Tag Archive for 'architecture'

Mumbai: Great city, terrible place

Published on July 24, 2010 in Design, Economy and India. 0 Comments Tags: A Place in the Shade, architecture, Bombay, Calcutta, Charles Correa, Cities, Design, Mumbai, urbanisation.

In his new book, A Place in the Shade (Penguin India), renowned architect Charles Correa explains why, despite bad infrastructure, Mumbai gets better and better as a city. Excerpt from the book in Mint Lounge:

Perhaps we are paying too much attention to the physical and economic aspects of a city—and not enough to its mythical and metaphysical attributes. For a city can be beautiful as a physical habitat—trees, uncrowded roads, open spaces—and yet fail to provide that particular, ineffable quality of urbanity which we call: CITY.

We all know examples of this. Bombay, of course, illustrates the very opposite. Everyday it gets worse and worse as physical environment and yet better and better as city. That is to say, everyday it offers more in the way of skills, activities, opportunities at every level, from squatter to college student to entrepreneur to artist. The vitality of the theatre (and the evergrowing audiences), the range and talent of newspapers and magazines—there are a hundred indications emphasizing that impact (implosion!) of energy and people which really is a double-edged sword— destroying Bombay as environment, while intensifying its quality as city. More:

An enduring love affair with bamboo

Published on July 18, 2010 in Design. 0 Comments Tags: architecture, Bamboo, Colombia, India pavilion, Pradeep Sachdeva, Ramu Katakam, Shanghai Expo, Simon Velez.

The church set on a barren piece of land on the edge of a lake.

In Frontline, architect Ramu Katakam profiles Simon Velez, the Colombian who is inspiring Indian architects to use bamboo. Velez is the inspiration behind the design of the Indian pavilion at Shanghai Expo:

Simon Velez has been designing and making bamboo buildings in Colombia for the past 30 years. He discovered that he could build major structures with the indigenous bamboo called ‘guadua’ at much lower costs than with concrete and steel. He was the first to introduce large-span bridges (especially over motorways for pedestrians and cyclists to get across) made in bamboo, and has made a number of other interesting structures as well with the material.

Simon belongs to a wealthy old family that owns vast tracts of land and cattle and traces its ancestry to the Spanish invaders. Interestingly, unlike Mexico, the armies that invaded South America did not bring their women. Once they settled, they formed alliances with the local women, which ultimately resulted in a very attractive race. Every Colombian has Spanish and Inca blood in him/her.

Simon’s family was among those who preserved some of the Inca gold and helped create the now-famous gold museum in Bogota, where the remains of gold jewellery and artefacts of the Inca empires have been exhibited. More:

Traditional Nepali home

Published on April 4, 2010 in Heritage and Nepal. 0 Comments Tags: architecture, Houses, urbanisation.

From Nepali Times:

We are so conditioned to seeing the ugly as we drive by that we have no time to notice what is still beautiful. This row of houses on the ride from Tansen to Tamghas may soon be replaced by seven storey blocks with triangular turrets. But maybe not.

This was a manifestation of the traditional Nepali flair for the simple, harmonious and tasteful. The people who live here, mostly elderly parents of migrant workers or Gurkha veterans, have a common sense appreciation of what is good and wholesome about living in Nepal.

Myanmar’s colonial treasures threatened

Published on February 14, 2010 in Burma, Heritage and Travel. 0 Comments Tags: architecture, British architecture, Colonial buildings, Myanmar, Rangoon, Yangon.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Yangon: The colonial buildings of this once-grand city are scattered about like tombstones in a neglected cemetery—unnoticed, and often unwanted, relics of a lost era.

Yangon is home to one of the largest collections of undisturbed colonial architecture in the world, with some neighborhoods left almost exactly as they were when the country gained independence from Britain some 60 years ago. But the buildings, already crumbling after years of neglect under a repressive military regime, face an increasingly uncertain future.

A government decision to move Myanmar’s capital from Yangon to a remote redoubt named Naypyitaw in 2005 has left several of the most important buildings almost totally abandoned, accelerating their deterioration. Meantime, resurgent investment from China and other Asian neighbors is triggering interest in development—including the possibility of building shopping malls and apartment blocks where old structures now stand. More:

Style over subdivision

Published on October 22, 2009 in Design. 0 Comments Tags: Add new tag, architecture, Interior design, Raji Radhakrishnan.

In the Washington Post, a story on Virginia designer Raji Radhakrishnan:

Radhakrishnan, a 37-year-old designer, has remade the standard open-plan living area into something more modern. She has added architectural heft with thick plaster moldings, steel brackets plus upgraded hardware and fixtures in the bathrooms and kitchen.

