CRITICAL REGIONALISM IN CONTEMPORARY INDIAN ARCHITECTURE

Abstract

The universal ideas and principles of modernist architecture have often been employed uncritically without consideration of regional peculiarities, leading to culturally and climatically inappropriate architecture which is unable to engage its occupants in a meaningful manner. As a consequence, many considerate architects have started combining ideas and principles of traditional architecture with the progressive ideas of modernisation to conceive architecture that tackles region-specific issues like climate-responsiveness and sociocultural appropriateness of built-forms.Architecture in the latter half of the twentieth-century witnessed a continuing endeavour to reconcile modernity and tradition. The term ‘critical regionalism’ has been used to describe the architectural approach that distils the underlying principles of traditional architecture and blends them with the latest construction technologies to create architecture that truly represents our time. Even though the term ‘critical regionalism’ was coined in the 1980s, its ideas have been pursued around the world since the 1950s in the work of architects like Alvar Aalto (Finland), Jørn Utzon (Denmark) and Luis Barragán (Mexico) (Figure 1). In India, as early as the 1960s, architects like Charles Correa and Joseph Allen Stein had begun pursuing the ideas of critical regionalism by situating their built-forms within the context of the locale. Thereafter, architects like Balkrishna Doshi, Raj Rewal, Hasmukh Patel and Uttam Jain started incorporating the ideas of critical regionalism in their designs to counter the homogenisation of architecture brought by modernism. By the 1980s, architectural regionalism in India reached its peak as buildings fulfilling a wide variety of programmes embodied a reaction to local culture, technology and climate.However, with the liberalisation of the Indian economy in the 1990s, global capital transplanted the ubiquitous air-conditioned curtain glass building to India. Eventually though, the inappropriateness of the glass curtain wall to the climate and culture of India engendered a strong reaction among certain Indian architects, reviving their interest in critical regionalism. Architects like Shirish Beri, Ashok B Lall, Sanjay Mohe and Chitra Vishwanath have carried forward the ideas of critical regionalism to the twenty-first century (Figure 2). Lately, more and more architectural practices have emerged in India that relate their designs to the deeper sensibilities and tangible realities of the place.