 Okay, yeah, so as Hassan mentioned tonight's a special kind of doubleheader if you will Where we get to now have the pleasure of learning more about the work of one of our panelists So Rahul Miprotra is a practicing architect an urban designer and an educator underlining all of those He founded our Good he founded his office RMA architects in 1990 And that's a that's based in Mumbai and Boston And he's designed a wide range of projects really from the scale of private homes to government and private institutions And then a collection of projects driven, I'd say by the office's commitment to advocacy So it's really interesting to hear The frame that he's putting around Charles Korea's work around agency The work of the office is really highly contextual in the deeper sense of context Embracing the particular opportunities. I'd say of climate culture and place We see frequent use of local materials and methods that empower local crafts people incorporation of passive cooling strategies like wind towers Or natural ventilation through courtyards And therefore we're looking ideas to you know, that are slightly more high-tech like living facades Which use plant life as a dynamic facade element appreciating but also cooling the building Incorporating evaporation with the irrigation systems The engagement with context though also spans into conservation so He's recently done a master plan for the Taj Mahal But there's also great humility in context where resources can be limited For instance, there's a social housing project for 100 elephants and their caretakers That's in Jaipur and throughout I'd say a sense of thanks. That's actually for you A sense of poetry really permeates the work with ideas like celebrating the connection between Earth and sky which we see in the Sydney modern art gallery competition In 2018 our america texts were awarded the venice architecture Biennales Jerry special mention for quote Three projects that address issues of intimacy Empathy and empathy gently diffusing social boundaries and hierarchies. I thought that really nicely Put a circle around the work So that's just the practice But Rockwell is also prolific in the academy He studied at the architecture School of architecture Ahmedabad where he received the gold medal for his undergraduate thesis And graduated also with a master's degree with distinction in urban design from Harvard University He's taught at the University of Michigan at the school of architecture and planning at MIT And he's currently professor of urban design and planning at Harvard's graduate school design where he recently served as chair of the department of urban planning and design He's also director of the master of landscape architecture in urban design degree program and co-director of the master of landscape architecture and urban design degree program So he's written extensively And lectured extensively on topics of architecture conservation and urban planning Especially in design in Mumbai and India So I'll just list some of the writings and you get a flavor of the topics Bombay the city's within which is covering the city's urban history from the 1600s to the present Anchoring a city line a history of the city's commuter railway And Bombay to Mumbai changing perspectives that one sort of explains itself He co-authored conserving an image the Fort precinct in Bombay as a result of which The Fort precinct in Mumbai was declared a conservation precinct in 1995 a first such designation in India again agency In 2000 he edited the architecture of the 20th century in the South Asian region quite encompassing you're marking the end of the last century in 2014 Oh, sorry, 2011. He wrote architecture in India. Sorry the list is just amazing The architecture of the 20th century. Sorry architecture in India since 1990 On contemporary architecture in India And that work has extended into exhibitions as well In 2014 he published the kumaila Mapping the ephemeral mega city, which was a university-wide research project And actually we passed a student thesis project on a similar topic on the same topic in the corridor here His latest co-authored book is titled Taj Mahal multiple narratives Which is also published in 2017 But his research on urbanism is largely focused on Evolving a theoretical flame framework for designing conditions of informal growth what he refers to as the kinetic city Many of his design studios have focused on this area of interest And this topic is is what his current research looks at which is expected to be published later this year Outside of practice just to wrap up. I've said enough outside of practice is teaching And teaching Rahul has been involved in civic and urban affairs in Mumbai Having served on government commissions for the conservation of historic buildings and environmental issues with various neighborhood groups as Executive director of the Urban Design Research Institute in Mumbai So again, I think I've said enough here. Please join me in welcoming Rahul So thanks, thanks Nate and thanks Hassan Steven and thanks for being patient We've been trying to organize this for a year now and many apologies and very glad to be here So thanks again So what I'm going to sort of do is you know share with you some projects and hopefully through that extract some Issues which are rather specific to India But I think also something that we should all be thinking about as architects and sort of going back to this question of agency of design I thought it's interesting. So, you know, I think one of the things that And you know here I think a lot of these observations come out of teaching and many things that sort of Nate alluded to which I'm not going to talk About which is the writing exhibitions and that kind of feedback loop made one think about many of these issues Also in the context of one's own work and so this idea of you know, the sphere of concern in the sphere of influence I think this is something I believe we all struggle with because our sphere of concern is all the way from climate change To iniquity and poverty and we can speak about all of this and we wake up the next morning And we don't know what we can do about any of this And so how do we begin to map and intersect our spheres of concern with our spheres of influence? And I think this is a big challenge for architects and I think one way we can do this is really you know We talk about the practice of architecture, but what is the architecture of practice? What is the the form or what are the models by which we can engage with the world? I think we need to deeply reflect about because I think there's a lot of redundancy in the way We perhaps even teach this there's a kind of There's a kind of implicit message in In our teaching of architecture, which brings it down to very narrow one or two possible ways of doing it And we of course go out in the world And that's what a good education does is it equips us to go out in the world and then discover the other ways of Engaging with the world and models and I think that's fine But maybe I think we could begin to as pedagogues and academics reflect about what might be the other models by which We could engage with the world and I think here the spheres of concern and spheres of influence can begin to create some sort of intersections And the third observation I want to kind of which has been more recent for me Just through my Experiences and I I want to preface showing you the work with just these three observations is I think related to this fear of Influence and concern sphere related to the idea of models of practice is also our understanding of the client We see the client as a very unified entity But I've begun to think through my own reflections that actually the client is a patron client An operational client and a user client and these are differentiated and you know for example in a in a in a university You have a university building committee Then you have the president of the university the president might have influence often on choosing the architect or the natural building or bringing A donor in so the president becomes a kind of patron in a way the operational clients are you know of the the engineering or the Building you know whatever the building committee or you know who have a whole different set of aspirations from the patron And then you have the users which would be the students faculty Etc who also bear upon these decisions. These are completely disparate entities with completely different aspirations often and as architects We get often trapped in one of those spheres So we either are overly sensitive to the user and then struggle with the operational client Most often we get consumed by the operation client who calls the shot and we take them at face value as the client Often because we don't have the ability to go across these circuits So some architects aren't good at connecting with students and faculty and feel shielded within the building office As their clients and some come right through the president as the patron and then can't attach themselves to the other two in terms of feedback Loops, and so I think in practice to recognize and differentiate these become really critical And I think our ability that we must cultivate through our education But through our operation is how we can move Horizontally slide through this and have a much broader imagination of what the client would be and of course The most important of all these clients is the planet earth now in some cases the client actually Collapses into one entity and a weekend home or a single family house is the classic example where it might be partners that you have to Sometimes negotiate some differences between but you know It's minor compared to say building for a university or then building for the government in a country like India Where it's even more disparate and I'm going to show you a series of projects Really to share with you the projects But I just want you to keep these lenses in mind because each one of these have a completely differentiated Dynamic in terms of what the client means and what the client could potentially mean and I believe that some of these Were successful painfully often because we began to intuitively recognize this and work across These different differentiated aspirations. So the first project I'm going to start with a house where these things collapse and Mumbai the metropolitan area young architects always start by doing weekend homes And small projects like that. That's sort of the route that you cultivate your practice This is interesting. This is the kind of stuff that gets built there I always tell this sort of story, you know where you have the Palladian villa or the classic kind of example of an object in the landscape where the symmetry of