Younger or Better?

In India, the rise of new architectural talent is not supported strongly enough.


Many younger architects in India are profoundly puzzled by what is currently regarded as impressive architecture. Why, indeed, should anybody think architects are making anything other than superficial contributions to our lives and built environment when they encounter tinny, eerily temporary-looking builder developments – yet more colour-saturated urban stage-sets littering India's so-called urban renaissance with cynical gimcrack architecture that might as well have been designed by marketing wonks, or extruded from the pages of Chinese rendering companies. India’s new architecture is a shot out of JG Ballard's novel, The Atrocity Exhibition: "Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonise past and future."

In England too, David Chipperfield complained in The Architects Journal that the Riba's "soft" attitude towards organising design competitions was stultifying: "I think there were five open design competitions in the UK last year. There were 200 in Germany and 1,600 in France. I think that's shocking." His inference is that too many British architectural competitions have produced same-old same-old outcomes. Talented younger architects who are not inclined to fag for the establishment's prefects are thus at a major disadvantage.

India’s cities, do deserve better than to be reduced to a systematic regeneration formula of “stunning golfside “green” developments' and post-industrial mall –leisure monsters in the urban core, and outside it a sprawl of distribution sheds, retail malls and reduced versions of the architectural styles of 150 years ago from no matter what place.

Why don't those who are reinventing our built environment demand better, more thoughtful architects, better materials, better urban thinking, better ethics? Because, in many instances, they simply don't need to spend 3 or 4 per cent more of their development budgets on these absolutely crucial things to gain building permission. The new pathology of socio-urban change spreads across countless experiments of redevelopment: tranquilised town and city centre regenerations and blustering “new enterprise zones” like malls and developer pigeon hole housing certainly create jobs, shopping and housing – but how often do they convey any sense of a vividly engaging plunge into fresh urban, architectural and cultural richness?

It doesn't help that the media often treat architecture as if it were mordant entertainment that has more to do with postmodern or Orwellian versions of big boxes than with any thoughtful discussion of architectural quality. We have become supplicants to the iconic and its Zen of architectural bling. And if architects and architecture are perceived as faintly trivial, why should governments, or rich developers roaming our towns and inner cities in search of development parcels, pay more than lip-service to what architects think or say? And yet it isn't just cardboard cut-out developers, planners and Government ministers talking puerile nonsense about architecture that threatens to transform most architects into plug-in design drones. Across two decades of helter-skelter socio-economic change, architects have simply failed to get a hugely important message across to the public, to planners and to those in Government. It is that architects and architecture of unmistakable quality are absolutely crucial to the future intelligible meaning of our cultural and commercial landscapes.

If the governments do not wake up by 2020 for India’s 10,000 architects, will soon not only find themselves members of the Council Of Archifarts – they will form an army of querulous, closely controlled corporate service providers recomposing our towns and cities, via "radically relaxed" planning rules, extracting maximum profit from maximum architectural defeat.