 Welcome, everyone. It's a great pleasure this evening to be hosting the seventh annual Kenneth Frampton Endowed Lecture, which was established on the occasion of one of Ken's birthdays. I won't say which one. And which we look forward with anticipation and a sense of optimism every year at this time of the semester. This optimism is not a coincidence. And in the times we are living in comes as much needed breath of fresh air but also reaches us somehow in the form of infectious energy, endless curiosity, sustained engagement, critical sharpness, depth of knowledge, and most importantly even, the kind of humor that lifts everyone in its path. I think you all have recognized the very special and unique qualities that make Ken Frampton not only one of a kind but also so important to our school and beyond. We're really thrilled to be able to honor him again this evening. This year, I wanted to highlight just a couple of ways the school has had the pleasure to engage with Ken's writings and revisit his pedagogy. First, with the publishing by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City of Rights, Writings, Reflections on Culture and Politics, on the occasion of Frank Lloyd Wright at 1.50, unpacking the archive exhibition at MoMA, and the Living in America, Frank Lloyd Wright, Harlem, and Modern Housing exhibition at the Wallach Gallery. And second, with the Modeling History exhibit at Ross Gallery, which included photos taken by James Ewing of the models also in the show of significant 20th century buildings which were made by students as part of Ken's history of architectural tectonics, which he taught here for many years. Elsewhere, Ken's pedagogical methods were also on display this year with the exhibition Educating Architects, Four Courses, by Kenneth Frampton, which recently closed at the Canadian Center for Architecture where Ken's archive was acquired. Kenneth is the where professor of architecture here at GSAP and has taught at the school since 1972. And his writings have shaped the minds of innumerable architects. This shaping is celebrated tonight as part of the series, which has brought to us in the past a rich dialogue on modern architecture with lectures by Eduardo Soto de Mora, Yvonne Farrow, and Shelley McNamara, Angelo Bucci, and B. Joy Jane. And so we're so pleased to have Raul Merotra to add to our honored guests this evening and to share his thinking and work with us. But before welcoming, Raul, please join me in inviting Kenneth Frampton to introduce him. Welcome. Good evening. I'm very happy you're all here. And I'm very happy that Raul Merotra is here, which is he has had a passing kind of, you could say, tropical affliction and has sort of more or less recovered enough to give this lecture, I'm very happy to say. It's a little embarrassing to say at least to not to say pathologically salipsistic to be part of an endowed lecture series bearing one's own name. And it's sort of time I've definitely moved on, I think, in order to get over this problem. But I also take this opportunity to remind the dean that I'm still teaching tectonics because I don't have too many other ideas. Yeah. Too many other games at my disposal. It's really a great honor to introduce Raul Merotra, whose extraordinary achievements, both as an architect and as a public intellectual, make him an exemplary figure in this profession. And it is a very broad profession because in his case, includes both architecture and urban design. And he is, of course, professor of urban design at GSD, was at some point a chairman of that department. He divides his time between really Cambridge, GSD, and Mumbai and both benefits but also suffers from the victim of globalization and as much as he constantly is passing from one to the other, which is taxing on even someone of his stature and absolutely extraordinary energy. And he was educated first as an architect in the SEP school in Amadabad, which is the school founded by Doshi, which, by the way, as a building is now under a certain threat. And he then also studied, taught at the University of Michigan, studied at MIT. And is now, of course, as I've already said, a member of the faculty, senior member of the faculty in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. But it's very unusual, I think, for someone to have this kind of dimension of a public intellectual and at the same time be an extremely talented architect and also, as if that weren't enough, someone who has manifested very wide scholarship, has produced innumerable books and also both directly but also as an editor and also has curated many exhibitions, of course, always more or less on the same topic, urbanism and urbanism in relation to current, yes, we can say, escalated development. And I think that he's going to talk tonight about the landscape of democracy and show, well, in fact, play out these two sides, I think, during the course of the evening, both as a public discourse and a capacity to create buildings of amazing stature. I give you, Raiwood Marotra. Thank you very much. Thanks very much for this honor to deliver the Frampton Lecture. And it's great to be here. Columbia is always a wonderful place to speak at. I've known Ken Frampton since 1998 when I started working with him on this amazing volume of books, just a shot off my shelf, so you know the stuff I like. And this was an amazing project. I think I was involved in Volume 8, which focused on South Asia. And these sort of marked the canonical works of 100 years, the last century, was sort of sponsored by the Architectural Association of China. It was an amazing two or three-year project. And so of course, one has sort of known him since then. But his seminal work much longer and in many ways have been the foundation of the values. I think I've explored as a practitioner. And I do hope Ken will recognize his contribution in the manner in which I've imagined practice and also in the articulation of my architectural responses that I'm going to show you in this lecture. And so this is my tribute to his mind-blowing contribution to the field more generally. I'm going to share with you some of what this relationship I have with my city, city of Mumbai, how it's come to influence me, how it's begun to inform what I've sort of been doing as an architect in India. And the kind of engagements that we've sort of been involved with is a kind of triangulation between the practice of architecture, urban design, conservation, and interest in landscape architecture. I've organized this talk really in two sections. The first is I'll share with you issues that have been central, at least to the questions I've been asking. And my imagination as an architect and that I continue to struggle with. So these are by no mean definitive answers, but rather questions. And largely the struggle with the idea of how one can articulate those issues to make productive as issues make them productive for designers, because often there's a kind of gap there. And then the second we'll focus on a series of projects that I'll describe and share with you in terms of their design logic and materiality. And I'm sure you'd make the connection. And these issues that I'm going to share with you could be lectures in themselves, so please bear with me as I sort of flip through them. But I'm sort of trying to be inspired by them from the perspective of design, its instrumentality, and what these could potentially mean for us as folks that intervene in the space of cities and these broader landscapes. I think equity and social justice is perhaps the most important issue, I believe in the coming years for an entire generation that's going to practice, but a lot of us who are practicing. Because besides the disruptions that globalization has caused, it is a drive of capital that we know has been detrimental in some ways to the kind of values we have bought to bear on our environments. I've spoken at length about the architecture of what I call impatient capital because capital is inherently impatient and finds its patience when it resides in foundations and institutes and universities, but that also makes it an architecture that drives us towards a vendor-driven autonomous object. And to my mind, it's clear that this free-running capitalism will never help resolve this inherent contradiction about our aspirations to create whether green-building, socially inclined architecture, human environments, while as architects simultaneously that we pander to capital and the forms that it naturally demands. As Wolfgang Streak has said in his book title How Capitalism Fails says to quote him, "'Capitalism can no longer turn private-wise "'into public benefit. "'It's existence as a self-reproducing, "'sustainable, predictable "'and legitimate social order has ended. "'Capitalism has become more capitalist "'than good for it," unquote." Or even in the words of Karl Marx at Resonate who said to start with about capitalism and to quote him, "'Capitalism has conjured up such gigantic images "'of means of production and of exchange "'that it's like a saucer "'who is no longer able to control the powers "'of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spell." And even in Mumbai, we haven't been spared by this gold-plated, gilded trumpeter. Spatial inequity is critical and as Charles Correa, the Indian architect, wrote, "'Today,' to quote him, "'today the amount of urban space one controls "'is directly proportionate to one's status or income. "'It has no connection to actual family size. "'In fact, poorer people most often have larger families. "'This space differential, therefore, "'cannot be justified in human terms "'and only economic ones. "'In Australia, in urban areas, "'at least the 1980s, "'something I verified a few months ago in Sydney, "'every family could have no more than a quarter acre. "'Australia was locked into spatial equality "'and thus clearly a society, "'as we know, that detests elitism. "'But equity is not a quantitative measure alone. "'It has subjective dimensions of access. "'Sometimes perceived access "'or an illusion of equity, perhaps, is productive. "'Plot divisions that were the very fabric of a city "'is a great contributor to this "'and by extension architecture." This is what I think designers can play a role in defining. Martha Chen, who works on informal economy at the Kennedy School of Government advocates in the context of economy, and to quote her, "'What is needed most fundamentally "'is a new economic paradigm, "'a model of hybrid economy "'that embraces the traditional and the modern, "'the small scale and the big scale, "'the informal and the formal. "'What is needed is an economic model "'that allows the smallest units "'and the least powerful workers "'to operate alongside the largest units "'and most powerful economic players.'" And this is a project that I'll share with you in more detail as we go on. And by extension, I think this discussion leads us into the question of sustainability, something I believe we use very loosely, because this comes down to a chemical or a mechanical fix for any problem perpetuated and driven, which is now being driven by an entire green industry. The crucial questions that are absent and have to do with spatial arrangements, I believe, is how do you make space a social condenser, an armature to foster and facilitate social connections, not hard thresholds that separate? So here the human dimension, at least in my observations, is totally absent and that's really frightening. In addition, pluralism, which is another issue, the issue of pluralism and coexistence, or form, its coexistence, are inevitable in a democracy. As are collisions between deferring forms of urbanism in close adjacencies. Thus, dissipating these polarities and softening thresholds between these disparate forms of urbanism are the essential design challenge, I believe, in the coming years. Facilitating the connection and networks between diverse forms is one way to promote these synergistic dependencies. The questions that naturally as a designer come to mind, can borders be deconstructed and softened? Can boundaries be dissipated spatially? Could this become the basis for a rational discussion about coexistence? Or is the resulting urbanism that surrounds us, especially in places like Mumbai, inherently paradoxical, is the coexistence of these differing forms of urbanism and their respective configurations and their respective states