the building probably comes from its Exteriors as you see in that diagram up there, but in the traditional sort of Fabric it would be the other way the kind of the the symmetry really comes from the courtyard Which is you know the center of the house the house might be asymmetrical on the outside So in different traditions, this is differentiated and this is the kind of house that gets built in the peripheries of Mumbai for weekends and you know, I was on the boat going to this sort of Area with a contractor who was boasting about how he was designing this house It's for a really well-known pop star and I said, who's the architect and he said no, no There's no architect. I'm building it She gave me a postcard of the White House in Washington and asked me to copy it and what this does is Architecture becomes an instrument where you polarize society because this these are comparatively Impoverished not as wealthy peripheries as the city itself their rural landscapes and the elite build weekend homes for indulgence here And then you have houses like this which have nothing to do with the environment You have compound walls beware of dog signs if you go down the driveway You feel you're on a landing strip in an airport because they have bollards every two feet, you know So it's it's completely out of sync and therefore you create very hard thresholds because you have to buffer yourself in isolation from actually the reality of the countryside Around and here you really are reminded that the instrumentality of architecture to either separate people or bring people together is a critical part of our Empowerment in a sense and we can use it either way and so this was one of the early houses We did in this area called Ali Bagh. It was for a young couple Where what we essentially did was in talking to them we realized that in the year They're gonna spend about 60 days at the most which is maybe six weekends or ten weekends or you know Whatever and so what here the living room is that porch and the living room also becomes a gesture to the community So the caretaker in this case can actually use that space when people are not there to entertain his friends to sit with his own family You know etc and so you begin to get a softening of the threshold So what they do the couple does is all that light furniture is put into the house And that becomes an offering to the countryside to caretaker to people who actually engage with the house in terms of their services And of course we've sort of detailed it and it's not a matter of just making these gestures But also articulating the building and that's what it sort of looks like the roof collects the rainwater You see the two taps there because they're surplus water The taps are accessible to the villagers who can come and extract the water because the couple doesn't need that much water For the few days that they spend there and so for me This was about what I would call softening thresholds where you begin to use Architecture in a way that becomes more porous. It allows this kind of movement even if it's a gesture I think it's important and a follow-up project which you see at the bottom of the screen Which is the periphery of the village with the village beginning to encompass it is for a doctor a very famous young doctor who Discovered drug-resistant TB and so he had more money than he needed and wanted to build a mansion and asked us to almost Short of giving us that postcard of the White House I mean that's how he described what he'd want as a villain and I think in our arguments We talked to him about Imagining that village grows around you how would this feel integrated within the village and of course then the first Sort of thing we had to do was to disaggregate it and so the house was broken up into chunks for us It was also an experiment to imagine how the same ideas as a research agenda Would work for a middle-class family where if someone had to had to invest Incrementally and here I think the inspiration of architects like Charles Curia very important How would that happen and so what do you see on the top there is the living dining and a kitchen? And then you have a lap pool with a doctor's study in a guest room and then you have a separate block Which is three bedrooms where the family can go so if the family is together They can actually use it as one big room on a weekend and bond and all of that if they take other guests from whom They want privacy those rooms can be closed off and that's kind of a study model that shows you and this is how it sort of feels When you sort of drive up to it when you see it from the village It's fragmented enough that when the village grows around it the skyline will hopefully just merge Of course, it'll always be distinct, but in terms of scale it would absolutely Merge and the swing pool is not in the garden and it's not exposed because again These are important decisions because here you have gardeners who are often poor Who are working in the garden and then you have these kinds of hedonistic practices of pools with beach umbrellas It's kind of out of sync. So the pool here is an exercise pool which is integrated within the house It's discreet so that you don't begin to create these visual polarities also in terms of functions Etc. And it's fit. It's a series of courtyards. You see the water body there and It's a very simple materials in terms of scale that was a living room This is how the pool is sort of integrated within the space So it becomes a feature, but it also becomes a very usable from the study and it's discreet But yet frames the outside so it blurs the inside and the outside visually and this is the bedroom area where they are very You know blinds are very discreetly tucked away You can bring them down and actually it's very Japanese and its inspiration that it can separate the rooms for total privacy But it can also very generously open out into like a three-bedroom suite if the family and the extended family the kids Etc around because this is after all a weekend home and then it's sort of designed for different climates It's designed for the monsoon in the way it kind of the same elements begin to respond to collecting water But making it also usable in the monsoon, which is a very extreme form of climate In a region such as this and the details are subtle So copper is just used as a flashing but also made ornament for the windows But otherwise the materials are all very local and and and rather simple Which when there's very little art and it's these colored glazing that sort of change light in the room And therefore make you aware of the time of the day Etc and then again the way it sort of blurs in and out of the From the from the outside to the landscape and the inside etc The second project is is more complicated and this is Hyderabad, which is where Hassan's family I think or you have connections there It's in the southern part of India And this was the Nizam the Nizam of Hyderabad was at one point the wealthiest man on the planet And he had a series of palaces which went into disrepair after independence when you know They lost their power on these sort of properties And we got involved in this in 2000 in a very decrypt state and there you see the Charminar Which is a well-known monument you see the four towers And the city had sort of encroached upon this and our project was to Stabilize this as a public space and the Nizam's wife came back to India She lives in Turkey to reclaim this property But to create them as assets for the public and this was complicated because here your client or your patron now Was the Nizam's wife who had these intentions The most important player and this was a lawyer who was part of the patron sort of group The users we had to imagine because it was going to be the city in the future And the operational clients were Crafts people they were again lawyers who were helping us reclaim the land So it was a decade-long project which resulted in the creation of public space for the city What you see in red is all the property that had been encroached upon which we couldn't reclaim but we had to Stabilize the edges so that the central courtyards the three courtyards You can look at the density of the city and so it becomes actually an asset because it becomes a public park So is it a conservation project? Of course, it is a historic preservation project because it's an important piece of you know Heritage but it's also a public Interest project. It is a public space project. It's a landscape project It's a planning project because land rights had to be negotiated working with these lawyers Etc to make sure where we were investing the money was property. There wasn't encroached that really belonged to the Nizam Etc that's how we sort of when we walked into the property. That's the shape It was in sort of anchor what like parts it sort of just gone into complete this repair So it was a matter of actually documenting it We created a portfolio about 120 drawings which were measured because these drawings didn't exist and And so this mapping of defects and so this we spent about two years just doing this because we couldn't embark on a ambitious project like this without having very very good documentation and then of course There were many learnings. So you see these beautiful arches. Actually, it's a post and beam granite Structure and everything else is decorated decoration, which is built in lime and the lime takes months to sort of build because you have to let it You know you do it in layers and you mold it and there you see crafts people and luckily in India these traditions are living and so it is a matter of Actually challenging what I was describing as models of practice because here instructions one tender documents instructions were Creating a wrapper with the crafts people who often didn't even speak English or couldn't read and then working with them on site Living there for periods of time to gain their confidence To learn from them because they would tell you how it could be done the best given the kind of quality of lime They're given the state of the stone that was a substructure and so it's it's really interesting because I think for those of us We're doing historic preservation and contemporary buildings. I believe they are part of the same activity We have siloed them both in the academy But also in practice people specialize in historic preservation because I think contemporary architects have a lot to learn about weathering For example material life cycles in conservation projects You very quickly realize that all the problems lie at the junction between two materials that have two completely different life cycles Because one decays before the other and so I think these are lessons I believe we have