Infrastructure has not kept pace with this development in the way we would want it. A two hour commute from Gurgaon to NOIDA or Goregaon to Churchgate are the classic examples. However there seems to be a sense of urgency that is now creeping up….maybe a decade too late, to get things in order. Case in point, the new airport terminals in Bangalore, Hyderabad and New Delhi all opening in the span of 12 months.

Gautam Bhatia, a very well know architect and writer talks about this event in his recent article in the Times of India and touches upon a very “touchy” topic. Why does India invite foreign architects, planners, and designers to conceptualize things for them. Where is the homegrown talent and the pride in the same.

His reasoning for the most part follows a very predictable arguement that has been tossed around for a few years. However from whatever I have gathered, there is a dearth of the technical expertise to somehow figure out the logistical and programming challenges that come with mega projects. And with the need to get them built as of yesterday; there is a very small margin of error for experimentation and a trial  error exercise.

It is only a matter of time, if not already in place; that Indian firms will have the expertise that they have picked up working side by side with these foreign firms to have the confidence to deal with megastructures and projects. Till then there is no shortcut out. Or at least one without risks.

Continue reading Gautam Bhatia’s article

Pride of India ?

By Gautam Bhatia / Times of India

When questioned about the cultural and technological stagnation that came with socialism, a bureaucrat in Nehru’s time once remarked that all the best work had already been done in the West, and we merely had to pick ideas for our own use. At a time when Indian inventiveness and productivity were state-controlled and highly suspect, borrowing made a lot of sense.

Sadly, even in today’s era of open economic borders, we still remain unconvinced that the Indian mind is capable of producing anything of real value. The new Terminal 3 at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International airport is cited as the eighth-largest in the world, and comes loaded with other enthralling statistics: a floor area of over six million square feet, the equivalent of 20 malls, 92 automatic walkways, 78 aerobridges and 168 check-in counters. In every respect, the building showcases all the high-tech skills of construction and automation, and all the customer satisfying conveniences that say that the building belongs to the new century.

Certainly, the successful completion of a large and complex structure like an airport is to be commended. But is the satisfaction of statistical demands the only way to go?

What makes London’s Heathrow airport a traveller’s nightmare is the unfortunate mile after mile of mind-numbing anonymity that goes with the experience of moving 40 million people annually. Jakarta airport may not be in the same league, but its thoughtful, extremely Indonesian layout provides precisely the opposite experience. You move past courtyards of plantations that induce a quiet intimacy and a background of such calm that the trials of long distance travel are subdued and annulled.

But Jakarta and London are specific to the identities of the two very different places. Unfortunately the grand design of infrastructure in India is still based on the bureaucrat’s belief that the best work has already happened in the West. Terminal 3, though built in Delhi, was designed by American architects, and managed by MGF, a Dubai-based construction consortium. It uses tempered glass, a steel frame, and aluminum cladding all shipped from abroad. However, as a concession to India, Indian labour was employed in its erection. World class it is, because it’s conceived and built by the world.

The various venues for the upcoming Commonwealth Games reveal a similar story. Peddle Thorp, an Australian architecture firm, has designed the indoor stadium for badminton and squash; the new, aquatic centre is the brainchild of a foreign company that specialises in water sports facilities; the refurbishment of Jawaharlal Nehru stadium, which now looks like a space ship, was carried out by the German engineering firm of Schlaich Bergermann and Partners. The food concessions at the Games Village are being handled by another Australian company. In almost all facilities, the foreign hand can be felt from conception to realisation, catering to management. Enthralled by the scale of the endeavours, the shine and sparkle of steel and glass, as Indians we have stood by proudly to watch from the sidelines.

Foreign technology and inventiveness on Indian soil is certainly not new, especially in a country that has had a long history of direct imitation and mimicry. In the 1970s, it was a matter of Punjabi pride that the world’s most successful innovations could be copied in Ludhiana. Grimy workshops filled with labour were kept busy producing German machine parts, American denim, and other sundry items picked up in European markets. Indian businessmen travelled abroad to European industrial fairs and American specialty stores merely to buy items that could be duplicated in India at a fifth of the cost. Today, things remain much the same, only the scale of the borrowing has changed; as an open society we need no longer secretly copy and produce, but invite the original inventors to participate in a global bid.