of physical utopia and dystopia inevitable? Can spatial configurations of how this simultaneously occurs be formally imagined? Or is it just inevitable that cities will be modeled or molded in a singular image where architecture is the soul and remarkable spectacle of the city? So these are sort of the kind of questions that one grapples with in the everyday of practice. And I think what I have so far described is the sphere of our concerns. How do we make a productive overlap between these spheres of our concern and the spheres of our direct or indirect influences practitioners? As architects we are aware and concerned with many issues from the societal through the planetary scales and ranging from poverty and public health to urban violence and climate change. More often than not our sphere of influence does not empower us to address any of these issues in a tangible manner. Across the design professions, the frustration tied to our attempts to engage with these problems are palpable. Entire disciplinary practices aren't the danger of dissipating because they can't move beyond expressing and representing these concerns. So how do we intersect them with that of influence? Most importantly, I think these narratives illuminate the narrow sort of influence or circumscription of the architect's territory of operation in the business's usual model of practice. It also sheds light on ways to better understand the site as mediated and embedded within a larger scale of economic, social and political processes. Through this broader scope, designers can potentially, I believe, have a far more reaching and progressive social impact beyond the immediate sites of our projects. And so for us, the city and understanding and engaging with these issues has been critical and actually a generator of our practice. Understanding these narratives or to borrow the words of my colleague, Neil Brenner, to understand the context of the context. We understand the context as something that we can physically understand in tangible ways and excavate climate, material, with a slightly deeper excavation, cultures of our place. But this is always nestled in another context, which is sort of the geopolitical context and trying to create these intersections is I think where the most productive questions will kind of nourish our practices. And so for us, the question really is also what is the architecture of practice? I mean, the practice of architecture we speak about and I think this is what Ken was sort of alluding to because for us, advocacy is one sort of aspect of what we do, but I think we're very mindful, if I may say so, in constructing the instruments for this advocacy because often we do one or the other. But how do you combine them in productive ways? I think it's a very big question for us. And so books become, books, catalogs, pamphlets, manuals, other forms of research publication become instruments of advocacy for us when engaging with these sort of complex projects and problems and it becomes also a way of creating partnerships, collaborations, friendships, which serve to keep the conversation on issues and engagement to work with a particular site alive. Similarly, then the publications we hope go out into the world beyond and these projects have their own life and they, I hope, expand the sphere of our influence because finally, if we don't have agency or find ways to have agencies, actually the profession breaks down and I think this becomes a critical question. So these books that I'm, so there are a number of them. This is a family of books on Mumbai which went all the way from walking tours to more serious sort of documentation of the history, different aspects of its infrastructure and these have outcomes. This led to the first urban conservation legislation in India as a result of a kind of critical mass that built up through many such engagements with many such people and collaborations which I think were triggered off in part by some of these research projects and of course they find their way also in advocacy. So here we worked as advocates for a whole decade trying to organize citizens groups on the ground to preserve areas, to recycle buildings, to generate new economies for these places. It also led us to looking here, the Prince of Wales Museum, a very particular precinct in the center of this historic district, it was engaged with architecture, contemporary interventions which were reversible but were transitional in what they were trying to do to the problem that exists. In this case, a visitor center which became a gateway which housed security and many other things. At the other end of the spectrum, we're also interested in kind of urban issues and as Ken was sort of describing, this was a massive project which was a cross Harvard University that documented a ephemeral mega city called the Kumbh Mela, involved seven schools and landed up in this publication and then as advocacy also extended itself into the Venice Biennale as an installation to talk about these incredible landscapes which have become a reality in our world all the way from refugee camps to places for celebration or the military and this has resulted in a very recent book called Thus Permanence Matter and this maps about 300 cases of ephemeral landscapes such as this with three, four, 500 million people on this planet spending their daily lives here and Andreas Lepic took this and has now converted this into an exhibition at the Munich gallery because in the conversations in Germany, this is something that resonates very deeply and so it's a three, no, it's a five month long exhibition with many conversations around it and very beautiful installation. These are carpets that were made locally there which actually have maps of these ephemeral settlements that you can look at and sit around and we've also digitized things like say Burning Man and all of these settlements we've digitized so you can begin to pull the metrics into the planning discourse so we can actually measure densities and we can measure distances. You can create metrics to understand these and this is extended now into a broader project which is looking at urban India and in the present sort of official calculus of the government, India has something like 7,200 and something towns and we're making an argument that there are actually 32,000 settlements and it's a condition of flux because the argument we're building in the research is India is 60% urban for six months of the year and 40% urban for the other six months so the flux of 350 million people how do you deal with in terms of design? It has huge implications of housing for example and rental markets even in the big cities because you have a seasonal change that is mind boggling and these are so we should in India not be talking about smart cities we should be talking about smart agents because there's these 350 million people that go between the rural and urban or this blur we can't even use those binaries any longer that are making the biggest transformations in the landscape and the culture of these sort of settlements but looping back to architecture which is what I'll stick with I just wanted to use that as an introduction to talk about my spheres of concern as I come to my spheres of influence I hope so from Ken's book, the book I worked with Ken on a decade later we made this book on architecture in India since 1990 when we liberalized our economy because we began to see very particular patterns that were emerging this became at the National Gallery of Modern Art major exhibition two years ago which mapped architecture in India since 1947 many many interesting things came out of it in my own learning what you see in this, besides capturing the seminal publications and things again this was a book that Ken did the forward for you know at independence we had one school of architecture which is this yellow line and at two years ago we had 480 schools of architecture it's an amazingly mind blowing sort of trajectory and what you see in blue from 1990 when we liberalized our economy real estate became a more formalized sector and you see the growth of schools sort of related to the growth of real estate actually the demand of architects is inversely proportioned to the growth of real estate because real estate when it becomes an organized sector it's large developers building large gated communities using one architect, one landscape architect for multiple projects so 600 homes get built by an in-house architect often and so in another paradigm it would be a completely different economy as far as the profession goes so we shouldn't be having more schools of architecture in fact less so there were many things like this which had to do with criticism, documentation, education how many PhDs we have and there's a very intense documentation of the state of architecture but one of the things that taught me was and you know I'm sort of leading into our projects because these are learnings that loop back is that there was a variety of protocols and processes through this diverse country which needed to be looked at and it also taught me that 90% of the architects in the country which we didn't include in the exhibition and created a huge controversy because all our friends were left out of the exhibition because we said no single family homes and by just doing that we eliminated 90% of the best known architects in the country and you know it was like you really made good way to make enemies and so we found that this is 1% it's just amazing that architects aren't involved in the public realm for various reasons and so on the other end you have advocacy practice with NGOs self-initiated projects, research, alternate practices which there is some critical mass that's building and because the money is there, the issues these are issues that occur outside the main city so it sort of engages another body of professionals and people but really the big transformation in the mainstream either involves architects from outside India or it involves like I said in big firms in-house architects it doesn't really come out to the profession in the way that it recycles ideas or it nourishes the built environment with these ideas and this mainstream is I think where one can actually make the shift and I think this is true for any part of the world and in India it's institutions, corporates the developers, government and faith-based this is massive, the biggest projects this is what I covered in that book on architecture in India since 1990 the biggest projects happening in India today are the faith-based practices which are 10 times I mean they're building temples which have congregation areas of 30,000 people the biggest convention halls in India are 2,000 people so the scale is mind-bogglingly different so when we imagine global capital transforming the environment with these investments we're totally off because the faith-based practices are building universities they engage ancient imagery but they have really modern aspirations and this is an incredible dichotomy that we are grappling with and so recognizing this was sort of important as part of this exhibition the other thing this taught me in looking at forms of patronage is that you have to nuance when we say client actually and I'm sure again this might resonate in other parts of the world but in India especially we have patron clients we have operational clients and we have user clients and the projects I'm going to show you is how you work across these various scales so therefore as an architect and as an advocate of the project you've got to negotiate these forces completely differently which is very interesting in my view so patron clients and users I'm just going to use that for short but they're all clients of different kinds in a weekend house for example these collapse into one entity it's one person who's a patron who's a client who's the operational person and these become these of course a lot of our work and a lot of our beginning work was to do with this even now we continue doing weekend homes this is the metropolitan region of Mumbai here they collapse into one so this is a house we did about three years ago you know a lot of these get built near villages so they begin to colonize villages but they become humongous in their expression and so how do you fragment it how do you make it more integrative in terms of design and so here we set ourselves a