urban epic at the foothills of the
myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed Himalayas, and which ironically has now been usurped by a
was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, (Hindu) religious right, exhibits multiple fissures. The tryst
although it had five thousand years of history, although it had with destiny, as Nehru scheduled, gives way to a hundred
invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, trysts and a million destinies. Architects now hesitate to talk
was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country of an Indian value as debates rage between essentialist and
which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal differentiated positions. While a quasi-nationalist articulation

Surendran Nair, Auto da fe, 1996

‘It’s what you oughtn’t to do but you do anyway.’ The painting is part of Nair’s ‘Collected
Mythologies’, a body of work about belonging and dissent.

7
 and lush outdoor spaces for cavorting (no pulsating mob
either). In the film, Sundarnagar is depicted as a town in
India, but the reality is that the entire film was shot in New
Zealand. The Indian city of Sundarnagar may be fictive, but it
is depicted in a real place, and that place is elsewhere, and
that is the fixation in the Hindi filmic imagination: the
relentless flight towards elsewhere.
This flight is embedded and encoded in multiple realms,
from the ‘song-site’ numbers in Bollywood filmic
productions to new building configurations.4 This presents a
juxtaposition of the place here and now and a place
elsewhere, the messy city and a dream topography, where
the former is of a native and the latter of a transnational
provenance. The places from elsewhere in the song-sites,
which are real and actual, become fictive in the Hindi film
narrative because the places are not named, nor located with
precision; they are literally framed to be ‘foreign’, to be
elsewhere. What makes Mein Prem Ki Diwani Hoon striking is
that it takes the elsewhere of the song-site to the entire film.
The longing for elsewhere – or the desire to secede – is
The road to Gurgaon: the city in search of urbanism.
increasingly being embodied in new building configurations
that are radically altering the urban landscape.
was premised in most work until the late 1980s, architects, Despite the exhilarating lightness of arbitrariness, the
like Prem Chandavarkar in his essay in this issue of AD, relentless dissolution of geography and the adoption of
currently consider the palpability and specificity of places in mimicry as an economic policy (Meenakshi in Mangalore
lieu of a singular spatiality of the nation. A critical post- presenting herself as Monica to a housewife in Minneapolis),
nationalist practice now maintains a triple resistance – to many architects return to the intractable and redemptive
both Indianism and globalism – and at the same time does theme of place specificities. The critical question – whether it
not appear to be ‘backward’. is in this issue for Bijoy Jain in the humid swamps of Mumbai,
Prem Chandavarkar in a temperate and verdant Bangalore, or
Sundarnagar – A Place Called Elsewhere Rafiq Azam in the terracotta terrain of Dhaka – is still ‘where
Urbanism is the Achilles heel in the rush for euphoria. An is architecture’ and not so much ‘what is architecture’.
upsurge of houses, malls, IT campuses and condominiums
marks the architectural landscape in market-driven India, yet House Works
there is little attention to how the individual creations come Housing is out, houses are in. If one allows for some more
together as a social and spatial matrix among themselves and divine apparitions, gods are now in small structures, and in
with the existent. In his essay Ramesh Biswas writes that a their meticulous crafting, where the condensed poetics and
paradigmatic thinking in city-making is needed for this
unprecedented urban phenomenon, notwithstanding forms of
media, broadcast and cinematic urbanism. The urban utopia
of Chandigarh that was criticised for its alienating features
has been superseded by a greater phantasmagoria – of a
Gurgaon in Delhi or Hirandani in Mumbai, which are at best
exclusive places in relation to the larger context, or, more
questionably, in Gayatri Spivak’s rephrasing of global capital
behaviour, ‘secessionist’.3
Popular Hindi films provide a vicarious view of this new
translocation. The setting of the 2003 film Mein Prem Ki Diwani
Hoon is a fictional town called Sundarnagar, or ‘the city
beautiful’. It is a place of bourgeois opulence, of resplendent
houses populated by patriarchs and purveyors of tradition.
The lawns to the houses are wide, and the driveways regal,
while the riot-free, languorous town harbours manicured
parks (obviously water supply is not a problem), quaint
telephone booths (no sign of the ubiquitous ISD-NSW-Local), The new battleground.