She dumped the standard tile fireplace surround for one she created of perforated steel and added a faux finish to the plain wood mantel.

In the master bedroom, Radhakrishnan turned a photo she snapped at Versailles into a giant sepia mural that serves as a headboard. It picks up on a passion of her husband’s: Murali Narasimhan, a 40-year-old software entrepreneur, is a collector of first-edition books. “It has an old-world feel, sort of like a library,” he says.

Radhakrishnan’s life in design and arts unfolded dramatically. Born in southern India, she traveled as a young girl while performing classical Indian dance. Her father’s Indian foreign-service job took the family abroad. More:

My Architect — A Son’s Journey

Published on October 16, 2009 in Bangladesh and Design. 0 Comments Tags: architecture, Louis I. Kahn, Parliamentary Building of Bangladeh.

“Jatiyo Sangsad Bhaban” -- Parliamentary Building of Bangladeh or the National Assembly Building of Bangladesh, located in the capital Dhaka. The complex was created by architect Louis I. Kahn and is one of the largest legislative complexes in the world. The video clip is from the academy award nominee Documentary “My Architect — A Son’s Journey”.

Saving Punjab

Published on September 17, 2009 in India. 0 Comments Tags: architecture, Golden Temple, Heritage, Raghu Rai, Restoration.

Golden Temple, Amritsar, India. Image: Shashwat Nagpal / cc

A Sikh architect is helping to preserve cultural sites in the north Indian state. Geoffrey C. Ward in the Smithsonian:

My wife says I suffer from an “India problem.” She’s right. I lived in New Delhi as a teenager during the 1950s, came home to college at 18 and managed to stay away from India for a quarter of a century. But over the past 26 years I’ve been back more than 20 times, sometimes with a legitimate excuse-an assignment from one magazine or another-but mostly because I now can’t imagine life without a regular dose of the sights and sounds and smells I first knew as a boy, can’t bear not seeing the friends I’ve made there.

When the editors of Smithsonian asked me to pick a place I’d always wanted to see, it took about ten minutes to settle on Punjab, the north Indian state that was brutally halved between India and Pakistan after they won their independence from Britain in 1947. The Delhi I knew growing up-my father was stationed there, working for the Ford Foundation-had only recently been transformed into a largely Punjabi city by the influx of more than 400,000 Hindu and Sikh refugees, all of them haunted by bitter memories of the violence of Partition that had forced more than ten million people from their homes on both sides of the border and may have cost a million lives. Virtually everyone I knew had memories of Punjab. The tutor who struggled to teach me high-school math had stumbled across much of it on foot. His elderly mother, whose gently spiced samosas I can still taste, somehow made it, too. My two closest boyhood friends were Sikhs whose poultry farm on the outskirts of Old Delhi adjoined a sprawling tent city still crowded with Punjabis awaiting new homes seven years after they’d been forced from their old ones. More:

A monumental mistake

Published on July 4, 2009 in Design and India. 0 Comments Tags: Amrit Dhillon, architecture, B R Ambedkar, Dalit, Dalit leaders, dalit pride, Kanshi Ram, Mayawati, Mayawati memorials, Mayawati's statues.

Instead of building meaningless bronze and stone statues of herself and other Dalit leaders, Mayawati could have made the leap in imagination to commission a world-class memorial that could have put Lucknow on the world map, writes Amrit Dhillon in the Times of India.

Standing beside the dirty Gomti river in Lucknow, looking at the structures Mayawati on its bank in her quest for immortality, is enough to make you weep. Not over the hubris behind the self-aggrandisement. Nor over the idea of building memorials to honour Dalit leaders such as B R Ambedkar and Kanshi Ram. Nor even the colossal cost or the efforts of an army of poor workers labouring under a pitiless sun.

It is the way she has squandered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. With acres of land and billions of rupees at her disposal, this was Mayawati’s chance to go down in history as the woman who gave birth to a piece of architecture rivalling anything that has come up in the past 60 years. It was a chance to be bold and daring, to create something beautiful and unique. A chance to hold a nationwide competition of architects and order them to let their imaginations soar. The competition would have animated Lucknow residents. A lively debate would have ensued on what they desired for themselves and future generations. What did they want in the city? A stadium, a museum, a university, a hospital, a park or a monument?

Prince Charles declares Mumbai slum model for the world

Published on February 6, 2009 in India. 0 Comments Tags: architecture, Mumbai shanty town, Poverty, Slumdog Millionaire, Socially sustainable settlements.