challenge that even a weekend house this is for a very well-known doctor who wanted a villa but we've disaggregated it because we felt that it should also work for a middle class person who might be able to just build one room out of this earlier so this is a living dining kitchen this is a lap pool with a doctor's study a guest room and three bedrooms for the family which can be closed off to become one large room but it's also incremental in what it suggests as a configuration so it becomes also as a paradigm perhaps relevant for the growing middle class but also the disaggregation allows it to sit in this landscape in the rural landscape more likely rather than the kind of neoclassical villas that are being built or even in terms of materiality a simplicity which is not doesn't polarize sort of what's around it and so the scale becomes an important issue as you approach the house it's a series of courtyards with very simple materials that's what sort of the configuration is the pool is very discreet this would normally be out there but again that's a form of polarization where you have these sort of hedonistic engagements while gardeners are toiling in the lawns and mowing the lawns so again how do you make all this discreet but yet create a kind of ambiance in an atmosphere that sophisticated urban people might enjoy in a rural landscape and these are the three bedrooms that can become one large room designed for the monsoon condition in the way it collects water opens out to the landscape in terms of its sort of detail here we've just emphasized the protection for the window to counter weathering which is an important issue for us in these contexts using materials and there's sort of hedon-want art so we've got these colored glass which sort of register the sun as it moves around the house in ways it throws shadows and these sort of courtyards that relate to the outside in larger conservation projects which is also an interest this is the Chaumala Palace in Hyderabad that's the Charminar for those who might know Hyderabad again here it was complicated because the patron was the Nizam's family who wanted to resurrect the palace the clients were the state tourism others who wanted to sort of bring this as part of the economy and the users were the citizens of this dense part of Hyderabad and why it was a contested project was this is the inner city that's the Charminar and what you see in red was encroached upon illegally so this involved lawyers it involved stabilizing the edges of it it involved violence sometimes because people felt they were being threatened of course we didn't get rid of anyone living there we just stabilized the core to create a large public space and posing it as a public space changed the narrative and this is the state we found it in the usual measure drawings and mapping I think we had about 120 measure drawings like this with condition reports and all of that and then of course here you know even the operation client breaks down because you work with general contractors you work with craftsmen who can work with lime that column takes three months to build it brings a different imagination of time in the way you engage with these processes and understanding these kinds of places this is the main Darbar Hall that entire ceiling you see was reconstructed from scratch because it had collapsed, the chandeliers it had many components so even the crafts people here it's such a wide range that you can't see it as the entity of the contractor you're negotiating with about 12 or 15 people it's become a museum on the legacy of the Nizam's family it had a very low budget so it's not highly air conditioned and you know it's sort of quite casually, informally sort of articulated as display in institutional buildings there's kind of another sort of dynamic that happens and here I want to share with you the architecture school in Ahmedabad which Ken mentioned and I just want to dissipate that it's not under threat this is a campaign that there's a lot of politics involved there because there's a change in management and it's sort of triggered off a whole discussion but I'm glad it did because it makes us aware of this this is a building designed by Doshi I studied here it's a beautiful building it's a beautiful campus and we were invited to do the first building which is not a Doshi building and so that itself was very controversial and but anyway we engaged with it that's what the campus looks like and these are the build this is the image I showed you but these are buildings designed by Doshi in the first phase which are incredibly beautiful and then there were a number of buildings added as different donors came about and the rest of the campus is really quite chaotic and incrementally sort of developed and the site we were given was a pivotal site and we basically these were all buildings that existed so we were given the site and the program required a six-story building by the master planners and that was like unbelievable to imagine but we had to fulfill that requirement and so we created coherence in the plaza so we've paved it this is a new cafeteria and a student facility that's been added again to give coherence to the core and create relationships across so like this building also begins to define this plaza which are other schools that are quite disparate in terms of building so it's like a pivotal building but in a case like this it was you know the patron was the Amdabad Education Society which has a wonderful tradition because they were patrons to buildings by Charles Correa, Doshi, even Louis Kahn and Corbusier so very enlightened people we could sort of go to when we needed it the client and the operational client was a president of the university who also happens to be an Aga Khan award winner Dr. Patel so and then we had users which are the faculty and the students and that was like the difficult group to deal with naturally because you know in an architecture school everyone and his uncle have an opinion about what should be done so it meant a huge amount of presentations which went up on YouTube you had alum from around the world calling me and writing and but it was a wonderful process of transparency they were all up on YouTube you can yet see them and we sort of this was the footprint we were given so within that we had to accommodate what would have been a six-story building and naturally for us it was an intervention in a modern historic context and one that I had studied with and learned so much from so the first decision was we're not going to go one inch above any of Doshi's buildings in fact stay a few inches below just as a sign of respect and so it meant actually trying to come up with a building that went three floors below the ground and that was a challenge but made a lot of sense in the context of Amdabad because it's a very hot climate the stepped wells and just going down there the geothermal advantage is so great that once we could get it past the clients it really was the right thing I believe to do and this was a model I presented and I had the other half of it closed here and I went to them I didn't tell them we were doing this I just went to the model that was only three floors above the ground they said impossible to fit the requirements and then I waited for this discussion to heat up and then I removed the other half and they saw the building and there was like silence for 10 or 15 minutes and then they finally slowly got used to the idea because it's a challenge technically to do it but I think that made a big difference what I'll share with you is what the building feels like that's the stuff below ground what's above ground is very light it's the reading rooms on the ground floor is the reception rooms for juries and student meetings and then there's a call within the three buildings one is the skin one is this sort of thing that encloses the core which is like four floors of book stacks and then one floor which is just the archives but the book stack is like a central thing and each section of the building has its own logic in terms of floor heights and things so you get a very rich sectional kind of quality and so that's what it sort of feels like there are series of courtyards that take light all the way down and I'll just show you some images of that in section the light comes right down the skylights which bring it down here this is archives so there's no natural light there and this is the book stack which sort of is like a central bit in the building and along the edge in these courtyards are carols where you have a lot of good light to read so these, sorry, these are the carols where students and PhD students can sit and this is separated so you enter it through a series of bridges so this is a building that sits with the courtyard separating it and a whole skin that goes around it and so that's what it sort of looks like these are movable fins and a very deep base wall these become totally transparent they're operated, there's a catwalk from the inside and you can adjust it and now they're gonna use the building that was one of the brief how can students learn from the building and how can one use newer materials because Doshi's buildings are in brick and concrete which was the buildings of her time and they're very beautiful and robust but the idea was also students today confront glass and jibboard and a whole range of new materials in liberalized India and so how do you also demonstrate to them a use and an articulation of those materials which might inspire them in different ways and in fact now one course at the university is going to be on this building where climate is gonna be taught through this building with students mapping it and we are developing a manual with the faculty for how the building will be operated the louvers set twice a day for different weeks of the year depending on projections of climate, sun movement, et cetera so it'll really become a living building and also as part of bringing coherence to the campus we added little pavilions, consolidated plazas and squares which wasn't there earlier and scale was of course very important but the materiality was also important in the way we kind of didn't replicate this but as you'll see try to capture many aspects in terms of proportions so for example these proportions actually reflect those proportions but in a kind of different and more nuanced way so as you enter the building through the bridge you get a sense of the courtyard below this is already minus four meters as you go below the ground the concrete gets lighter so that it gets more luminous and this is four meters and then you go down to eight meters these are common areas for juries and meetings it's totally on axis with Doshi's building so it kind of embraces and reinforces that axis so that the plaza begins to get a sense of centrality and become the core of the place this is the common area which students use for workshops and exhibitions which is just open non-air condition the air goes through it's well shaded that's the kind of sense you see as you walk around the building because it's central you have these openings and you get glimpses of the inside and then as you go below the building you have a different logic of just eight feet or 2.4 meter heights which is the book core which is I'm now gonna show you that core and these are the carols which open out in these courtyards which also these are gonna be furnished with ferro cement design furniture which is being designed by students and things these are the carols and the book stacks these become places people who wanna speak step out so that you don't disturb the library so they're and it's very cool protected from the rain it has sun in the winter so these are wonderful places climatically to sit in you're always aware of the different levels so you're now at a level which is minus half, two meters or something so you look down to that level you get a sense of the level above and these are all these mid mesonines I love this image because obviously it's a comfortable place lots of students sleep there and these are the kind of book stacks within that central stack where you see the sectionally you're simultaneously aware of at least three levels so you're simultaneously aware of about a 12 meter difference but broken into slab sectionally so there's a sense of intimacy without different zones being disturbed and what you see here is at