By comparison, the 1982 Asian Games were a wholly indigenous effort. Local architects and construction firms built modestly, with brick and plaster, whitewashing the buildings before the foreigners arrived. The athletes were garlanded at an airport where the fused tube lights were quickly changed and the staff instructed to smile and take fewer tea breaks. Everyone stayed at a games village constructed by the PWD and travelled around in a bus service quite similar to the ordinary commuter’s. By all counts, the city and its services put up an entirely Indian and reasonably successful show.

While many of the new projects for the Commonwealth Games airports, stadiums and metro stations provide sparkle to the ramshackle grime of the Indian city, they remain foreign implants, silent spaceships sent by self-absorbed cultures. Faced with situations and conditions that are uniquely Indian, none among the new buildings seek Indian resolutions. Designed neither for the unforgiving landscape nor the general misuse of public facilities expected in India, their long-term usefulness is suspect.

Hard-pressed though we are to find symbols of the new India, the new terminal, with its import of foreign designs, foreign materials and construction technology, does little to promote India and Indian ideas. If the prime minister is proud of the airport as the gateway to a new global India, as he said at its inauguration, he is only crediting the many international companies now working in the country, thanking them for making India appear more efficient, more competent, more capable…more, well, like everyone else.

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In that respect, the new move by the Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority raises a few issues.

Architects, engineers and developers have strongly opposed the decision of the Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority (AUDA) making it compulsory to renew their registration and licences every year for projects within its limit.

According to them, the fiat issued this week is highly unwarranted and would not serve any purpose other than causing harassment and inconvenience to over 4,000 engineers and hundreds of builders, real estate developers.

Senior architect Pravin Patel said that forcing for renewal of registration and licenses amounts to harassment because one would have to rush to AUDA every nine or 12 months.

He said all the architects having passed out from engineering and architecture colleges were registered with the Council of Architecture, a Central government body with legal status, and hence, there was no need for another registration with the urban bodies or corporations. “Do physicians or surgeons renew their licenses every year? Then why engineers and architects are being treated like this?”  [ link to article ]

This is a pretty dumb move on many levels. This just increases bureaucracy and creates more instances where bribes can be extracted because someone forgot to renew their license in time.

However there is a a larger issue that remains unanswered. Should architects renew their license with the COA periodically? And what about continuing education, professional development and knowledge upgrade? Unlike many other countries, India has an architect for life license scenario. Just keep on paying fees and you will be an architect till you die. There is no onus for the professional to update their knowledge, revamp their skill set and keep abreast of new technology etc.

In the US, architects need to take a certain number of Continuing Education Units (CEU’s) and document that process and submit it to their licensing body. This is in no way a fool proof system, however this forces all architects to take their continuing education seriously and in an idealized scenario is completely beneficial to the profession and society in general.

This is something that the Council of Architecture needs to consider in the coming years. The floodgates to educational institutions opened in 1992 and the first set of graduating students from those schools have already been out of college for more than a decade. Time to update skills ? I say yes.

Kanvinde studies under Walter Gropius at Harvard in the Functionalist style of design.

Himanshu Burte writes an interesting overview of Kanvinde’s work and thought philosophy in this article title “ Function with Feeling ”.

Function with feeling

Himanshu Burte / Business Standard.

Schooled in the dry Functionalist approach to architecture, Achyut Kanvinde created spaces that were ‘humane’, buildings where you felt welcome and comfortable.Achyut Kanvinde (1916-2002) was among the earliest Functionalist architects in modern India. He was a self-effacing person, but his work helped shape some of the things we automatically expect in buildings today — that they should function efficiently, should not waste space, and be elegant too.

Kanvinde himself achieved this by seeking sculptural ideas in the functional needs of a building. For instance, at a dairy in Mehsana near Ahmedabad, he arranged ventilation shafts into an elegant arrangement of towers that make this industrial facility look elegant. By the end of his career he had managed to show that a Functionalist approach could also lead to humane spaces — that is, spaces where you felt welcome and comfortable.

