Rohan Shivkumar: Let’s throw open the debate: what constitutes architecture? On the one hand, architects cater to a conservative milieu – clients who have money. On the other, architecture addresses an important idea – the idea of Utopia. An architect tries to project a whole new system of human behaviour and relationships in the space of his practice.

 

Shimul Javeri Kadri: All architects start out as dreamers, thinking they can change the world, bring about gender justice, and a more equitable distribution of wealth. My dilemma as an architect is tied to providing what the client wants, while pursuing this dream.

Rohan Shivkumar: So, how important is the client to the act of ‘creating’ architecture?

 

Neera Adarkar: Architecture is not only a profession. You have to see architecture as also having the potential to change society. Ironically, both these aspects have to be balanced.

 

 

 

Shilpa Ranade: I think we need to take the discussion beyond the axis of the architect-client. In a way, the architect is peripheral to the building process, which has many forces acting on it. Of course, there is, what one might call, ‘boutique architecture’. But the urban experience, as we all know, includes much more than that.

 

Neera Adarkar: Yes. If you look at Bombay, more than fifty percent of the population is living in a city that has not been created by architects. So, the built environment can exist without architects.

Rohan Shivkumar: What constitutes urban planning? Unfortunately, cities are increasingly designed for movement – not for stationary people who inhabit them. We prize stainless steel and cold glass buildings. If there is a public bench, there is bound to be someone making sure you don’t sit on it.

Mary N. Woods: But citizens can also adapt and modify their environments. We have to think about the life-cycles of buildings. We learn a lot about public space by looking at post-colonial landscapes. Architecture is not just about the monumental; it also involves people and the ways in which they claim space.

Architects often lose sight of the fact that they are meant not just to build individual buildings or plan community spaces, but also to create actual infrastructure. Architecture can transform power structures. It does not need to create the city from scratch to do this. Instead, it can intervene in the existing fabric.

Rohan Shivkumar: Yes, we have to look at ‘tactical space’ – the idea of claiming space as part of architecture. For example, how in a city like Bombay, when no one is using a road-divider, a barber will go and use it to set his shop up.

Shimul Javeri Kadri: What this means is that the definition of the client is much bigger than the person who initially pays for the building. The generations to come and ordinary viewers are also clients.

Shilpa Phadke: But if architecture is produced to create and re-create a city, then, who gets to be the client? Who dreams the grand urban dream? Moreover, what happens if several such dreams contradict each other? Whose dreams remain untranslated?

 

Rohan Shivkumar: We seem to be facing a crisis in Bombay. Architecture is increasingly imagined as a service provider to a global network: the design ‘happens’ in New York and the plans get carried out here. What kind of an economy are we participating in? I guess, this leads us to the larger question – what role does a teacher of architecture play today?

Neera Adarkar: At the Academy of Architecture in Bombay, where I teach, most students are interested only in building high-rise towers like those in Shanghai or Dubai. To want them to think differently is to get labelled as someone who only talks about slums and mill-lands. Ironically, the fanciest concepts come from boys from the lower strata of society. They are the ones who talk about “building without limits”.

Abhay Sardesai: Many of you are teachers. How do you try and correct the absence of inter-disciplinary activities within Architecture and Social Science courses?

Mary N. Woods: Architecture in American and European universities is still stuck in 19th century systems, where everything is about the studio. I would like to challenge this centrality of the studio, to have a dialogue, to value the points of views of people from other fields – like journalists. Perhaps, we need to think about design rather than just architecture, particularly since architectural education is so focused on the grand building. Increasingly, for students it goes like this: if it’s not Dubai, Shanghai, or Mumbai, then it’s Goodbye. (Laughter)

But, seriously, is architecture just about grand monuments? I think it is good for students to think about architecture in terms of things outside urban spaces – in terms of initiatives that have greater social value. Like thinking about the architecture of a book, for example.

Rohan Shivkumar: You need a degree to ‘practice’ architecture. We need to have students who come out of the academy and know how to build. This is what the market wants. In this situation, cynics claim that students get confused if they are given too much information about Literature and Sociology. But, I believe, that as teachers, we have to give students the correct tools to look and learn. Our pedagogical institutions have to re-model themselves.

Neera Adarkar: Architects always assume that by virtue of being professionals, they have no need to re-examine their pedagogical systems. It is only thanks to my involvement in the Women’s Movement that I began to think differently. And it took me a long time to link this gender awareness with my practice as an architect. I used to believe that architecture could be neutral.

