A pi-dog sniffs turd outside a glass shopping mall, and slowly makes its way towards similar looking glass office blocks behind, treading past open parking lots piled with sand and used scaffolding. Along the stretch a young oblivious population also makes its way through piles of rubble towards these shimmering structures for recreation, shopping, entertainment, or just to hang out in the air conditioning. A hoarding advertises a stand-up comedy act with free drinks. On Friday nights the women get in free of charge. Through dirt and dust, slum and shanty, into bright lights, glassier lobbies, and higher atriums, city architecture creates happy distractions; families move about with softy ice creams willing to submit to all the new forms of visual disbelief available free.

In cities only known for their ugliness and drudgery, new shimmering places offer momentary opportunity – a new form of public space, available to all. Take it or leave it. In monsoon rain I once ran towards the lift lobby of a Nehru Place office building, along with some other wet people, a couple of dogs and stray cattle, only to find that when the lift doors opened there was already a cow inside. Refusing to budge, we merely snuggled alongside and moved to our respective floors.

Such glaring contradictions no longer appall or surprise. A French Bistro opens for business alongside an open sewer, mixing smells of fresh baked bread with chemical and biological waste. A three-bedroom apartment across the Dharavi slum in Mumbai costs the equivalent of a million dollars, as does a neo-classical or Pagoda style house in Amby Valley, a leisure home preserve of artificial lakes north of the city. Elsewhere, a Hindu temple is quietly being regularized down the road; a delegation of Buddhist monks is attending a peace conference in a rented hall. An old woman sells a heap of lemons on a flyover, a younger one is raped in a moving taxi – theatrical scenes in discordant play. Considered together they produce the schizophrenic character of the new India.

How then do you begin to practice architecture in a country of such staggeringly desperate realities? In the past people couldn’t care less what architects and artists were doing or thinking; much of architecture grew as a mere extension of ritualistic and daily enactments. When I grew up in Delhi, the experience of day-to-day living constantly reminded you of the workings of buildings. You opened windows, banged doors, looked for light switches, drew curtains, closed wooden shutters against the sunlight, washed stone floors, smelled the thick sweet khus of a summer cooler, watched monsoon rain in the verandah, slept outdoors on rooftop terraces… in every way, you were the cause of the transformation you enacted on architecture. To fill your sight quickly with the noise and glare of glass and chrome, and the false belief of wealth, can hardly replace the death of these old ways. Indian architecture’s moral dilemma is in fact all the more cruel for ensuring that any and all forms of carefully cultivated Indian practices are quietly buried under the debris of second rate foreign images. Three distinct models of architecture that had been carefully formulated by the most unlikely of sources in the most diverse of places, have been relegated to the dung heap.

 

Rural: Mahatma Gandhi once said that the rural home will be built of materials and skills available within five miles of the building site. The prophetic simplicity of the statement encapsulated an ideology on building, ecology, lifestyle, self-reliance, even human dignity, few understood as a blueprint for village life. The rectangular house plan of Gandhi’s own home at Wardha is organized in the simplest of rectangular divisions – four rooms draped in mud plaster with slatted windows letting in a subdued light. Built under his own ideological constraints, the house is Gandhi’s most convincing message on rural industry, material and craft. The generic symbol of a wholesome idea built to local conditions, the rural model is clearly thought out and boldly represented.

In the current circumstance of rural neglect, the urge to resurrect the village has been cleanly overtaken by a desperate urbanization. The move to the city has led to a rapid decline in the rural population and consequent material craft and self-reliance, encouraging instead the invasion of cheap industrialized goods and services. The neglect is the outcome of both a religious and political polarization that has splintered cohesive rural communities along caste lines, and the failure of the bureaucratic imagination to develop rural economies, lifestyle, and craft.

In remote villages in Himachal and Uttarakhand, for instance, the ban on stone quarrying and timber for home construction has left an architectural legacy of expensive cement and foreign construction material transported from the plains. The appearance of small Ludhianas and Jalandhars set in the snow ranges of the Himalaya is a tragedy that could have been averted by a more equitable rural policy that gave easy access to local materials and encouraged stone and wood craft practices.