From The Guardian:

The Mumbai shanty town featured in the film Slumdog Millionaire offers a better model than does western architecture for ways to house a booming urban population in the developing world, Prince Charles said yesterday.

Dharavi, a Mumbai slum where 600,000 residents are crammed into 520 acres, contains the attributes for environmentally and socially sustainable settlements for the world’s increasingly urban population, he said. The district’s use of local materials, its walkable neighbourhoods, and mix of employment and housing add up to “an underlying intuitive grammar of design that is totally absent from the faceless slab blocks that are still being built around the world to ‘warehouse’ the poor”.

Modernism’s monster

Published on November 26, 2008 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: architecture, Chandigarh, Le Corbusier: A Life, Urban design.

In the Washington Post, a review of Le Corbusier: A Life by Nicholas Fox Weber. Corbusier designed the city of Chandigarh.

In 1938, while visiting a new villa built by the Irish designer Eileen Gray, Le Corbusier was inspired to improve on her work. He admired the white-walled classicism and industrial finesse of the home, which was built in the spirit of his own domestic architecture. But he thought it needed a little something.

And so Le Corbusier stripped naked, took out his paint brushes and covered the house with large, sexually provocative images. “One of the murals was on the previously spare white wall behind the living-room sofa, so that what had been specified by Gray to be a point of visual respite was now an animated scenario,” writes Nicholas Fox Weber in his new biography, Le Corbusier: A Life. Gray, who admired Le Corbusier and was, like many architects, proprietary about her work, felt “raped” by the incident.

Chandigarh: The remaking of India’s model city

Published on October 31, 2008 in India. 0 Comments Tags: architecture, Design, Le Corbusier, Urban planning.

John Krich in the Wall Street Journal:

Now, though, Chandigarh’s very success threatens the original traits that gave it appeal. A fight for the model town’s soul has been sparked by a new population explosion driven by the country’s increasingly wealthy middle class, drawn here by the lifestyle. The city’s population is projected to double over the next decade or so to two million, four times the number Chandigarh was designed to house, bringing demands for showy office towers, shopping malls, mansions and highways. Those would hardly be in line with the contemplative landscaping and functional buildings meant as homage to the simplicity of India’s ancient way of life.

“Chandigarh is at a turning point,” declares Prof. Rajnish Wattas, principal of the city’s College of Architecture. “While this was conceived as a dream, a textbook for urban planning, even dreams are surrounded by socioeconomic conditions. Cities can’t be museum pieces kept in a glass box.”

Today, there’s increasing talk of raising height limits and adding parking garages that never figured in the original plans. Even Chandigarh’s uniquely modernist cinema, fronted by one curved sweep of brick, has applied to be turned into a glitzy multiplex.

Mysteries in the marble

Published on September 11, 2008 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: architecture, Art history, Culture, Giles Tillotson, Heritage, India, Mughal architecture, The Taj Mahal, William Dalrymple, Wonders of the world.

In The Independent, a review of Giles Tillotson‘s Taj Mahal. Giles Tillotson is an art historian specializing in South Asia and the author of many books including Mughal India and Jaipur Nama: Tales from the Pink City.

The Taj Mahal at Agra stands for India in the eyes of the world. Yet the Archaeological Survey of India, founded in 1861, which looks after the Taj, has never devoted a publication to its most famous site – not even a guidebook. Indeed, there was no architectural monograph until 2006, when Ebba Koch’s excellent The Complete Taj Mahal appeared.

The art historian Giles Tillotson’s Taj Mahal leans on Koch’s research, as he is happy to acknowledge; however, his accessible and enjoyable style will engage a broader readership. Like every author in Profile’s “Wonders of the World” series, Tillotson considers not only architectural history but also cultural heritage and resonance – picturesque 18th-century aquatints of the Taj, early 20th-century restorations by Lord Curzon, literary responses such as Rabindranath Tagore’s poem (“a teardrop on the cheek of time”), and the famous photo of Princess Diana posing alone in front of the “monument to love” shortly before her marriage break-up. Tastefully omitted is the Trump Taj Mahal, a casino resort in New Jersey built by property mogul Donald Trump.

In The Times, William Dalrymple reviews the book:

In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the great Mogul city of Agra is revealed to Adam after the Fall as one of the future wonders of God’s creation. This was hardly an understatement: by the 17th century, Agra had grown larger even than Constantinople and, with its 2m inhabitants, dwarfed both London and Paris. A succession of riverside palaces and “sweet-smelling gardens with sweet blossoms” spanned both banks of the river Yamuna.As the Mogul chronicler Abdul Aziz put it, the city was “the wonder of the age – as much a centre of the arteries of trade both by land and water as a meeting place of saints, sages and scholars from all Asia . . . a veritable lodestar for artistic workmanship, literary talent and spiritual worth”.

