South African architect Ilze Wolff suggests that we work towards an architectural practice of radical openness.
As a tribute to
its namesake, a three-day international architecture conference was organised
by the Charles Correa Foundation at Kala Academy in the first week of
September. With the theme “Buildings as Ideas”, the intention of the
organisers, as written on the conference programme booklet, was to “explore
further what Correa believed – that buildings are ideas that manifest and take
form.” However, as one of the presenters, Ilze Wolff from Cape Town, South
Africa, reminded the audience, if buildings are ideas, they could also be bad
ideas. It is this precise notion that is scary, because most times energy is
only invested in making a building aesthetically and functionally ‘good’. In an
environmentally sensitive place like Goa, for instance, no building or less
building is also a good idea. But let us assume that buildings have to be
constructed, in which case it is imperative to ask what constitutes bad ideas
in architecture?
Wolff stood out
amongst all the other guests because she seemed to be most sensitive to the
context of her practice. She argued that buildings that were designed by
architects in the apartheid period endorsed discrimination based on class,
race, and gender. Apartheid was the official policy of racial segregation
formerly practiced in the Republic of South Africa, involving political, legal,
and economic discrimination against non-whites. In this regard, Wolff referred
to the case of the garment-manufacturing factory, Rex Trueform, a modernist
building designed in 1938 in Salt River, Cape Town. Segregation based on gender
and racial stereotyping was manifest in the zoning of activities in the
building, where areas were earmarked based on race, gender and class.
Discrimination was also made apparent in the factory by having separate
entrances and staircases for different people. There also was a difference in
the amount of area given to people, based on race and class. The most
privileged were the white male employees from the management, whereas the black
female factory workers were the worst off. Wolff was sensitive to reading the
(bad) ideas inscribed in the buildings in order to “unstitch” them by
dismantling the biases in her own design projects. Most importantly, her
building philosophy makes a point to not differentiate between people based on
race, gender, or ability.
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| Ilze Wolff |
Another problem
with architects is their limited understanding of the ‘context’ for their
design. Common responses of many architects presenting at the conference to
‘context’ were superficial interventions at the level of the physical forms,
like mixing the local soil with cement in order to transform the colour of
concrete. This allows architects to play at being modern - by using concrete,
the archetypal modernist building material, while appearing ‘sensitive’ to
local context - by matching the colour of buildings to the surrounding
landscape. Similarly, in Goa, while I love the overall design of Kala Academy,
a Correa project, I harbour deep reservations about its use of laterite pebbles
on the walls to imitate laterite stone masonry, probably in an attempt to merge
the building with the surrounding context. Such form-based ideas are a limited
way of addressing local issues of context. As Wolff advocated, ‘context’ in
architecture must not be reserved solely for understanding the physical
surroundings of the building, but must include broader references such as
‘context of freedom’, ‘context of race’ or ‘context of ideology’ to name but a
few. Only when design starts responding to these contexts can architects aspire
for a practice of radical openness.
As suggested above,
Wolff was the only architect present at the conference who seems to be “working
towards an architectural practice of radical openness”, as quoted by her. An
Indian architect, Sameep Padora, in contrast, was proud to present the design for
a temple project. Given that projects like temples promote segregation, both on
religious grounds as much as on the basis of caste, it seems like a bad idea to
have included the temple project in the conference. The Jetavana Centre built for Buddhist Ambedkar Dalit Communities, and designed by Padora, also embodies bad ideas in its architecture. For this structure, Padora prescribed cow dung coating as a finish for all the floors. This is despite “most
vocal members of the [Dalit] group wanting to use tile and concrete”
(quoted from Padora’s admission, as written in an Architectural Review article
by Mustansir Dalvi, 16 May, 2016). In India, it is always women of the
marginalised communities, who happen do the job of applying cow dung. Imagine
the suffering of Dalit women having to apply cow dung to the floor of the entire
project every fifteen days. Architects promote such terrible ideas usually
under the garb of protecting “Indian values” to achieve sustainability. Such
bad ideas for buildings continue to discriminate against people based on caste
and gender.
Unlike their
South African counterpart who seems to have accepted the problems of race and tried
to address the issues of discrimination in her design, Indian architects have
not even accepted that casteism is a problem, let alone one that is reflected
in the designing of buildings. This is probably because most practitioners of
architecture in South Asia are themselves beneficiaries of caste privileges
and, accordingly, perpetuate such discrimination in their own design practices.
Conferences like Z-axis are thus important to critically evaluate architecture
for good ideas as well as bad.
[This article was first published on The Goan on 25/09/2016]
