domus 57 December 2016 CONTENTS 23

December Volume 06 / Issue 02

2016 R200
Contributors
Suprio Bhattacharjee Author Design Title

Authors
Editorial
Joseph Rykwert Kaiwan Mehta 24 Time and arguments
Aparna Andhare
Imran Ali Khan
A. Srivathsan Joseph Rykwert 25 Domus 1000 Domus seems indestructible
Miki Desai
Tanuja Kanvinde Confetti
Sanjay Kanvinde Design Cultures
Suprio Bhattacharjee
Marco De Michelis
Aparna Andhare 28 Sanjay Chitara Drawing sacred spaces

Photographers
Design Cultures
Sergio Grazia
Photographix India Imran Ali Khan 38 Remembering the Forgotten
Dhiman Chatterjee
CEPT Archives
Arvind Talati: A forgotten pioneer of Contemporary museum for architecture in India
A. Srivathsan 46 modern Indian architecture To fill a gap in history

Miki Desai
INDIA 057 LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO Tanuja Kanvinde
Sanjay Kanvinde 56 Achyut Kanvinde — Akar
Contemporary museum for architecture in India
Drawing modern perspectives

Project
Suprio Bhattacharjee 70 Tushar Desai Associates Spatial Fulcrums

82 Patrick Berger – Jacques Anziutti The Canopy, Paris

96 Vincent Van Duysen Merging design and architecture

Feedback
Marco De Michelis 102 Venice
Rassegna
108 Outdoor

December Volume 06 / Issue 02

2016 R200

INDIA 057 LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO

LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO

057 December 2016
Cover: The volume of the building for
the Green Acres Academy is defined
by its concrete surfaces; the other
defining feature of the building is the
detailing of its aluminium vitrines and
coloured glazing. The windows activate
the façade into narrow horizontal bands
that actually help creating the illusion
of a building longer or wider than it is.
As a design strategy, in its current built
state, these window openings offer a
dynamism and visual vibration within
otherwise simple and rational box-like
enclosures – a superimposed order of
seeming randomness

