withdrew into their air-conditioned boxes. Somewhere in the process, architecture—and the issues it addresses—has become sadly diminished.
It is a dislocation apparent in formal architectural vocabulary as well. Con sider, for instance, the house of Ali Qapu, facing the Meydan-i-Shah in Isfahan. An enormous roof hovers over the entrance, creating not only shade and protection, but a great evocative gesture towards the city, exactly the kind of architectural tour-de-force that made Corbusier, that frozen Swiss, come to life when he saw the Mediterranean, and later Brazil. The machine for living! Yes, and always the great sculptural decisions (the overhangs, the double-heights), were placed facing the elements—i.e., at the business end of the habitat (e.g., the Esprit Nouveau Pavilion, the various Unites, the Shodhan house in Ahmedabad, etc.). But as Corbusier’s influence permeated into the colder climates, these heroic gestures had to withdraw into defensible space, into the mechanically heated and cooled interiors of the building. In this retreat they lost much of their rationale: they began to appear rather arbitrary and capricious. Indeed, the bigger they got, the more wilful they seemed—till finally one had the wildly extravagant atrium of a five-star luxury hotel. In these humongous lobbies, despite the spatial pyrotechnics, the ambience seems somewhat artificial, contrived, stillborn. And for a simple reason: they do not connect with any open-to-sky space which could quicken them to life.
Precisely the contrary is true of the Alhambra—here a structurally decadent, rococo building generates a truly extraordinary experience in us. Why? Because the basic premise of the Alhambra, viz., axially placed courtyards, inlaid with fountains and water channels, under an open sky, evokes an echo in the deep-structure of our minds.
‘Fiction,’ said Cocteau, ‘is primordial memory.’ Perhaps so also is built-form. Certainly architecture is concerned with much more than just its physical attributes. It is a many-layered thing. Beneath and beyond the strata of function and structure, materials and texture, lie the deepest and most compulsive layers of all. And these can manifest themselves not only in epic monumental architecture, but in projects of a much smaller, more humble scale as well.
Which brings us to our third issue, viz., housing the urban poor. It is indeed a wrench, for this is an area involving totally different kinds of knowledge and skills: in economics, sociology, land policies, mortgage-rates and so forth. Yet even here, we will find that the spatial continuum we have been discussing is of decisive importance not only for housing, but for the very survival of the cities themselves.
Many are already aware of the scale of the problem. All over the Third World, from Africa to Asia to Latin America, migrants from rural areas are pouring into towns and cities to find work. The world has not seen such epic migrations since the 18 th and 19 th centuries—when Europeans, through their military prowess, redistributed themselves around the globe, for much the same reasons. This is an option not open to most Third World countries today. Hence we must see our cities, like Jakarta or Bombay, for what they are—substitutes for migrating to Australia, growth centres for absorbing distress-migration (especially in the tertiary and bazaar sectors), on a scale which is truly mind-boggling. For in stance, Bombay in 1965 had a population of about four million; today it is over eight. By the turn of the century, it is expected to cross fifteen million. To generate urban land on a scale commensurate with this demand, necessitates a transformation of the transport network, job locations, desire lines. And so forth. In short, a restructuring of the city.
In this process, I believe that the architect has two crucial roles to play. First, in conceptualizing the new growth options, and second, in establishing the ground rules which will generate the housing. Now both these tasks necessitate an understanding of space (and its alternate uses); but, of course, it is the second which relates so clearly to the continuum we have been discussing here.
For there is much more to housing than just building houses. The room (the box) is only one element in a whole system of spaces which a family needs in order to live in a city. This system is usually hierarchal, starting from the private family zone, and moving on to the doorstep (where you greet your neighbour), then to the water tap or village well (the community meeting place), and finally to the great maidan (the principal focus of the city).
Each element in this hierarchy consists of a mix of spaces (from closed box to open-to-sky), in a delicate balance determined by the cultural and economic context of that particular society. In a warm climate, many of a family’s most essential activities (like cooking, sleeping or entertaining friends), do not need to take place within the four walls of a box, but can occur in verandas and courtyards. Under Indian conditions, where such spaces are livable for more than nine months of the year, the point of trade-off between cost and benefit can be determined—and the most economic and efficient patterns of housing identified. In most Third World cities, these turn out to be low-rise high-density configurations making extensive use of terraces, verandas and courtyards. For in a warm climate—like cement and steel—space itself is a resource.
This conclusion is an extraordinarily important one. First of all, it describes a habitat which people can build for themselves—and that means not just sites-and-services, but also the kind of indigenous vernacular architecture one finds all over the world, from Mykonos to Rajasthan to the casbahs of North Africa. Furthermore, it is of decisive relevance to employment. For while money invested in high-rise steel and concrete buildings goes into the hands of the few contractors who can build such structures and the banks which finance them, this low-rise pattern of housing is built by small masons and contractors—which, of course, generates a far greater number of jobs exactly where they should be generated: in the bazaar sector of the economy, where the rural migrants are looking for work.
Of course, these and all the many other benefits (incrementality, identity, variety, etc.) become possible only when we realize that the way to low-income housing in the Third World is not through increasingly sophisticated technology but through more extensive use of the open-to-sky end of the continuum. This is where indeed our efforts should be directed—and where the people themselves have been so incredibly resourceful and innovative. It is we architects who have been remiss.
For the developing world is eager for innovation and change. Much more so than in the West, where the past (perhaps because it is receding so fast) evokes so much nostalgia. ‘I have seen the past—and it works!’ Which is indeed ironic. For it is societies like India who live with the past all around, who accept it in their everyday lives as easily as a woman drapes a sari—these are the societies most impatient to invent the future. They see the past everyday—and much of it doesn’t work, much of the time. Thus, we have Mao Tse-tung restructuring China through his system of communes. And we have Mahatma Gandhi with his non-violence and his Sarvodaya movement.
To invent the future . . . architecture as an agent of change. This is our fourth issue—and perhaps the most basic one of all. Past and future, continuity and invention—how is the balance struck? If we look at Mao or Gandhi, we find that neither of them was hung up about whether an idea was new or old—or indeed where it came from—so long as he knew he could make it work in the context of his own people. Thus Mao’s communism stems from a German who lived halfway around the world and a whole century earlier, and much of Gandhi, of course, derives from Emerson and Thoreau. The genius of both men was that they could stitch these ideas into an old social fabric and produce a seamless wonder. New ideas making the past work. (And vice versa!)
‘There are no great men,’ said Stendhal apropos of Napoleon, ‘there are merely great events.’ And, one could perhaps go further and say: there are great issues. For we are only as big as the questions we address. And this, to my mind, is the central riveting fact of life for architects in the Third World. Not the size or value of the projects we are working on, but the nature of the questions they raise—and which we must confront. A chance to grow: the abiding virtue of a place in the sun.