8
Hafeez Contractor, Proposed Software Development Centre, 2005
Fabulous forms and phantasmagoric visions.

tectonics negotiate the pendulum of the inevitable here-ness Reincarnating Types

and the tantalising elsewhere. Since the 1960s, housing (and Rahul Mehrotra’s Orchard House outside Ahmedabad recalls
other public projects) was a major domain of the Indian both the courtyard paradigm of hot-dry climates and a
architectural enterprise that reflected a communitarian reactive interiority that may stem from the raucous urbanism
concern of the post-Corbusian/Nehruvian period. The of Indian cities (Mehrotra explains that his architectural
emerging economy and radical shift in the lives of the middle vocabulary hinges on the reading of his city of practice,
classes have now opened up new desires for articulating the Mumbai). While courtyard houses are by nature exclusionary
house. The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk writes that the way (socially and visually), the redemption is in the itinerary, in
to understand the people who have been part of the the arrival and passage through the various articulated
astounding expansion of the middle classes of India and China thresholds articulated by walls into the ecstatic focus of the
is to see their private lives reflected in novels.5 In India, a vast house: the open-to-sky court.
part of that transformational imaginary is being narrated The obverse of that model is the pavilion where the inner
through the house, from opulent havelis (private residences) court gives way to a canopy, and the predominantly solid wall
and fictive ‘farmhouses’, to the elegant constructions of Bijoy dematerialises into perforations, membranes, lattices and jails
Jain, Rahul Mehrotra and others, and the delectably delirious (perforated screens). Much of the architecture of Bijoy Jain
propositions of Michael Sorkin. (Studio Mumbai Architects) is a delightful celebration of the
The dialogical continuum of house/home with the world is pavilion, approximating the Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey
being refashioned according to the emergent ‘secessionist’ Bawa’s consideration of the house-as-a-garden in the hot-
tendency to Home versus World. It is also in the context humid milieu. Whether in tactile-rich wooden slats, or a
where the public building recedes in the social horizon, on diaphanous luminous screen, Jain’s architecture amplifies the
the one hand, and unprecedented atomisation proliferates phenomenal and spatial continuum between the house and
socially on the other, that house/home is now a major site of landscape in a moisture-saturated environment. However,
the architectural exegesis in India. Whether it is merely such singular typologies are not always possible as one
another object in the consumerist cosmos (KK Birla of the confronts inevitable complexities, either programmatic or
famous industrialist family points out that what was once a urban. Samira Rathod, in her Mariwala House, creates a
symbol of attainment, the brick house, shifted first to the horizontal symphony of disparate pieces that are tactile,
motor scooter and now to the car),6 and whether it retains colourful and voluble. Mathew & Ghosh, for their studio and
the gravitas of dwelling, remains unclear, but the projects residence on a small site in Bangalore, produce a compacted
presented in this issue return to the house as an embodiment bricolage of diverse pieces as an urban essay. In their attempt
of situation and materiality. to reconfigure the contemporary urban box, in a context

9
 dusty, monotyped pamphlet on Gandhi’s house. Written in
1978, as an ethical and sociological explanation of the
emblematic bapukuti (Gandhi’s own house in the ashram), the
pamphlet predicted the challenges of the coming decades,
the onrush of accumulation and consumption in a ‘shining
and incredible’ India. Both Nehru and Gandhi represented
Modernist self-reflectivity, but while Nehru professed what
was then an internationalist position, Gandhi appeared
parochially nationalist. The matter has reversed now. If Nehru
is the Modernist of the now much discredited industrial-
socialist makeover, Gandhi’s experiments with himself align
with the radical Modernist project of transfiguration: through
the ascetic body in the minimalist space. I see Gandhi sitting
on the floor of the Farnsworth House, and being quite at
Sanjay Puri Architects, Silver jewellery mall and office tower,
Vashi, Mumbai, 2008 home behind the large plate-glass walls. The once national is
A spectacular presence. now the irrefutable international, but in his own ashram he
is ironically absent.
where a purity or unity is no longer possible, the architectural Following Illich’s prognosis, an accelerated consumerism
body is composed of fragmentations and a patchwork of proceeds at warp speed (pun intended) throwing caution to
memories and events. Rafiq Azam, in Dhaka, rearranges the the wind and revelling in a febrile architectural outpour India
conventional location of building, garden and landscape, and has never seen. What to make of this all?
in doing so boldly devises a house of landscape layers even
within the city. Many of these works share a material and
expressive language with a trans-Asian tropical modernity.
A transformation is also happening where architects fear
to tread – rural houses or dwellings for the economically
disadvantaged, both of which constitute a significant figure
in South Asia. For his contribution to this issue of AD,
Adnan Morshed, in a sort of subaltern narrative, traces the
anthropological metamorphosis of rural dwellings touched
by the Grameen Bank housing programme, and argues that
a quiet revolution is happening to these ‘timeless’ villages,
something that needs to be incorporated into the story of
Indian and South Asian architecture, especially as the axis
of contention in the new economy is increasingly between
the city and village.
Studio Mumbai Architects, Jamshyd Sethna House, Mumbai, 2007
Gandhi in Exile The landscape and an architecture of the pavilion.
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to
it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our
music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our
sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories
that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
— Arundhati Roy, 20037

Our architecture? I was not wholly surprised on a visit a year

ago to see Gandhi’s ashram in Wardha (Nagpur) rather
desolate like a residue of an abandoned village. A few
Japanese tourists sat down for a lesson in the charka (spinning
wheel), while giggling couples from the neighbouring areas
roamed the yards in oblivious frivolity. If the charka is an
emblem of sustainability – and Gandhi is to be credited for
Nuru Karim, ‘Charkha’: Celebrating Mahatma Gandhi's Philosophy of the
that much fashionable architectural term now – it is now as
Spinning Wheel, Pune, India, projected 2008
alien as Buddha’s dharma-chakra (the wheel of law). I was more Spinning the Wheel competition-winning entry for an Architectural Symbol for
surprised to find the name of the venerable Ivan Illich on a Contemporary India.