Sketch of The Green Acres Academy, Chembur,

Mumbai designed by Tushar Desai Assosiates
24 EDITORIAL
TIME AND ARGUMENTS
As one more solar year will end in the next
few weeks and days, we will all celebrate and
prepare enthusiastically for a new year and
newer times, in hopes and in aspirations. In
the moving of time we experience joy and
hopes but we also prepare to lose and forget.
Time is often stretched to expand and it often
flashes past us in speed and over-subscribed
spaces. In the magical and the sacred, often,
time is suspended or it collapses millions of
years and lives that would have ever passed
or partaken of these magic rituals and sacred
spaces into one stream of shared belonging.
Time is often measured in history and time is
often twisted in history. History brings time
to us on its own terms. Museums and archives
collect time, preserve it; but museums and
archives often also help us forget time, lose
it forever. Amnesia is often the motif of our
contemporary times, as much as we fight over
history and myths. Myths are fantastical and
they can take over imagination, but they also
hide within themselves, suppressed desires and
social anxieties, and the churning of cultural
journeys. Myths play with time on the outside,
but they hide detailed notes on time sometimes
on the underside. Myths are like a carpet of
time, with a pattern or a picture presented
large and visible, but when you go close to
it, textures and weaves start emerging as
independent objects engaging in a battle over
space and time, stories and ideas.
Archives and stories are the repositories of
time, and history dips into these to shape a
narrative of human culture and civilisation. In
this issue we dip into archives and histories to
explore and understand what contributes to the
many design cultures in human civilisations
and especially in India. Time is enmeshed with
space — and whether it is the geography of
home or the monumental, sacred spaces they
have all tried to collapse or negotiate time.
Places and geographies are active zones of
politics and cultural processes and it is our
constant attempt to understand the complexity
of what makes a place and how the lives of
people and objects are part of these places
— their structure, their composition, their
occupation, and their journeys. What is the
relationship between life and places, politics
and spaces in the everyday lives of people and
their societies, their objects and their stories.
But we also ask what is the relationship of
history to objects, especially when objects
challenge history, rather than history providing
a context to objects. In this context we look at
images that challenged the normative sacred
space and produced more fragile sacred spaces;
fragile but sharp and strong in the colours
and lines that drew these spaces and magic of
Kaiwan Mehta
sacred belief. As shrine cloths make the seat
of gods and these enshrined bundles of cosmic
energies a paraphernalia of traveling objects
— and the shrine cloth is an object now that
is more personal yet cosmic — the journey of
the Kullu Valley gods claim a geography and
the shrine moves out to a celebration and
battle of rights and ideas. The painting and
motifs on the cloth, the Mohras (cast faces
of gods and goddesses) and the palkis are all
intricate objects of art and design not just in
their making, but in the relationship of their
uses; their bodily as well as psychological
engagement with cultures and geographies
of space, as well as believers and viewers.
Space and time collapse in relationships here
that are only recognisable through cultures
of story-telling and rituals, where stories are
words of refuge, wisdom, caution, creative-
play, and memory, and rituals are the bodily
engagements of human life with eternal time
and cosmic space. The ritual as well as the
story, measures and squares, time and space.
Another measure of time and history that we
dwell upon in this issue are the archives of
architects; we began this in a focussed way in
the last issue - focussing on the archives and
publications of architects and their works, in
India. In the last issue we looked at four very
recent publications — Women Architects in
India: Histories of Practice in Mumbai and
Delhi; Christopher Benninger: Architecture for
Modern India; The Architecture of Hasmukh
C. Patel: Selected Projects,1963-2003 and
The Structure - Works of Mahendra Raj.
In this issue we continue by looking at an
exhibition on the architect Arvind Talati
and a forthcoming publication on Achyut
Kanvinde. Whether it is the history of women
architects and women clients in India, or more
contemporary archives of a practice such as
that of Christopher Charles Benninger, or
more senior practices with obviously much
older archives as in the case of Mahendra
Raj, Hasmukh Patel, I M Kadri, or Achyut
Kanvinde and Arvind Talati — these are all
repositories of architecture and architectural
practice in India that are now entering the
public sphere. As the vitrine (an image of
this marked the opening page of the Confetti
section in the last issue DI_56) on books
on architecture in India at The State of
Architecture: Practices and Processes in India
(curated by Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote
and Kaiwan Mehta; presented by UDRI at
the National Gallery Modern Art, Mumbai)
discussed how the 1980s with the Festivals of
India two exhibitions (Vistara and Architecture
in India) and book-catalogues accompanying
them actually gives a push to more post-
domus 57 December 2016
independence writing and history writing on
architecture, hoping to produce a narrative for
Modern and contemporary India. Since then
few surveys have made brave attempts to write
the rich history of architects and architectural
practice and building-making in India — from
Jon Lang, Madhavi Desai, and Miki Desai to
Rahul Mehrotra and Peter Scriver — they have
all tried to write broader histories outlining
themes and narratives to make sense of this
enormous and gargantuan world of building-
making and architecture. But at the same
time the limited nature of publications on
individual practices and senior practices, with
just about two historians writing introductions
to these monographs, limited our sense of
what it means to practise architecture in
India — and what are the challenges, travels
and travails of the architect and architecture
in India. What was published and what was
written was important, necessary, helped us
develop perspectives — but we just needed
more! India’s tryst with the modern and the
traditional got too soon too bracketed, and
became an ideology, and a formula, rather
than a creative expression of challenges and
times. The emergence of more monographs
and books, and the availability to access more
archives through these publications I am
sure will open up a Pandora’s Box of history
pretty seriously. A few monographs and books
remained important — some very crucial ones
— but with a library of monographs and books
we are at the threshold of beginning many new
conversations and arguments. Yet we lack the CONFETTI
IIT Kanpur, sketch of the original scheme by A Kanvinde; courtesy KRC Archives
kind of commentaries and critical writings such
as Gautam Bhatia’s Punjabi Baroque (Penguin
Books, 1994) and Romi Khosla’s The Loneliness
of a Long Distance Future — Dilemmas of
Contemporary Architecture (Tulika Books, 2002)
but one knows that those will surely emerge
soon too, as indeed the space of exhibitions and
publications has now really opened up in the
scene for architecture in India.
The archives draw out time for us and help us
challenge histories and myths, ask questions
off our aspirations and imaginations with and
for architecture; they can, and should, draw
new debates on what the architect does, and
what can s/he do, and what should s/he do?
As well as the evaluation and imagination of
architecture, in multiple contexts of time and
space, can now be creatively and critically
nuanced as well as argued out. km
@Domus_India
42 CONFETTI domus 57 December 2016 domus 57 December 2016 CONFETTI 43
DESIGN CULTURES

REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN

The seven-day-long Kullu Dussera Festival following Vijayadashami is when
more than 300 devtas and devis are worshipped across the Kullu Valley, and make
their way to the enclosure of Lord Raghunath, the presiding deity of the town.
The author explores the notions of time, space, and collective memory, tracing the
living traditions of a place through its geographical armature
Imran Ali Khan

Opposite page: A palki – I spent a long time living inside
a palanquin that carries the Ramayana, where characters
the deity – on its way
to Lord Raghunath’s
can change their shape and their
private enclosure. will, where time exists in multiple,
This page: detail of sometimes confusing ways.
mohras – crafted faces But it always creates a pattern.
symbolising the devtas
and devis Sometimes these patterns were
closely knit, at other times they
were far apart. And I don’t mean
this as a narrative structure only.
Every pattern has small openings,
sometimes so small that only the
tip of your finger would fit through
and it is here, that we, as tellers of
this story, fill. And so I decided to
put the stories into my pocket and
see how they evolved in spaces
outside of myself. I made my way to
Kullu in Himachal Pradesh to watch
the Kullu Dussera (or as they say
‘The International Kullu Dussera
Festival’). When I opened my eyes at
the end of a 14-hour bus journey –
of which I had slept a total of 12 – I
saw, for the first time, the Himalayas
rise up in front of me, and down
the line of my vision on the winding
roads I saw a palki floating, like an
offering of flowers on the Ganga.
The Kullu Valley is cradled by the Pir
Panjal to the north, the Parvati range
to the east, and the Barabhangal
44 CONFETTI domus 57 December 2016 domus 57 December 2016 CONFETTI 45

