Walking through the streets of Mumbai, India, is an experience unmatched anywhere else. The energy of India’s largest and most populous city is palpable through the people, their activities, and most importantly, the built environment. The city’s dynamic culture is evidently expressed through the structures that dot its landscape.
Mumbai is an eclectic mix of buildings large and small, old and new, and traditional and modern. The city of contrasts boasts an architectural legacy that goes back over 2000 years. Located in the state of Maharashtra along the west coast of India, Mumbai hosts a variety of architectural styles such as Victorian, Gothic, Art Deco, Indo-Saracenic, Modern and Post-modern. The city is characterized by its old charm and liveliness, a diverse stage for people to pursue their dreams.
Rahul Mehrotra is a practicing architect based in Boston and Mumbai and he has been teaching at Harvard’s GSD where he is currently Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and Director of the Master in Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program. Born in 1959, Mehrotra grew up in Lucknow, a city in Northern India and an important cultural and artistic hub. His father was a manager at a large machine tool company. The family moved a lot following Mehrotra senior’s frequent promotions, which led to changing residences owned by his company. Besides a few years in Lucknow and Delhi, they lived in different neighborhoods within Mumbai.
Kinetic Cities, courtesy RMA Architects. Image Courtesy of RMA Architects
Rahul Mehrotra is an urbanist, educator, and founding principal of Mumbai- and Boston-based Rahul Mehrotra Architects (RMA Architects). Across India, Mehrotra has designed projects that range from master plans to weekend houses, factories, social institutes, and office buildings. Over decades, his endeavors in urban activism have culminated in the founding of the firm’s Architecture Foundation, which focuses on creating “awareness of architecture in India” through research, publication, exhibitions, and inclusive public dialogue surrounding architectural ethics and values.
The new graphic identity of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial. by LA-based ELLA. Image Courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial
The third Chicago Architecture Biennial will occur from September 19, 2019, to January 5, 2020, and yesterday the first group of contributors to the 2019 edition and publication was announced. This year’s theme, “...and other such stories,” will bring together a multi-faceted and international exploration of architecture and the built environment. Newly commissioned projects for the Biennial will highlight issues including public housing, social justice, and the appropriation and preservation of the natural environment.
Entrance to the Visitors Center at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), formerly known as the Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai. Photo: Rajesh Vohra
As a point of entry and exit, a threshold has a dual coding in society as both a physical and symbolic marker of separation and connection. Thresholds are often explicitly hard-edged or even brutal in their expression, demarcating rigid boundaries, as in the definitive lines of walls, barricades, and security checkpoints in buildings, around cities, or across larger territories. Too often, thresholds also divide human activity or communities according to social, ethnic, national, or economic characteristics. Architecture and planning can unwittingly contribute to these different forms of physical separation, especially in ways made visible through their practitioners’ interpretations of culture, religion, or legislation. As the academic disciplines that inform spatial practices, architecture and planning are themselves often similarly separated by disciplinary thresholds, inhibiting porosity between fields of research. By definition, an individual discipline necessarily is organized around a self-referential center of discursive production, but this often happens at the expense of the richness found at the intersection of multiple disciplinary perspectives. Is architecture, in its compulsive drive to create the autonomous object, inherently hardening the thresholds separating it from other disciplines and, by extension, reproducing those schisms within the built environment? Can architecture and planning intentionally construct soft thresholds―lines that are easily traversed, even temporarily erased―thereby allowing for multiple perspectives across different modes of research and practice and catalyzing disciplinary and social connections? What, then, is the physical expression of a soft threshold―a space that is visually and physically porous, plural in spirit, encompassing of its context, and yet rigorous in its expression?
Ranjit Hoskote, Rahul Mehrotra and Kaiwan Mehta during a working session. Image Courtesy of Suresh KK (mid-day, a Jagran Group Publication)
Today, the rapidly-developing country of India is one of the key places in the world where architecture could have the most impact; in spite of this, there has been little critical reflection on the country's architectural landscape, and architecture has struggled to assert its value to the wider population. Currently, the country's first major architectural exhibition in 30 years is taking place in Mumbai, curated by Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote, and Kaiwan Mehta and running until March 20th. In this interview, a shortened version of which was first published in Domus India's December Issue, Mustansir Dalvir sits down with the curators to discuss their exhibition and the past and present of Indian Architecture.
Looking back to the time architectural practices first began to proliferate in India, one sees that they always operated within an ecosystem of practice, academia, and association. We can trace this to the 1930s, when the Indian Institute of Architects (IIA) was set up, which in turn emerged from the alumni of the Bombay School of Art. Teachers at the school were the most prolific practitioners in the country, and students made the easy transition from learning to apprenticeship, to setting up their own practices. Even patrons, largely non-state (in the penultimate decades before independence) aligned themselves with the architects in a collegial association. The Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects and their annual lectures became the mouthpieces of collective praxis, as the many presidential speeches show. Everyone knew what everyone else was doing, knowledge flowed centripetally.
In the years after independence, these bonds became looser as the nation-state became the chief patron. While private wealth and industry provided steady work for architects all over the country, the IIA still continued to remain the platform of discourse and dissemination – an internal professional rumination, largely distanced from changing politics and culture in the country, especially from the seventies onwards. While students of architecture did briefly take political stances during the Emergency, practice remained unaffected.
On his recent visit to Santiago, Chile we caught up with Rahul Mehrotra, founder of Mumbai-based RMA Architects and a professor of Urban Design and Planning at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Mehrotra is known for his advocacy work in Mumbai and has carried out projects on a myriad of scales including interior design, architecture, urban design, conservation and planning. His projects include everything from a house on a tea plantation to a campus for NGO Magic Bus, the KMC Corporate Office in Hyderabad and housing for mahouts and their elephants. Mehrotra has also written and lectured extensively on architecture, conservation and urban planning in Mumbai and India.