The lightness of logic

Rationalist that he was, Kanvinde liked to reveal the internal functions in a building (for example, office block, walkway, auditorium) as separate masses. These were then arranged in ways that were functional from inside and elegant from outside. This analytical approach is evident in the buildings at IIT Kanpur that he designed in the 1950s. Here he clearly separates parts of buildings according to their material, and also achieves a delicacy of effect. The library, for instance, is a Reinforced Cement Concrete (RCC) frame with infill walls in exposed brick. By inserting gaps and shadows between the concrete and brick components, Kanvinde was able to make rough and heavy materials look light.

That lightness spoke of the primacy of ideas over matter, of logic over contingency. It was a theme that never really left his architecture. It appears at the National Insurance Academy at Pune late in his career. On the one hand, the elevated walkways speak of a desire to float above the irregularity of the ground condition. On the other, they speak of efficient movement almost like on a conveyor belt. Either way, it is possible to detect a persistent reluctance to embrace a site or a context wholeheartedly in much of Kanvinde’s work. Yet, his work is often responsive to subtle needs of dwellers even if within the terms of a given problem.

Rational yet humane

Kanvinde ’s desire to create warm and engaging spaces without letting go of Functionalist ideas is evident at the National Institute of Bank Management (NIBM), Pune, built in 1985. As Narendra Dengle, a senior architect and academician who had worked with him says, “Kanvinde’s work is remarkable for the way it was rigorously logical and also humane.”

At one level, the humaneness is about size and scale. Even in more technologically-oriented projects, Kanvinde always tried to bring buildings down to a human scale. At IIT Kanpur, it was the slenderness of concrete members and the lightness of brick forms that helped. At the NDDB offices in New Delhi, it was the way the building block was broken down into small office spaces opening into private terraces.

Sense of place

At another level, humaneness can be about a sense of place, and a connection to the built heritage in a locality. Both emerge together at NIBM, perhaps uniquely in Kanvinde’s body of work. There, Kanvinde chose to build in the local basalt stone (deccan trap), common in older architecture in Maharashtra. He also spread the low rhythmic buildings across a well landscaped site in such a way that walking from one set of spaces to another involves passing by (or through) gardens. From inside and out, the campus offers a series of comforting continuities across domains that are usually separated in urban life. The building thus redeems some of the promise of early modernism that had fired the young Kanvinde.

FUNCTIONLISM AND KANVINDE

FUNCTIONLISM was an approach to architecture associated with the Bauhaus, a school of design founded in 1919 in Germany by Walter Gropius. Functionalists believed that the shape and form of a building should emerge out of the logical arrangement of spaces inside and not from any predetermined idea like symmetry. They believed a building should only have features that were functionally necessary, and no non-functional decoration. They also advocated using the latest technologies and industrial products in construction such as RCC and industrial doors and windows. Their buildings were asymmetrical, white, cuboid forms, with repetitive arrangements of windows. And yet they were elegant.

By mid-20th century, Functionalism, and modernism in general, soon replaced the older European approach based on imitating the architecture of the past. Modernism was attractive to developing societies trying to break from the memories of European colonialism that the older styles still carried. It represented a new 20th century faith in democracy and technology as harbingers of a better world. By the 1970s, however, it was to be attacked for producing characterless environments that did not answer people’s need for stimulation, sociability and identity. Architects like Kanvinde worked in developing countries to help connect modernism to a more humane path.

Kanvinde was sent to Harvard University (where Walter Gropius headed the architecture department) by the Government of India in 1942, after graduating from Sir J J College of Architecture, Mumbai. Kanvinde returned to India in 1947 a Functionalist. He was soon appointed principal architect to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and built many government buildings from 1948-54 in this capacity. In 1955 he started his independent practice in Delhi in partnership with Shaukat Rai and was later joined by Morad Chowdhury. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1974.

Hence the news that foreign educational institutions are coming to India, means that it could be an interesting time for developers and architects.

It will be interesting to see if these foreign institutions bring in their own architects to plan and design campuses or will they hire local talent.

The article below dwells into this issue and brings up some interesting arguments.

