I’m unapologetically modernist. To me, history only runs forward, and yesterday is usually an embarrassing old version 1.0. If you saw my questionable fashion choices from years past, you’d hasten to agree.
Given my technobarbarian predilections, this NYT story extolling the virtues of housing Bangalore tech workers in former tobacco warehouses strikes me as nothing more than the romanticization of poverty:
In contrast to these unabashed clones of buildings in Palo Alto or San Jose is a 37-acre campus in the heart of the city whose granite- and terra cotta-adorned buildings are set among decades-old trees and painted in vibrant Indian shades of brick red and deep green. The buildings have names from the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, while the rooms within are named after the ancient books of learning, the Vedas. Every morning the Indian flag is ceremonially hoisted on a central flagpole, an unusual practice for businesses here… most of the streets have been paved with local stone… walls made of hollow terra-cotta blocks, flat stone tables and acoustic-friendly ceilings that are fashioned out of earthen pots. The giant century-old chimney, ancient trees and even an old fire station have been left standing… [Link]
Crappy old clay buildings, unpaved streets, giving buildings names in local languages? In India that’s not called ‘environmentally friendly’ architecture. That’s called all architecture 
The NYT’s spin feels to me like the wealthy patting the pre-industrial on the head. It’s a yearning you only get after industrializing:
… Galapagos Bar… reminded me a hell of a lot of a cement factory in India, with a dank pool taking up most of the space, stone walls with hand-lit candles mounted in odd places, not the least behind rows of expensive vodkas. The charms of the torture castle, the provincial, it’s the classic example of art defining itself as other. Even when other means pre-industrial… in developing countries this would not have been recognizable as a chi-chi place in the art sense, handmade is the order of the day and not as admired as standardized and mass-produced… [Link]
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The renovating architect drew inspiration from The Fountainhead. Ironically, the illustrations on Ayn Rand’s popular edition covers are not about building for human scale at all. They’re soaring neo-Gothic works which draw inspiration from the spires of Soviet universities, albeit stripped of communist symbols. They’re Rockefeller Center. Skyscrapers move books, even when they contradict the book’s aesthetic
Mr. Jaisim, whose firm is named Jaisim Fountainhead, in reference to the Ayn Rand novel, said his work had always been defined by the book’s central character, the architect Howard Roark. “I read the book in the 1960’s; it has been my moral guideline ever since,” he said. The book influenced him to work on his own terms and abhor commercialism, he said. [Link]
Now this is more like it. Let’s first build some skyscrapers before saying we’ve overdosed. Even the low-rise city of London kvetches that it wants a more memorable skyline, Erotic Gherkin or no:
“Every company wants to outdo the other,” said Mr. Sagar, citing the spaceship- and Sydney Opera House-inspired food courts at Infosys’s headquarters and its plans to build origami-shaped buildings in nearby Mysore. “Companies like Infosys and Wipro have the power to shape Bangalore’s skyline,” he said, “and so they should.” [Link]
Is there any more apt passage about technology than this one about the raw mastery of nature? Howard Roark was a terraformer.
Howard Roark laughed… He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters. He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore under the ground. To be melted and to emerge as girders against the sky. These rocks, he thought, are here for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them. [Link]
Manish said:
But that’s what most of the objectivists / Ayn Rand fans that I know love about her work. They think that makes her an original thinker. There may be some truth to that since there is little original in her works (Nietzsche anyone?) and the bits that Manish dismisses may be the only parts that are really hers …
Then again, this is a topic where I have agreed to disagree with my friends, so I’ll bow out here, having just roiled the waters slightly 😉
p.s. Honestly, my main gripe is that I find her unreadable. I couldn’t even get to these “insights” of hers.
For the record, I like Nietzsche. Nietzsce is peachy. Rand is no Nietzsche.
The Chrysler building and the Empire State buildings were the icons of the taller higher extremist trend.
There was also a lot of opposition to the Eiffel Tower, when it was first built, it was called a 300 meter pole for the French flag.
It can be argued (by a subscriber of Roarkian philosophy) that glass buildings (and marble doric columns for that matter) do not go with the environment. All Jaisim has done is use naturally available elements in the campus’s immediate environment. That’s architecture.
