Projects Won’t Trickle Down

Urgent need to address alternative modes of architectural practices for Goa

Architect Arijeet Raikar, one of the resource persons for the workshop organised by the Indian Institute of Architects - Goa (IIA), impressed upon the audience that it was possible to build a first-rate residence for a family within rupees seven lakhs. The problem though is that it is financially unviable to run this kind of an architectural practice within the existing ideology of practice, where the norm is that the architect’s fees is a small percentage of the total project cost. Enabling such alternative practices, with commitment from architects as much as from the State, would go a long way to satisfy the housing needs of the locals as well as the design challenges enjoyed by architects. Ensuring employment opportunities to young architects while continuing to address the specific needs of development in Goa will require the change in the architecture of practice itself. 

Architects have a major role in shaping the development process in Goa. We often act helpless and complain in private realms about the situation of crazy real estate development, while continuing to ruin the very environment we love, professionally. The question is what can young architects do in scenarios where elites from Indian metros, ably aided by the local real-estate industry, have taken up the reins of development here. While this development continues to deprive locals of affordable housing due to escalating costs, the local architects, contrary to the belief, do not benefit from these projects as the designers of these luxury second-homes also often happen to come from Indian metros.  Therefore keeping both Goan environment and employment of local architects in mind, there is a need to change the ideology of architectural practice itself. In the film, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, philosopher Slavoj Zizek states that it takes a lot of effort to recognise the current capitalist ideology. The predominant ideology in architectural practice means being slaves to glamour buildings as consumerist objects (even so-called sustainable second-homes), emphasizing form at the cost of everything else, catering to clients’ needs whatever they are, making big-bigger-biggest projects, turning a blind eye to corruption and over-pricing in budgeting, and so on.

  Goa is undergoing rapid and uncontrolled urbanizations, which are largely guided by the aspirations of elites from Indian metropoli. The Indian elites who buy second-homes in Goa are not here to settle. They are here to consume Goa and move on to greener pastures when the going is not good and the green is gone. In the 1980s and ‘90s, it were the super-rich who started the trend of buying second homes here. Since the turn of the century, with the liberalisation of the Indian economy and the boom in the Indian middle-class, this trend has changed and many more are acquiring second-homes here, making Goa their weekend getaway.  Clearly, the focus has moved from merely enjoying Goa for its sights to the ownership of sites, in the form of real-estate properties.

Most professionals assume that faster development will lead to bigger employment opportunities, seldom realising how the capitalist economy works. In his article, “Trickle-Down Economics -- The Most Destructive Phrase Of All Time?” (Forbes, 6 Dec. 2013), George Leef, writes that “[i]n a free society, wealth doesn’t trickle down, or up, or sideways. It is earned. What people … don’t understand or won’t admit, is that people of all economic strata, and no matter their race, religion, sex, or anything else, have far more opportunities to earn in a society with a small, efficient, frugal government than they do in a society with a huge, wasteful one.” This line of thinking is critical to Goa and especially for practicing architects. The impetus given to large-scale development projects in Goa is usually in the hope that there will be a trickle-down effect.  Local Goan architects for instance are under the illusion that the trickle down economy is going to cater to their needs, and deliver to them some projects. We passively allow economic policies to be thrust on us, hoping against hope that some of the project opportunities will trickle down to us. The grim truth is, they seldom do, except maybe to a few cronies of those at the helm.

At another level, architect Rahul Mehrotra, the keynote speaker at the recent Z-axis conference in Panjim, highlighted that, today, the State’s contribution to the neoliberal economy has been restricted to the development of infrastructure, such as highways, flyovers, expensive bridges, and so on, which are meant to benefit corporate projects, while the important “mainstream” projects like housing have been left to the mercy of private developers. Architects, he rued, are either co-opted by these developers, or contend with boutique practices like designing luxury second homes. While the developers’ practice is that of crunching numbers to maximise the saleable spaces of apartments, the boutique practice has become the practice of indulgence, both on behalf of the elite client as well as the architect. Mehrotra also identified the media as being guilty for encouraging glamourized boutique practices by creating signature ‘hero’ architects.  Usually architecture practices as represented in popular lifestyle magazines largely represent the projects commissioned by the rich. Today, it is important to break this hegemony of the popularly accepted ideal architectural project like luxury second-homes, so that new categories of practice emerge, categories which address the unique development model that Goa requires.

(This article is based on the keynote address I gave on ‘Refiguring the Architecture of Practice’ at a workshop organised by IIA Goa on the occasion of World Architecture Day.)

[This article was published on The Goan on 23/10/2016.]

Buildings as (Bad) Ideas

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.

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]