Letters To A Young Architect Read online

  tools, which we share in common with all architectural professionals; and

  interests, which we profess and which distinguish us from all other professionals.

  It is out of the latter, or out of the shared interest with the common man and our commitment to basic human rights that we will form our political ties. This distinguishes us from the technocrat who, committed only to his tools and techniques, can theoretically work for any master. Within the New Architecture we must also beware of individual power wielded at the expense of the interests or unanimity of the larger group. The New Architecture should not be hijacked and held to ransom by individuals whose style, approach and goals do not conform to the majority interests of the profession as a whole, or who use the language of revolution as a tool for acquiring personal dominance.

  (Article published in ‘Akshara’, October 1980)

  Letter

  The Design of Design

  We are all gathered here today by a common devotion to something called design. For each of us it may have a different meaning, but for all of us it is a ‘process through which something is achieved.’ We may think of ‘a design’ as an object like the Coca Cola bottle, or the Sony Walkman, or as a beautiful interior space. But the iconic designs which come to our minds are the outcomes of a design process. We are all involved in this process.

  All of my friends sitting here are ‘designers’, be they industrial designers, architects, interior designers or artists. Each, in their own way, is a master of a unique design process. Design to me is a method to achieve an end result, whether it is creating the Tata logo, conceiving of a reading lamp, or rolling out a new automobile. The process starts with a vague image of what is needed and desired. It involves defining performance criteria and applying legal standards, creating optional solutions, and evaluating options against performance criteria. Then we create and refine prototypes before rolling out the final product. Reasoning, criticism, logic, questioning, simplicity and analysis are all fundamental to the design process. Limited resources – whether in the form of finances, human effort, or time-temper the process. The best designs often emerge when the defining resources are constrained; hence our attraction for tribal art, handicrafts, and the rustic architecture of villages.

  Designs may range from the plan of a city, the design of a neighborhood, the layout of a public space, the design of a building to designs for lighting buildings and open spaces, designs of household goods and of small artifacts. They include the lighting of an entire road network or that of a small apartment...

  As designers, we work as the catalysts of complex interest groups and stakeholders who will manufacture, use and judge these designed artifacts, whether large or small. Designers of entire cities, or an aspect like the systems that light them, work on timelines, following sequences of planned events, design criteria, performance standards, testing options, evaluation, and defined outputs, and they employ modulated processes to achieve results that match specifications.

  Design has emerged as a necessity. Thirty years ago designers were viewed as frivolous artists, churning out fanciful ideas. Indian products were poor imitations of foreign designs from another thirty years before. The term ‘lighting design’ would then have sounded exotic if not weird.

  Today a product will not sell – it will in fact flop – unless it is well designed. A city will be ugly and will not function unless it is carefully designed. The lives of its inhabitants will be miserable, frustrating and empty in the absence of design. This is the challenge we face in India. Our role has to expand from fanciful, lyrical stunts to the epic stage of social and economic transformation.

  Industrialization has made it possible to bring thousands of daily use items within the reach of the average citizen. Things which were unaffordable when made by hand dropped in price when churned out in the thousands. Rustic oil lamps were difficult to maintain, awkward to operate and unsafe to handle, while modern lighting is inexpensive, safe and accessible to all. We have moved from the design of crafted objects to the creation of entire technological systems that have interdependent design elements and components, right from the energy source, energy distribution, marketing and bill collection, to the electrical fitting, the luminaire, the type of bulb, and the space being enhanced, and all made functional by light. Object design is simple; systems design is complex. If one part of the system is missing, the entire interconnected framework may collapse. There is no sense inventing the radio without a broadcasting station, and one radio receiver will not support a station. So, thousands of radios must be mass-produced to sustain a broadcasting system. Unless advertisements are designed for broadcast from these stations, there will be no revenue to support mass media. The culture of objects has given way to the culture of systems.

  Early in the 20th century the marriage between art and industry occurred through the German Werkbund movement, evolving into the Bauhaus and maturing into what is often referred to as industrial design. One of my gurus, Walter Gropius, brought this movement to America when he took over at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The ‘Bauhaus Approach’ formed the basis of teaching at the National Institute of Design in India and permeates all basic design courses, be they in fashion, interiors or architecture.

  However, industrialization has also uprooted and moved millions of people from their traditional occupations and habitats, bringing them into alien urban environments. The shift of jobs from rural production to industry has triggered a mass migration for which there was no design. It was chaos resulting in squalor. The results are unhealthy and inhuman. Design has not failed; it has been ignored.

  We must create the scenarios where design can play a crucial role in uplifting the human condition. Design is the organizer that harmonizes thoughtless machines and raw materials to produce functional and beautiful artifacts. Design when wisely employed enhances the quality of people’s lives. Our collective interest as designers is how we can create scenarios where design can profoundly impact the quality of life of average people.