Anyone can look at a piece of art and claim it to be useless, and that it can be done by a child. There is the technical element of architecture, and then there is a design element. Not everyone understands or can appreciate the design element. There are certainly buildings and spaces in India that are unthought, and then there are spaces that are carefully designed. There is a big difference, even when the design doesn’t necessarily work the way it was intended.
I’m no fan of the Fountainhead, nor of your erroneous link between the NYT article and the cover art.
Oh, it’s not useless, it’s just ugly.
Please elucidate.
Don’t assume other people haven’t read the book, that’s insulting 😉
This is what Ayn Rand had to say about the origins of the novel: “There was one skyscraper that stood out ablaze like the finger of God, and it seemed to me that the greatest symbol of free man…. I made a mental note that someday I would write a novel with the skyscraper as a theme.”
But my main point was that the discussion here suggests that it is interpreted in very different ways in India, and I’m curious as to why–the different characteristics of the pool of people who read English-language novels?
Finally had to mention this site to Jaisim in Bangalore. He seemed amused. Maybe he will be posting his thoughts here.
If you guys havent done it yet, check out his complete works,
He is helping us design rural hospitals using local materials which will be rural tech (as opposed to high tech!)
My bad.
There’s no question people look to skyscrapers as symbols of humanism, and Rand may have done so as well, but in this novel she inverted that premise.
Well, here’s the climactic quote in the climactic speech of the book, at Roark’s trial:
“From the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.”
Consider the scene where the heroine is asked what she truly values, and she whispers “skyscrapers.” Etc etc.
I really don’t see how it’s possible to read the book as anti-skyscraper. Do you have any textual evidence?
Oh, just the pages and pages of yammering about Roark designing with form following function. The temple of man, which you’re inexplicably dismissing even though Roark designed it to represent human achievement. The house he builds, the housing development he blows up—those were made with an eye toward holistic, in-context design, not form for its own sake.
I donÂ’t remember the skyscraper quotes you reference, so at a minimum letÂ’s say if itÂ’s not anti-skybrush, it at least doesnÂ’t hold them up as the pinnacle, especially if designed by the bookÂ’s mediocre, corporate-whore architects.
Iam sure that a lot of controversy must have arised out of this rather topical article from Sarita Rai. I happen to be the architect/designer of this fascinating challenge.
Many people conform without understanding what conformity is all about.
Using Tradition and culture in the expression of a topical project like IT does not mean abandoning technology and Hi-tech. Infact it is these two that assisst in the dynamic expression of a people and their culture in the present. Whereever they are. the world is too small for isolation. Again one cannot abandon the savor of the locale in what one expresses. Therein lies the human mind’s ability to create. In this project of resurrecting tobacco godowns- physical to the mind state -an IT park involved tremendous amount of hi-tech and material and structural understanding to crete this environemnt which is not only flooded with light and all the elements of nature but has an ambience which has minimalised attrition of people turn over. I know LEEDs, if I presented it it has to get a citation above the platinum. it has been a pleasure reading the comments. I am glad some dust of controversy is raised. Jaisim JAISIM FOUNTAINHEAD
I wonder wehter over the years this dialogue on architectural controveries has died down or is simmering with someone to kindle the fire.
Trust individuals who comprehend the totality of a holistic approach to spaces for Human beings and their life styles with relevance to culture and personal Ethos bring in a lot of fresh air.
“I’m unapologetically modernist. To me, history only runs forward, and yesterday is usually an embarrassing old version 1.0. If you saw my questionable fashion choices from years past, you’d hasten to agree.”
No my friend, you have just got a serious case of cultural cringe.
now bite me.
Even after over a decade this campus is as fresh as the new born leaves. And whenever I happen to tread these spaces I wonder how it ever was realized. Something in the air there must have inspired the thoughts that went to imagine these spaces and get them created for a international corporate office. Extremely difficult path but it amazes one and all.
I sometimes wonder how these spaces can be retained over a long time. But that very concept defies nature which is continuously reborn. And these spaces are never the same any two days of the year.
Very often there are corporate discussions that meet here and say – can we raze all these spread inter spaced units and put up a tall structure. But all calculations have proved that the density that one can gain is hardly worth the atmosphere and environment that is lost.And also it would cost a fortune to put it up and loose the trees with their majestic canopy which are over a hundred years alive.
Well the future hols many surprises. One patiently awaits it to see how these spaces will transform.