THE seventh triennial Aga Khan Award for architecture was presented at the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, on October 9. Marking the 20th anniversary of the Award, the $500,000 prize fund makes it the world's largest and most prestigious. Among this year's seven winners from over 420 nominations are three Indian projects which excelled in concepts of reclaiming and sharing community space, responding to social and environmental conditions and playing a catalytic role within their societies.
It's no surprise that India's First Architect Charles Correa should be among the awardees. Known for the wide range of his architectural work in India and on urbanisation and low-cost shelter in the Third World, his winning project: the Vidhan Bhavan which sits atop a hill overlooking Bhopal city in Madhya Pradesh. Completed in 1993, Correa organised the large government facility in a series of courtyards and pathways and spaces that welcome public participation. Conceived not as a monument but as a city within a city, the use of local red stone, handmade ceramic tiles and painted surfaces help to hum-anise the public complex. Large contemporary murals, sculptures and paintings by local artists decorate the building. According to the high-profile Master Jury, the Vidhan Bhavan is a successful integration of local art and architectural traditions in a modern building.
"The nice thing about the award is it gives us credibility and we can reach out to more cities and more governments," says Ahmedabad-based consultant engineer Himanshu H.Parikh, whose winning project was the Slum Networking of Indore City. A consultant in urban planning, infrastructure design and environmental upgrading with an emphasis on urban low-income areas, Parikh pioneered the concept of slum networking.
According to Parikh, it's taken for granted that in cities of developing countries, environmental degradation, strained service infrastructure and the growth of slums are inevitable. "The policy-makers are often conditioned into the 'poverty syndrome' in which problems are perceived to be too overwhelming in terms of scale and complexity in relation to the resources available," says he. His unique concept exploits the linkage between the slums, natural drainage paths which influence urban infrastructure and the environmental fabric of the city. Thus slums, instead of being resource-draining liabilities, actually become nodal points for a quantum change in the infrastructure and environmental quality of the city.
A mid-term evaluation of the ongoing Indore project showed that house-to-house water supply had been installed as had sewerage and lighting and the communities themselves were investing money to convert their homes into pucca structures. Polluted water bodies were slowly turning into freshwater ponds; green areas were multiplying. On the social front, 79 committees had already registered under the Societies Registration Act and 70 youth clubs formed. Many of the slums were heading towards full literacy, frequency of epidemics had dramatically reduced and incomes, particularly of women, had increased. Benefiting a population of five lakh slum dwellers, Parikh's approach won the award for 'transforming the environment and improving the quality of life by providing a clean and liveable habitat for its citizens'.
The third project to have received recognition from the Aga Khan jury is the Lepers' Hospital at Chopda Taluka in Maharashtra. On the border of the remote and forested Satpura area in Maharashtra, it's the first such treatment centre for leprosy in the region. Norwegian architects Jan Olav Jensen and Per Christian Brynildsen developed a rectangular plan in which a series of linear buildings enclose a courtyard. Live-in patients work the fields around the enclave and tend buffaloes to sustain themselves. For the patients, the hospital is 'the door of hope' in a society that had made no provisions for them.