minus eight meters below the ground and here you get a sense of all the mid levels the courtyard level up there up there that's the lowest level so these sections sort of work and there are tables and little rooms so there's a lot of intimacy the spectrum of spaces is enormous and that's what we try to achieve in the building and you have these kinds of cutouts so you kind of register different levels and you see people move through it so by going down three floors there isn't a sense of claustrophobia by both controlling the sectional kind of dimensions but also creating this porosity and the sense of layering so to speak and then when you go down to this level it's much quieter and the idea here was to create a quiet space that people could fill their thoughts with that's not very heavily detailed in fact it's completely sparse all the services are integrated in the book stack so except for wifi codes which are in these, I mean, routers nothing else is on the ceiling and so this is what that area feels like and this is the modulation of light as you adjust the louvers and it even gets as luminous as that and this is eight meters below the ground so you basically don't need artificial light if you have the sun up there in terms and these are, these portals are the structure and that's it and there's a wifi router there which you'll see and that's it and it's very sparse, it's very quiet it's just the light that modulates which gives you a sense of what's changing in the atmosphere upstairs and the whole structure is supported by these three or four portals that go around and it's sparse except for the skylight the corners are rooms which are like smaller rooms so again you have an intimacy of scale this is the furniture going in now these are the corner rooms with that and now we'll go up to the top which is it's much more luminous it's open, it's white, it's intimate and it's very transparent when it's opened and these are the reading rooms and the reading facilities which have a completely different ambiance where people work, it's gonna be open 24-7 and you have outdoor spaces where furniture will go in these are meeting rooms outside in the good weather that people can use so you don't disturb the library and the louvres, that's the catwalk which has a thing for a harness these are just construction workers doing it and you can kind of adjust it so we're working this manual out where these adjustments will be made twice a day through the year to optimize and it'll be sort of studied and also the base was designed to create the sense of intimacy, the scale changes students sort of use it to sit and to read so you're reading outside the library but you're engaging with the space of the library and it's very transparent and so it also frames the landscape outside that's of you through Doshi's building to the lawn which I showed you in the first slide, that's the main entrance so it's framing the building in different ways and the outside is in concrete and raw concrete and the inside is sort of this plastered surface but all dry construction it's dry wall with steel so because we actually did this building with design and construction in I think 15 or 15 and a half or 16 months it was very quick and so we had to deploy materials based on that but also to demonstrate a spectrum of building materials so then when we go to buildings like corporate offices which are slightly less contested than institutional buildings I'm gonna show you two corporate buildings here really the patron and the client become one and the users is what you negotiate with them I'm just flagging this out not that that's what sort of determines the design but just to give you a sense of the spectrum of questions you might negotiate and this is in Hyderabad which is in Cyberabad which is the high tech area this is an early Google image now this is full of offices that's by Mario Bota there are many other buildings by different architects here and we were given the site for an infrastructure company which is a high tech infrastructure company that has all the equipment wired and what they do is they monitor through this control room projects happening in Jaipur trucks have cameras they're kind of high efficiency and they of course wanted a glass monster and this is what happens in Hyderabad this is Mercedes Benz and this is a glass building but what you see is the nets because this was when the states were being divided so there were riots like every second week and a glass building isn't, you know people just destroyed them and so vendors who were selling you curtain glazing actually gave you a whole choice of fishing nets so if you took blue glazing you could take blue fishing net or white fishing net so fishing net and its details, the fixing details the stainless steel clamps came as part of the outfit of the curtain glazing because so it made you think that these images that globalization bring and what people identify with are so compelling that you're willing to even go to these sort of heights we were very much sort of inspired by this little hut and there are about 100 huts like this put up in Jaipur that guy works for the business association and the government partnership that puts these up they're water coolers they're put up in the summer when he puts his kettle he's open for business it's clean water which is very cool people come say hello they're no plastic cups they cut their hand they drink the water it's just like an amazingly inspiring thing that happens in Jaipur and they set it and every once in a while he comes out and humidifies it with water so through evaporative cooling the hut stays very comfortable in the hut he has earthen pots which again through evaporative cooling keep the water cool and it's clean and it's just a very beautiful experience and this blew us away and we began to document it and made this video and measure temperature and just the beauty of this we said how can this inspire us to make a building in Hyderabad which is not an equivalent kind of climate which is dry and hot so we kind of did this building which is a five story high garden it's not a green wall we haven't stuck the green on the wall it's actually a performative screen which is humidified and it allows the air to go through we couldn't get a LEED certificate because we didn't seal our windows and we didn't bother with air conditioning everywhere but anyway now India has modified the LEED sort of thing with Greha and many others which look at these sort of other questions that are more relevant so anyway so this is where the misting happens the facade actually acts as and you know and then you have three layers one is a trellis on which the facade grows we tested it and you know we tested different plants and saw how they grow and so every facade can be different and you go back at different seasons and the building looks different and also case of impatient capital these guys wanted the building in 14 months we negotiated with them that we'll take three years to grow the facade they agreed the cows went in to make the building sacred the scaffolding was yet up our trellis was made through a small contractor near Hyderabad so it helped him set up a business because he only bought one mold and so again this question of even craft we seem to fetishize craft when it's used for a very small spectrum of materials like wood and stone and the idea here was how you take a material like aluminum in this case where we took recycled aluminum so that's why you have different textures on it particular alloys that gave us a texture on this trellis so that even if it was burnt out the plants the trellis would look beautiful very small components all handmade in a 20-person kind of plant that was set up many women worked here this is a large anodizing plant and you can see the texture on it it's got a lovely patina which came from the recycled mixed alloys of aluminum and two people could carry it looks heavy but it's very light two people assemble it over two years it was assembled slowly and that's with the plants and the misting system on a different grid so different plants need but the misting is to cool the building not for the plants the plants are actually cooled with drip irrigation in hydroponic trays sorry, okay anyway that's so this is how it sort of becomes a woolly monster you have to give it a haircut it goes back and forth so you've got to kind of control it a base where the parking and the entrance is and you know even sectionally it has different volumes that sort of look at how air can hot air can escape this is the tendering department so that's the only one that sliced off because of privacy and the podium which creates social spaces for people to congregate in the flowers when they bloom and you know it yeah and so sectionally like I said it sort of has its own sort of intelligence in terms of the way it's articulated both for function that building got a LEED certificate and we didn't so you know and so we've been sort of mapping it and we did this sort of intuitively I'll admit my friends who are now sort of really into all this stuff have made me measure temperature and we are giving them data and they're gonna try to analyze it now that it's been in operation for four or five years but that sort of and this is what it sort of feels like within the building I use this slide and I often tell this story this is an intern from Panama City who took this image so it's not a stage image but it made me think very deeply about what the building was about and this is the Marty Chen quote that I shared with you that people of different economic now the gardeners here are the poorest paid people in a corporation like this normally you'd have a garden you'd see them toiling the boss would go by in tinted glass sort of foreign imported car there'd be no eye contact here the lowest paid people the gardeners there are two things about them one is there in your face you negotiate them all the time but the other is that the identity of the building depends on them because the facade depends on how well the gardeners sort of operate and there's a kind of empathy here but you know empathy is I think not enough and I think this is a very particular situation it's made me think how in the US for example people who collect trash in the evening from our university can they be surfaced in ways that the role they play be made more dignified of course it's more complex here because the garden is linked to the identity of the building I think people get a kind of particular position here within that hierarchy which is amazing and so this woman won't have won a sorry if she wasn't in the face of her bosses she would be in much more ordinary clothes if she was just working in the garden and so that sort of reversal I think is something very interesting because they're really the heroes of the building and you know here's someone working they're working there's a kind of coexistence they're blinds there so you can put the blind down if you want to cut somebody off but that doesn't happen and if you go to their website and other blogs it's amazing the kind of friendships that have developed again unintended it's not like we set out to design to do this but it's a feedback that we are sort of enjoying now to address things in the future this led us to extend these ideas this idea of the building as a social condenser for a building that we were asked to do in Europe this is the first building we've done in Europe and it's on the Novartis campus on Basel and that's our building it was one of two on the river we were lucky to get that sort of site and it's a site plan done by as you know Vittorio Lumpugnani and it's a very strict rigorous you know European ordered site plan so the footprints are sort of very determined and the envelope is determined and I suppose they had one triangular site so they gave it to Frank Gehry but everybody else got you know the big rectangles that's what it looks like in progress so our building was there now they've of course developed this whole landscape and it's kind of transformed a lot this is an old image and that was sort of the conceptual model that we first presented but this was interesting because of course we studied all the buildings because they've documented each building in a beautiful book and it was remarkable that we found that the footprint was fixed and then everyone was given the two ducts