Developers hope to benefit from foreign univs’ entry

It is niche developers like HCC and SEZ Sri City who see an opportunity by roping in big institutions

By Ranju Sarkar / Business Standard

Construction companies and real estate developers smell an opportunity when foreign universities are allowed to set up campuses in India. Last Monday, the Union Cabinet okayed the Foreign Educational Institutions (Regulation of Entry and Operation) Bill. Once cleared by the Parliament, it will enable foreign universities to do so.

Construction companies like Ahluwalia Contracts expect business to double from the institutional segment once foreign universities start setting up campuses. Ahluwalia has set up university campuses for Amity University across the country and campuses for JK School in Jaipur, and NIFT and NCERT in Delhi.

Shobhit Uppal, deputy managing director, Ahluwalia Contracts, feels these hopes are early but hopes to increase his share of the institutional market once foreign universities do set up campuses. The company also participates in the ongoing expansion of IIT campuses, and will also be eyeing the new Indian School of Business to come up at Mohali, near Chandigarh.

More than construction companies, it is some niche developers like HCC and SEZ Sri City who see an opportunity by roping in big institutions in their developments. HCC, which is developing a township called Lavasa near Pune, has roped in Oxford University and Ecole Hoteliere, a premier Swiss hotel management school. Sri City, an SEZ 65 km north-west of Chennai, across the border with Andhra Pradesh, is also trying to rope in big names. The idea: once you have a big name like MIT, you could leverage it to attract others and sell them office, residential, and retail space. Developers could make money on the system they create around the institution.

Soumyajit Roy, Assistant Vice President (marketing), Jones Lang LaSalle Meghraj, said developers realise that education could be a big demand driver. They are focused on creating education clusters, where universities could come up. In the US, there are many ‘knowledge corridors’, such as the area around Boston which has lots of universities, research institutions, and industry-academic linkages.

Once you have a university, it fosters research institutions and start-ups. Sri City, with over 5,000 acres, is stressing on education as a driver to attract manufacturing units. It is hoping to leverage Chennai’s positioning as a manufacturing hub. For instance, if you have an engineering industry, you could have a focused research chair devoted to a particular industry, such as logistics or mobile applications, say experts.

Once you have a known university like Oxford or Wharton in your eco-system, it will be easier for a developer to rope in, say, a Google, IBM or Microsoft, which can relate easily to these names. It would allow companies to access research and talent and understand how to work together. ‘‘The whole idea is to brand, give them an incentive to set up base here, and create the right eco-system for it to thrive,’’ said an expert.

“Developers who have a land bank outside metros and can provide an environment which is campus-oriented could offer good options for universities,” said M S Jagan, consultant, Sri City. If the bill is cleared by March, he expects at least 10-11 colleges and universities to get into action mode and set up campuses in two to three years. There are 130 foreign institutions who have some kind of alliances with Indian institutions.

Anshuman Magazine, CMD, CB Richard Ellis, however, feels universities are unlikely to rush to set up campuses here. “Universities will be excited about the opportunity but will adopt a wait-and-watch attitude to ensure they don’t take a rash decision,”’ added Roy. There would be 15-16 colleges who would be keen to enter India but would also prefer to partner with local developers rather than buying the land themselves.

However, Pranay Vakil, chairman, Knight Frank, said as many of these universities had big balance-sheets, they are unlikely to partner with developers. They would rather seek land from the state or partner with them, which would also take care of connectivity. “It will create opportunities for companies like Larsen and Toubro, architects and project managers on how to create a university at a much lower cost. Technology will become important,” he said.

For instance, Mumbai-based architect firm Somaya & Kalapa Consultants has created a school in Baroda which doesn’t require any air-conditioning. It has managed to keep the construction cost low by opting for a brick structure and avoiding plaster.

Ravi Ramu, director, finance, of Puravankara Projects said there could be many deals between developers and universities in the next two-three years but people need to be cautious. ‘‘Setting up universities is not just about acquiring land and building campuses. People will find it difficult to make money in education, as salaries will shoot up,’’ he said. As more seats come up, capitation fees will come down, which will make education less attractive.

