Cities of Opportunity …Lost……..Gautam Bhatia
It was as a student of architecture travelling in southern France that I first realized the possibilities offered by the combination of architecture and urbanism. The amalgamation was most obvious in the medieval city of Le Puy.
The approach to the cathedral in Le Puy was a roadway lined with stone shops and houses. The cathedral was the central composition in the cityscape and as one got closer to it, the road became steeper and steeper, and along with the buildings, kept rising till the road became a ramp. The ramp became a cascade of steps, rising high and steep. As the cathedral front loomed, I realized the steps were, in fact, heading underneath the building and I was ascending below the nave. Under the building, the church floors opened and suddenly, I was face-to-face with God.
As I turned around, I saw the city far below, the entire length of the street from where I had come, and I understood how the street and the building had combined to give me the complete kaleidoscopic experience, how the cathedrals high elevation had been used to extend the church into the city. The city, hill and cathedral merged in such a way that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. It was an architecturally gratifying and monumental experience, fashioned simply by the cathedrals location on the hill. The hill dictated a possibility for the layout. The medieval architect multiplied it tenfold into a truly concentrated ideal.
How many cities, especially in India, ever consider their position or seek any real advantage from their unique landscape? Does Mumbais sea location create any special conditions in urban layout or architectural design to catch the sea breeze or evening light? Is the mountainous terrain visible in the architecture of towns in Sikkim or Himachal Pradesh? Is the desert or the river location of north Indian towns, with the exception of Varanasi, a criterion in their layouts?
To attract residents to the sea, the small town of Cape May along the New Jersey shoreline oriented its entire grid of streets on a diagonal. Whatever the street, you are either going towards the beach or away from it. A plan of such astonishing simplicity, yet so effective in urban terms, was made by a mere deflection of the conventional street pattern.
A concern for new ways of orienting ordinary city life makes many builders seek unusual combinations of the public and private face for their own buildings. In Madrid, for instance, with dense and crowded ground conditions, an enterprising builder chose to move the urban dimension of his apartment block to the roof. In an unusual connection to all the apartments, the roof offers the essential pleasures of public life usually reserved for the ground level: meeting, cabanas, clubs, theatres and restaurants.
Besides extraordinary views of the city, the reversal of convention between the public and private gave an entirely new expression to the architecture, the urban design, even zoning. The private street and the public roof were proof that it is possible for builders to do something more than just the predictable and the banal.
In the steep high-rise buildings of Gurgaon and Pune, the only difference between apartment blocks is style and colour. No one, least of all the builder, is concerned with design.
In the search for innovation and new ideas, it is a known fact that Indians invariably choose the well-trodden path. Tried and tested ideas. Whether in science and technology, information technology or streetlamp design, irrigation or road systems, city planning or urban design, it is the same story. Despite the countrys extraordinary beginnings in art and design, its unmatched craft history and architectural heritage, the culture of borrowing has made India into a second rate habitatand the Indian, a second rate citizen. So used are we to mediocrity and urban neglect that the only complaints we have are about water shortage.
Unable to produce, design or build anything of lasting value or quality, our reliance on foreign ideas keeps citizens guessing about their urban future. Will the next shopping idea come from Dubai? Will the new transport hub in Bangalore be designed on Japanese lines? Perhaps. But only Indian solutions to Indian situations will result in a truer expression and a more coherent urban landscape.
Meanwhile, the government sends its emissaries, armed with camcorders and copying equipment, on yet more study tours. To Russia to study the 100-year-old Moscow subway system; to Switzerland for bridge design; to Mexico for increasing agricultural output; to Scandinavia for the health system. To beg, borrow and steal in a way that gives no credit to the original but creates a model in a way that the original begins to look like a copy. But who cares? The pandit is already there on the new flyover with a coconut, waiting for the minister.