for the services because these are labs so the services are incredibly intense so these were large bundled ducts and we felt when you do that you create a zoning you create these heart thresholds you segregate lab from administrative staff you know a whole hierarchy of people in any organization and so this was difficult to do with the SWIS but with the 10 or 15 consultants to negotiate with them how we would disaggregate the ducts so that would give us a clean footprint where we could modulate space in much more interesting ways and finally they agreed with circulation so for fire it was actually even more efficient and they accepted this and it's the only building on the campus that broke away from this the other thing we did again I think coming from Mumbai where you're always trying to manipulate space this comes naturally to us most people accepted the envelope accepted that because the labs needed five meters that you would do five floors which were five meters and everyone was in there we questioned the idea that the administration which didn't have heavy services didn't need more than 2.4 meters which means we could get more floors on one side which means that we would save air here which means that we could have carved a courtyard out which could create again a wonderful space as a greenhouse both for cooling and this building is all leads it's got complicated geothermal systems but we thought we could add through the greenhouse of a way of heating the building cooling it with skylights that are openable and they agreed to that we were surprised but these two little shifts opened up all sorts of possibilities so then we got a section where you had these shafts which were disaggregated you got a garden there and you got split levels because the levels varied so like I showed you in the SEPT building you got these sectional you got Vistas sectionally which connected more than one level at a time which is it's a much more social space as a result because more people are making eye contact more people are climbing only half levels to meet people and so those incidents are much more we worked with Gunta Wook from Zurich to conceptualize this garden at the center which would also be performative on the facade he created a registry of the seasons with 28 species which would actually map and burn out and something would bloom at any given time and the other side where we face the Rhine actually this has blinds which are automated but in this image it's sort of all open and that's what sort of the building looks like this is the ground floor where you get glimpses of these different labs as you move through it these are the disaggregated ducts so you come through it they're meeting rooms and then your conference room on the river side you go up this large stair so it's a very kind of transparent space and you get glimpses of the labs as you go through it from different points the artwork we collaborated with Pipaloti wrist from Zurich and she created these video installations through the building and they're kind of these warm shards of color that you walk through in the winter as you pass through the building and so they appear in different sort of locations and then these are the intermediate levels where the office which is much lower kind of blurs into the garden these are meeting areas that actually bridge the labs and the office area so they become very social spaces because both groups can use them very easily and then you frame the views of the Rhine River these are some of the labs which is furniture designed by Toshiko Mori she was appointed by an artist to do that and this was the first one that she fitted out and you know it's very loose spaces between the labs and the other more common areas which they respond to all the requirements of the lab but just this transparency allows it to become a much more social space and it's always half levels so you climb through the building much more easily these are meeting rooms where that's a flat screen and these become seminar rooms actually in the garden and there you see the relationship between the two from the labs you see through the office to the Rhine River but this green which is a greenhouse so it's performative too also becomes a kind of social condenser at the center of the building and this just gives you the feeling of the sectional quality of the mid levels and the way these are framed through different apertures as you sort of walk around it and that's sort of just a detail I come to the last two projects which take you completely to another sort of spectrum of questions which is working in India one can't sort of avoid dealing with these really harsh social questions and here sometimes the clients don't exist sometimes patrons don't exist some of these are self initiated the users are often hard to even connect to they're wicked problems as we would sort of define them and I quote Pratap Bhanu Mehta who is now the vice chancellor of the Ashoka University used to be the head of the Center for Policy Research and to quote him because this sort of captures what as an architect we sort of deal with and to quote him, in a society driven by deep inequality there's not even the minimal basis for mutual concern where social distance makes human beings almost a different species in each other's eyes why would you expect anything else? Why would a contractor care if one of his construction workers used his hands rather than a brush to apply a dangerous chemical? The more inequality there is the harder it is to imagine what it's like to be in someone else's shoes it has to be admitted that even the most well meaning and sensitive find it hard to imagine what the suffocation darkness and sheer physical suffering of being at the bottom of the social hierarchy might really be like the very thing you would expect to instigate questions of justice makes it hard to even raise them, unquote and this is really something, I read this I realized gosh one is dealing with that every day when one is dealing with some of these problems and you see the level of poverty except for Goa and or Kerala sorry and Kashmir which is highly subsidized and Goa which is a small state I mean the country is just largely below the poverty line and within this I mean there are many projects that can share but I wanna share one low-cost housing project and a sanitation project this is Daravi or what most places where majority or half the population in a city like Mumbai live I often share this story this is an image I took accidentally I mean I took this as one of many images but when I downloaded it on my laptop I was sort of really moved I had goosebumps because what it made me think about was my kids going to school would look like that this child is intact because the white socks the tie is going off to school jumping over the compound while it lives in one of those huts and what it made me think about was he probably defecated in the open because he has no access to a toilet and so to have someone that intact I mean what is the role, what is the agency of design and so open defecation is like a massive massive problem you might not read this so clearly but I just wanna make a point that India has got the highest open defecation in the world it's like way above any other country I mean even Africa where we might think this would happen now whether it's cultural, whether it's a density so this is detailed mapping we've done even in Mumbai according to wards so you realize where this happens so we've been sort of pursuing this with an NGO in Mumbai if you look at just the statistics in Mumbai the UN Habitat says this one is to 1,440 people one toilet, one WC for 1,440 people mind-boggling, Spark the NGO we partnered with says it's one is to 800, they have other ways of calculating it the Bombay Municipal Corporation's aspiration which means their target is one is to 50 which means six families would share a toilet which means you'd have to have a lottery every morning or you'd have to have a system that once in 50 days you would be able to use the WC which is ridiculous, it's shameful that even as a society we have an aspiration like that our Prime Minister has made this a big agenda and he said that he wants construction of toilets in every household by 2019 amazing, I mean really brave of him to have done this but the question is I think we as designers have to be part of this debate because if I look at that can I get a toilet to everyone by 2019 it's impossible, it's I mean totally impossible so what is the government doing, they've got factories they've said they've built two million toilets they've built these toilets, a truck goes around every village and dumps it outside the village research has shown that these toilets are the only solidly constructed thing so it's used for storage of grain, jewelry it's used for everything but a toilet because it's got no relationship to the house so the question really is that as designers we need to think about transitions we don't give enough attention to what it means to design for transitions because we think in absolute terms and so the transition to solving this problem is community toilets which is what the World Bank is doing which is where we got involved but this is what they design and some people use it some people defecate outside here for women and children it's really dangerous so there are many problems associated to it and this NGO Spark that we worked with had been appointed to build 300 of these so we got involved and we began to develop a prototype where we said we'd segregate the men and women we used a facade like we had developed which would be flowers so people might pluck flowers to use for prayer that would be wonderful, being very idealistic we put the caretaker's house on top of the toilet he got the penthouse which is usually the lowest caste which is also a politic there the space here became a community space for children, women I got a client to donate solar panels so we could get it off the grid so children could study in the community space at night it looked really great and we started trying to build them we tried, this one got stopped at the plant level because the government said this is too iconic we are going to be removing the slum so why are you creating a community center? we tried building in many locations and the eighth attempt we managed to build one in a real hurry the solar panels in this sort of squatter settlement it became a nice space, bamboo slats very well protected in the rain children used it, the solar panels went up that's housing that was built 20 years ago by the government which didn't manage to relocate the slum dwellers which means that this is a problem of transitions and how do we design for transitions becomes an incredibly important question and then I went back six or nine months later and it completely failed I realized that this was a case where I was working with the operational client which is the NGO I had no patron the politicians, the world bank I had no access to them I had no access to the users it was a complete mistake a local politician had taken the money to build this and was running it and then made it into a kind of club that's actually a television to watch cricket matches there are rum bottles lying there there's a bed where they sit on and the government was building another toilet complete disaster of course Beckett tells you fail again, fail better and so we entered a competition by the Gates Foundation we won the first prize it was an international competition where we embedded it even much more made it reversible that it could be dismantled and the material recycled we put shops there we put a laundromat into it it was a wonderful idea and the way it worked but again we weren't successful because I don't know the supply chain to make it happen wasn't on the ground and so we won the competition but couldn't make it operational symbolically we said it should be across from the temple, etc so this is a project we are pursuing I think it questions us as in terms of our disciplinary engagement on the notion like I just said does permanence matter it's become a default condition when we design in today's world of flux we need to think about those imaginations in the same way we think in terms of absolutes when we are solving these problems whether it's housing or it's public sanitation how do we imagine the space of transitions and