“An Anthology of Contemporary Indian Architecture” by Jagan Shah moderately succeeds at the ambitious task of having to navigate and represent the uneven, unwieldy and often ungainly panorama of contemporary Indian architecture. After going through the well-summarized introduction and a diverse compilation of built and unbuilt work, I am left confounded – Is this as good as it gets? Or has the author opted for the safer route of relying too much on recognizable names and has failed to dig deeper? In the diverse economic landscape of post-liberalization India, for every firm like Morphogenesis that employs scores of professionals to churn out forgettable corporate interiors and tiresome mirror glass facades, there’s got to be more than a handful of Glen Murcutt – style architects and smaller practices improvising and channeling their creative energies in lesser known corners. This volume is a convincing survey of an established and recognized few as much as it is a lost opportunity to identify the works of those who have been overlooked by a neutered Indian architectural press.
The book is a distillation of self-selected works of twenty architects most of who are in their second decade of professional practice. To paraphrase the author, there are shockingly few decent buildings, relative to the overall size of the construction industry. The Mumbai-Delhi-Ahmedabad triangle has its usual suspects, in addition to a generous representation of Ahmedabad-trained Bangalore architects. It’s not surprising to see Chennai and Kolkata’s conspicuous absence given the lack of critical mass of creative architectural energies. However, there is a token representation from Auroville and from Kerala.
The collection has a range of project types from private residences and commercial interiors to institutional buildings and pays lip service to urban design with a collaborative work between S.K.Das and EDAW, rendered in watercolor, which screams “made in corporate USA”. There are hardly any multi-family housing projects featured in the book. Developer-driven flats with ‘two and a half feet thick aesthetic’ proliferated by Hafeez Contractor and his numerous clones my not be the ideal ambassadors of contemporary architectural discourse in India. But multi-family housing is the fast growing segment of housing types and it is disappointing to see just one decent housing project (Andrews Ganj Housing – S.K.Das).
The book does something most Indian architectural journals still seem reluctant to embrace: supplementing photographs by readable plans and sections. It is a relief to see works of the older generation–by the way of Correa, Doshi, Raje, Rewal, Kanvinde, among others—have been relegated only to the introductory essay. There has been enough printed pages showcasing their work in the last forty years, and it’s about time we moved on. Attempting to portray the entire spectrum of contemporary Indian architecture in less than 300 pages is challenging indeed. But I would have happily traded some of those many pages devoted to well-photographed rooms filled with Chinese-made veneer furniture, prefabricated kitchen counters, and terracotta horses in front of ochre walls, to get a whiff of those lesser known architects doing good work, and for a wider oeuvre of projects that engage the public realm.