really embedded in our contemporary projects And you know I can point some of these out as we go along But for me it's become a complete blur and I think this is something again within the academy We have to promote much more because they're deep learnings from historic preservation for contemporary buildings Which don't seem so evident and I think weathering is one great example and that's sort of the finished product That's the main Kilwat Mahal which is the real palace where the Darbar occurs those chandeliers were put together We identified the grandchildren of the people who had originally assembled them because of the records in the Nizam sort of archives And they came back and they knew exactly what to do with these chandeliers which had been put in away in boxes That entire ceiling that you see in this Kilwat Mahal was built afresh Luckily again we have these crafts they were fragments from which we could actually reconstruct it and a whole host of details Which take you to a completely different granular sensibility when you're looking at it and the budgets were constrained So this is not a fancy air-conditioned gallery. It's very loosely organized from the Nizam's archives Just to give people an insight into their family their life what they did This is the beautiful textiles. So here we made an intervention by putting glass You see the spider clamps are not visible from the outside anywhere So it's very minimal in terms of how the new touches the old and these sort of create these Museum spaces because some of these are very rare textiles that also needs minimal crime climate control and humidity Control so this was a project that we did and this took us into Another much broader project. In fact, they were happening simultaneously because in post-colonial conditions This conservation actually becomes very complicated because when the custodians of an environment a different culture from the Creators of the environment. That's what post-colonialism is. It's very complicated because whose narrative are you using and whose narrative are you? Reinforcing so here are the custodians are the Indians which is a completely different culture from the British So when we use British narratives of English heritage, which comes out of the narratives and the culture of the creators There's a dyssynchrony in the location. And so how do you construct? Significance while keeping the illusion of architecture intact This becomes a complicated and a really interesting question and here we zoomed out and created this legislation to declare the whole fort the historic district of Mumbai Conservation zone and here the patrons we were the patrons because we were self initiating this the clients were people we put together as Citizens associations and the users were the citizens at large And so, you know the historic city its present state How do you begin to create a new significance for it? How do you how do you identify the contemporary engine that might drive the process of conservation? We began to identify different districts that had consistent aspirations. So what you see in yellow is a banking district You know the tourist district what you see in the pink up there is the corporate district And we began to organize different citizens groups and this is a lecture in itself But I'll give you a glimpse of what we did in the art district Which is what you see between the yellow and the red where they it was never an art district historically But we found there were 15 galleries that were occurring over time there Automatically and it had wonderful public space. So we began branding it as an art district We constructed a new significance Recognizing that would be the contemporary engine that could potentially drive the process of conservation and we organized as Activist citizens groups we began to develop a narrative. We organized a festival We began signposting the place so that in people's imagination They had a new kind of imaginary of what the area could potentially be started organizing Concerts in the open lighting up buildings using interstitial spaces for children's activities in this case convincing Building owners to allow their facades to be used as pavement galleries Organizing concerts in the public space to raise money pavement galleries Using that money then to repair the public space because this is very low in the priorities of the government who's dealing with many other kinds of You know immediate problems, but this was done through raising money privately through the organizing of festival actually restoring buildings Creating tripartite arrangements in this case between the state government the education secretary and the association of the art district To restore these grade one buildings So this was we were being the clients and the patrons here as the association that raised the money and appointing architects It was wonderful because very early on my career I was actually appointing our conservation architects and so that's all these are the experiences that made me See the production of the built environment from different perspectives and realizing that it's the rapport between This deconstructed more complex form of what you imagine clients to be That could be very productive in the way we could engage as architects in creating these circuits and feedback loops of decision making So here too it was about documentation here is a prince of wales museum and here we kind of Did an annex for them which was actually A warehouse which had no openings except one hoist here and one door and this was a light well And we added a veranda here to create circulation systems So opening up 50 000 square feet of of space for this art district So it was also about architectural intervention because as we understood and imagined the art district We knew we knew what kind of responses we needed architecturally So you actually then create your own agency in a sense that is you define the context within which you might intervene Because then you're very clear about how you're going to intervene And then of course it's a matter of getting people to imagine these projects And that's the new intervention. So done with contemporary sort of sensibilities It's all done a foot away from the old building. So it's reversible So it also meets the cannons of historic preservation. It can be dismantled Very easily if another generation believes that an intervention like this in a historic fabric is not the right way to go And then later we at the bottom there you see that curved oval shape We added a visitor center and now we're adding we just added a children's pavilion which opened last week Many small interventions contemporary interventions within this historic grade one precinct But all with the way that they were contemporary They kind of set up a new dialogue with the historic grade one building and they're all reversible So this one it can be dismantled in 48 hours, which is this visitor center Which was the opening image of the lecture So now when we come to institutional buildings, I want to share with you a recent library that we've done And this is a campus designed by Toshi. So this is the first non-doshi building there And it's a school of architecture where I also studied so it was really intimidating to be asked to Design a library in the heart of the campus And so we were given a site Christopher Beninger who's a American architect who settled in India did the master plan and this is the site they gave us So we had very little choice and the requirements needed a six-story building Which was very problematic for me because these are Doshi's buildings This is the cafeteria and an eating facility We've just recently added and we've also restored the entire plaza So that you create a relationship between these buildings and so to put a six-story building here It was difficult This was a very complicated project because my patrons were of course the amdabad education society, but the But the operational clients were all architects and all people who had been Senior to me in the school of architecture. So it was very difficult proposition Many consultations with students and faculty And finally we came up with this idea that we are not going to go a centimeter above Doshi's buildings But instead we're going to bury three floors underground And this was a difficult decision to make But it was the only way that you could make it contextual and for that for me that was very important because this is a modernist historic precinct And very important as part of our own heritage besides my own personal sort of heritage and that's our first presentation where after Teasing the committee for a while. I opened the side of the model and they realized they kept saying you can't fit all the requirements It's impossible We know in a day I said no all the requirements fit and I tease them for 15 or 20 minutes Just to soften the mod and then I removed the side of the the model and they saw three floors below The ground and there was silence and then they could absorb it and I then I realized I'd won the battle And we went ahead and we designed the building which is actually Like these sort of Chinese or Japanese dolls where they nestle into each other It's actually three buildings the first building which is the outer skin Which you see on the top there is one which actually acts as a skin It modulates the climate of the of the of the building The next layer in there is surfaces which are now well protected because they are four meters They're set in so the rain doesn't get to them But it's a skin that insulates areas that had to be air conditioned All the building the entire building is designed for air conditioning But you don't need it in most parts and then the inner building is a stack Is the book stacks which is a completely different building that goes down three or four floors Now the interesting thing is that the sectional logic of each of these buildings is different The outer building has a 4.5 meter Floor height the next one has three and then the third one has just 2.4 meters eight feet Which is what you need to reach a book and so sectionally they don't actually align Which means you get beautiful slippages that allow you to see across the section on a diagonal Which is critical to not feel claustrophobic when you've gone three floors below the ground But also the we've taken natural light all the way down So you don't feel the claustrophobia because you have natural light going down all the way to minus 12.4 meters Which is quite was quite ambitious. So that's what the building looks like in section You see that's the stacks which has its own logic That's the reading rooms which has it's like another building and then that's the outer skin which is movable