Tacitly Urban
He dreams of morning walks, alone,
And floating on a wave of sand.
But still his mind its traffic turns
Away from beach and tree and stone
To kindred clamor close at hand.’
I always find myself devoting an inordinate amount of time to try and understand the identity of a new place. If you can manage to unearth the underlying factor beneath a people’s culture, ideology, or cuisine, you will invariably find the thread that binds us to our roots. The land we identify with runs fervent as a unifying element — from scales human to monumental.
Tangible testaments of place-making are a strong undercurrent to our sense of self — indeed our sense of community — through vagaries of history to uncertainties of the future. As architects, we find ourselves in the singular situation of not only conceiving and building habitats but also educating ourselves on the history, parlance, and ideals of a community. It is a solemn responsibility: layered with intangible nuance.
The filigree of old cities betrays a strength that relays itself wordlessly through what is left of them today. The morphological evolution of these heritage precincts belies an ingenuity that still astounds us. The very streets turn themselves over to accommodate functions diametrically opposite to their original identity, either embracing or succumbing to the change. At such pivot points, these cities need a visionary who can straddle the past, present, and future.
Architects who were sensitive to this were eager to attune to the pulse of each locale. I lived much of my adult life in three cities — New Delhi, Jaipur and Goa — and frequently shuttled between them over the years. Naturally, I have been doggedly trying to develop an intuitive understanding of their place-making. One such architect’s work, however, underwrites the unique, distinct identities of each of these cities. This rather unassuming man, Charles Correa, could astutely perceive each of his site’s requirements. He could intuitively extend it to the natives: how they would respond to change, whether it would be an effortless integration, would it enhance their contextual experience. One only needs to reminisce one’s experience of his buildings — Jawahar Kala Kendra, National Crafts Museum, British Council, Kala Academy, Cidade de Goa — to appreciate true contextual architecture.
Most cities are an intricate layering of historic events; what was once a meritless space would be differently rendered, decade by decade, with captivating splendor or functionality. Much of this fabric is under threat of butchering in the name of redevelopment and modernization. Many such legacies are heavily bleeding under the influence of the insensitive in power; most recently the (d)evolving situation at Central Vista. A few, like Chandni Chowk, have held on through sensitive revival initiatives. The Taj Ganj heritage precinct, too, is a heart-warming instance of intelligent intervention. Many, however, such as the Hall of Nations in New Delhi, have already succumbed to flagrant disregard, effectively extinct. They live on only in the memories of their experience, and a soon-to-be-obscure architectural pedagogy.
But sometimes, it takes the death of an archetype to bring it into the conversation.
It’s essential that anything we create — an idea, a built structure, a space for public interaction; intentional ones that we design and incidental ones that form by-the-by — becomes not only fully utilized and adopted by its demographic, but also manages to attain a rather fluid timelessness. All the better to negotiate a fickle, fluctuating modern world.
Being an architect is a derivative journey, navigable through an unlikely compounding of ideas, detrimental curiosity, a love for the irregular, the overlooked. It is hard not to be consumed with a blind sense of injustice and apathy over — to put it succinctly — all that could be but was not. Notwithstanding, to know that design can tacitly affect human behavior is impetus enough to draw a line and — as they say — watch it come to life.
Why do we do what we do? We do this to translate an abstract idea into a coherent solution — one that remains relevant, one that withstands the flux of time, ingrains into its enveloping fabric.
But mostly, for the thrill of it all.
