Visual anarchy?

Big, bold, brash seem to be the watchwords of today's builders, who smash their concrete fists through once quiet neighbourhoods. Architects find it difficult to innovate in increasingly cramped spaces, observes GEETA DOCTOR.

CITIES WERE once celebrated because of their buildings. The architect was said to belong to a noble profession. Whole dynasties and historical periods were identified by their architectural style. The Chola period, for instance, is known to us chiefly on account of its splendid art and architecture. The Roman architect, Palladio, has contributed the term "Palladian," which is synonymous with a perfectly proportioned classical ideal of a building.

Compare this with what we have to face today. Architects are at the cutting edge of the transformation that is taking place at every street corner and market centre. They are literally cutting up the architectural texture of Chennai and replacing it with grotesque examples of modernistic whimsy. There are steel and glass towers, with shiny reflecting surfaces on every street. The most jarring combinations of colours are used. Green glass in the case of one jewellery shop, with contrasting yellow panels, or salmon pink at a well-known shopping centre, inset with bright blue bathroom tiles. As though to add to the comic book effect, there are green water tanks on the terrace, a wide bandage of grey paint, like suspenders in front of the building and at night, huge lozenges of tubelights that yawn brightly, advertising the place. Or else there is the new craze for Post- Modernism, that is to say, crazily cobbled architectural details from every period of history that are rammed together without any sense. The so called "award winning" monstrosity that tilts over the horizon at Teynampet, looks as though it has been put together during an earthquake. The walls have been rammed together at sharp angles, a tiny cottage hangs over the top of the building. No matter from where you look at it, the white and blue building sticks out like a street urchin throwing a stone at a glass fronted building, just to attract attention. Yet none of this is quite so disturbing as the change that is taking place in the silk and gold district at Panagal Park. Here, the architectural anarchy has reached such a proportion that it requires a separate paragraph to itself. Is this a symptom of our multi-cultural society, or just another turn on the slow ride into chaos? Is it time we made architects and town planners accountable for the type of visual anarchy that they are now inflicting upon us?

"It's not just us. It's the promoters", say the architects. "The promoters and property developers are those who call the shots. We architects are quite helpless. If we did not design according to the current fashion, we could soon be out of business. Forget being idealistic, that is for those who want to live in the boondocks, mucking about with mud and cowdung. Here in the market place, it's war and the public, the so called helpless citizens of Chennai, are just as anxious for the kind of glass and steel faced buildings that we design."

"It does not have to be like that", explains S. L. Chitale, the most respected name in the architectural field today. His firm boasts of three generations of architects. "Take the Jehangir Art Gallery at Bombay (or Mumbai). When the architects Durga Bajpai and Vanoo Bhuta were asked to design it in the early 50s, they did it keeping in mind the character of the buildings that were already in place. They knew that they could not compete with a building like the Prince of Wales Museum, at the back. It was a perfect building of its type. They did not try to compete with it, or to ignore it altogether. They designed a building at a lower height so that it would skirt round the property in such a way that it would make its presence felt as a piece of functional architecture. I would say that it is very functional. It serves its purpose very well as an art gallery, or a number of galleries, that has continued to attract a large number of people over the years. "The gallery has a generous feeling of space, built as it is over wide open areas supported on a framework of RCC columns and beams, with an interesting use of Malad stone on the exterior surface, to match the stone finishes of the earlier buildings across the Kala Ghoda plaza. This harmonious integration of buildings and public space has now become an annual feature of the artistic and intellectual life in the City. It integrates the performers and the public in a way that is completely democratic and vital by allowing for this easy sharing of different spaces, both public and personal."

"When you upgrade a building, or an area, it is very important to look at the changing needs, the traffic patterns, the communication systems and the functional planning of the place", says Chitale, refusing to be pushed into admitting which are the buildings that he admires in Chennai. "I think as a general rule, a building should not jar. It should not stick out. There's nothing wrong with a building like the Oberoi Hotels from the design point of view, but when most of the buildings in that area have seven or eight floors, how can you have one that is eighteen floors high? This is what I mean when I say that it jars. I remember when the LIC building came up on Mount Road I could not believe that it had been designed in an East-West direction. You don't have to be a Vaastu expert to say that it's wrong to have a building in the tropics, designed to face the Sun both in the morning and the evening. But this is something the architect sitting in the West, would not have been able to understand at that time. We have all the laws in place. We have all the guidelines, but who follows them? I don't agree that the old "form follows function" theory is out of date today. If you have a British architect, he must be able to design following the functional needs of the Indian environment, and vice versa. If I, as an Indian, have to design a building in the UK, I must be aware of their needs. It is a simple and yet very effective rule of the thumb for the architect to follow."