Lovers and that's what it sort of looks like with the things that's what it looks like completed It's a concrete base which has these deep niches which were meant for students to sit and occupy it So people eat there they work on their laptops So the base is always full of students that occupy They're like little alcoves and reading niches and the the louvers Each panel can be operated by one handle. It's all mechanical And you can completely make it transparent or you can close it depending on you know where the sun Is penetrating the building And at what time and that's how it sort of sits in context This is the plaza that we've restored and we've picked all our lines and our points and datums and reference points from Doshi's buildings So it kind of respects that but doesn't mimic it in terms of materials It keeps the texture similar But it begins to pick up all the datum for the proportions to inform the the proportion And this is the threshold you walk through where you see this large 4 meter space which protects the building it it picks up on the same kind of bristle a but it does it spatially In a completely different way and therefore bridges which come in from four directions Inspired by the Fatehpur Sikri Tansen sort of platform Which allow you and you see the depth of these niches where students can Can sit and and read and the ground space the ground floor is a completely fluid space Which is meant for students it's used for exhibitions used for reviews. It's used for student meetings It's a common space for the entire campus So that through the function allows a complete fluidity at the ground level Between all the buildings it's used for exhibitions more formally It's lined up totally on access to Doshi's buildings So it kind of respects and frames that old entrance of the existing architecture School and in the evenings you begin to get these beautiful reflections And as you go down into the building you see the natural light. This is a courtyard So that's the ground level the concrete gets lighter as you go into the building So that's a dark charcoal concrete and it begins to get white as you go down And the light penetrates through these skylights and it comes all pouring all the way down Especially down to this level and this is the archives. There's very minimal Light there and so this is at the minus four meters level. You see the skylights That you see there and then this is how you see the relationship between the inside and the outside Carols sort of are Along the perimeter and the stacks sort of within which have again like I said their own logic And you have a courtyard outside. So if you want to step out to meet And have discussions now they have tables and chairs there you don't disturb the rest of the library So within that lower courtyard you have a meeting space For discussion and in the good weather you can actually have a seminar class there and all of that and then sectionally That's what so at any moment you actually see three or four levels simultaneously with natural light filtering down So you don't get stratified just because each of those buildings have a different sectional logic And so the porosity visually and on the diagonal I think helps open the vistas and Extends the perspective and the space and the low most area is quiet reading rooms And then these are the stacks which I said were eight feet with these sort of staircases that Take you up these mesonines. And so This is what sectionally it feels like these are catwalks on which you can stand to on this Arrangement for a harness And this is how you go through the section of the building These are the bridges that sort of connect you across different parts of the campus These are the carols And the skylight The concrete as you can see has got much lighter It becomes white as it goes down and this is the lowest level where you see light pouring down So this is already at minus eight meters And you see the book stacks within These are the reading carols for the phd students and you know students who need dedicated space Uh And those are the half levels between the the the book stacks As you go through kind of the building and so this is the lowest level and you know the the These are three of these are four portals that are the entire structure So there are no columns the portals really support the building above And uh all the electrical air conditioning is all integrated in the stack So you don't have ducting. It's a very clean pure concrete space You know with the with the reading rooms in it with sort of sections within it which for for more private sort of Gathering and as you go up to the upper levels. It's much lighter There's more light. These are the reading rooms and spaces for magazines journals for people to work on their laptops It's air conditioned their areas outside the air conditioning where now they have tables These are conference spaces which are very cool because they're well shielded from the sun And uh, you know and then the louvers can be adjusted at will And one of the sort of aspirations of this building were as I read it with the users and with the faculty Was how can one actually, you know, not do something in brick and concrete which is beautiful But not as relevant today or much more difficult today when you have an influx of many new materials So how can the building actually demonstrate to the students the use of new materials like glass and plywood and Gypsum board and stuff but do it in a way that might also be performative. So the building was also meant to be Instructional in its aspiration and the climatic aspects of it was one key Apart because we forget climate. We were talking about form follows climate And so this building is now used in the third third year first semester I think for their environment and climate class as a building they map through the semester And so what we did was we produced a handbook in two languages Which tell you how to operate the building tell you what months what Temperatures and now their students are mapping temperatures in different parts to understand how Climatically by altering the way the louvers are set in the morning and the evening it could actually become instructional So it becomes a demonstration of that and at night, of course it all reverses because it becomes very transparent You begin to get the surfaces silhouetting and you get these beautiful Reflections where you have the play between this raw concrete and the more kind of finished interior spaces So from that to jump to hydra bath back again where we started with the palace restoration This is a corporate building and you know, I call a lot of the corporate and global architecture I call it the architecture of impatient capital where capital is intrinsically impatient And these are buildings which Have to manifest the value of capital very quickly That's why they're often vendor driven buildings and architects now Have to worry about going higher than each other or twisting the building more than each other But it's really the vendor who delivers the building for the client on time because time is of the essence And terrains that actually create the least friction for impatience the for the impatience of capital like dubai shanghai Suddenly become celebrated. They're all autocracies that allow that to happen So in a democracy, what does that mean? And of course in places like manhattan where capital and land as such premium this gets perpetuated and Many other parts of the world get built in that image And so here we were approached to do a corporate building for a state-of-the-art infrastructure company That was getting global investments and they wanted exactly this they wanted a glass box essentially And it was really difficult but in this case the patrons and the client were one entity Of course the users were different and almost Non-consequential to the clients but to us they were naturally very important. This was the site It's outside hydra bath in cyber bath, which is a kind of very dry hot climate really Everything here is a glass box except that circular building which is mario botta So it's clad in brick and it's different But the rest are essentially all glass boxes and this is like I said a state-of-the-art kind of Infrastructure company. This is like a nasa room where they have every piece of equipment That means all their trucks their dumper trucks tractors anything of their equipments that are 500 kilometers away have cameras loaded on them and they in real-time monitor who's doing how much work if someone takes a Loot break. That's too long. He gets a call on his cell phone from this control room So these guys are really into efficiency and stuff. So the kinds of buildings They showed me were these like this is mercedes-benz showroom You see the ben sign at the bottom of the slide and you know Hydra bath was going through this political crisis where the state was going to be divided into telegana and andra prudation These glass buildings were ideal buildings to stone by riot years, you know Don't throw stones at people. You know if you live in a glass house And and so these were what was amazing was they all had fishing nets on them And I discovered that the curtain glazing manufacturers would actually give you a choice of fishing net colors Because it came with the detail of the curtain glazing on how you can fix the fishing net So that if people threw stones at the building you were safe and it made me really think that Talk about impatient capital talk about globalizations the kind of Compulsor or the strength of these images of what is called global architecture in terms of its materiality And what it means to relate to that as a corporate building or investments from around the world Is pathetic and you know talk about architecture not being a movable feast and Hassan was sort of emphasizing How architecture is about the region and about place This was really bizarre and so at this time we were in Jaipur doing some research And I came across these beautiful tach huts which I discovered were water coolers which a business community and the government Collaboratively did they were 200 of them and they were set up in the summer in April when the temperature was about 45 degrees centigrade How does that translate into Fahrenheit? 