Debating the Death of Design

AT INDIA’S FIRST-EVER INDIA DESIGN FORUM (IDF), held in early March at Delhi’s Le Méridien hotel, a full auditorium listened in rapt silence to an eloquent, cutting critique of urban Indian design. That is, until they erupted in laughter when the ubiquitous penguin dustbin came on screen, followed by images of homes seemingly inspired from neighbourhoods in Spain and Morocco and Aspen, and by a signboard that read ‘10 Downing Street’.

“Really, when was the last time you saw a penguin in India?” asked the speaker Sujata Keshavan, a pioneering graphic designer in the Asian industry and co-founder of the design agency Ray+Keshavan. “And these houses could be anywhere!”

This anxiety about the identity of Indian design was what animated the discussions at the IDF, which brought together professionals from across design disciplines—architecture, product, industrial, fashion and graphics—in India.  The participants—design practitioners and design experts alike—tried to push into the spotlight concerns that should guide our contemporary design debate: Can there be a common visual design code in India? How can India harness its rich legacy of crafts to design an identity that is quintessentially Indian?  What role will India play in the future of design?

Having absorbed diverse influences over the centuries—each outside intervention helping create the trademark style that marked the essence of various cities and regions—indigenous aesthetics is today struggling with the issues of context and identity, purity and hybridisation, schools and styles.

After every Western style had made its impact in India—including German Expressionism and Bauhaus—it was Jawaharlal Nehru who, in 1950, took a landmark decision to abrogate Gandhi’s philosophy of using “appropriate technology”—especially building with material gathered within five miles of a construction site, as Gandhi himself in 1944 had told Laurie Baker, the British ‘sustainable-organic’ architect who would go on to adopt India as his home. Nehru, ever the Modernist, commissioned the celebrated French urbanist architect, Le Corbusier, to draw up the master plan of Punjab’s new capital, Chandigarh. The city’s design, which Nehru famously proclaimed was “unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation’s faith in the future”, became the touchstone for design and architecture in his socialist India.

From 1960-80, Le Corbusier influenced a legion of Indian architects, the only outstanding factor of whose buildings was their blind dedication to his belief in béton brut (raw concrete). His disciplined and frills-free architectural vocabulary was seductive to professionals brought up on the formally ornate Indo-Saracenic style of the so-called Modern Indian Architecture Movement (1920s-1940s), a reaction to the International Modernism of the European milieu. So, they tried to follow the difficult-to-emulate example set by Le Corbusier’s Secretariat Building in Chandigarh, built in 1953, considered the world’s best-known early Brutalist architecture. Some are still trying, but without moral strength of the socialist utopian ideology that informed the best of Brutalist architecture.

Over the past few years, a handful of architects have been trying to break free from frameworks they see as imposed or borrowed—even from the India-centric Empiricist school, which came after the Modernists, and which, according to John Lang in A Concise History of Modern Architecture in India (2002), created architects for whom “[i]ssues such as climate, heat and dust and winter chills, and social context became more and more important in designing briefs…”

Influenced as much by Laurie Baker’s Gandhian utilitarianism, with its focus on local materials such as terracotta and improvisation as by the ease of high-tech Computer Aided Design, a new breed of architects trained in good design schools in India and abroad is spearheading a design revolution rooted in understanding and working with India’s quirks and needs.

Among them are architects Kapil Gupta and Christopher Lee of the UK-based Serie Architects, who work on “harnessing the cumulative intelligence of buildings” to create structures like Mumbai’s Tote on the Turf restaurant on the roof of the defunct betting house at Mahalaxmi Racecourse. In their session ‘Urban Responses’, Gupta and Lee talked about remaking of the betting house into a thriving restaurant propped up by columns shaped like branching trees. A decorative anachronism always heightens the effect of clean Late Modern lines, and so the betting windows were left intact. In another place, Lee had said that Serie Architects speciality was a “British sensibility … a modernism that is more attuned to craft or materiality”.