 

Suburban: it took a poet to understand that the difficult urban conditions of a colonial city and the desperate inadequacies of rural Bengal needed an altogether new architectural expression. Starting Shantiniketan as an ashram, Rabindranath Tagore’s vision understood the value of nature and expanded the idea into a school; its suburban value combined building and landscape with an unguarded openness that drew intensely from local ecology and horti-culture. As with Tagore’s literary and artistic efforts, the school itself sought contributions from literature, art, architecture, for its design. Though buildings of an eclectic nature found their way into Shantiniketan, their stylistic flourishes were less critical than the adoration of nature as the vision in a suburban ideal – what Tagore described as home and the world – an idea where architecture opened to broader influences, more egalitarian concepts.

At the core of Tagore’s conception was the hope that the congenial collaboration between nature and architecture would allow for an equally congenial lifestyle. Unfortunately, for the suburban homeowner, the value of ownership lay not in the shaded experience of suburban life but in an inversion of that experience for himself and by himself. Democracy lay in committing a private outrage on a public street. Weddings, inaugurations, festivals, were all seen as sanctioned events for cultural mayhem. Was architecture then any different? Did its presence on a public street call for restraint, when most of Indian visual culture did not? So the owner at once became architect, builder, banker and developer, and in one swift stroke eradicated the conventional role of design, space, lighting and ventilation. Instead he scored where architecture mattered most: on the façade.

 

Bavarian castles, Italian villas, Rajasthani havelis, Tudor mansions, an East meets West concert of such brazen confidence that it was no longer seen as mimicry but accepted by architectural historians as a new style. Gujarati Baroque, Marwari Gothic, or Early Halwai, call it what you will, it broke the restrictive suburban mould of order and claimed its place in history. Today all across India, the basic theme of the private house is a method to keep the viewer in a state of visual ecstasy; though its scope is now extended to a complete new attitude that encompasses design, landscape, lighting, fusion cuisine, even stand-up comedy. From the outer façade, to interior cove light, dinner table setting, fridge vegetable display, bathroom shampoo containers, bedroom slippers, and in everything in the designer’s hand, must be visible. By keeping viewers in a state of animated suspension, the architect is in complete democratic control of private lives, his visiting card available even in the soap dish.

 

Urban: if there is an architecture that deals effectively and positively with urban life, Laurie Baker’s work in Kerala is grounded not just in practicality, but creates a new order from local conditions. Tight constricted building sites, some with old trees, awkwardly angled lots, the reach of Baker’s private urbanism was not merely guided by pressing private demands and impossibly low budgets, but allowed an astonishing design freedom. Buildings molded like stretched plastic that conformed to no structural or architectural regulation, created willful and surprising definitions derived from rooms that grew out of brick screens and courtyards, some deeply walled, some open to sky. Baker’s was a physical, sensory employment of architectural tactics. The resident manipulated and was manipulated. The experience of day-to-day living constantly reminded you of your important place in the scheme of the building. Even in the confining severity of urban plots there could be a multitude of lyrical ways to cloister, enclose, experience and enlarge space. But that time has gone.

 

So far the only real measure of architecture had been the link to some deeper social or political history. Indian Modernism grew as a self-styled understanding of buildings, a formal geometric exercise. Soon after independence architects aligned their narrative to new political thinking and the concerns of a new nation in need of institutions. Working on a broad empty slate, their work sought to define the fabric of an emerging democratic society. The resultant scale of construction included dams, bridges, institutions, science centres, legislative complexes, civic facilities – new modernized structures of such size and girth that architecture was a defining catalyst of great significance. Unfortunately, whenever European Modernism was practiced in India, the architect was building in exile; mainstream architecture’s self-importance always fed on keeping the public in the dark. It was the primary method that kept architecture mainstream.

 

The second generation, born after independence, wrote a story that resonated locally and was slated to reinforce regional and cultural – a framework of buildings that distinguished their material and design layouts with a modern vernacular. What was built took its cue from what already existed, and left a mark not so much of individuality but of historic or cultural cooperation. A house from Kerala made clear and unequivocal references to the state.

In the ’90s even that changed; the demand for large-scale residential constructions pushed the architect away for locational values into new global market concerns. At the time, Indian business hopes lay in a western outlook and a quick adoption to technological expression. The rooted static qualities of old buildings were discarded for an uninhibited classless landscape. The glass mall obliterated regions and cultural differences and brought a civic imagery like any other, anywhere in the world – Beijing, Dubai, or Mumbai.