100 or something really how you could fry an egg on the road It was really hot and these were water coolers which supplied Safe drinking water free of charge without any plastic cups people just cup their hands wash their hands and drink water Sign of gratitude and were on their way We were touched by this gesture and we said asked ourselves how this could inspire our building because this was really relevant And this is just a footage from what that looks like. So this is the hut That's the opening this guy works for the association in the morning at about 9 30 or 10 he comes to work And all he has the only valuable thing he has is a brass kettle Which he puts out and he's open for work and people come cup their hands drink water. It's safe clean Very good water and people appreciated a great deal And every once in a while he comes out and he humidifies the hut And so that through evaporative cooling even the hut stays really cool and within the hut All the water is in earthen pots and that too through evaporative cooling keeps the water naturally cool It's called a matka which is classic and historically used to keep water to and he assures you it's hygienic water What more do you need and such a beautiful gesture no plastic cups? It's beautiful in the way people make eye contact. Thank you And move along and so this was deeply inspirational to us and we thought my god Let's sort of see how does this translate into a building in Hyderabad, which is a similar hot and dry climate And so we began to you know look at many things we looked at the quality of light through the patch we looked at how You know it performed And then we came up with the building which is a five floor high garden on all four facades now This is not a green wall like you put those plastic containers Stick them to the wall and make patterns out of it. This is a performative screen Which gets humidified through a misting system that's integrated in the trellis And they're hydroponic trays from which the plants grow So it's very efficient very little water to grow the plants and the misting can keep the plants damp And therefore they through that humidity and evaporative cooling the building keeps cool We applied the clients are of course very keen to get a lead certificate We failed on all the applications for the lead certificate because our windows weren't sealed our air conditioning wasn't efficient But we didn't need that and of course later india changed to the grea model which is a model adapted for Passive cooling and things but when we were doing the building, you know, and finally we convinced the clients They were very young people that look go this way This is going to give you much more mileage in whatever you're trying to do And so every facade is different we experimented with depending on which direction of the sun And we kind of made patterns all the things that people do with alicobond Because they were showing us buildings where alicobond did different things in colors We said we can do that with plants and so we came up with this sort of facade We grew them in a nursery to experiment with them We talk about impatient capital. They were in a hurry. They wanted the building in 18 months We gave it to them They got the cows to inaugurators and did all the rituals and everything And we said give us one more year to grow the facade and they agreed And in this little shed outside the city with an old contractor Who said that if you give me a year to do the thing Which means like instead of buying five molds, which are very expensive I'll buy one and we'll use recycled aluminium and melt it down We can take a year to do this, but that's when it'll be economical for us Because otherwise investing in the molds would not give him the return And so we got the client to agree and we slowly built this trellis It was all handcrafted in this kind of new material In this little workshop Which was in a sense it felt very handmade just because of the process It was that's the one mold that we invested in And the mold has a particular form This is all the recycled aluminium biscuits which are that sort of different colors But it gave us a beautiful texture by default and it felt you know rich That is the trellis which has a piping which and they're very small components So two people can hand make them women are employed here Who help with the anodizing This is one of the largest anodizing tanks you've seen But you see how light it is and when enough accumulate they put it in a little truck A pickup truck and take 20 panels to the site And two people can begin to actually assemble it and then it gets assembled the plants grow And that's the kind of misting just when it had been done Which keeps the building cool for atmosphere and any of that And so you know it becomes a woolly monster you give it a haircut You don't recognize it when you go back a year later It is kind of dynamic but it's organic And that's the trellis which is also designed with the care that in case the plants didn't grow Or you had to replace plants one year the building would not look bad It would look it glistens in different ways because the different textures pick up light The podium has all the parking and you have this building that sort of grows above it In plan two and in section is designed in a way to extract hot air The sandwich the salami you see in the sandwich is the tendering department because the accounts needed the privacy This is the corporate area. That's the auditorium the gymnasium the cafeteria So it has a array of spaces. So it's a kind of world within this sort of envelope of green It has a podium which has water bodies meeting places You know, you see curiosity young people looking at plants So it has a sense of the public also and commons and you know the species flourish sometimes they burn out in bits You grow them. This is lemon grass. That's what the interiors look like. They extract air And now we're you know that building you see on the top like the walkie-talkie in London They got a lead certificate. They're right across the road from us And you know this deadly on the public sphere And we couldn't get a lead certificate because they met all the Sealant requirements and the air conditioning efficiencies and all of that But now we are beginning to map it. We've done it sporadically. I must admit It's a really intuitive project in a sense. We didn't sit down You know scientifically to say what it might be We kind of went along and now we're trying to mine data from it to understand it the shadows become ornament and This is an important image which I like to talk about and in turn from Panama city took it So this is not a photographer But this is again going back to the idea of the soft threshold in a corporation like this the the The gardeners would be the lowest-paid employees. They'd probably be on their haunches Working in the garden as a CEO would drive by in an Audi with reflective glass making no eye contact But now the 20 gardeners in this building As a friend of mine said you've created true green jobs because the identity of the Corporation and the building now depends on the poorest paid But more than that they're empowered in a funny way. They can roam on these catwalks anywhere They can look into anyone's office Someone can be rude and pull the blinds down that never happens So they make eye contact with anyone they choose to make eye contact with and you know that woman wouldn't be wearing that Sorry to work if it was she was working on her haunches in the garden where no one noticed her And so you begin to and again this wasn't something we consciously sat down to design but You know thinking and reflecting about it one realizes that you create access It's the same way as in our buildings in the u.s. And I don't know the solution for that People come in in the night into our and clean all the garbage and take the recycling stuff away They're invisible in a sense. So here again, you make visible through architecture The unimpaired perhaps you could argue and so there's a great rapport between now the people and the 20 gardeners If you go to their blogs they talk about things like how they made friends with the gardener And now they prepare bouquets for them if there's a celebration at home They catch butterflies for their kids if they've got to study them in school So there's a synergy that occurred again. I think by default. I don't take the credit Consciously about that, but it's important to reflect about it And so they become really the heroes of the building in a sense And so again, this is not a staged image if it was I would have moved those wires in the newspaper But you know, I just happened to walk into this guy's cabin and there the workers were Right in the background, you know right there and they sometimes tap on the glass and say hello and move on And so it's a nice sort of synergy between like I said You know the the the the the the best Uh The highest paid and the lowest paid and these are just again images of it This is something we made recently for the Venice Biennale and I went back These are the old images, but we went back at the heat of summer that was last May When we thought everything would burn out and we did some footage and we found that actually the plants were really thriving This is of course early footage the new footage will come in a second But we were surprised that You know, it had survived now over 10 years or 11 years And you know, you can set the misting depending on the atmosphere you want the glasses where the conference rooms are So they come out beyond the green the top is all solar panels So all the public spaces run on solar energy and this was at the height of summer last year Where the plants were really flourishing and bits they were burnt out because those were particular species that's shed in the summer But overall it was uh in in in pretty good shape and you can imagine when it's blooming how those different colors would sort of Would would would register. So this is again an example where this not only has an aesthetic dimension I think by default it had a social kind of uh dimension But also it's performative in the way and it was we were lucky it sat next to a garden Which the government it's a common garden. So visually it feels like it's actually growing out of the garden Although it's on the edge of the garden. So that kind of Helped us a great deal So what I've sort of shown you so far. I think I would say these are kind of global programs corporate offices library for a school of architecture And the challenge is how do you localize them? How do you take what are global programs that? float around the globe and in a sense they have expected images that are supposed to be Instrumentalized to manifest them and how do you localize it? That's been the challenge in the few projects I've shown you we've done many others where we've experimented with this idea The converse of that would be how do you take very local programs? And you know, I've only put one project We've done three or four including community toilets and many others Institute for slum children, which I don't have the time to show you but in a number of our projects the The question has been how do you take