Another IDF speaker, Tasneem Mehta, vice-chairperson of INTACH, restored Mumbai’s 154-year-old, Greco-Roman-style Victoria and Albert Museum (renamed the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum in 1975), which is today a UNESCO Heritage site. Her efforts (2003-07) had given this oldest of Mumbai’s museums a new ‘Renaissance Revival’ lease of life, repairing its chipped Ionian columns, a painted, nave-like ceiling, ornate chandeliers and long, shallow staircases.

The IDF served to highlight that, since 1991, product design in India has been frozen in the headlights of an internal struggle between BL and AL (‘Before Liberalisation’ and “After Liberalisation’.). Our options at that time were limited: the Ambassador was only the choice of saloon, the Contessa was for powerbrokers and the Premier Padmini was for families; Bata shoes have been around since prehistory, Action and Power came later; kitchen mixer was limited to Sumit; and Nirma was the inflation-beating washing powder. Visiting relatives from abroad lugged in any consumer item more advanced or better designed or both.

When the license/permit/quota system in India was suddenly dismantled, product design here found itself paddling in midair. In the mid-1990s, if they could afford it, people became privy to a monumental shift in product quality and design, and since China hadn’t yet learnt how to (badly) mimic the West, for Indians going to the high-end sections of certain markets, it was like walking into Charlie’s Chocolate Factory in full flow cranking out Lindt and Toblerones and Hersheys.

Challenged and haemorrhaging money and prestige, Indian products responded by improving quality and acquiring—more like cobbling together a new, catchall, khichdi—design aesthetic. A country with a millennia-old arts-and-crafts tradition became associated with deplorable product quality and a consequent drubbing of the ‘Indian identity’.

It was as if we had crossed into the all-Indian Laurie Baker Style, through the remarkable Scandinavian-Indian aesthetics of Charles Correa, and bounced right back into the worst years of Louis Kahn’s monumentalism-for-monumentalism’s-sake. Renouncing all attempts at creativity, our design picked from already existing Western templates; and when we finally managed to tweak them, we came up with what architect-turned-social commentator Gautam Bhatia called “Punjabi Baroque”.

“Our identities were underplayed and suppressed,” said Sujata Keshavan. “We decided it was disadvantageous to be Indian.” The lack of context, she said, not only disregards our creative history but lays waste our image in the design world of products and buildings, both. Among the slides she used as illustrations was one of the finest examples of the revival of Extreme Brutalism, which was supposed to have died in the mid-1980s—a towering, 27-floor pile of béton brut, glass and exposed struts that has become a much-abhorred fixture on South Mumbai’s skyline: Mukesh Ambani’s Antilia which, depending on your perspective on it, stands for either a ‘city of gold’ or the very edge of the world where, according to the ancient Romans, there be dragons. In a city commonly known as ‘Slumbai’, the tower represents everything wrong with the city’s development. It also typifies superfast, unstoppable, insulated growth that has come to represent modern Indian architecture.

Trapped in the great Indian property boom where real estate sharks pull down heritage buildings to put up factory-produced highrises, flattened cities are scrambling skywards in bizarre shapes, epitomising what architect and Harvard professor Rahul Mehrotra calls the “architecture of impatient capitalists”.

The IDF spent much of its time introspecting why the world’s largest democracy and home to one of its oldest civilisations aspires for cityscapes that look like faux signatures of the new, tiny autocracies of the Middle East. The forum also gave people an opportunity to respond with scepticism. Ambrish Arora of Lotus Design asked during his session, ‘Design Solutions’, if this quest for an Indian identity was “nothing but thinly disguised nationalism”. Arora, who has worked on projects as varied as the Laurie Baker-inspired Devi Art Gallery to swanky, cutting-edge retail spaces like Gaurav Gupta’s new store with its floating mannequins to the dark, decadent Shiros and the airy Café Diva, believes that relevance and appropriateness has nothing to do with “being Indian” but everything to do with being grounded in the place one is associated with. Context, he said, was best found in “the 50 metres around us”.