Mario Botta: Swiss architect who designed TCS offices

By Ishani Duttagupta & Neha Dewan, ET Bureau

For well-known Swiss architect and urban designer Mario Botta, India has definitely been among the shaping influences of his style. “The past is very important for my work and so is the environment and climate of a place. All this translates into a modern architectural genre,” says Botta who has worked on various urban architecture projects around the world. The past, he says, makes up 95% of the current place in which we stay.

“But it doesn’t imply that we should reproduce the past but rather be inspired by it,” he says assertively. He adheres to a philosophy of historical determinism in which architecture acts as a mirror of its times and some of his most important work includes the SFMOMA museum in San Francisco, the cathedral in Evry, the museum Jean Tinguely in Basel, the Cymbalista synagogue and Jewish heritage centre in Tel Aviv, the municipal library in Dortmund and the Kyobo tower and the Leeum museum in Seoul.

In India, Botta has designed Tata Consultancy Services offices in Hyderabad and Noida. “For the Noida TCS office, a double skinned wall ensures a system of natural ventilation for the internal spaces of the office. The south walls have no apertures, and thus form a screen against the direct and strong sunlight. A portico shaped space on the ground floor reveals the presence beyond of a vast green area. These are features which are inspired by old buildings in India,” says Mr Botta.

The TCS office in Hyderabad is located in the technology hub of High Tech City. The underlying intention of the design for the offices is to present a monolithic element hollowed out on the inside and open towards the city. “While one of the offices is on the outskirts of the city, the other is located in the hub. The two different locations have helped shape the different architectural styles,” says Botta.

He confesses to being fascinated by the history of India. “The old and new co-exist in India which is an interesting interplay. I hope to have some influence of India in my designs!”

There are a lot of things that Botta feels are significant to consider as an architect. “Firstly, one needs to understand his surrroundings and create dialogue. The building should not be isolated. It is also important that the buildings are environment-friendly which can help to control the temperature. Lastly, one must understand the culture of a place and translate it into a modern way,” he says.

Rahul Bhatia at Open Magazine tries to bring the persona of Hafeez to life. This is a perspective of a non-architect looking at what an architect is doing to the urban fabric of the city we stay in and we all love.

Bhatia creates a fine balance in trying to bring out the issues without getting into any of the bias that clouds most architectural arguements concering Hafeez. And daresay I even agree with Hafeez on this one point

Hafeez believes the only reason people object to taller buildings is that builders lobby for permissions to build them, which means someone, somewhere, is making a lot of money. “Can you believe that?” he exclaims. He wants Mumbai to be taller so that there’s room for its inhabitants.

Hafeez Contractor is India’s starchitect, whether architects like it or not. It. At this stage in his professional career Hafeez could do a lot more to improve the overall urban quality of the cities he practises in. His clout with the developer, politician and his understanding of architecture and design should allow him to push a better agenda for our cities. Exploiting loopholes in the law is not one of them.

Rahul Bhatia / Open Magazine.

Deconstructing Hafeez Contractor

In Hafeez Contractor’s factory, hundreds of architects and draftsmen sit elbow to elbow to churn out buildings. From morning to night, their sole purpose is to draft and design the innumerable rough sketches that originate from Hafeez, who has a good view of the office exit. As a result, employees do not attempt to leave before dinner. When a project is over they immediately begin work on the next. There are no milestones, only more buildings to make. People here do not linger. They have been taught to respect time. The act of endless production has stripped them of most ideologies, bar one: the client’s happiness comes above all else. Here, the architect is as the dictionary defines him: a person who designs buildings. This is not about form follows function, or less is more, or envisioning habitats. The factory’s patrons know the worth of a buck, and they do not care much for architecture as art. Which is why they come here. They like their costs minimised, and design amplified.