Sameera Khan: You can see this view at work when you discuss some of the problems regarding the availability of public toilets for women, with students. The mindset is the same whether the composition of the class is predominantly male or female. The three of us (Shilpa, Shilpa, and I) have taught a course on Gender and Space at several colleges (to students of Architecture and to students of the Humanities). Many students assume that you compromise on the number of toilet cubicles for women and build more male urinals in order to use space efficiently. They don’t see it as a matter of gender injustice.

Rohan Shivkumar: When I told some people that I was coming here for a panel discussion and that one of the areas we would be looking at was Gender and Architecture, a woman architect who runs a professional practice said: “What is the point? A beautiful building is a beautiful building; it doesn’t matter if it was designed by a man or a woman.” This is what I find interesting, since ninety percent of my students at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies, where I teach, are women, and architecture is often considered the ‘sensitive option’.

Shimul Javeri Kadri: Do we have to see architecture as a non-gendered and technology-oriented practice? Human beings occupy buildings, but we treat them as if they are invisible. We need to address this is our discussion.  I remember that at a recent workshop at Indigo restaurant, kids were asked to paint some walls. I was amazed when I looked at the results. Boys had painted man-made things – cars and rockets. Girls had chosen to paint subjects from the natural world.

Shilpa Phadke: The old Sherry Ortner argument is that in the West, culture is privileged over nature because men are aligned with culture – as they can transcend their embodied-ness – while women are tied to nature and their bodies. This makes way for the hierarchy of men over women. Of course, others have argued that this is extremely essentialist.

Rohan Shivkumar: I find that students join Architecture courses with a certain set idea about femininity. Then, slowly, over five years of architecture, they get masculinised. There is a feeling that practising architects have to be macho.

Abhay Sardesai: Howard Roark is the great role model, isn’t he

Sameera Khan: Yes, like when we started our project on toilets. At first, many women asked – “Why do you want to know about us?” But when we asked about their experiences – the times they did not find clean public toilets – they began to express their anger.

Shimul Javeri Kadri: I feel that whenever people talk to me about gendered architecture, they always discuss toilets, safety, and the location of the kitchen. I feel that there are other issues we could discuss: like the notion of green buildings. I have just built a factory in Karur, Tamil Nadu. I discovered, in the process, that a building without air-conditioning facilities doesn’t qualify for a LEEDS rating. So, it hasn’t even entered the consciousness of people who have devised the LEEDS system – which is a system meant to assess whether a building is green enough – that some buildings can be green and not have air-conditioning.

Shilpa Ranade: To get back to Abhay’s question about inter-disciplinarity, I think students who come out of Architecture schools in India aren’t even learning the elements of construction properly. One cannot expect them to perform more roles. The architect is just one among so many people who make the act of building possible. We ought to include practitioners of other disciplines in the building process. We need to not just problematise architecture, but also the role of the architect, which is often seen as sacred.

Rohan Shivkumar: Do students need to be taught how to make a building? Or do they need to be able to evaluate architectural systems rather than architectural forms?

Shilpa Phadke: Well, if you are giving them certificates saying that they can make buildings, then at least their buildings should not fall down! I am sure it is possible to be both a creative thinker and a builder-professional.

Rohan Shivkumar: Perhaps. At one level, we want Architecture students to plug into market systems, to learn construction techniques. At another level – within the same pedagogic set-up – we want them to critique the very market they are going to end up catering to. As teachers, we are constantly struggling with this duality.

I think if the tangibility of architecture is connected to the theoretical notion of the imagined body, we might find the right balance. We usually think of architecture as something designed for someone else’s gaze, rather than as creating a lived space. Architecture has to imagine its inhabitant. Because this inhabitant is a real person: one who sits stands, has a size, a scale, and a gender.

Neera Adarkar: But why only teachers? We can intervene at the level of policy. We can re-examine our development plans. A new one is being made next year – are we going to put our foot down? Unfortunately, the Architecture curriculum is quite hostile to critical thinking.

Rohan Shivkumar: I don’t think it is just the curriculum. Architecture, as a practice itself, is very inflexible. We therefore need to de-construct what is assumed to be the architect’s domain. We have to dismantle pre-set notions about the constitution of beauty, about what is built and not-built.

I think teaching and thinking about theory is very important. Most architecture magazines just provide descriptive reviews of buildings. Theory is seen as something destructive – something that destroys architects’ egos.