things that are very local very particular to a place and you almost expect? representation of those programs In in very localized ways of doing things which often become a caricature of what you're trying to do And these local programs actually in our globalized world should resonate globally So how can you take those lessons whether they're of sustainability of questions like water and sanitation? And actually resonate them in ways that the world can learn from them in some ways in terms of their process So there are a number of projects but because I can't show you I'm just showing you one Where this was the most complicated project. That's why I'm showing it to you Where the patron in this case was a chief minister of the state of Rajasthan who commissioned a competition, which we won And then very quickly she went out of power And then for 10 years she was out for seven years. She was out of power and we were Struggling there because the operational clients were the public works department the forest department the secretary for zoos You know people who are total bureaucrats who had no access often to the chief minister or the new chief minister And had no care for the users in which in this case They were a hundred elephant and their mahuts and the mahuts are all muslim because this is the history Of the moguls bringing elephants to a desert the elephants shouldn't be here They end the tropics They should be in Sri Lanka, Kerala in India where they thrive. They have enough water They have you know coconut trees that they can break and scratch their backs with here There's not a stick in the ground. It's a desert climate And so it's an accident of history that they are even there and so the climate doesn't suit them at all They've been celebrated as part of tourism. This is from the new york times in the 60s Where they became the icon for which you know visitors went the elephant in india the maharaja And all of that they take tourists up and down the ramparts of these forts They get painted in these colors which are toxic. There's no water. So they can't wash them So their skin's discolor which i'll show you in a second That's where the government had them live which were you know, they all were parked at the bottom and the mahuts lived on top And they were like cars in a garage, but the mahuts all moved down That's how you see the beds down there and the mahuts even moved out of here This was housing the government provided which didn't work because the relationship between the mahut and the elephant is a very complex one The elephant is can be a very gentle animal, but it's also can be a beast And you know, they've been cases at umber where tourists have been killed where these elephants have been uncomfortable and annoyed And so the mahut Builds a relationship with the elephant. They sing to the elephant. They caress the elephant They have to be in close proximity their children play with the elephants So they become part of the family and so as a housing type This was a completely wrong solution which didn't work and that led to animal activists Lobbying with the government to have this sort of new housing for them and the competition, etc And that was a site we were given which was a it was just sand And so of course we began to study water requirements How much elephants need what we could aspire to and we made it a landscape project around water For us the architecture was inconsequential And I think we wanted because of that because I know many of my other colleagues in the competition Perhaps rightly so they kind of fetishized what were elephant stables So they looked at historically how elephant stables were and you know the the construction, etc So they're like mega structures where 50 elephants at a time would live and but here for us the Fundamental question was how do you create an armature for life? And water was essential for the life of these creatures and for their survival And so we made water the primary kind of Protagonist in this sort of project. This was a site studying it in google image Images we realized the path of the water and therefore came up with the scheme of creating micro dams Where the water could be actually harnessed and then in the interstitial spaces we placed the housing units We didn't put the housing units in the prime land, which would be used for the water And so that was a site plan. It had you know components like we Planned a visitor center now. We've done one here, which I'll just show you These were some abandoned buildings from a previous project So we restored them to make a school for the kids of the Mahots And these are the housing units that have been spanned and this is a kind of entrance Zone and that's how when we got the land in 2007 that was our first site visit. That's what it looked like In three years. That's the same hill that you see here. That's how we managed to transform it And then now Recently, that's the same hill. It's a completely different landscape And this was only because we managed the water rather than emphasizing the architecture And of course the public works department and other agencies went ahead with the building because you know, that's where the money is In a sense, we didn't even have landscape in the tender items But we managed to convince them to just plow soil out to be and and the government fell So for three years the new government didn't want to have anything to do the project We were frustrated We were about to walk out But then later we realized that was to our benefit because it allowed The landscape to regenerate itself untouched because no one lived there So when we made bridges to the new government who are now our patrons and they came to site with us They said wow, this is transformative and they got excited and began to help us incrementally in the project Of course, we also worked hard on the housing and you know, these are 400 unit homes Which is what the government allows for low-income housing because the mounds earn about 5000 rupees less than 100 dollars a month So it's like really low income But by aggregating the three houses again going back to the things we talked about Korea's housing lessons. We created a cluster of three houses with a house for the elephant And which is in very good proximity to the house We added a courtyard so that that actually expands the house from 450 to 650 and then three people share courtyards which we defined which means implicitly We give them another 1000 square feet each So suddenly what is a 400 square foot house becomes a 2000 square foot space And if you aggregate the courtyard, it's a mansion if the three families get along Well, they're really in a mansion because they can actually create their own privacy, etc Which is what has happened And you know and then the principles of keeping it cool by Creating structure for the tach to be stored so that way you get insulation So you have food that is used every day food that's left out to dry The grasses that gives the elephant a very comfortable kind of space And and again, I kind of always jokingly say this because you know elephants are of different sizes And they can't sleep on flat ground. They need a berm. Otherwise they can't get up So that was something we learned on the job and this is the kind of mock-ups We had to do to figure out if the size of the elephant and the size of the room worked And we haven't done a monograph on our work yet And I jokingly say this is going to be the cover image and it's going to be called small medium large and extra large And so this is what it sort of looks like, you know when it's when it was just complete You see begin to see fabric and people begin to use that's the first water body These are pavilions where they hang out together because they can't be elephants are very social They can't be left for too long alone because they get kind of rogue They got to go and meet buddies and hang out and spend time So there's a whole kind of social engineering that kind of has to happen and you see umber fought there Which is where they go to work And you know, these are just how you know, we have to keep the safety of the children in mind So these are windows they can caress the elephants or the elephants are not endangered I'm endangering the children's children's safety And you know, you see the berm here. There's a someone coming home That says courtyard different people have done different things to their clusters And this is what the extra water does because now they have more water than they need for the elephants So they grow flowers they sell flowers in Jaipur The middle class would die to have a lawn in their houses Which they can't because they have to buy tankers of water just to keep their water supply going leave alone their gardens But here the poorest in the community actually have more green than they need And they all have the aspiration of the middle class really in the Indian context and life corrodes architecture and housing As I said the trees are growing. They're now using the courtyards as their kitchen Which gives them one more room within which we and the goats have arrived the elephants and the grow goats hang out The trees are up You know have clusters like this where people get on well. They have their own chicken This guy's sort of looking for their dinner And you know, so your kind of life begin now you don't see the houses painted here yet because they weren't allocated They've just been recently allocated and in Rajasthan. There's a great, you know Capacity for painting and decoration, which people will begin to do. That's a before and after that's when we just built in 2010 And in eight years, that's the same hill again as a reference That's the kind of transformation that has occurred in this essentially Desert climate and now the dish antennas have arrived means life is thriving That's what the elephants sort of Do they take tourists up there? And and you know one of the things again that happened by default. You see the discolored skin here So the water bodies we put because we realize the elephants need water We needed the green we needed to create a micro environment But we didn't realize that actually what we had done was create an amazing bonding Between the elephants and the mahout because the time that they Really bond is when they bathe together because the the mahout actually spends a lot of time Bathing the elephant and that becomes very sort of important for that kind of relationship And and that really was finally the most important aspect of bringing so much water, you know to their availability And that helped a lot. And so here, you know, you see them frolicking and just look how peaceful that elephant is It's almost steady Well, this guy sits and just sort of rubs and