Contractor’s employees work towards this end, honoured to be a part of his assembly line. Whatever other architects think of Hafeez (“Worthless”, “Over-rated”), his workers believe he’s a genius. “Why do people hate me?” Hafeez Contractor asked his cousin, the architect Tehmasp Khareghat, one day. Khareghat, who had once convinced a young Hafeez that his future lay in architecture, replied that he wasn’t hated, just misunderstood. But the misunderstanding is a deep, divisive one. Called a mouthpiece for the builder lobby, accused of being a media manipulator, Hafeez’s ideas for a taller Mumbai are ridiculed, and his buildings are deemed ugly. He is viewed as an unfortunate freak by many in his profession, as well as by conservationists. This is because his allegiance is to the builders, and the popular perception is that he ignores the principles more discerning architects abide by. This perception gets him shouted down at lectures and public presentations, though he does himself no favours by letting his mouth run ahead of him, like he did when he called mangroves ghaas-phoos at a discussion where environmentalists and conservationists were present. To the naked eye, Hafeez’s dominant contribution to the Mumbai skyline is rooftop domes, and a mish-mash of elements derived from Greek and Roman architecture. A noted professor calls the style “deconstructivism and neo-modernism—there is no deeper connection to anything”. Asked to describe the development that first turned the spotlight on him in 1986-87, Lake Castle at Hiranandani Garden in Powai, architects opined that it was unspeakably horrible.

Adjectives like these have followed him since, and serious discussions that invoke him usually turn to aesthetic and moral objections. A former associate from Hafeez’s firm recalled watching students drown out his presentation at JJ School of Architecture a year ago as they objected to his plan to create a belt of greenery and skyscrapers around the city. “That was the first time I saw him feel bad,” says Santosh Wadekar, who worked with Hafeez for a decade before starting an interior design firm. “He didn’t say anything for a while, but you could tell he was shaken.” They returned to their office, where he seemed to forget the day’s events under a deluge of work.

Before Hafeez, architects usually worked on government projects, and residential buildings were built mostly by people without imagination. It resulted in a dour landscape with a depressingly bland skyline. His arrival changed how people saw the profession. Architecture had critically-acclaimed professionals, but in Hafeez it found a man of the people. “When Hafeez came into the picture, he looked at buildings from head to toe,” says Harshad Bhatia, an architect. “He tries to do something that makes it distinct. He thinks about adding value to skyscrapers. No one else treated their buildings like this. It’s a testament to him that we’re even talking about the skyline right now.” He made people look up.

At its heart, the issue regarding Hafeez Contractor goes beyond architecture. He is guided by the principles of free markets. He does not like restrictions nor does he impose restrictions on others. For him, his supporters say, every client is of value. He has turned down only two clients in nearly three decades—decisions he says he regrets (he refused because those projects were planned close to the sites he was working on, and would have led to a conflict of interest). The debate over Contractor can be condensed to this: is his work art? Some have made their peace with him, but many others (“The retired people,” he calls them) find him distasteful. “I feel senior members of the profession felt antagonised. He loves doing things quickly, while others would tell him not to take more,” says Bhatia.

Architects used to come with a standard understanding of rules and regulations, and gave their clients no options. “But he looked at things from the view of design economy as well as the market economy,” Bhatia says. “He told builders that if they added extra floors it would cost a little more, but their returns would be substantially higher. He sold them the idea of penthouses.”

Soon after Hafeez joined his cousin Khareghat’s small practice to learn the ropes, he asked Khareghat why he didn’t expand. He was better than the others, the teenage Hafeez insisted, so why didn’t he market himself better? Khareghat had a life outside architecture, and he says that he worked “for his own satisfaction, not the client’s”. He would leave at six, while Hafeez stayed on to draft projects until midnight. After his formal education was complete, Hafeez returned to his cousin’s practice, where projects moved disconcertingly slowly.

Also, he found Khareghat’s resistance to client suggestions baffling. “A client would tell him what she wanted,” he recalls. “But he would tell her she was not looking at the inside flow. Then there was a wife-husband client who we designed a bungalow for very enthusiastically. But she wasn’t happy. She liked pitched roofs, she liked Spanish villas. But we didn’t do it for her.” Khareghat didn’t believe an architect could design a Spanish villa in Maharashtra in the late seventies. After a few unsatisfactory meetings, the couple vanished.