It was the Emperor Shah Jahan (1592-1666) who was responsible for the jewel of the Agra waterfront, and the Mogul empire’s most enduring creation, the Taj Mahal. The Taj, which was designed by Shah Jahan’s master architect, Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, is arguably the most admired building of the past 400 years, a masterpiece rising above the river Yamuna as perfect, beautiful and shimmeringly symmetrical as it was when its great dome was first completed in 1643.

The Chandigarh dream

Published on August 30, 2008 in Heritage. 2 Comments Tags: architecture, Chandigarh, Culture, Design, India, Le Corbusier, Unesco World Heritage site.

Long neglected by its own people, the treasured buildings Le Corbusier built for the capital of Punjab and Haryana are now decrepit, and in need of preservation. A Unesco World Heritage Site nomination, likely to come through in early 2009, is the city’s last hope. Melissa A. Bell in Mint-Lounge:

Outside India, though, the city has been a source of fascination for the international architecture community that has both vilified and adored Le Corbusier, “the father of modern architecture”. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) approached the city in 2001, with a plan to nominate the city as a possible modern World Heritage site. Design students constantly make pilgrimages to the city. And, last year, foreign furniture dealers auctioned off original Le Corbusier items from Chandigarh. A typical piece, such as a wooden coffee table, which fetched around Rs100 at a government auction, went for over Rs67.7 lakh at Christie’s in New York.
After years of dragging their feet, the city’s authorities have finally gone into an overdrive to protect their heritage, spurred on by a group of architects and design lovers in the city, and by the embarrassment of the Christie’s sale. Not only have they created committees to oversee the preservation of its historical core and organized community outreach programmes to educate citizens, but, in a major coup, the three governing bodies in Chandigarh-the Punjab, the Haryana, and the Union government-have finally agreed to submit the Unesco nomination. The preservation, maintenance and repair work done at a Unesco Heritage Site can only be carried out under the UN body’s supervision.

The world’s costliest home? Mukesh Ambani’s Mumbai skyscraper

Published on May 2, 2008 in Business and Design. 3 Comments Tags: Antilla, architecture, Design, Forbes, Hersch Bedner Associates, Mukesh Ambani, Mukesh Ambani's skyscraper, Nita Ambani, Perkins + Will, Reliance Industries, vaastu, world's costliest home.

Mukesh Ambani’s 27-storey, $2 billion, vaastu-compliant skyscraper, Antilla in downtown Mumbai, when completed, will be the world’s costliest residence. Matt Woolsey has the story in Forbes.

While visiting New York in 2005, Nita Ambani was in the spa at the Mandarin Oriental New York, overlooking Central Park. The contemporary Asian interiors struck her just so, and prompted her to inquire about the designer.

Nita Ambani was no ordinary tourist. She is married to Mukesh Ambani, head of Mumbai-based petrochemical giant Reliance Industries, and the fifth richest man in the world. ( Lakshmi Mittal, ranked fourth, is an Indian citizen, but a resident of the U.K.)

Take a tour of the world’s costliest home in pictures here.

Beyond Bawa: Modern masterpieces of Monsoon Asia

Published on March 26, 2008 in Design. 0 Comments Tags: architecture, Beyond Bawa, David Robson, Geoffrey Bawa, South Asian architecture, Sri Lanka, Thames & Hudson, tropical modernism.

In Spectator, Christopher Ondaatje reviews David Robson’s book on Sri Lankan born architect Geoffrey Bawa (with photographs by Richard Powers, Thames & Hudson, 224pp, £39.95)

Although there have been many architectural books featuring the works of Geoffrey Bawa, the Sri Lankan born architect, most notably a first monograph authored by David Robson a year before Bawa died in 2003, a second book, Beyond Bawa, also by Robson, is a biographical and artistic revelation. What is surprising and different about this new edition is that it reveals an extraordinary biographical account of the talented younger son of a wealthy Moslem lawyer and his Dutch burgher wife; and also illustrates the legacy of perhaps one of the most influential architects in south Asia in the 20th century, by discussing how his inspiration has continued in a number of younger architects who worked with Bawa in his practice and who have continued his creative force today known globally as ‘tropical modernism’. Examples of his genius can be found in Sri Lanka, Singapore and Bali, as well as in resorts and residences throughout Asia.

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