There is a renewed awareness and focus on art and architecture in the non-Western world. Recently, the exhibition "Independent Projects: Decolonized Architecture in South Asia, 1947-1985" was held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, focusing on how post-independence architects and engineers in South Asian countries embody political and social aspirations and new national identities, using limited and even barren resources to build new cities. Today's South Asia often dismisses post-colonial architecture as a relic of poverty, but they embody the beautiful fruits and grandeur of designers who combined modernism with local traditions. Curator Martino Stierli hopes to push South Asian architects who have long been in the "waiting room for history" back into a broader perspective.
In 1956, at the Parliament Building designed by Chandigarle Le Corbusier in India, a woman carries cement in front of the Secretariat.
图：Ernst Scheidegger, via Museum of Modern Art, New York
Back in the 1950s, architect Minnette de Silva pioneered a new form of modern housing in British Ceylon. She floated the living area above the garden with slender concrete ground floor overhead columns, designing ventilated and flowing interior spaces for family gatherings and Buddhist ceremonies, with rooms surrounding a curved staircase. The building uses native woods such as wood pineapple and hexagonal wood.
In 1951, Minnet de Silva climbed a ladder to inspect concrete columns in a residential building in Colombo
图：Anuradha Mathur, via Museum of Modern Art, New York
De Silva's designs wisely respond to Ceylon's tropical climate and see European modernism as another tool stored in a toolbox along with local traditions, materials, and technologies. Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, later declared its independence. De Silva offered a new kind of architecture for the autonomy of the country.
A flood leveled the slums of Lahore, and Yasmayne Larry built the Agra Fort on the site
图：Jacques Bétant/Aga Khan Trust for Culture, via Museum of Modern Art, New York
In the early 1970s, Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari experimented with a different housing concept. Anguri Bagh is a place of shady streets, sunlit courtyards and two- and three-storey dwellings, built mainly by untrained workers using the community's local bricks. Larry hopes the project will serve as a model for accommodating large populations. Its layout was inspired by the greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis' design for Islamabad, Pakistan's new capital, in the 1960s, and from the walled ancient cities of Multan and Lahore.
In modern Pakistan, Larry believes that dwellings should "follow the human scale, weaving the fabric of the village like a weave." ”
"Independent Project: Decolonized Architecture in South Asia, 1947-1985" is being held at the Museum of Modern Art and is being organized by Martino Stierli and a group of curators and consultants who studied Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh after the collapse of British colonial rule. It's a comprehensive, occasionally heartbreaking exhibition full of grand ideas and beautiful works, too much of which is unknown to the general public.
Residential works by Minnet de silva
To disseminate nature is the primary goal of the exhibition: beyond the ancient stories of Le Corbusier and Louise Can, by the standards of Western modernism, they expelled people like Larry and dei Silva to what the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty called the "fictional waiting room of history."
You may recall an exhibition about postwar Yugoslavia, "Approaching Concrete Utopias," in which Stery, the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, co-curated a few years ago. Region after region, he was picking up the great and unappreciated architects from that waiting room, ushering in the post-World War II era of "dreams and blue skies", when designers, planners and engineers were suddenly commissioned to build cities, societies and nation-states from scratch, from Brasilia to Belgrade to New Mumbai.
Of course, Yugoslavia is not South Asia. South Asia is a much more diverse, complex, and geographically larger place on the world map, but in the end, people still explore it from the same old perspective.
My old perspective is that the "Independent Project" is still based on the European framework, the end of British colonialism, and anxiety surrounding Western influences – as in the case of centuries of temple architecture, Mughal architecture, local brick architecture and other indigenous architecture and design in South Asia, where many of the works in these exhibitions draw inspiration can still only be understood in a relatively Western perspective.
If that's a problem, I don't know how to fix it in a place like the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I suspect that this exhibition sparked debate among people who knew these materials better than I did.
For example, I wonder if people will discuss the absence of architectural forms such as Afghanistan or Nepal and Pakistan. I'm also curious if anyone thought of the lack of context for the exhibition to be what happened before 1947. At the end of the day, modernism came to South Asia long before India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was in agreement with Le Corbusier's interest in the foothills of the Himalayas. Before the 1930s, the decorative arts and concrete industries already existed in India.
Meanwhile, when the British retreated, South Asia fell into abject poverty. Economist Utsa Patnaik recently estimated that over the course of nearly two centuries, rulers plundered the equivalent of $45 trillion in wealth from India. Shashi Tharoor, former U.N. under-secretary-general, claimed that as many as 35 million South Asians had died under colonial rule. But unlike in Europe or East Asia, there are no post-colonial Marshall or MacArthur recovery plans.
What are the possibilities in the face of resource scarcity?