This page: A palki (left) This page, right: A pujari

leaves for its meeting with on the rath of Lord
the Lord with much ritual Raghunath; far right: a
fanfare. Far below, left palki bearer; below: a
and right: temple of the procession during the
Devi at Parashar Kullu Dussera Festival
46 CONFETTI
This page, left: A mohra-
studded palki during the
Kullu Dussera Festival;
far below: offerings made
to the gods; far below
right: ending the day with
celebrations; below: a
palki bearer
domus 57 December 2016 domus 57 December 2016
range to the west and lies almost at
the heart of Himachal Pradesh.
Known in ancient Hindu scriptures
as ‘Kulantapitha’ – the end of the
habitable world – the rulers of the
valley initially ruled over an area
restricted to the upper Beas river,
with their capital in the ancient
village of Jagatsukh near Manali.
The valley, which opens up like a
gateway, became a crucial trade
route between Central Asia and the
Gangetic plains and by the 17th
century, the kingdom expanded its
borders further to include Lahaul-
Spiti and the Sutlej river. It was
under the rule of Raja Jagat Singh
when the capital finally moved to
Kullu. The idol of Lord Raghunath,
the presiding deity of this town,
was brought from his mythical
birthplace in Ayodhya by the king,
and established and introduced
Vaishnavism and Dussera. In
this single action, Jagat Singh
established Kullu as the centre
for Dussera, when over 300 gods
descend into the valley to reaffirm
their position and loyalty to both, the
king and god.
On the tenth day of the ‘white moon’
(the day we in the rest of India
celebrate as Vijayadashami – the
last day of Dussera), the 250-odd
devtas and devis funnel down the
great mountains to the bowl that is
Kullu and wait for the grandmother
of the ruling family – Hidamba devi
(also Bhima’s wife) and the statue
of Lord Raghunath to lead and
begin the festival that will continue
for seven days. The statue of Lord
Raghunath along with Sita is placed
in a circular enclosure at the centre
of the field; the King and his family
occupy another enclosure not
far from it; the other devtas and
devis in tents dotted around these
two great circles; and further off,
a market mushrooms. There are
over 300 devtas and devis who
This page, above: A
palki bearer during the
procession; right: a
young boy partakes in
the festivities
CONFETTI 47
are worshipped across and around
the valley, each with his/her own
backstory of his/her origin.
“Villagers affirm the importance of
their village deity by claiming the
identification of this deity with a
pan-Indian God, Rishi or heroes.
The Gods of Kullu can be classified
into three classes. The first are the
ancient rishis (sages) and pious
women of epic character. The
second category belonging to the
Naga (serpent) class and the third
must be tribal chiefs and heroes. For
centuries these devtas (village deity)
have been at the centre of village
economy in the valley. Villagers used
to donate generously to the village
God, who held courts, and was also
responsible for the well-being of
all inhabitants. Every temple was
headed by a pujari who was the
custodian of the devta’s properties
and had thus, right to use it.” [Singh,
Vijjika. Dussehra Festival: Situating
the Cult of Rama in the Kullu Valley;
International Journal of Humanities
and Social Science Invention;
Volume 3, Issue 6 (June 2014)]
---
The movement from home to
festival ground displaces both time
and space – where space takes on
new meanings, the temple space
is replaced by a tent, the ground
takes on sacred meanings. And time
begins to alter – time is no longer
structured by its physicality but is
instead determined by rituals that
punctuate the day. The hours are
counted by ritual and worship – an
early morning aarti, mid afternoon
walks by the palki and late evening
songs. Everyday the palki makes
its way to ‘meet’ Lord Raghunath
in a private enclosure, circling and
dancing before the idol.
Gatherings such as these are rarely
an example of individual identity but
are instead an example of individual
48 CONFETTI domus 57 December 2016 domus 57 December 2016 CONFETTI 49

memory. People’s identities are

created by the interaction with each
other as representatives of the
village at one end and a collective
identity of them as performers in
a gathering of the gods. And it is
precisely this collective memory
that drives the narratives of these
scenes both internally as well as
externally. It is collective movement
– from village to field, that identities
form a unified whole, memories
of past movements to the same
ground for 350-odd years, passing
seamlessly between generations. It
isn’t ‘history’ in the strictest sense
that drives them but is instead
a history that has morphed with
myths that surround the space. Not
‘repeatable’ but ‘now’.

This page, left: A pujari

sits beside his palki;
bottom left: a man and
his decorated palki
during the festival;
bottom right: a bench
outside the temple
in Parashar; all images
courtesy the author

This page, top: Dhoop

holders are a common
sight during the Festival;
top right: objects of
worship and performance;
right: raising the flag
at Dadka; above: the
paraphernalia used during
prayer ceremonies