10
 giant squid is finally pinned to the ground, all tentacles
flailing, one realises it is not a multitentacled squid after all,
but a hydra-headed creature.
With the task of mapping contemporary architecture, I
wanted to see what analogy could be drawn from literary
anthologies. Among various anthologies of the vibrant literary
outpouring of India,9 that edited by Adil Jussawalla, a very
early collection (1974), is particularly prescient. Jussawalla
opens the volume with an excerpt from Qurratulain Hyder’s
reflection on statelessness from her transhistorical fiction The
River of Fire.10 While a Himalayan view of India is always a
dubious project, Hyder’s River speaks of the ‘Indian’ state of
Samira Rathod, My House, Alibag, Maharashtra, 2005
Weathering the house: an artificial sheath of rain that can be turned on to mind that overflows the imperviousness of new nation-states.
create a cooler microclimate. Within an effluent history, it charts the cultural fluidity,
geographic porosity and transnational mobility that describe
the South Asian meta-national matrix.
Is the vitality in literature matched in architecture? As this
issue will show, there is certainly a definitive inauguration of
new latitudes and energies in Indian and subcontinental
architecture. The enigmatic empty jar of Saleem/Salman that
portended an archaeology of the future is now and here. And
if that bottle were filled, would it look like the present issue of
AD, a raga of indelible vitality? 4

Notes
1. In an idea where ritualised death is conflated with the production of the
mandala, Vastupurusa is an undefined being who was seized by the gods and
pinned down to the earth, and whose dismembered body was distributed
across the gridded mandala before building and habitation could begin. Vritra
is mentioned in ancient Vedic texts as a terrestrial creature who controls the
waters and must be annihilated – in this case by the celestial Indra – before a
proper socialised beginning. Both myths perhaps circulate the prehistoric
subjugation of terrestrial and locational symbolism by the predominantly
celestial and abstract Vedic ideology.
2. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, Penguin Group (New York), 1980.
3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘City, Country, Agency’, presented at the
conference ‘Theatres of Decolonization’, Chandigarh, 1995. Spivak was
referring to a statement on the nature of electronic capitalism by the US
Secretary of Labor.
4. The ‘song-site’ is a literal space of the exotic and faraway in popular Indian
filmic imagination that weaves music, dance, couture, urban and landscape
imagery into a phantasmagoria of dreams and desires.
5. Orhan Pamuk in an interview with Alexander Star in The New York Times,
Looking at the subcontinent: a Himalayan view. 15 August 2004.
6. Dr KK Birla, ‘India 2020’, Hindustan Times, 9 May 2007.
7. Arundhati Roy, from her address at the 2003 World Social Forum, Porto
Anthologising India Allegre, Brazil.
India is a giant squid that every now and then must be 8. Bajrang Dal activists vandalised the Gufa in 1998 over MF Husain’s artwork
in what appears to continue up to now as the Hindu religious right’s policing
wrestled to the ground in order to make sense of it. And in of art and cultural production.
the melee, one tentacle does not know what the others are 9. I especially mention Salman Rushdie, Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian
doing. Is India poised for an economic lift-off the likes of Writing, Vintage (London), 1997; Amit Chaudhuri, Picador Book of Modern
which has not been witnessed before, or is it perched on the Indian Literature, Picador (London), 2001; and The Granta Book of India,
London and New York, 2004.
precipice of an urban and ecological cataclysm? Is India about 10. Adil J Jussawalla, New Writings in India, Penguin (Harmondsworth), 1974.
the irrefutable phantasmagoria of Bollywood or the timeless Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire was first published as Aag Ka Dariya in 1957.
poise of a Bharatnatyam? Is the Indian an argumentative one
or a meditative one? Is India about the conciliatory Gufa of Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 6 © Surendran Nair, photo
Himanshu Pahad; p 7 © Vastu Shilpa Consultants, photo John Panifer; p 8(t)
Doshi and Husain, or the virulence of the religious activists
© Kazi Ashraf; p 8(b) © Mayank Bhatnagar, www.graphicreflections.org; p 9 ©
who vandalised it?8 Is India in the end really about India itself, Architect Hafeez Contractor; p 10(t) © Sanjay Puri Architects; p 10(c) ©
as understood by notions of nations, or the much more fluid, Courtesy of Studio Mumbai Architects; p 10(b) © Nuru B Karim; p 11(t) ©
elusive and yet definitive subcontinental substance? When the SRDA, photo David D’Souza; p 11(b) HIMAL SOUTHASIAN, www.himalmag.com

11
The India Project
While pockets of India are now approaching the living standards of
Switzerland, other regions are debilitated by a level of poverty that is akin to
that of Zimbabwe. Sunil Khilnani asks what remains of the universalist
project of India’s political founders. Has architecture, in the rush for market
and economic success, lost its self-understanding?

A landscape of frenetic changes.

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