caresses them So suddenly they become so docile because this is of such Comfort to them in a hot climate like the one here in the desert of Rajasthan And now slowly the government gave us funds to embank it. We've been yet involved This is all local species of what is called kikar, which is grown. Then these are the pavilions where They have to hang out The reason I left this slide with this copyright is because I got this off the internet and when I went to trip advisor And some of these blogs I realized it was really one of the most popular sites in Jaipur, which has the best historic buildings But hathi gama elephant village was what where everyone was hanging out and the teenage kids of the mahouts Who are now savvy with social media actually started a company And it's like got a web presence. It's called Elephantastic and they wear t-shirts and they advertise this thing and european and american tourists who now go to jaipur They pay 100 rupees to feed the elephant so they can get that definitive image for their instagram or for for their facebook page And if you pay 500 rupees They actually will get you to participate in bathing the elephants like they were so it's become like really a hot tourist spot So here you see them at play that guy is one of the fellows who run it So these guys now hang not only do the elephants hang around together But the young generation has actually turned it into an economy, which is quite brilliant You know to think about it So this was a recent mapping that I did Which is interesting what you see in color at the bottom Well, you see the days the years and this is the bjp government in orange and then they fall when we just start working That's the congress government And then that's the bjp coming to power. These are the different actors. So this is the patron These are all the operational clients and depending on which government came in which secretary was appointed The agency was in charge of the project change. So we were shifting agencies all the time The only steady actor in this whole thing was our firm which you see in red Somewhere here we lost interest because I wrote about a hundred letters some of which are here and you can if you read them They're all letters of encouragement to the government. I have a file that thick I wrote the chief minister every month to tell them why it was an important project And then somewhere here I get a call from the chief minister when we get re-engaged and she says come and meet me On monday. I've been wanting to do this project for political reasons. I didn't do it now This is the last year of my chief ministership the elections. I this was in january the elections are in december We've got a year to finish the project and that's what we did in a year We actually finished whatever we could have the project and she lost the election a few months ago So we were lucky we did it. So now the congress party has come into power Nothing will happen because just because the other government did this not because they're not interested in the project And we'll wait another two three years and get re-engaged to finish more of it And it was a very interesting mapping because it made me kind of really learn About what i'm sharing with you the patrons the clients the users and how this can be unpacked and put together And who plays what role and how you can be instrumental in creating these feedback loops The only people we really stayed in touch with were the elephant keepers and that helped us with the continuity in terms of our Own presence on the site and you know what really did the trick was it's funny the university of ferrara In italy for some reason two years ago gave us Or two or three years ago gave us the gold medal for the most sustainable project that year for this project And the president of the jury was glenn murkett, which was also like a real surprise And so that certificate i sent to the chief minister and that's when i got the call suddenly legitimize something And then that helped but those are kind of the before and after now we are doing many more pavilions and water bodies And trying to finish the project those will be trellises on which creepers will grow so it'll be even more green Those are the pavilions where they'll hang out We've now got the money to add water trucks, which we've did which are very important You can see the green it's almost become virtually a forest and parts Just because of retaining the water from what was just sandy desert And that's a new gate. We've done with a little interpretation room where there's an office where tourists can now buy a ticket to come in So it gives them a little income It's a many infrastructural components of the project that we are doing We've now added a small guest room nandita was talking about charles courier's idea of the think tank for the chief minister So this kind of inspired that a little bit. It's a courtyard with four rooms where Conservationists people who are interested in ecology can actually book a room and live there And their lives are led out in the courtyard so they don't disturb the ecology of the elephants and the elephant keepers So it's a very kind of low-key building with a veranda And it kind of isn't the same vocabulary as the houses of the mahouts and the elephants you enter it there It's around a courtyard very simply finished very basic materials Those are the wives of the elephant keepers and that woman sitting at the end of the table Is a secretary from the tourism department. She's training them on how to look after this little guest house So that provides them income they cook and they clean and they actually are the custodians of the guest house So it's also was a way of Bringing them into that ecology and that's the veranda finished in very simple materials Now these are the houses that got first allocated you can see many sticks in the ground we planted 5000 trees in the in august september last year and What is interesting is when I went to site and I saw these birds painted on the houses and I thought You know the rajasthanis are going to paint animals and elephants and celebrate the elephants So I kind of sat with them and asked them what they were by They said what you don't understand is the ecology of the place has changed because of the trees and the water Now you have experts who come here to document birds and the amount of birds we have here There are more people coming here to see the birds than to see the elephants and one you know That was complete surprise and one was totally unexpected But when I reflected on it, I realized that I think what we finally did was created an ecology. I think Uh an armature to support life and then what happens within that is often unpredictable like life And this was one of the surprises that the project kind of threw up And some of the parts of the site which are low lying have actually become very thick That's a photoshop image, but that's how we are imagining it now Adding many more micro dams to create a wetness within the desert. So it'll really be like uh like an oasis And then this is the area we've Renovated the old buildings that had broken. It's become a school for the mouths children We've used the same materials and vocabulary as we've used in the guest house and in the houses There's a consistency in the architecture the disparity of function doesn't become evident And now this next generation is I think enjoying Kind of new armature for their you know life and so Just in conclusion, I mean, I think I think working in a place like South Asia Offers many challenges, but also many frustrations. It makes vivid very extreme conditions Whether it's conditions of inequity and poverty, which is not to say that doesn't exist here It does to but it in that extreme form it's heightened And I think the way we as architects across these geographies can address these issues We can actually make the lessons cross over rather than siloing them or making them specific to a geography But the artifact of architecture itself is I think very specific to place to climate to material Which is the kind of thing that we've tried to address And also to address the question of very specific vocabularies, which are very relevant for particular kinds of projects You know, we often You know, I mean as architects too, we often get caught in this sort of rubric of consistency We judge architecture by the evolution of that consistency in terms of the aesthetic But I think every place demands a different response So while you might sense a consistency in the approach that we've taken architecturally even in as aesthetic vocabulary, etc They're very disparate buildings, which are very much a response to a very particular situation And so I think the question of the sphere of our concerns and influence and how you make them intersect How the instrumentality and the agency of design can be resituated within the conversation and within society Because society invests in us to imagine better spatial possibilities And how do we instrumental instrumentalize that aspiration and that Expectation of society I think puts us in a situation today within the academy and I'm sure we all deal with this Of a series of crises and questions That we have to ask because the world has changed very fast and I think for the next generation How do we reflect on this will become critical and so this crisis is what I believe is occurring and this crisis is what I think we need to translate Into some kind of action because as they say a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Thanks, baby Yeah, I'm happy to know the three big water bodies and You know, it's an interesting thing because you know when we dug these water bodies, we wanted to line them Because we felt that it's going to just percolate because you get a few inches of rain and Rajasthan you get these downpours and And the government said well, that's not it's not a tender item. So forget about it So at that point we actually almost gave up on the project and then the old Mahout's the elder Mahout's they told us that look don't worry about it Just do it because it'll take one monsoon This is a very particular kind of clay that if it's kept damp with even an inch of water It'll harden as a membrane And we did that and that's how we collected water But the truth is now that the elephants are using it so much They're breaking that layer and we are losing more and more water Although the images that took off their mouth again, I had to document that for the Venice Biennale So we shot that imagery in may which is the peak of the summer But there's enough water and there's enough water for those elephants to line So which is not bad But at some point they'll have to line it to then the water will be all the