Mary just said that the centrality of the studio is a problem. But, I think it is within the studio that we can effect a change. It is fine to teach Sociology in a Humanities course, but unless we ask difficult questions during design studio sessions, we won’t be able to problematise attitudes.

Mary N. Woods: I agree we have to re-envision the studio to include a research component. In almost every American university, schools of Architecture are kept in intellectual isolation from other disciplines. One way to break down the classic centrality of the studio is to make sure that themes from the Humanities are taught. I feel strongly that as a historian, I should participate in design reviews and in students’ theses. For instance, it is important to look at Gender Studies as a kind of discipline that is not just about white, middle-class women. We must move out of our own positions when we talk about gendered architecture.

Shilpa Phadke: Yes, when exploring gendered spaces in India, we must not assume that the user is neutral – for this then inevitably means that the subject is upper-caste, middle-class, Hindu, heterosexual, able-bodied, and male.

If we see this project in larger terms, as connecting movements, then the Environmental movement would speak to Worker’s movements or Dalit movements, because all of these constituencies have things to gain or lose with public design projects. We ought to discuss the material process of design, for instance. For example, look at the spaces for children in this city – it is just much harder to push a pram in Bombay than in Amsterdam.

Sameera Khan: Yes, or taking a toilet-trained child to the loo…

Rohan Shivkumar: Why is it that every time we talk about gender and space, we keep coming back to toilet seats?

(General yelling and laughter)

Sameera Khan: The removal of hawkers from footpaths has also affected women. Now, if you walk from the Fort area to Churchgate, the booksellers have been removed, so you have dark stretches where there used to be people sitting till nine o’clock at night. We have rules that bars and shops have to close at a particular time. It is as if we are shutting down the city to make these empty aesthetic blocks. This is quite problematic. Also quite scary.

Shimul Javeri Kadri: We have already discussed safety. Rohan mentioned that women move through the five-year Architecture course and emerge fairly masculinised. A lot of professional courses do that because they are churning out ‘products’. Personally, I love design studios. But, so far, we only have architects as design professionals. We should have others too – like the Gender & Space team! Unfortunately, there are few people in the profession who understand sociological, leave alone, gender-related issues.

Rohan Shivkumar: It goes beyond gender really. It is about valid and invalid bodies.

Shilpa Phadke: In fact, it is about the lack of bodies. The clean lines of urban forms – certainly in Bombay – aim to divest the street of people. People are messy, they don’t use space in the way that the architect would like them to. Cities have glass barriers, where people can supposedly look in and out, like in shopping malls or coffee shops. But in fact, city planners don’t want to see people. They want to see ‘beautiful buildings’ not the people who inhabit them.

Mary N. Woods: The human element is often erased in cities. This is where I think photography and film can be an important means of seeing an inhabited city. With Photoshop, it is so easy for Architecture students to delete what they don’t want and to insert beautiful bodies into their designs instead. Ironically, the Modernist obsession with the ramp could make perfect sense for the elderly and the disabled.

Neera Adarkar: I think we are wrong to say that the city is not designed for human beings. It is – but only for certain sections of society…

Shilpa Ranade: The reason why some architects don’t design for bodies is that they themselves often get disembodied in the profession and are rendered identity-less. It is important to acknowledge the diversity of backgrounds that students come from. Students training to be architects should learn to acknowledge the diverse needs of clients. What happens when students who come from villages are told to design Western toilets? This is only an example but you all know what I mean.
 
Some people may feel that we have had enough discussions about toilets and parks. But, maybe, this response is based on a prejudice about acts of mundane construction ‘not being architecture’.

Shimul Javeri Kadri: But many practitioners do feel that the mundane is important.

Neera Adarkar: But our concerns have not reached the Residents Associations at all, even though women dominate them! The things we are discussing – toilets, road-crossings – are run past these Associations for approval. But, it is impossible to argue with these women. When I was part of the Queen’s Road Association, Churchgate, these women wanted to get rid of the people selling things in front of their buildings – but they were willing to pay for manicuring trees!

Rohan Shivkumar (chuckles):This is what happens with many Citizens’ Organisations. Proposals made to the state can be used in ways that we cannot predict. As part of the Urban Design Research Institute, I came up with a proposal to ease commuter traffic in Churchgate. Stage one involved making subways, stage two involved putting railings up. In practice, the proposal was subverted; stage two was implemented before stage one and hawkers were removed.

Abhay Sardesai: How do we respond to the chaotic and contradictory architectural registers in the city? And I am not only referring to what Gautam Bhatia calls, “Punjabi Baroque”. Which are some of the more significant architectural developments in recent years?