transitions sometimes take you away from a kind of linear trajectory the challenge always is how you come back to target but I think it's worth designing and I'm going to now share with you my last project and the most complex one which is for these guys who are Mahuts they look after elephants this was a competition in Jaipur which again we won and here of course this is really a complex project now being on for 12 or 13 years here these were differentiated in mind blowing ways the patron here was the chief minister who called for the competition and awarded the project the clients were the public works department and agencies that changed every six months depending on who was in power which I'll show you in a second and the users were the elephants and the Mahuts and in this case we kind of negotiated all three which is why I think the project is happening I presented this year at Columbia seven years ago and I remember Ken reminded me today I used to go to the site after the first two years with my resignation letter because I thought every time I'm going to sort of resign and I'll show you what that meant of course the pink city Jaipur tourism elephants became sort of very much part of that whole landscape they take tourists up to Umbair palace they get painted and because there's no water their skins discolour because these are toxic these paints that are used they go rogue actually it doesn't get reported they've killed tourists because they go rogue in the summer can't be controlled the government created housing for them which was like the Mahuts living up there with like garages all the elephants here that doesn't work so the Mahuts have all had moved down because the relationship between the Mahut and the elephant is incredibly complex for him to build a relationship to control the elephant and so this was a complete failure so they had the competition and this was a piece of land which had been quarried by sand contractors it was almost initially unbuildable of course there's a lot of research of how much water they need how do we capture it so we made it a landscape project and I think that's why we won the competition because we beat the drums on the idea that if you didn't have water there was no point in doing a project like this because elephants are tropical beings and for them to be in a desert climate of Rajasthan in outside Jaipur was like unbelievable and so that was the site as we got it there were some buildings that were sort of abandoned which we integrated finally we found the path of water through Google and that was the site that we finally colonized and we created a series of micro dams to capture water from different directions because of the topography to create water bodies this part isn't done yet it's been finished up to there and that's sort of the site plan many buildings the brief was only houses for 100 elephants but we added by repairing some of the buildings we said we should create a school a visitor center and there are other things we've suggested which were initiated by us as part of the project now in 2007 when we got the site that's the same hill and this is the transformation over 10 years this transformation happened in the first few years because the public works department built the buildings because the kickbacks are in the construction landscape wasn't even a tender item which we had to struggle to fight for to create these ponds, et cetera and then the government fell so the BJP government which initiated the project of chief minister called Vasundhara Rajya a woman really well organized, very motivated the Congress came into power and as happens in many places they abandoned the last government's project so it was completely abandoned but that was great because I mean I was frustrated I thought what the hell am I doing how am I gonna wait for another three or five years for these guys to come back if at all but in hindsight it was fantastic because it allowed the landscape to generate because it was abandoned no one lived there for three years but the DNA, the bones were there so the plants began to grow and now of course it's sort of completely green we of course paid attention to the architecture they wanted row houses but we sort of did a cluster development we made the only three or 400 square feet a house with a little room for the elephant but we kind of created a series of courtyards so if these three families got together they actually had a mansion because they had a large public space which was their private space with a wall that surrounded it courtyards for every houses, flat slabs so they could build on the terraces and they could colonize it and how it would mutate the elephants have a separate entrance but they participate in the courtyard and those are the sort of rooms and these are just sort of drawings which and one of the reasons I carried that resignation letter is every time I would send them beautiful details of stone gargoyles to celebrate how water is captured I would go to site and I would find a PVC pipe instead and I would freak out and the PWD engineer would look at me and say that even my home doesn't have such details so there was this whole hierarchy be understood in a state like that it's very complex and that's what made us keep fighting back because we began to feel that it could be a mission so Ken, the reason I didn't give them that resignation letter finally like I threatened when I spoke here at Columbia seven years ago was because then one said let's make it a mission and I'm glad we did and so that's the elephants room which are higher ceiling where they store the food and it allows the cooling and the ventilation so all these kind of climatic principles elephants can't sleep on flat ground they need a kind of berm depending on their size otherwise they can't get up and so this is like our mock-ups to see what sizes would be for what elephants and I jokingly say this is my version of small, medium, large and extra large so this is what it sort of looked like the first water body that's umber where they go to work these were the first sort of clusters that got built windows so the kids who are going up some of whom will become Mahots could interact with the elephants social space but just basically things we anticipated would mutate people would plaster, paint those were the expectations when they would be allocated this is the guy coming home now you can see that slope different people treat their space differently because these weren't allocated this basically people started moving in the government abandoned it the new government didn't want to deal with it some clusters flourished because of the water so these guys have flowers they sell flowers they have lawns this is the aspiration of the middle class in Jaipur but and the middle class in Jaipur have to get tankers of water because there is no water supply on a regular basis so again an unintended consequence we didn't go ahead to design that we would turn this inequity because of the water we just went ahead to design a robust environment an armature for life but these are the consequences that we sort of were very pleased to see and these were some of the abandoned ones where they hadn't allocated people homes which the trees just grew it began to become environments and then as people moved in life carolds housing people began to use the outside for kitchen the trees this just it became not a not like a squatter settlement they had some access to getting the houses but there was no government patronage the goats moved in the trees grew the elephants coexisted the environment began to transform people had dish antennas so there was an economy that was evolving just because the housing and the water existed but there was no government patronage in all these years and the other consequence was this is Umbair this is what they do they take people up these ramparts which is a very difficult job and as Ken was describing to me earlier it's a whole city and so it's a lot of area they work, walk back from work it's horrible conditions 50 degrees centigrade in the summer but now of course these are images from 2007 they can have a snack going to work we had just sort of planted trees this was all in the initial years which I'll show you how it's transformed but it began to create a different kind of environment but the water which we thought was to support life actually the other unintended consequence of it was the bonding between the Mahut and the elephant so what they told us as feedback is besides their health improving they behave much better with us because through the process of bathing the Mahut and the elephant actually bonds very deeply and so again that was one of these consequences and here you see him bathing the elephants I mean they just love this in that heat and this is again something that we were very very pleased with and you see their skins and how badly they've discovered they're much healthier now and then as time has gone back there have been little dribbles of fun so we managed to you know create these embankments you can see the local species the kikar as they're called have flourished but again the general infrastructure hasn't happened elephants are social beings they have to hang out with their bodies if you tie them for the whole day alone they go kind of they start freaking out so every few hours they have to come together and they hang out so we created these kind of pavilions but again unintended consequence of this was we didn't realize now the Mahuts had teenage kids and they started a company called Elephant-Testic and they had a website and tourists could book time and they charged you 100 rupees to feed the elephant if you want to bath with the elephants 500 rupees if you go to TripAdvisor this is one of at one point this was like the highest hit in Jaipur especially for younger tourists who are what their Facebook pages so they have to post that image with elephants so there's a whole economy that sort of developed out of this again I mean again just in reflection the fact that we made I think the right decisions in terms of supporting life there now this is just again in summary this is a mapping I did recently for an exhibition at the GSD 2006 is when we won the competition I'm sorry 2007 they begin to build those houses 2008 a little more happens and the government begins to dwindle here it falls the Congress takes over and this is the BJP government coming back to power this is the political system this is the actors involved so we had the tourism department and the Umbar development authority the PWD every few months you can see the agency changed now we are finally with the zoo authority and the forest department which I'll tell you in a second and so these are letters I wrote a letter every month to the chief minister whoever's in power to make a case for this which was like incredible and in this period when the new government came I wrote some letters and I got no responses so I was frustrated till then we were at our own cost going to site every month just to keep working with the Mahoods and the elephants to keep that user group as part of our sort of allies and then at some point out of the blue we got a with Glenn Merkett on the as a chair of the jury we got a gold medal from the University of Ferrara for the most sustainable project of the year and so I wrote to the chief minister with that certificate and I said you know you need to pay attention to this project and this January I got a call from her met her presented and she put there's the same one who started the process and finally after being abandoned for these three four years completely with trickles here with this kind of advocacy and lobbying it was really our connection to the Mahoods and the elephants in this case and a different kind of access to the chief minister that helped the project because the animal activists were against the government but because we had the elephants on our side we could negotiate with them that's how the forest department and the zoo authority have been bought into it became a very complex kind of set of negotiation and this just tells you that in more detail and these are all the elaborate letters making a case for it and you know writing to her and trying to get the project going and that's finally you know where and that's a letter from her on the government letterhead calling me Rahul G with great respect