It was inevitable that advanced states of urbanity – high rise apartments, air-conditioning, basement parking, skyscrapers – wherever they occurred, invariably produced the same logic of construction, and other than superficial elevation deviations, looked much the same. Behind the glass façade, the young girl from Punjab wiped away her accent to answer the American phone complaint, sitting in a building that had tossed itself into the global discourse. The resident and residence, now one and the same.

India adapts, India copies, India makes its own. In three quarters of a century since independence little has changed in Indian planning, urbanism, architecture or ways of thinking. No attempt has been made to define, in a common language, the kind of architecture we would like to live in. The civic disorder of places confounded by squalid government construction, extravagant private commerce and mounting slums, continues. Civic mayhem, ill health, pollution, insecurity, inadequate water and waste management, amid decaying lifeless buildings, the city resident has learnt to practice one of two options: to submit to the growing inadequacies as a resident in perpetual complaint, or as a reclusive inhabitant of a private estate, surrounded by high walls shielding an abundant private life.

 

What affect that has on an already rudderless profession is a telling sign. With everyone playing architect – bureaucrat, builder, financier, interior designer, except the architect – much of recent constructed work can only be enshrined in a fragmentary and partial understanding of tradition and technology. Buildings try hard to appear as promoters of change, without actually being so. In a half-baked way, alluding to high tech, or attaching archaic historic ideas to the façade, such incomplete imagery can hardly act as a serious endorsement of a new form of urbanity. In the absence of sociological concerns, architecture’s validity becomes suspect. And all that remains are the fake reconstructions, the incomprehensible language, and illusory symbols of the good life.

If you gauge the state of architecture in India, it invariably begins in a rousing groundswell of good intentions and ambition; but then on closer examination, quickly peters out into an erratic rudderless uncertainty. For the past two decades, other than foreign technical introductions, little has changed in material, construction and design. Little of the country’s political moods, its national and international affiliations have drawn attention to any new logic or precise ideals. No creative influence challenges the mild suppositions on which the country’s post-independent architecture was built – the borrowed scaffold that allowed us to project that India was meant to be a free thinking place of private depth and public magnitude. It bears rethinking that in the absence of an institutional culture, architecture can only be a private inconsequential activity. People build on whim, day in and day out, adding personal appendages of construction to new or previous assemblies, adding to the jumbled mix.

 

Somewhere in time, the collective of bricks begins to erroneously resemble a neighbourhood, a city, and encourages the false belief that what has been built indicates cultural progress. Functioning only as designers, architects are generally not alert to such falsehoods and easily fall prey to such building seductions. Architecture assumes a special position amid the gallery of city structures, determined by the architect, for himself. Yet, unless there is a critical reaction and a sustained response to the growing disorder, things will continue to be accepted as mere evocations of private social functions and class attitudes. Sadly, like physicists, we have come to believe that the world can be explained in mere material and technical terms. The presence of building, any building, is proof of architecture. The birth of a real community and its expression in architecture can flower only when the recent references are forgotten, and the old forgotten ones are remembered. The future of any new architecture only relies on cultural memory.

A place wracked by a growing poverty of ideas looks desperately to catch up to become ‘cutting edge’ and ‘smart’, but ignores the very values that were affordable and gave it the distinction of place. Architecture was once – and still is – a physical entity built on its own ground, owned and inhabited by a singular entity. From the private vantage of ownership and identity, such an approach is no longer tenable. In fact, future cities may see its obliteration altogether. The view of architecture as a settled place may become altogether archaic, and in the migratory struggle, will create shifting alternatives of urban space. The promise of future civic formlessness may deny the architect the conventional livelihood of designing privately behind high walls. In the long-term that may be a good thing.

 

One of the many drawbacks of current architectural practice is the absence of constructed subversion, the hope that a building vision provides for a future of new possibilities – the tiny house, mobile libraries, shared city apartments, underground living, dismantlable houses, parks in high-rise buildings – by setting sights on untested ideas, we would kindle the hope that one day architecture may convey a wholly different narrative – and one that incorporates the new citizens’ expectations. The unimaginably wide disparities in living conditions must force imaginative architectural solutions. This, away from electrified fenced homes, gated communities, despairing slums and remote isolating high-rises, into something not just livable, but conspicuous and wondrous. It is what a magician describes as creative imbalance, the hope that an audience pins on the failure of an impossible act. When it fails it is serious tragedy, or comedy. When it succeeds it crosses an unknown frontier.