  Around the dawn of the 20th century business leaders in Chicago and San Francisco understood that there were no adequate city plans that would create order in urban life. In Chicago the railcar maker, Pullman, built a model town for his factory and his workers. The city’s industrialists and traders floated a competition for the city’s new plan. Within a decade the city came onto the world map as a good place to do business. Good design branded the city as a ‘must see’ destination in the world. By the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘Chicago School’ of architecture was synonymous with modernity and progress.

  Design was an engine that drove an epic narrative. Design began to tell a story about the new life and the good life. Design created the futuristic image that inspired and catalyzed nations. Design created icons of ‘what can be,’ and then created the defining cultural artifacts of modern civilization. Design was integral to the process of urbanization and industrialization. An experiment in one city became the prototype for a dozen more, and then it became standard practice. This is what I mean by epic design, as opposed to effete or even lyrical design. Small ideas and little designs tempered taste makers, and then became the big story of life.

  Too often designers focus on ‘the pretty,’ the ‘clever’, the ‘cute’ and the ‘luxurious’. They start getting drawn into a partnership to promote conspicuous consumption and consumerism. They worry over what will sell and what is fashionable. By the time they do it, the fashion has turned stale and they are part of an outdated style. The glitzy small ideas, the fashions of a season and the gift wrappings all hide the underlying truth that needs to be revealed. Each designer seeks attention; they become obscene and obnoxious just to gain notoriety, like a loud and demanding baby yelling and screaming, instead of an anonymous worker creating for the betterment of society. The result of such behavior is effetism and this little effet
e narrative, this tiny irrelevant story, begins to eat at the roots of the larger narrative. Design must get out of tinsel town, leave romanticism to Bollywood and shun the virtual reality of Hollywood. We need to recapture the Modernist mission, and focus on bringing ‘the good life’ to the masses. To this end we must employ appropriate technology.

  Design today has become mundane and banal; frivolous and effete. It is playing on cheap emotions, like being the tallest, the largest, or the most stupid! Bright colors, reflective metals and using a surfeit of materials get crass attention. This is what I see in architecture, interior design, and in product design today. We must defy this.

  I recently visited the Spanish town of Granada, where centuries of a city making tradition and effective urban design have tempered the inhabitants’ lifestyles for the better. The key to their success lies in the design fabric of separate templates for pedestrians and vehicles. People rarely walk across polluted and dangerous streets. They move down covered arcades, through human scale plazas, within pleasant gardens, past proportioned statues and harmonious fountains. One minute they are in luminous natural daylight; the next they disappear into dark shadows. Historic buildings are aligned along the visual axes of pathways. There are outdoor cafés and places for children to play and the elderly to sit. Shadows play through the glittering rustle of leaves of protective trees. Youngsters flirt and laugh everywhere. As the sun sets, calm light sets in the foliage creating a soft and romantic ambience. At each corner one is greeted by a pleasant, unexpected new experience.

  Collectively it is our challenge to bring the benefits of good design to more and more people. To do this we must take on ever more complex challenges like the design of our cities, urban precincts, riverfronts, open spaces and affordable shelter. One of the simplest interventions in the urban scenario is the creation of appropriate public lighting for roads, footpaths, public gardens, statues and iconic structures.

  City governments do not have the intellectual resources to make such plans, nor the vision to foresee dramatic changes. Urban planning legislation stifles any qualitative improvement of cities, forcing them into a step-by-step, knee-jerk method of identifying little projects arbitrarily lumped together and called a Development Plan. There is no design in all of this, just scheming and adjusting.

  India’s designers, industrialists, business people and professionals need to engage with its urban scenario. But this should not be a cabaret where we hold useless meetings and ‘do-good’ seminars, just to watch each other dance and sing the praises of what we neither have nor can achieve. We need to study statutory barriers as well as plan options and work on a multi-level platform between policy, programs, projects and people. Our cities and metropolitan regions remain among the few mega-habitats in the world without even the gesture of designed urban environments. There is no opportunity for designers to play a role. What are we waiting for? Let us create that opportunity!

  We must apply design logic, design processes, design techniques and design methods to the creation of artifacts that impinge on more and more people. We must employ design logic to correcting the environmental disaster facing us. We must employ design methods to create access to shelter for the poor. As designers, we can even create urban lighting scenarios for streets, footpaths and public spaces. We can do this!

  Before our eyes we have seen the Mumbai-Pune Expressway emerge. We have seen the Hussein Sagar Lake transform from a polluted cesspool into a beautiful urban precinct of public domains. We have seen a dirty nalla in New Delhi transform into the Dilli haat. The landscape designer Ravi Bhan transformed a neglected drainage catchment in Ayodhya into a beautiful riverfront experience. A private developer, Harsh Neotia, in Kolkata turned a virtual garbage heap into a charming center for the arts called Swabhumi. In Pune’s Koregaon Park a dirty nalla was transformed into the wonderful Osho Park. The examples of what we have achieved through design in India, and through private-public-designer partnerships, is endless.