Chitale has been waging a constant battle to bring about an awareness in the safety aspects of a building, what he calls the housekeeping. According to him, it is the responsibility of the architect to not just design a building that follows international safety norms, but that he or she should also insist on there being a periodic up-gradation of the electrical fittings and other safety aspects of a building. Every building should have a regular system of maintenance against fire and other hazards. Failing this, we have one of the most wasteful forms of building maintenance, he says, dependent as the systems are, on a catastrophe such as a building collapse, or fire, before anyone takes any notice.

As compared to this humane view, the motto for today's builders seems to be bigger, bolder, brasher. They smash their concrete first through once quiet neighbourhoods, tearing up the trees, ripping through the roots with incessant blows of a sledge hammer and drive the stakes that will support the newly grown conglomerations that can now house upto seven or eight thousand people in one small area. Since the architects feel helpless to innovate in these increasingly cramped spaces, they allow their imagination to grow wild by their 'value additions' that is the stuck-on devices that have now begun to sprout from the roof tops. There is a whole thesis waiting to be done, by a new generation of architecture students on the type of decorative devices that architects employ to distinguish their buildings.

There are the hats and topi specialists. They place solar topis at the corner of the terrace, or design a whole range of curved and tiled roof-tops, like mushrooms, or worse, small slums on the sky-line. There are steeples covered in blue tiles, like castles in story books, there are Mangalore tiled roofs that cap the high rise buildings and domes, cupolas and sharply pointed triangles that suggest a 'house of cards' effect. Perhaps one of the worst examples of this kind may be seen in the group of medium rise apartments that stick out of the former Government estate on Mount Road. They imitate in the most pathetic parody of the former grandeur of the Rajaji Hall, the Palladian or Greek temple effect, of the frontage of the old building.

The Greek style seems to be coming back into fashion. Not only are there innumerable apartment buildings that sport the trademark pillars and triangular pediments, but schools, office buildings and jewellery shops that also try to get the Doric or Corinthian pillar effect. This brings us to the Panagal Park school of architecture. The buildings are designed to attract the customers who want to splurge on the annual frenzy for gold, diamonds, silver or silk sarees. The interiors are in the choicest chocolate box style, smooth 'as' cream granite surfaces gleam and twinkle in the midst of opulent glass chandeliers, etched mirrors and marble accessories. Outside, it is the even more garish 'mithai' box effect, all shiny frontages and gilded signs. The exteriors are put together using false inlays of tiles, glittering glass surfaces, ornamentations in plaster of Paris that can include statues of nymphs and apsaras, massive pillars that hold up traylike roofs and in one case, Doric columns, a curving Kerala style roof, balconies in the Italian manner that are still in the process of being plastered onto the exterior of the building.

One explanation for this ornamental excess is that since most people travel around in cars, or two wheelers, they need to have their attention stimulated in these ways. When you have only a couple of nano-seconds to stare at a building, all that matters are the bare essentials, the outline, the colours, the frills, the architectural shouts for attention. It is an assault on the senses that defies reason and it's being done in the name of architectural brilliance.

Notice, for instance, the affection that architects have for windows and balconies. These come in all shapes and sizes, though at the present time, a window in the shape of an inverted fan, or scallop shell seems to be in vogue. If not windows, there are Regency style balconies in wrought iron, lacy RCC grills that flutter down the front and sides of a building and when all else fails, painted sub-sections that turn the building into a vast patch-work quilt.

Entrances too are given the full treatment. These are tubular or cubist depending on the architects' whim and most of them these days are faced with the most expensive varieties of stone, granite or marble that the designer can find. It's facade architecture at its most arrogant. It massages the ego of the client at the expense of the ordinary citizen, who can only gaze in wonder or horror, as the case may be, and walk on.

Architecture rarely happens in a vacuum. It is signal of the culture that nurtures it. Looking around the streets of Chennai provides a comic horror show of what our insensitivity to our environment, the lack of training in the visual arts for large segments of the public and the apathy of the political system can lead to.

It is a sign of the disintegration within. As against this, compare the tributes that were paid when F. W. Stevens, the British architect, who designed the headquarters of the Bombay Baroda and Central India Railway, near Churchgate, died.

As reported by Rahul Mehrotra and Sharada Dwivedi, in their exquisitely produced volumes commemorating the Mumbai's architectural heritage, the Times of India wrote, "But what Bombay owes to him is not merely these noble monuments as they stand, but the continuous lesson in art and beauty that their presence along our streets inspires - that insensible education of the public eye to the graceful form and fine proportion and glowing perspective qualities that have an adorning and harmonising influence on every nature above the level of the clod." (From "Anchoring a City Line" The history of the Western Suburban Railway and its headquarters in Bombay).

This is the ideal that we must try to aspire for, both as citizens living in a City that is still in a dynamic phase of its growth and as those who want more from our architects and planners. We need buildings that inspire us to dream of a better future, by instilling a sense of pride in our daily life, today.

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