Architecture spaces, his final frontier
As an architect practising in delhi since the 1960s, ranjit sabikhi has tried hard to design a city for its people.
There are two sequential pages in the middle of Ranjit Sabikhi’s new book, A Sense of Space: The Crisis of Urban Design in India, that represent some of the main questions it raises. The pages describe one of the large projects that he, as part of the architecture firm, ‘The Design Group’, was involved in-the District Centre in Janakpuri, New Delhi, built in 1984. The first spread has three beautifully drawn, idealised views of the centre in black and white. In these views, plazas are populated with lounging, chatting citizens, people dutifully waiting at stop signs, and eating at cafes.
A great deal of attention has been given to ensure that different kinds of bodies are shown inhabiting the spaces-men, women, people from different classes and religious and caste backgrounds. It is a secular imagination of a public realm. These bodies are surrounded by the brutalism of high modernist concrete towers rising heroically into the sky. We are being asked to rise to what the architecture demands us to be-free and modern.
As you turn the page, you see the spaces as they eventually got built and inhabited. Signboards and dish antennas mar the facades of the buildings, the pavement is cracked, and there are informal hawkers selling food on the streets. But also, around the bedraggled trees, there are people hanging around, walking in the vehicle-free environment that the plaza affords. Burdened with the task of fulfilling our desire for the betterment of our spatial environment, architects can’t escape the utopian impulse or, consequently, the inevitable frustrations that come when those dreams become a concrete reality.
Sabikhi started his practice in Delhi in the early ’60’s and has since been involved in some of the large architectural and urban design projects in the city. He has also taught urban design at the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi and has been involved in the shaping of architectural and urban thought through both his practice and his academic work.
This is the first major publication of his work, both in terms of his writings and of built work. These two work off each other in the book, as projects seem to be placed within arguments, to elucidate a point being raised by the text. With these kinds of contextualisations, the book attempts to build a dialectic between the larger concerns of his practice and the built projects, including the housing projects he did for the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), like the Yamuna Apartment Buildings.
Across the book, Sabikhi is a trenchant critic of the bureaucracy responsible for the design and implementation of these improvement schemes, charging them with ineptitude, short-sightedness and a lackadaisical attitude. He tells us, “The primary difference was that the early master plan was meant to be implemented by organisations that had specialised professionals as part of their system. As the city grew rapidly, in spite of the fact that this would require more professionals involved, their number has steadily declined. This runs parallel to the commodification of land in later times, such that even Government bureaucracies like the DDA started speculating on what was meant to be land for the public good.”
He reserves most venom for what he calls the ‘babu culture’ of the city, in which the elite and the bureaucrats shun their responsibilities to build democratic spaces, instead using their power and influence to garner privileges. An example that he quotes is the New Moti Bagh or Netaji Nagar developments, built as recently as 2007, where on a site of 110 acres, only 492 apartments were created for senior government officials-a blatant example of those in power cornering prime property in the city for their own benefit. At the same time, Sabikhi also speaks of how land allocations for the urban poor have constantly reduced, making it impossible for the poor and migrant labour to find homes in the city.
The history of Delhi is on of the relationship between ideology and urbanism. As the centre of power for centuries, the form of the city has always helped us imagine the relationship between the governed and their governors. As the crucible, within which an imagination of a democratic nation is played out, these kinds of spaces also serve an ideological purpose for the modern ‘Indian’ public realm.
Sabikhi has been in a unique place to observe the transformations of Delhi over the years. Unhappy with the current state of affairs, he longs for a truly democratic public realm. “If a new parliament and offices were indeed necessary, these could have easily been built stage-wise,” he says of the planned redevelopment of the Central Vista. “The current plan seems to be short-sighted with hardly any signs of good urban design.”
#modernarchitecttimes #modernarchitectindia #architect #news #article #government #building #rawmaterial #history #art #sculpture #home