Shilpa Ranade: A major shift has happened since the ’80s, when the debate about Indian identity took centre-stage. At that point, architecture schools were obsessed with how to define ‘Indian-ness’ and what it meant for a city to be an ‘Indian’ city.

Rohan Shivkumar:  I think there has been an important increase in the number of platforms for debates about architecture. Suddenly, newspapers and magazines are talking about spaces – who they belong to and what is going to be built on them. When it comes to buildings, the most significant ones are not necessarily the ones we like. Hafeez Contractor’s buildings are significant because they express a certain kind of desire. Mindscape in Malad also tries to envision an ideal city. Mindscape is the epitome of all things artificial. It has call centres with glass facades, but no one is supposed to look out of them lest they remember that they are not in the same time-zone as the people they are talking to. It is also totally schizophrenic – thanks to the historical references used in its residential buildings and the futuristic references used in its commercial buildings.
           
Sameera Khan: Isn’t it, what is called, a ‘sick building’? It was built on a garbage dump, which continues to emit methane gases. The air-conditioning ducts keep breaking down and computers ‘die’ sooner than usual.

The conversion of mill buildings into multiplexes has had an immense impact on the city as well.

Shilpa Phadke: The destruction of mills serves to mark the privileging of Bombay as a service centre city, which over-writes the industrial city. This new city is visualized as a city of compartments that people can move between. The street becomes the conduit of transitions. It is no longer the space where urban life is lived. It gets lived, instead, in interior spaces.

Sameera Khan: Another major change has happened with SRA schemes for slum development. As the city moves from horizontal forms to vertical forms, the sociological contexts of people’s lives change.

Shilpa Phadke: And a concomitant development is the kind of parks we have in Bombay. They are mainly paid parks. This has implications for women and the freedom they experience. Surveillance of spaces of pleasure and leisure has also increased. Parks are becoming increasingly anti-poor, anti-queer, anti-couples. Bombay is sadly becoming a city that is anti-public pleasure.

Mary N. Woods holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and is Professor of Architectural History at Cornell University.  Her books include From Craft to Profession:  The Practice of Architecture in 19th Century America (1999) and Beyond the Architect’s Eye: Photographs of the American Built Environment (2008).  She is currently engaged in researching and writing with Madhavi Desai, a history of women architects in India and Sri Lanka from the 1930s to the present. This project is supported by fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Neera Adarkar is an architect and Women’s movement activist, a founding member of Majlis, and a Convenor of the Girangaon Bachao Andolan (Save Girangaon Movement). Together with Meena Menon, she has fought against the displacement and dispossession of mill workers and the destruction of Girangaon. The book, One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices: The Millworkers of Girangaon, An Oral History, co-authored by Adarkar and Meena Menon, came out in 2004.

Rohan Shivkumar is the Academic Co-ordinator and Head of the Research and Design Cell at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies, Bombay. As an architect and urban designer, he has done residential, commercial, and institutional work. He has a Masters in Architecture from the University of Maryland.

Sameera Khan is a free-lance journalist. She was an Assistant Editor at The Times of India in Mumbai (1995-2000). She has written for the mainstream media in India as well as the foreign press on subjects such as public health, medicine, environment, business, gender, development, local history, and culture. She is currently working on a book on old Muslim neighbourhoods of Mumbai. Khan is part of PUKAR Gender & Space Project team.

Shilpa Phadke is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay. She conceptualised and led the Gender & Space Project at PUKAR from September 2003 to September 2006. Se is currently writing a book based of the Gender & Space project along with Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade. She has published widely in journals (Economic and Political Weekly and the Indian journal of Gender Studies, among many others) and books. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines.

Shilpa Ranade trained in Architecture at CEPT, Ahmedabad, and has an M.A. in Cultural Studies from the University of Arizona, Tucson. She is a founding partner of the design collaborative, DCOOP, where her portfolio includes interiors, architecture, and urban design projects. She was Associate Editor of the South Asian volume in the sereies, World Architecture 1900-200: A Critical Mosaic, and has published widely in architectural magazines. She is a part of PUKAR’s Gender & Space Project team.

Shimul Javeri Kadri is the principal architect at SJK Architects. Set up in 1900, SJK is a firm of architects, interior designers, and urban planners, who believe in creating ecologically sensitive buildings. Their projects have included high-end corporate offices, factories, resorts, houses, schools, and colleges. SJK believes in using natural materials and local skills to construct naturally lit and ventilated environments.