Urban Culture and Change in India – The Berlin Lectures
During the last months, the MOD team in Berlin gave two lectures on urban culture and change in Bangalore and in India.
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Archived entries for Built History
Space is the Yantra
The last issue of Urban Design journal, published by the Urban Design Group, London, focused on to urban design practice and discourses in India . Invited by the editors of the issue, Naresh, Anne and Sumandro of MOD, contributed an essay on ‘Reinventing the Indian City.’
While the full contents of the issue will soon be available at the journal website, below is an excerpt from the piece:
India is an ancient urban civilisation. The sub-continent has faced the challenges of planning cities and providing for growing populations since 2300 BC. By 700 BC, India had gone through its second urban revolution with the growth of sixteen ‘Mahajanapada’ (literally, megacities) across the Indus-Gangetic-Vetravati-Godavari plains. A unique set of codes for spatially organising the urban centres, from the city scale to that of the household, has existed since then and was applied in building the Harappan cities (BC 2600-1900).
In later years, an evolved form of these spatial logics came to be known as the ‘vastu shastra,’ variously understood as knowledge or discipline of built objects or spatial design. One of the central elements of this body of knowledge is the ‘yantra,’ literally meaning ‘machine,’ which meant a harmonious configuration of various forces towards a common goal or state of being.
Recently there have been different attempts to interpret these texts in a modern context. This essay re-visits the ancient concept of ‘yantra’ – as a practice of spatial analysis based on human experience – and re-interprets it as an analytical and visual device for studying and re-inventing Indian cities. Furthermore it takes the concepts of ‘informality’ and historicity into account to evoke productive strategies for the future cities of India.
Naresh Narasimhan and Anne-Katrin Fenk are Co-Founders of MOD and Sumandro Chattapadhyay is modbug-at-large. Find more about them in the MOD team page.
‘Cities for People’ – CoLab Lecture
In the CoLab/Goethe panel discussion on ‘Reclaiming Public Space for People’ held in May this year, Naresh spoke about ‘Cities for People.’
He discussed the processes in Indian cities today that are undermining the public spaces — namely, automobile-isation, infrastructure-isation and security-isation. Through a historical evaluation of making of public spaces in Bangalore, he reflected on what it takes to make public spaces, what is the design process for making/re-claiming public spaces for people.
Here is a copy of the presentation on ‘Cities for People.’ The presentation can also be accessed at Sildeshare.
For further information, including downloadable version of the document, please contact us at mail[at]mod[dot]org[dot]in
Naresh Narasimhan is Co-founder of MOD Institute and the Principal Architect at Venkataramanan Associates. Read more about him in the MOD team page.
Tahrir Square image courtesy of Ben Curtis/AP.
‘Otto Koenigsberger: Bringing Modernism to India’ Research Project
How did a German refugee become the first Director of Housing in independent India? How did the Indian environment transform European modernism in the 1940s? Who were the main players in shaping Mysore State’s urban development in the first half of the last century?
These are some of the questions that Rachel Lee is endeavouring to answer in her PhD thesis “Otto Koenigsberger: Bringing Modernism to India”. By using the biography of the German refugee architect and planner Otto Koenigsberger (1908-1999) as a critical research tool, she is analysing a defining period in India’s architecture and planning history.
In the run up to Indian independence, from 1939-1948, Koenigsberger was the Chief Architect and Planner of Princely Mysore State. From his base in Bangalore he designed a wide range of public and private buildings from bus terminals to theatres and hunting lodges to universities. In addition, he produced master plans for major industrial towns such as Jamshedpur and co-founded the architecture and design periodical MARG.
With independence, a period of nation building began, and Koenigsberger, who had been appointed Federal Director of Housing by Prime Minister Nehru in 1948, was in a highly influential position. In particular, he was responsible for addressing the problem of housing approximately 10,000,000 predominantly Hindu refugees flooding into India from Pakistan following partition. By the time he left India for London in August 1951, Koenigsberger had planned four new towns (including Bhubaneswar, the capital of Orissa State), supervised the development and planning of a further two, developed an affordable prefab housing system and designed its production process.
By focusing on Koenigsberger—the person at the centre of a diverse network of figures including Jawaharlal Nehru, Mirza Ismail, Jamshed Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Mulk Raj Anand and Rabindranath Tagore—Rachel Lee’s work will contribute to a much‐needed re‐evaluation of the post‐colonial architectural and urban development in a rapidly urbanizing country.
The results of Rachel Lee’s work will form the foundation of an exhibition titled “Urban Visionaries”, which is scheduled to be shown at the NGMA Bangalore in 2012. The exhibition will also showcase Gustav Krumbiegel’s landscape architecture in Bangalore and will be curated by MOD and the Visual Art Collective, Bangalore.
Rachel is a MODbug. Read more about her in the MOD team page.
Pre-fabricated Housing Factory
Lecture at MSA: Lost Visions vs Capitalistic Green
Anne Katrin Fenk gave a lecture at MSA (Munster School of Architecture) on the subject of ‘Lost Visions vs. Capitalistic Green – about the (de)construction of open spaces in India‘.
Excerpts from the lecture:
[English]
India has been through changing town-planning situations. Registered city designs at the time of British colonisation (phase of global diffusion of ideas in town and open space planning) and the strong setting in of internationalisation that followed independence as well as modern and post-modern urban projects have all left different urban images in their wake. On one side it is possible to find homogenous “complete” cities or built utopias such as Chandigarh, Gandhinagar and Bhubaneshwar, which were realised under the ideals of modernism. The majority of Indian cities are however distinguished by a multitude of sometimes “incomplete” fragments dating from various eras.
The commercial apparatus and the associated building boom, especially in the private sector (e.g. real estate), generate and consolidate (completed) images of the building process (gated communities, apartment towers), independent of the area’s socio-cultural, ecological and economic histories. The newly created images are simply laid on top of the old. Traditional settlements and the public infrastructure feel these changes the most.
The question “What is/was and will be the nature of a modern Indian city” is rarely asked.
* See also: Aiyar, Shankkar & Mehra, Puja. (2007) “Prices out of Control,” India Today, March 5
[Deutsche]
VERGESSENE VISONEN VERSUS KAPITALISTISCHES GRÜN >
ÜBER DIE (DE) KONSTRUKTION VON FREIRÄUMEN IN INDIEN
Indiens Städte sind durch extrem wechselhafte städtebauliche Phasen gegangen. Eingetragene Stadtentwürfe zu Zeiten der englischen Kolonialisierung und die nach der Unabhängigkeit stark einsetzende Internationalisierung über Stadtprojekte der Moderne und Postmoderne hinterließen unterschiedliche Stadt- und Freiraumbilder. So findet man einerseits, homogene „fertige“ Städte bzw. auch „gebaute Utopien“ nach dem Leitbild der Moderne, jedoch der Großteil der Städte ist geprägt von einer spannenden räumlichen Melange der Epochen.
Die Frage: „Was ist/war die Eigenart einer modernen indische Stadt?“ wird nur selten gestellt. Und nur langsam werden historische Visionen, informelle Prozesse sowie radikalere Zukunftsmodelle erforscht und weiterentwickelt, obwohl gerade hierin ein enormes Potential liegt. Somit ist der indische Stadtdiskurs von heute vielmehr eingebettet in ein Milieu aus städtebaulichem Formalismus, postmodernen „Ideenwirrwarr“, Golf Course, Gated Community Ästhetik und ökonomischer Spekulation.
Anne Katrin Fenk is a Co-Founder of MOD. Find more about her in the MOD team page.
