LITMIR.BIZ

      Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya, Sabarmati Ashram

      Introduction

      This book would never have come into existence without architect Luis Martinez of the Caja Architectura in Madrid. About three years ago I received a letter from Martinez, requesting permission to publish a Spanish edition of some of my essays which had appeared in various journals over the last many years. I was surprised—and flattered—because no one, myself included, had ever thought of compiling these haphazard and epithermal writings into a cohesive book. There was a certain amount of correspondence, back and forth, about the choice of essays, the order of their presentation, and so forth—and then about a year ago, there arrived on my desk a volume entitled Un lugar a la sombra. Elegant, austere, minimalist—it was something that only the Spanish could produce.

      This book is really an extension of Martinez’s volume, with more essays included. Also added (in the last section), is the re-publication of a primer on the urbanization process that is changing our nation so swiftly—and so irrevocably. Written twenty-five years ago, and translated into Russian, Arabic and Chinese, it has been out of print for more than two decades now. The whole collection is entitled A Place in the Shade—a marvellously appropriate comment made by my friend Sherban Cantacuzino (quoted in the essay, ‘A Place in the Sun’).

      The essays in this book cover a great many topics—because you cannot look at cities without wandering into architecture on the one hand and politics on the other. And you certainly can’t look at architecture without also encountering other areas as diverse as music and landscape and films and toy trains. And so these essays of necessity cover a considerable range, from the 19th century engineer Isambard Brunel to reflections on the ideal city, to Mahatma Gandhi and Ayodhya. And, of course, to the crucial role of the public and the private, the mythic and the sacred realms—which generate the habitat in which we live. As Churchill, not one of my heroes, once said, with devastating insight: ‘We shape our buildings . . . and then our buildings shape us.’ So throughout this collection of essays, the essentially pluralistic and life-accepting qualities of India surface time and again, qualities that have always been so basic to Hindu and Buddhist thought. And this is where the phrase ‘A Place in the Shade’ resonates again. For it evokes the shade of a great banyan tree, which stretches out to protect and nurture the endless diversity of India—an image that Howard Hodgkin brilliantly expressed in the mural he created for the British Council building in Delhi. As he said: ‘I want to give back to India at least a little bit of all she has given me.’

      There are some other issues that may need explanation. This collection of essays and lectures, which cover a period of fifty years, have been intentionally left undated—so that they can be read as though they were written today. If they cannot stand that test, then they should not be considered for re-publication. (The actual dates and occasions of the lectures, and the names of the journals, are listed at the end of the book.)

      Then again, there is a certain amount of redundancy of thought in some parts of these essays. Rather than iron these out, the editors feel they should be allowed to remain—since insights and ideas are like building blocks that the human mind assembles in different trains of thought to arrive at different destinations. The fact that the same building block can exist in two different sequences, reinforces its validity—or so they feel. What also became palpable, as we started assembling the various pieces together, was the unexpected continuity of ideas and concerns that went all the way back to ‘The New Landscape’—first published twenty-five years ago. So several of the problems discussed in the chapter ‘Political Will’ are still around (in a far more intense form, unfortunately) in the Tehelka interview ‘Managing Our Cities’. This is because in the intervening years nothing essential in the management of our towns and cities has been accomplished—for example‚ accountability, corruption, citizen feedback and so forth. In fact, the deteriorating situation of our urban centres is cause for the gravest concern.

      Before I close, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the many people who helped this book come into being. First to Hatje Cantz Berlin, and in particular to its Director Cristina Steingräber, for her enthusiastic res­ponse to this venture; and to her colleagues Julika Zimmermann and Julia Günther, who supervised the design and production of the book. A big thank-you also to Nondita Mehrotra, for her invaluable advice and unstinted support—and also to those in my office who helped put it all together: in particular, Rohan Varma, Dhaval Malesha, Kanika Jamdar, and Vinita Gatne. Without their valiant efforts, this book would not have come into existence.

      Architecture

      Hornby Trains, Chinese Gardens and Architecture

      I think I became an architect because of toy trains. As a child, I had a Hornby tinplate track and a couple of locomotives and wagons. Nothing very ambitious, really just enough to run the trains around your room, and the following day, perhaps change the layout so that they could run into the next room, under a table and back again. That was the marvellous thing about those old tinplate rails. They had flexibility. Every time one finished playing, back they went into their wooden box—to be reincarnated the next day in a totally new formation.

      Ah, to have more rails—and more trains! But since World War II was on, there was no way my layout could possibly have been augmented. All I did have was catalogues (the legendary Hornby Book of Trains, Basset-Lowke’s Model Railways and so forth) which I would pore over. I drew out on graph paper the most elaborate layouts: straight rails, curved ones, sidings, cross-overs, the works. Trains moved through tunnels, stations, overbridges in one direction and then, through cunningly placed figure eights, came right back through the same stations and tunnels—but now in the other direction, setting up a brand new sequence!

      That’s how I spent many of my classroom hours: drawing up these hypothetical layouts in exercise books. Years later, at the age of fifteen or so, coming across an architectural journal for the first time, I felt I could read the various plans and sections—and what they were trying to do. That much I owe to Hornby.

      Cut to many more years later. As a young architect, I’m perplexed by the contrary attitudes of two quite different thought processes. The first produces architecture which has very strong conceptual ideas—but on which you do not really linger beyond the first five minutes. An example might be Eero Saarinen’s three-pointed dome at MIT—a very elegant creation, but also perhaps something you might feel you have digested in one scanning. On the other hand, there is another kind of process which does not involve any holistic schema at all. Many buildings (and most interiors) are designed this way. They present you with a series of spellbinding effects, one after another, perhaps without any real inter-relationship—except, of course, that one set-piece follows the previous one in a knockout sequence, rather like the way Gone With the Wind is structured around a series of unforgettable scenes. Or like the stories of Scheherazade. Once the sequence starts, you’re hooked—but can this ever provide a legitimate basis for serious architecture? Can such arbitrary and episodic narrative ever express the control, the rigour, the discipline, so fundamental to holistic thought?

      Fragile scenographic effects

      Jump-cut again, to China. Before I visited my first

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