Written by Shiny Varghese |Updated: December 27, 2018 8:32:44 am
Cities got to work hard and play harder, this year
From winning UNESCO tags to exhibitions around space and death, cities in India had quite a year.
Highest Praise
Ahmedabad-based Balkrishna V Doshi became the first Indian to win the illustrious Pritzker Architecture Prize, the highest award in the discipline. The 90-year-old has done nearly a 100 buildings, though his contribution to Indian architecture finds recognition in low-cost housing projects, and his finesse as a teacher and institution builder. His “quest for cultural centered-ness as a modernist” found expression in numerous ways including in the Aranya Community Housing, Indore, where he provided a social connect through its open spaces, and in the CEPT University, Ahmedabad, where he developed the idea of “education without doors”.
Heritage Matters
Mumbai won its third UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) award, this time for its ‘Victorian Gothic and Art Deco Ensembles’. Spread across nearly 163 acres, the buildings include areas around Fort, Churchgate and Marine Drive, with the Oval Maidan in the centre. While these buildings point to invested patrons and planned strategies by the government, they are also telling of how the metropolis grew, from being a mill-workers’ hub to an educated working class having reached its shores. From housing and cinema halls, to office buildings and universities under the WHS tag, the challenge lies in finding a fine balance between heritage and development.
Renewing Vows
Many academics, historians and architects found ‘the city’ as a new love interest, finding ways to understand her and cope with her complexities. Be it Amita Bhide and Himanshu Burte’s book called Urban Parallax – Policy and The City in Contemporary India; Urban Spaces in Modern India, edited by Narayani Gupta and Partho Datta; or Gautam Bhatia’s Stories of Storey: Art, Architecture and the City – these books investigate our relationship with our environment, from observations around the unseen in our cities to questioning urban policy. If well-known town planner Patrick Geddes’s Notes on Ahmedabad turned an exhibition into a conversation on the past and future of our cities, for the first time an international film festival themed on architecture and urbanism was curated in Pune at the National Film Archive of India.
How Not to Plan
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