After the partition of India and Pakistan, designers had to deal with the challenges of the sweltering heat in traditional ways, such as using balconies and cross ventilation. They don't have German steel, glass and air conditioning. I don't know what you think, but seeing so many projects that aren't sealed glass boxes like almost all of today's large buildings makes me feel happy and relieved, not to mention the benefits of this in the age of climate change. They produced some of the most beautiful, textured, and thoughtful designs of the mid-20th century with less material. I think of Balkrishna Doshi's Eden-like campus in Bangalore for the Indian Institute of Management; Muzharul Islam's Design at Chittagong University in Bangladesh; and Laurie Baker's Rather Decorative Center for Development in Trivandrum, India Studies), the center's brick walls are covered with lattice-like openings called "jails" that cast patterned shadows and allow air to circulate indoors.
Master plan designed by Muzaru Islam for Chittagong University, Bangladesh 1965-1971
图：Muzharul Islam Archives, via Museum of Modern Art, New York
Laurie Baker is a development research centre for design in Trivandrum, India
图：Randhir Singh, via Museum of Modern Art, New York
Bakrisina Dorsey designed the Bengaluru Indian Institute of Management
Judging by the headlines calling for the demolition of landmarks from that period, Today's South Asians dismiss post-colonial architecture as a relic of poverty, from a now forgotten era. This is understandable. Nearly 500,000 people are said to have died in India after partition. Millions of people find themselves refugees at home because they are on the "wrong side" of the newly demarcated religious boundaries. The scale of the atrocities will haunt the hearts of generations of Hindus and Muslims.
Overnight, demand for large-scale housing, schools, public institutions and new cities surged. Where will people live? What form will independence take?
Architects and engineers were asked to solve these puzzles. Nehru believed that an international India needed to remove architectural slate and build modern temples for global commerce and industry. In his view, the city of Chandigarh by Le Corbusier is admirably "free from the shackles of history". Mahatma Gandhi had another idea. Gandhi believed that architecture that demonstrates post-colonial autonomy relies on local traditions and draws on the essence of local craftsmanship and rural culture.
How these visions are coordinated, a theme that runs through the exhibition "Independent Projects". The exhibition strangely ignores one obvious example: the Gandhi Memorial Museum in Ahmedabad. It was Charles Correa's first large-scale stand-alone project, started under the auspices of Nehru, who loved it. Sjeri highlighted other cases like the National Hall in New Delhi. Designed and completed in 1972 by Raj Rewal and the great structural engineer Mahendra Raj, the hall – a series of truncated pyramids crisscrossed by huge ramps – is the center of the International Trade Fair, which commemorates the 25th anniversary of India's independence. Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, India's third prime minister, cut the ribbon for the opening ceremony.
Reval and Raj envisioned the use of metal. But because there wasn't enough metal at the time, the price wasn't right, and the entire country couldn't find a commercial space frame as big as a football field, eventually the hall was redesigned as a concrete structure, with a large number of people casting modules one by one on the site.
The result of this was a masterpiece of structural Expressionism, a handmade fauvist variant on an industrial scale that bridged the differences between Nehru and Gandhi.
Architect Rahul Mehrotra, a harvard professor and architect, talks about the residential challenges in the catalogue. In the face of millions of refugees, the nascent countries of South Asia eventually expanded their real estate construction, but only to increase and continue to divide classes for centuries. Islamabad was built for Pakistan's military and aristocratic elite, and refugees and poor people were resettled in Korangi.
There are some exceptions. Agra Fort, for example, is also the Artist's Village, designed by Koria in the early 1980s, built in Belapur on the edge of New Mumbai, a new city in which Koria was also involved. As Melotera points out, Coria recognized an organic wisdom in the evolution of Mumbai slums and other unofficial dwellings: he gained experience from the creativity and optimism of the people who built their own homes, from shared communities of urban space that were almost built by hand.
Coria tries to gather these lessons he has learned in the Artists' Village. It was a settlement of separate houses made of white bricks, with stone yards and sloping roofs, organized around the common areas. It is a low-cost, low-rise, high-density, progressive development for people of different classes to live in.
I think the Artists' Village has dissolved in the sprawling metropolis of New Mumbai, which, like all aging developments, has become dilapidated. But as Curia hopes, the city continues to expand on the basis of the urban DNA he implanted, sustaining his dream of a better India.
Perspective view of the National Hall, New Delhi 1970-1972
图：Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, via Museum of Modern Art, New York
Unfortunately, the State Hall in New Delhi cannot say so. It was razed to the ground one night in April 2017 — officials from India's current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi,'s Estate Preservation Commission officials failed to hear from architects and historians around the world who petitioned to protect the project. Officials claim the hall is not old enough to be protected and that it should make room for new developments.
Interior of the State Hall in New Delhi in 1974
图：Madan Mahatta/Photoink, via Museum of Modern Art, New York
In the exhibition catalogue, Stelry refers to the razor as an "act of malicious destruction," destroying a building that symbolizes India's vision of progress, which today "runs counter to the Nationalist stance of the Indian government."
(This article is compiled from The New York Times)
The exhibition "Independent Project: Decolonized Architecture in South Asia, 1947-1985" will run until 2 July 2022.