Leaning Tower

ne of the rare advantages of a philosopher is the authoritative sway he holds over an audience. Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo’s ease with a range of subjects makes him both a curious, intelligent bystander, and a convivial conversationalist. The combination produces a barrage of ideas that are free of professional jargon and the wordy despair often associated with scholarly inquiry. The coming together of a man who has written a lot and another who has built a lot has generated an oddly satisfying book on architecture. Unlike other books on the subject, Talking Architecture is shorn of the glib double-spread colour photography that reduces buildings to dream-like seduction—beautifully deceptive images devoid of the messy reality of Indian life. Instead, the book poses the serious questions that government and civic authorities should have been asking of themselves. Why are our cities so despicably ugly and inhospitable? Is there an Indian architecture? If so, how is it affected by globalisation? Indeed, what makes Indian architecture different? These larger public questions are posed by Jahanbegloo and addressed through the private vantage of one of the country’s leading architects.

Raj Rewal’s career spans four decades and includes a formidable variety: housing, institutes, exhibition halls, homes, even the parliament library. Having witnessed at close range the construction of large scale public works, he is in a position to raise difficult issues of urban despair and repair. The book is a personal view—a gentle harangue, on the possibilities and lost opportunities in a country that could have chosen its own distinctive rationale for building after Independence. But the path towards Le Corbusier’s modernism, and Nehru’s ‘temples of modern India’ led India into new shackles. An unfortunate aesthetic imprisonment that left the country with a destitute heritage. You see it everywhere, in small towns and metropolises—brick-and-mortar buildings, broken, monsoon-stained, repeating in endless smudges to the horizon. Unloved spiritless citadels, without thought or inspiration, they are the visible public face of modern India.

In the face of recent leaps of engineering, design and technology in China and the West, Indian attempts to promote an architecture of ideas are imitative or non-existent—to merely accept what exists, replace old structures with mediocre ones, widen it if it is a road, whitewash it if a slum, protect with a wall if a monument. It is, as the Duke of Edinburgh wondered aloud at an electrical job at Buckingham Palace, “as if an Indian had done it”. When India is seen as a large unmanageable problem, the solutions will be second-rate. The generous and more optimistic view, Rewal explains, is one of opportunity. Certainly, an imitation of western design and technology is a falsehood and denies the existence of very different Indian conditions. But the possibilities of making places that are international and Indian all at once is the true test of current professional wisdom. “Historic parts of cities which are crumbling,” explains the architect, “need to be renovated and future developments should be sympathetic to their scale while meeting the expectations of modern life.”

Free of the distractions of style, the conversation assumes the genial flow of a fireside chat—easy, amiable explanations of the role of design in society.