Posts Tagged India
Le Corbusier’s Indian masterpiece Chandigarh is stripped for parts
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 8, 2011
Group rallies to rescue city built as monument to modernity from neglect and plunder
It is a last-ditch effort to save a city built as a monument to modernity and hope but now threatened by neglect and the fierce demands of the global art market. Chandigarh, 180 miles north of Delhi, was built by Le Corbusier 60 years ago.
Since then, many of its finest buildings, recognised as modernist masterpieces, have been neglected. Recently, international art dealers have made substantial sums selling hundreds of chairs, tables, carvings and prints designed by Le Corbusier and his assistants but obtained at knockdown prices from officials often unaware of their value.
Now a group of local architects, art historians and officials are hoping to mobilise international help to prevent further damage to Le Corbusier's unique Indian legacy. A report commissioned by the government in Chandigarh has recommended a campaign targeting the UN heritage agency, Unesco, as well as foreign governments, especially in Europe where many of the items have been auctioned. Informal approaches to embassies in Delhi have failed, the unpublished report, seen by the Guardian, says.
The campaigners are led by Manmohan Nath Sharma, who was the first assistant of Le Corbusier in Chandigarh and later took over as chief architect of the city. "What is being lost is irreplaceable," he said, speaking in the home he designed in the centre of Chandigarh and surrounded by prints and paintings given to him by Le Corbusier. "Our heritage is going to be gone forever. This matter is being taken very lightly by the authorities so now we need international help. This is a handmade city. It is unique. It can never be replaced."
A Chandigarh manhole cover recently sold for £15,000, although there is no suggestion the furniture was bought or sold illegally.
Professor Rajnish Wattas, a former principal of the Chandigarh College of Architecture, is also calling for international intervention. "We were stunned when we heard the prices for manhole covers or chairs that you can still see watchmen sitting on outside offices. This was a wake-up call but what we are losing still hasn't sunk in," he said.
Le Corbusier was commissioned by Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, to build a city that would replace Lahore, the capital of the Punjab lost to newly created Pakistan after partition in 1947. Nehru said the new metropolis was to be of a design "unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation's faith in the future". Working on the principle that every detail had to be meticulously planned for the whole to function, Le Corbusier's team designed everything from the vast sculptures outside the monumental high court and local assembly to the door handles in the offices within.
Last year, the Chandigarh authorities approached the British high commission in Delhi in a bid to halt the sale in London of dozens of items including chairs from the assembly buildings. Indian diplomats in London also intervened. Neither attempt was successful.
Many of the items for sale in Europe come from stocks "condemned" as unfit for use by the local administration and sold off at auction to junk dealers. Others have been bought from officials often unaware of their international value.
Campaigners hope that with international support the auctions can be halted until new laws are passed.
"We have to act before it is too late," said Sharma, 87. "The Taj Mahal was made by foreign craftsmen and admired by foreigners before Indians saw it as a major attraction. Today the Taj is a symbol of India. Tomorrow it will be Le Corbusier's work in Chandigarh."
Antilia: Mukesh Ambani’s home in Mumbai
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 14, 2010
India's richest man moves into world's first billion-dollar home
Spit threatens Indian bridge
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 26, 2010
Kolkata's landmark Howrah bridge corroded by pedestrians' paan-chewing habit
It has survived West Bengal's monsoons, being rammed by a barge and a daily flow of some 60,000 vehicles. Now the engineers who maintain the historic Howrah bridge over the Hooghly river in Kolkata say a new enemy has appeared: the half-chewed mouthfuls of betel leaf, areca nut and slaked lime spat out by pedestrians.
Key struts that support the girders of the bridge – one of the biggest such cantilever structures in the world – have already lost half their protective metal casing to the acids contained in paan, as the mixture is known, engineers say.
There are few public structures in India that are without the tell-tale red stains from paan, which for thousands of years has been chewed throughout India as a mild stimulant, a palate cleanser and breath freshener.
A series of studies have highlighted the health risks of the tonnes of spit and chewed leaf spilled each day on India's already decrepit infrastructure, pointing out that the habit increases the risk of infectious disease as well as causing environmental damage, but have had little impact on its popularity.
Forensic specialists said the lime used in paan was a particular problem as it has powerful corrosive properties.
"A safety audit [of the bridge] is now being planned to find out the effect of constant spitting," one senior official told the Calcutta Telegraph. "The 6mm bases are now around 3mm each. If corrosion continues at such a rate, we would need to decommission the bridge for repairs."
Amithab Chatterjee, an engineer working on the 500-metre-long bridge, said: "It may not be a problem now but it may become a very big problem. The study will find out."
Efforts to crackdown on paan spitting are under way across the country. In Mumbai, the commercial capital, commuters caught spitting on trains were recently cornered by activists armed with buckets of water and mops and told to clean up. Other initiatives have been launched in the central city of Pune and in the poor northern state of Bihar. In the capital, Delhi, authorities have started a publicity drive aimed at cutting down on the practice, as well as public urination, before this autumn's Commonwealth Games.
In London Brent council recently launched a campaign, saying it spent £20,000 a year cleaning paan stains from pavements.
An estimated 50,000 pedestrians a day use the 67-year-old Howrah bridge, built under British imperial rule.
Police officers stationed near it said they routinely fined pedestrians caught spitting but a lack of manpower meant that fully protecting its structure was impossible.