and inviting me to make a presentation and then in this nine months it's going ahead and finishing in December it's unbelievable but also because she's up for election in January and in March and in December the election court comes into play so she can't spend money after that so she's getting it completed and of course there's a deeper politic here which I'm happy to share so in the last three months these are things that have happened the gateway and the Jaipur pink you can see all the planting done over 500 more trees have been planted just in the last six months pens have been created these will all be covered with creepers and plants this sort of contains groups of elephants and these are where they'll hang out with water troughs so this is all under construction I mean as we speak there are like a hundred people working there these are lookout spots which will be very heavily shaded where groups can sit and be explained things about the elephants and their operation we are now made proposals for swales to capture water to stabilize berms there's a lot of grass planting that's been done these are again natural local species many more of these pavilions that have been built and then you know six months ago we suggested to them that look right in the center here we should do just a four room guest house and it's not a boutique hotel but a place that people can actually stay at night and be at this sort of place and spend time and they accepted the idea and it's sort of under construction it's been built it's on one of these water bodies that's what the model looks like it's just four rooms and a dining facility around a courtyard with a very discreet entrance from the rear overlooking the water and it's a very simple plan all built in sort of local material large slabs of stone that make this portal to enter just bamboo for the pergola overlooking the water bodies and a courtyard where people can if they spend the night and they're having a scotch over dinner it's very discreet it's not sort of in your face and it uses just these two simple materials and a little steel to span the floors to make the guest house so it's very discreet what has also happened now is this is women from the government who are working with the wives of the Mahuts and this is also gonna create another source of employment because the wives of the Mahuts and by the way the Mahuts are all from the Muslim community which is a minority community community in Rajasthan so that also is a very complicated dynamic but these women are going to run this guest house and choose what food is sort of served there and actually maintain it and so again it creates another form of employment it wasn't part of the brief it just came up as an idea and then the Mahuts had many of their friends who were inmates in the local jail and so they said we should furnish it because these guys are really good with furniture so these are the inmates who have produced all the beautiful furniture for the guest house so there's a kind of link and I just got an email today that the guy who was really good with a particular kind of chair got released yesterday so we won't have those five chairs because he might not do it and then of course now it's attracting a lot of birds so as people are getting allocated houses Rajasthan has a great sort of history of craft they're beginning to decorate their houses they're beginning to tell stories and who knows there'll be all sorts of narratives told through the architecture and this is what I mean life corrodes I mean housing corrodes architecture the lowest parts of the site are actually as dense as that where the water naturally collects and it's completely transformed the landscape and this is just the last slide where now there's another generation so one of the buildings that had been abandoned we've also repaired that and actually an American NGO took it upon themselves to run a school there for these kids because they're now some 50 or 60 young children who need a sort of school so I just want to sort of summarize by saying that working in Mumbai for me I use that more emblematically it's about negotiating these sort of global flows that do not erase and remake landscapes but rather occupy local fissures to create fascinating hybrid conditions and really startling adjacencies which one has to discern and operate within the design challenge in this condition depends on how we make these disparate worlds blur can the threshold between them be spatially softened as a practitioner social access and its clear relationship to the articulation of spatial arrangements becomes a critical aspect of design this is not about the city of the rich and the poor or the regular models of the formal or informal or many other such binaries that are often used to explain cities in the south and Central America, Latin America, Asia, Africa rather it's what I call the kinetic space a space of flux where these descriptive concepts collapse into singular entities and where meanings are ever shifting and blurred sometimes even if just temporarily the question for architects, conservationists, urban designers, planners and becomes can we design for the space of blur or flux can we design with a divided mind and more importantly how might we be inspired by the design intelligence of what is produced by this flux which is the kinetic city and intervenes designers and activists in our own localities can we use design to construct soft thresholds that facilitate porosity both spatially and socially across our projects the approach has been to to create a kind of has been an aspiration to place our work in the context of democracy as Ken sort of introduced the thrust of the lecture and therefore deconstructing and unpacking to use that word what the client really means and what those dynamics are in a democracy becomes important which is the site of our operation India furthermore we have attempted to interpret spatial arrangements as well as building elements to meet contemporary sensibilities as well as building vocabularies that respond to this condition the attempt clearly is to combine resources while juxtaposing conventional craftsmanship with industrial materials tradition and architectural arrangements with contemporary spatial planning in short to give expression to what I believe are the multiple worlds the pluralism and the dualities so that so vividly characterize the Indian as well as the South Asian landscape and I think that the challenge in this kind of pluralistic environment is to it really requires planning and design attitudes and mechanisms that continually negotiate between the differences in architecture as the sole instrument for place making and the temporality that creates the condition for habitation and celebration it must include the state and market the empowered and the poor rather than allow one entity to prevail and remake the city in its own image or the habitat in its own image this is what makes for me working in Mumbai in the landscape of India unique challenging and very challenging here extreme differences exist in very close proximity there in your face and not distant or abstract in a pluralistic society I think is one that not only accepts this difference but also goes beyond to understand and even be influenced by it in productive ways and this is a threat in India in many ways in its political climate that is really to see the simultaneous validity of differences because once the architect and planner sees these various differences as being simultaneously valid the challenge is how do you go beyond these polarized binaries through the making of architecture of soft thresholds and spaces that are porous, plural and spirit expression and most critically encompassing of a context and the context of the context as its nourishment and I think this is really the aspiration of my practice, our practice we are aware that many of the conditions I have described are really emblematic of the issues and crises we are facing in many parts of the globe the contemporary world than the contemporary world that we collectively occupy understanding this crisis and articulating it in terms that are useful for us as designers I believe is a crucial step because otherwise the sphere of our concerns and the sphere of our influence will always be segregated and after all as Paul Romer from the World Bank said a crisis is a terrible thing to waste thank you very much Yes, well I'm supposed to respond but I mean how can one respond really to a lecture which is like four lectures in one, five, six maybe even and with such given with such intensity and with such with such experience and makes one realize you know I think this question of the yes the challenges is of course worldwide but provinciality is everywhere and one sometimes thinks of one's own environment as being a center but in fact of course we know that in other countries what there are cultures of architecture and of urbanism and of and of landscape which are you know more intense and more I think challenging but also richer than what we experience I mean here I think in the East Coast and I mean there are so many points that were being raised but I mean one of the things that the entire lecture makes me think about is this aphorism that is apocryphally attributed to Le Corbusier which is to design you need talent to program you need genius and I think what has come across this evening is you know the capacity of Raoul to engage in programming you know to in fact of course with regard to the elephant village so-called in Amber Jaipur you know it was a question of inventing a program in a way and then also as it were continuing to cultivate a program under very difficult circumstances this concept that he has articulated quite a few times during the course of the lecture of negotiating local flows I think that's what I amongst many other things that I've noted here that's what I would guess which I will take away from this lecture and I imagine many of you will do the same before we finally conclude this evening's events I would like to open the floor to any questions or comments that Raoul might be able to answer just a few maybe or else all in India and yeah they're all in India but you mean within India where they were here so Ahmedabad the libraries in Ahmedabad which is north of Bombay and Jaipur is a little north of that what else did I KMC which is the office building the green facade is south India which is in Hyderabad we have a lot of work in Chennai which I didn't show we're also doing some things in Delhi in many other parts which of course I haven't included but outside India we've built in Europe one building and we've done a small building in Oman which was for a set of buildings for an Indian client and I've done a I think I'm the only Indian architect who's built in Pakistan so I've done a project in Pakistan in Karachi which is another story but yes but otherwise it's largely based in India and Novartis and we've done some competitions which other geographies Sydney and you know other places so the decline in pluralism in India can be ascribed to many forces and the BJP could certainly at the especially the national level be one of those forces what was that tension like in dealing with the BJP at the state level in working in Jaipur completely different just because of the person involved in power the chief minister comes from a completely different background she's aligned with the BJP as you obviously seem to be someone who knows those nuances but yeah it completely differently and I think for someone who might know the kind of nuances within the BJP there are clear tensions between some states and the center on some of these questions my own sense in retrospect is I think she kept this when I'm saying this in public carefully but with all good intent I think she kept this as a late priority so she wasn't responding to those letters in the first years of her coming back to power because to suddenly take a project which was for the Muslim community would have created other controversies because there were many other things that had to be done in the state so it's much safer towards the end I think sequentially for her perhaps I'm just guessing why I didn't get the responses earlier and suddenly I got these responses so this is a I mean I said this is something that I think we're in India threatened about today just the way the nationalism