way up to that retaining wall Which is what it used to be earlier. It should be 10 feet deep earlier Now it's gone down to three or four feet But in the summer post monsoon and rises to five or six, but then through evaporation and Perculation it gets lost. So they'll have to deal with this There's also an issue of which we didn't anticipate of contamination So one water body is now so for drinking they yet do bore wells because the quantity for drinking is very small But for gardening for the planting for washing the elephants for other uses They've now Dedicated one water body and then one water body is just to bathe the elephant So that water body is a one that's damaged the most in terms of the membrane Which was a natural memory if the elephants didn't bathe there they'd have water overflowing But but you know someone will be exhausted with this project someone left to deal with it That's not an easy question and one is in the process of thinking about this and The two projects I'd link in in the context and Luckily they were both shown here was the the you know the The fort district the historic preservation project and this one and this one, you know, we are yet reflecting on it We don't know how it will go We don't know what this next cycle of a new government will do and that's why we're trying to map all that learning from that Also, actually it's that mapping that helped me Deconstruct or unpack the client and presented as the patron and thing is I realized it from this project That these were three streams that hadn't connected and we were the ones who were connecting them in some way I would say this the one word answer to that would be purpose So which is to say here water was the purpose till we made that the central drumbeat I think we managed to rally a lot of support As the project started getting finished There was oh, let's have a ticketing booth so we can get some income from the Tourist let's do this let's do that and then all these questions Hasan your question And I kept telling them we need lining to save the water We need to do that just didn't become a priority any longer because now it seemed that This had given rise to many other aspirations, which they could so how one makes that balance is important And the same thing happened with the historic district, especially the art district You know till at least the time I was involved for about five or six or seven years The purpose was singular that we are going to use this as an instrument to bring awareness to the area But also use it as a way to leverage finances to physically improve the area The current group that's sort of working on it. It's been my open public criticism So I'm happy to even share it here is they have lost sight of that it's become so popular Thousands of people come from around the city for it. I was there recently It was I mean it was almost pathetic that it had come down to that level because the number of people were out of scale with the area The precinct what it could offer the number of galleries. It showed actually a desperation For the need of public space in Mumbai, which is you know a discussion in itself, etc And I was saying to the committee that now runs it You've lost purpose of the fact that this was meant to instrumentalize the improvement to the built environment They're doing nothing about that money is just going into corpuses and becoming bigger Which means they can get more expensive artists to come and perform there Which means they attract more people which means they run down the area even more So, you know planners use the word carrying capacity. This is a more complicated kind of interpretation of that So I think I what I've learned is purpose especially on large scale projects which are urban where Constituencies are disparate where this idea of the client gets really complex and contested That purpose and I think our role in defining that purpose and keeping people on track on that purpose becomes really critical And I think in cities that's also a lesson that I would I think would resonate here No, I mean, yeah, I mean I could talk for hours on this but But I mean just a short answer just to fill you in more specifically to your sub questions I mean, I think Mumbai has grown I think one of the problems with urbanization in places like India with large populations Is, you know, the better you make Mumbai the worse it will get because the when you have inequity That's a problem. I mean, that's true in the united states. Why are cities getting bigger? Why are people going to the coast because you don't have enough happening? You know in the midwest or in some parts of the midwest, etc Um, so I mean, I think finally we've got to zoom out at national perhaps even global levels Inequity is what is creating the imbalances whether you talk about the refugees way, you know, finally it comes to inequity This has become acute on the planet, right? So I think that pans down to explain a lot about Mumbai And that's why in 1964 when Charles Curie and others were planning and projecting new Bombay It was about diversifying into other modes opening up more affordable land Using transportation mobility instrumentally. So he argued that in fact mobility and transportation which Is a huge issue in this country Is the best form of indirect subsidy to housing and you see often governments subsidize housing directly But if they don't have an interrelationship to jobs that housing means nothing it lies abandoned And so how do you make these connections? That's why urbanization and housing become critical in which mobility is a key component To receive subsidies not housing so much because housing can be self made built people can incrementally Apply sweat equity and all those good things that John Turner and others spoke about right? Sorry That's correct. So so correct. So so so that is I think at a meta level the problems of Mumbai at Then then then I think many scales there is a dysfunctionalism there in terms of governance and there's a structural problem in Mumbai, which is that The chief minister of the state of Maharashtra who essentially runs Mumbai Is not elected from Mumbai. He could be elected from a little village in Maharashtra Which means Mumbai becomes his golden goose essentially and that's how you have corruption And so the money goes in the wrong way. So there's a whole lot of systemic problems such as those Then I think at another level, which is what my writings on the kinetic city and on ephemeral urbanism and all have to do with Is I I argue that in many cultures and especially in the case of India architecture has been too central In the conversation about cities cities I imagined through its architecture And so again, sorry to use the word instrumental again Architecture is not the only instrument or the only spectacle by which a city can be defined and made And so I believe that in places like a lot of South Asia and maybe many parts of Asia The ephemeral needs much more It needs to be embedded much more in the conversation about city making So it's not only the static city But it's also Landscapes that can change and that's what my writing called the kinetic city is about where I argue that the city That that Mumbai or cities in India should be not about grand vision But about grand adjustments of how the city can kind of adjust and and this I kind of was inspired really as a student By j.b. Jackson who wrote a wrote a wonderful piece in a magazine. I forget the reference now Which was called the third landscape and he talked about how human beings in their first Retiration were nomadic as we kind of existed and formed communities And then as we became settlers essentially cities became Ways of dealing with the surplus of the countryside could be a simple explanation and cities became important and as wealth accumulated in cities architecture the city beautiful stability Was the mode by which we settled and that actually created all forms of inequity because a rich Zone themselves or in vienna a great example Even music was interior People you know zoning came from it. I mean of course in the german case through For responses to industrialization But anyway when the static city became a thing It actually created separation became hard thresholds for different parts of society and you began to Exaggerate segregation and that's I'm paraphrasing j.b. Jackson said it much more poetically But then he argued what he meant by the third landscape was He said he gave the example of the farmers market as ephemeral events Or the circus that comes to town And even if momentarily it suspends reality in a funding way So the farmers market it changes the way people actually relate to each other It animates public space and creates new relationships in a circus people went and they across the ring Children from different economic and ethnic backgrounds became aware of each other You saw an array of adjacencies colliding between acrobats and tigers and lions and suddenly your imagination was fueled But it was about human contact in that space Which is what he argued about and he's felt he argued essentially as I understood it as a student then Was that as we've made the city more static and created more segregation We need these temporary events that will begin to make connections and human contact again Correct. And so that you see in planning one of the biggest voids in planning is we don't know how to deal with time The notion of time there's no language We have scenario planning and we have phasing which is which is not time phasing is about Yet an end state and an end imagination and just ways of monetizing it in ways that you can achieve it But it's not about changing parts scenario planning does a little bit of that But time in its imagination of how even within land use and zoning things are a 24 hour zone And how do you manipulate that and you know a lot of that pop-up stuff that's happening now I believe is happening because there is a real need for it You know, I always say this story about when we first came to teach in Ann Arbor Our kids the school took them to a farmers market and they were only five or six years old and they came back running and saying We've got to go to the next farmers market. It's beautiful I said gosh, you guys have forgotten where we've come from the whole city's like the farmers market, you know And so I you know, I think these things oscillate and in Mumbai We want malls and we want more organized shopping and here I'm seeing like everywhere They pop up things happening all the way because people want to do things more spontaneously So we'll somehow as a society on this planet settle somewhere in between at some point I don't know if that's sort of fun You know kind of like convoluted way, but yes