  In Pune, I remember the wonderful fountains which came up all over the city before the National Games in the early 1990s. TAIN Square has created public space for its neighborhood where everyone else is building right up to the road setback line. We are trying to create a youth plaza in the College of Engineering, linking the severed halves of a historic campus, over the national highway, cutting through and connecting them to the riverfront.

  Why do we feel amazed when we stroll down the boulevards of Paris, stretch out on the green lawns of its gardens, and sip coffee at its sidewalk cafés? We feel amazed because we are a deprived lot. We are starved of the most basic human joys of life in a civilized city. We are hungry just to sit with a friend and sip tea in a cozy outdoor café.

  We must rethink design; we must reconsider the role of design; we must redesign design!

  Good design brings a better life to everyone. Good design is good business. If we want to do good things, we can do anything. Design is a process followed to reach our dreams. What are we waiting for? Let us design a better future!

  (Keynote address at the India Design Summit, February 2009)

  Letter

  Language and Pattern:

  The Mahindra United World College of India

  The Mahindra United World College of India is nestled in the Sahyadri Mountains between Pune and Mumbai in western India. It employs an architectural language that was set in motion by the Alliance Française in Ahmedabad (1974) and in the Bhanuben Parekh House in Bhavnagar (1972). The SOS Children’s villages at Bawana, outside New Delhi (1976) and in Kolkata (1978) continued this line of thinking, which permeates the Centre for Development Studies and Activities. Thus, it is a language that grew and evolved over several decades.

  This unifying language is composed of several design principles, of which the most important is the expression of materials in their natural form. This and the use of human-scale systems of proportion are legacies from my childhood infatuation with Frank Lloyd Wright. Another influence is my penchant for integrating the interior with exterior spaces using sliding glass panels, verandahs, low sitting walls, ottas and terraces. Classrooms and courtyards flow into each other, employing the vast borrowed landscape as a template, generating an immediate landscape, fusing the composition into the site. Over the years, my work has been characterized by an elaborate vocabulary of motifs such as ottas, ramps, kund-like steps, window boxes, round columns and waterspouts. These, along with murals cast in the exposed concrete, bring anthropomorphic dimensions and expressions into the work.

  While the language and its slowly evolving vocabulary persist, I have rapidly changed my attitudes toward patterns and employed them in ever more radical manifestations. Starting with modular grids, moving to parallel lines, I later worked in angles and curves anchored in a strong language and design principles.

  Once, asked about my conservative views on architectural language in contrast to my radical use of patterns, I replied, “Architecture is a curious craft. A structure may follow all the laws of design and yet be worthless. Another may break all of the principles and be profound. A building may be bad without doing anything bad. I cannot say that I am right or I am wrong, but it could be that one needs to sin against art to reach perfection.” Somehow that statement has haunted me.

  It is the deployment of a formal language in terms of strict principles that makes it possible for a large team to work in unison. An analysis of the Mahindra College reveals that totally new forms and patterns have emerged out of a gradually evolving language - the Art, Administrative and Student Centers being the most avant-garde. While they are part of the fabric, they are very particularistic statements. They speak the same language, yet they form their own unique poetry.

  The Mahindra College campus is a counterblast to the fashion in contemporary campus planning, wherein each building sits by itself on its own isolated little plot screaming for attention. T
his trend is at once silly and boring. On the other hand I worry over the inane uniformity of generalized mega-structures. I feel one must seek a balance between entrapment in an endless monotony, and the Disney World of anal retentive screaming babies. Let me elaborate. When I move through a large metropolis, be it in India, Australia or America, I am numbed by the dull urban sprawl. Buildings are not really designed. They are conceived as ‘statutory drawings’, presented to a local body to gain permission and extract the maximum FSI. Can such an exercise ever be architecture? Never! Then, in this sea of ugliness, inanity and boredom, someone sticks their tongue out at you – ‘gives you the finger’ so to speak. They pull a stunt and do something really obnoxious in the name of being different. There is no order, poetry, harmony in the work, just an obnoxious insult. The habit of running nude in a stadium, called ‘streaking’, is a good equivalent. Showing one’s ass is considered by these people as clever, unique and even spectacular. The only thing one can say is that this kind of seven-second wonder, or event, is remembered for some time, but it does not go down in history. Such acts cannot be called a great step forward for mankind. On the contrary they are insults to considered and articulate thought, analysis and structuring. What we can get then is a mundane urban landscape, occasionally punctuated with an insult. There are appropriate times to take off one’s shoe and hurl it at a symbol of inhumanity; but one does not scare a city forever by building monuments to stupidity. This is why ‘language’ is so important.