has gone well in the US too it's all gone so right that it's becoming almost ridiculous and dangerous and and I think in that context I think she stands out as being different in terms of the kind of extreme line she's taking it's I don't believe it's as extreme as what the national registry is doing does that answer your question? Hi could you speak a little bit more to sort of the role of urban planning or the discipline of urban planning in the projects that you have or your experience just because you sort of talk about how you know it wasn't part of the original intent to have this sort of social agenda to the project at the beginning but then it kind of came as a result but you know I mean the definition of planning is to like think ahead of time to you know be able to and then you maybe perhaps use architecture to actually implement it but I don't know if you could just speak to that relationship. So I think for me just sort of reflecting on 25 years of practice for me that's all a blur in a sense I don't see the silo so clearly I don't have a degree in urban planning I headed a department so kind of learned from the job did work like for me so for me the definition of urban design is about advocacy so for me urban design when I graduated in urban design in 87 here you know the projects in New York Cesar Peli, Battery Park City and all of that were the celebrated things in North America urban design became big architecture I didn't see it like that from what I'd understood when I went back I remember when I came to do my job talk for my position everyone is expecting big architectural projects I had a few documents which was about legislation and advocacy we had done in the historic district because for me urban design is a bridge practice which sort of bridges the abstraction of planning in the site specificity of architecture and it creates feedback loops and in the process of creating feedback loops is intrinsically about advocacy so that's what that's where I've understood it planning is about discerning patterns I'm saying this in a simplistic way and I think in the US and many parts of the world it's lost its speculative edge completely and so for various reasons and so I think in today's world the way it's coming back is the integrative practice of multiple disciplines that look at territorial dimensions where landscape ends and planning starts and the arguments that landscape is originally planning and you know all of that it's I think these all come together and I think that's the way in reflection one so I wasn't so articulate about this if you ask me this 20 years ago but in reflection I saw that we were intuitively working with these streams and oscillating between different protocols of different practices and different disciplines simultaneously and so where planning ends and begins and architectures and begins for me it's been less consequential thank you for a wonderful talk it was really inspiring and I just wanted to ask you to talk a little bit more about this notion of transitions that you brought up and you mentioned how you thought that this was one of the most important things that we need to be designing for and so I wanted to ask you a little bit what sort of transitions are you really talking about I mean it seemed like the social transitions are are are really important to you but so I wanted to give you a chance to just get into that a little bit more and also the role that objects architectural objects in this case play in those transitions you give us a number of projects and there was one which you had to stabilize the courtyard there was an existing building there that that had been encroached upon yeah and you and you help to sort of stabilize the boundary and a number of these projects are about boundary making in the elephant project when you showed us the the the guest house you talked about the wall as a sort of divider between the guests that would come in the and the residents so the role of objects in these transitions in in sort of articulating these transitions how could you talk a little bit more about how you see that and is it a way of easing transitions or quickening transitions or just how you you see that so I'll start with the second part of the the the borders the wall the bound and you know in all those I should have maybe emphasized that they all simultaneously porous and and definitive so in that little guest house one whole edge or one L is just those bamboo pergolas with a transparent veranda and a dining area where people can sit and watch the water body or night observe it and on the other side it has a sense of a boundary so it's I mean I'm sort of interested in how one can engage with that simultaneously so that it serves both purposes and it can be modulated depending on you so there's a kind of level of flexibility so whether it's the facade in the way the gardeners can transgress the space but it also is a facade so it's a containment for that building so I think I'm interested in and in the sep library similarly sectionally etc that you're in quiet space or in spaces where you can have meetings but they're visually connected and yet sort of not mutually exclusive in that sense I'm interested in creating those blurs using sectional qualities and articulations but also planar quality so to go to the transitions I mean of course that's a much much more complicated question so I think at the most abstract level for me what's interesting landscape as a discipline does this in some ways not adequately but it does it just by the nature of the discipline and the fact that you're dealing with nature in a particular way is the question of time I don't think we've addressed this whether it's planning I think for me preservation or conservation as I prefer to call it we can debate that I know is also about a society it's an instrument of planning that helps a society modulate the rate of change it's the way I see it as part of a kind of planning repertoire now there are questions of memory and the other complex layers that we can get into which I know you're interested in but so for me transition at the most abstract level is about how you deal with time then I think as a designer it's a how does one extend that and I think the transitions are I mean energy is a big question and urban flux is a big question how are we going to make this transition of three or 300 million people are moving between places what does that mean for design I mean one banal example is imagining a whole spectrum of rental kinds of housing that can change dormitory sharing all of that so people talk about that in energy it's clearer so in energy for example India is trying to make a transition from fossil fuels to renewables if we try to make that jump our economy will collapse so we are going the nuclear way with the bushes we sign these deals one more and saying now we might get trapped in nuclear or we might find our transition through nuclear so you go off into other directions and that's the point with the community toilets that if you have to change this culture of open defecation through infrastructure facility sometimes you got to you got to go to a form that might help you make that transition because by doing that you create a collect your culture of collective consensus that's why the community center on top of the thing where you and therefore then you can upgrade those quarter settlements or slums or favelas or auto construct whatever tab you want to give it so these are all interconnected and I think it's multiple strategies that I think spatial imagination can help inform and I don't think we have a voice on that debate so the solutions become absolute which means it is the slum we'll have public housing or make two factories that make prefabricated toilets and give everyone a toilet these are absolute solutions so it's I think a choice between which also shouldn't be posed as a binary there's an in- between spectrum there between the absolute and the transition area and I think as designers are pedagogy both taking permanence as a default condition but we also tend to actually imagine absolute conditions and absolute solutions whether we look at our studios we look at housing the way it's dealt with in most conditions so I mean I think I'm interested in this sort of you can call it another binary that you need to somehow blur between the absolute and the transition area and I think it plays out in different forms in planning and urban design and landscape in preservation thank you so much for this talk and I'm an awe of you and anybody who studied architecture in India I'm pretty sure we'll be your superstar and so my question was regarding the prototypes and the competitions that you were participating in back in my undergrad I had toilet yes so we had designed a prototype for housing in the slums of Bandra which also was not a success we didn't want to displace the people from the slums but design something for them within it a better community living because we think people don't want to move out of them because they're just very deep rooted in the culture they have within the slums but is there any reason other than the social fabric that you feel that these prototypes are not a success or people don't want to experiment with them much because I feel there is no solution to the problems of the slums until and unless we experiment with them but I don't see experimentation happening in India especially in slums what is your view on how what's the way forward well it's connected a bit to the last question what you're saying and so you know everyone and his uncle in Dharavi for example every university has done a studio in Dharavi and I don't think the solutions to Dharavi lie in Dharavi so what we do is fetishize it represent it re-represent it and they the solutions to Dharavi lie and looking at the metropolitan area of Mumbai I mean I'm taking it to one extreme and that's why what Charles Korea and his colleagues did with New Bombay for me was the last speculated avant-garde planning move that occurred in India since then we have been involved with what I described as involution which Clifford Gertz the social anthropologist talked about he talked about agricultural involution where Indonesian rice farmers try to do multi-cropping and break away from the rhythms of the what rice would have normally taken and so that makes for a very efficient mechanism but the involution implies that when the system breaks down it takes a long time to survive because it gets internally incredibly complex so our cities are going through an involutionary kind of process we've stopped thinking of these kind of evolutionary moves partly to do with politics partly to do with the lack of voice that the profession has the has so I mean the smart cities for example as a program I mean it's ridiculous the kinds of imagination they're coming up with because I don't think the profession has a voice planning is lost that speculative edge we don't imagine speculate about these I think it's our business and I think society invests in us to imagine those spatial possibilities so I think there are many many reasons for that and of course we can get into specific cases which is also to do with very much a specific context that part of the problem with prototypes is that they become absolute solutions in a way of being replicated and you know the second project I showed you the competition the Gates Foundation this was actually funded by the Gates Foundation for an NGO in Delhi and when we won it we were so excited I went to India I went to this NGO to meet them and the guy said very embarrassed you know it took a long time we couldn't wait so we've already appointed contractors to build a prototype we had already evolved so the Gates competition just became a tokenism and they went ahead so we you know again found that this prototyping and this absolute solution this universalizing of the solution is the way our economy our political economy everything operates now it's what Sunil Kilnani calls that today the state is involved in a statistical architecture it's not an architecture of buildings and place-making but it's a statistical architecture of GDP two million toilets built that's what the imagination of the state in the neoliberal kind of regime has come down to and it displaces architecture and our voice which is where we lose our agency if we don't speak up thank you