Mukul Devichand: Prince Charles’ view of Mumbai’s slums would be well-received by the poor who live in them
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 6, 2009
In 2003, Prince Charles visited the teeming lanes of Dharavi in Mumbai and, according to remarks he made this week, he was impressed at the intuitive "grammar of design" in Asia's largest slum. From my own experiences in the slum last year, making programmes for BBC Radio 4, I'd say many of the slum's residents would agree with him – but only up to a point.
I remember very clearly how the atmosphere changed when Raju Korde took me into his chawl. He is a left-leaning slum politician, born in Dharavi's lanes. I was appalled by the stench, filth and dense humanity of the slum on my first day. As my guide, Korde wanted to show me where he lived – his chawl – which he said was an example of redevelopment done well.
On our way there, we picked our way through piles of rubbish, open sewers and sub-standard shanty homes packed so tightly they cut off the light. But then we turned through a gate and – as if by magic – the noisy clamour and fetid stench faded away.
The chawl represents a vision of the future that I think both the Prince and Dharavi's poor would support. Rather than building vertically, the architects of this scheme have recreated ground-level slum dwellings. But unlike the sprawl that dominates the rest of Dharavi, these were well-built, planned homes of two rooms and an indoor toilet, arranged around a clean courtyard centred on a banyan tree.
The residents here could continue to work from their ground-level dwellings – the stitching, processing, weaving that allow the slum to be a place where the poor can work their way out of poverty. The chawl retained the old sense of community lost to people rehoused in multistory blocks.
It's an older vision of redevelopment: this chawl was built over 30 years ago. But when I asked Korde whether he would want all of Dharavi to be re-made this way, his answer surprised me.
"No," he said, "of course, we don't want redevelopment like this. We don't want to ask for what's not possible."
In fact, Korde and others in the Dharavi Bachao Andolan, the coalition fighting the current private sector redevelopment plan, are not fighting the creation of tower blocks per se. They just want bigger flats and more public space in those blocks.
Their reasons for taking this stance are purely practical. While the private-sector plan involves tower blocks being built by companies, the reality is that government-funded schemes and even some in India's NGO sector are building tower blocks as a solution to the slum problem.
The tower block appeals because, in the end, Mumbai's problem is one of space. Redeveloping Dharavi in the fashion of Raju's chawl takes up lots of it and, ultimately, everyone – government and private sector – wants to reclaim the vast swathe of the city currently taken up by the 60% of Mumbaikars living in slums.
That may be wrong, but it's an attitude that doesn't show any sign of changing fast. So Korde and his fellow residents have made a compromise. And this is what separates them from Prince Charles' more idealistic view.
The Prince, of course, is in a position to take bold and often laudable stands – such as his campaign to save the hutongs of Beijing. The hope is that such intervention opens up a space for pause and reflection for the leaders of development-obsessed Asia.
But the surging political and economic pressures of India and China mean the poor themselves don't have the same luxury. As Raju Korde puts it: "Agitation without an alternative is baseless. Agitation with an alternative is worthwhile."
Charles declares Mumbai shanty town model for the world
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 6, 2009
The Mumbai shanty town featured in the film Slumdog Millionaire offers a better model than does western architecture for ways to house a booming urban population in the developing world, Prince Charles said yesterday.
Dharavi, a Mumbai slum where 600,000 residents are crammed into 520 acres, contains the attributes for environmentally and socially sustainable settlements for the world's increasingly urban population, he said. The district's use of local materials, its walkable neighbourhoods, and mix of employment and housing add up to "an underlying intuitive grammar of design that is totally absent from the faceless slab blocks that are still being built around the world to 'warehouse' the poor".
The prince's comments are likely to be seen as a criticism of western developers who export plans for large-scale, often high-rise buildings to developing countries. They will also come as a boost for residents of the Mumbai slums who protested against Slumdog Millionaire for characterising them as "dogs" and fought attempts to demolish their homes to make way for skyscrapers.
The prince was addressing a conference at St James's Palace organised by his Foundation for the Built Environment. The charity is attempting to involve local people in the redesign of slum areas in Freetown in Sierra Leone, Kingston in Jamaica and impoverished areas of New Orleans which were hit by Hurricane Katrina.
The prince, who visited Dharavi in 2003, said the adaptation of traditional settlements would deliver "more durable gains than those delivered through the present brutal and insensitive process of globalisation that is shaping so many aspects of how we live".
He warned that a soaring urban population - rising from 50% of all the world's inhabitants today to 70% by 2050 - could only be accommodated without disastrous social and environmental consequences by developing local urban design rather than "a single monoculture of globalisation".
"I strongly believe that the west has much to learn from societies and places which, while sometimes poorer in material terms are infinitely richer in the ways in which they live and organise themselves as communities," he told planners, charity workers and government officials.
"It may be the case that in a few years' time such communities will be perceived as best equipped to face the challenges that confront us because they have a built-in resilience and genuinely durable ways of living."
He shared a platform with Jockin Arputham, founder of the National Slum Dwellers Federation of India, who attacked attempts by foreign investors to clear large parts of Dharavi and replace them with 23-storey apartments. "I am a slum dweller, not a slumdog," he said, in reference to Danny Boyle's film.
"Many developing countries look to the west as a model but that cannot be the model. These [western] buildings use too much power and would not be affordable for us. In India the population has gone beyond all control and it is wrong to expect western development to help us."