“That hurt me,” Contractor says. He left to start his own practice. By now, his belief that architectural philosophy was futile hardened. The rules students were judged by were of little use outside. “I felt ‘why should we practise architecture the way it is taught, when those you are practising it for don’t want you to practise it that way?’” he says. “If a man wants something, if he has something in mind, why do you want to give him something else and lump it? A lot of times, architects force their will and views on others. All that happens is you get unsatisfied customers.” Every client deserved to derive satisfaction.

Among his first clients were the Hiranandanis, whose township in Powai (a suburb of Mumbai) is critically despised for its design but admired for the sense of community. “The thought for that first building came from wanting to construct something cheaper, and also wanting to create an environment so that people felt at home. We looked at Gothic arches and looked at palaces. Nobody had done this 18-20 storeys high. I knew that if we mastered it, people would love it,” Hafeez says. “But just because I did it for a builder, nobody (read: his peers) bought it.” (Asked about the rationale behind importing Roman and Greek elements, he said, “The world is connected in every way now. We drive Japanese cars.”) With today’s emphasis on client experience, Hafeez’s approach seems sensible. But at the time, it was completely unheard of. Architects who worked primarily on official patronage looked down upon most private developers. “All the great dons would not even touch builders,” Hafeez says.

The eighties were witnessing the rise of private developers, and he was there to catch the wave. Anybody with land came to him, and he was, by all accounts, an equal opportunity service provider. A Marwari client came to him one day, he says, with an aim to make 800 square foot flats. He had the measurements down pat. When Hafeez added them up, he saw that the client’s numbers fell short. “Kirti, how does this add up?” Kirti replied, “Boss, that’s why I came to you.” Even if he thought a request couldn’t be done, he didn’t tell the client. “Usually there was an answer.” Clients came in droves, and he said yes to everything. More spectacular, and contentious, was his method to design. They sat across a table in his office, telling him what they wanted. As they talked, he formulated the design mentally. By the time they were done talking, he asked an assistant to hand him a sheet of paper and a sketch pen. In minutes, he would have an external design ready, and this would be passed down to draftsmen. He understood the builders’ language perfectly. The ultimate buyers were people emerging from the stasis of socialist India, and the building had to be about aspiration. Of course, the builder had to maximise value too. So came the domes—which also served the purpose of covering rooftop water tanks—and fancy exteriors with a post-modern touch. The insides suffered, but this did not affect demand for the apartments. Their purpose had been fulfilled; it didn’t matter how uncomfortable the interior was, as long as the building looked great from outside. This was anathema to other architects, who selected their projects with consideration and deliberated on every space.

In an essay about contemporary architecture, a passage by Himanshu Burte about a certain kind of modern architect seems written keeping Hafeez in mind. ‘The approach of the architect to the surface of the building is similar to that of advertisers and marketing strategists. The objective is not just a beautiful surface, but a surface made saleable in a beautiful manner. Thus, the surface of a typical building is packed with a jumble of various elements borrowed from the popular imagination, for their association with exclusivity and opulence. The aspirational aspects of these images or elements (almost always of a Western pedigree) are startlingly similar to those in advertising campaigns for a consumer product… The development throws up the issue of the role of architects and architecture in society. On examination, it becomes obvious that the architect of this persona is working only as a member of the marketing team. That too, as a glorified packaging artist. This kind of service industry conception of architecture is limiting and socially irresponsible.’ (An aside: Khareghat has for long maintained that all architects are product designers.)

When Contractor cast out the thinking that academia encouraged, it was only natural the universities would fight back. Teachers used models of his work to show students how not to practise architecture. Particular colleges became bastions of an anti-Hafeez language and reaffirmed more traditional approaches to architecture. And yet, as Hafeez puts it, through it all, “half the students in college wanted to join me”. Not exactly half, but a large enough number. Prashant Chauhan, a product of Rizvi, was one. “For the first 2-3 weeks, I could not understand the volume of work,” he says. Other newbies reported feeling similarly disoriented. His dean, Professor Akhtar Chauhan, was puzzled by Prashant’s choice. But it made sense to the acolyte. He had heard of the factory, and it was so different from the world he lived in as a student that he had to experience it. He was given a space five metres away from Hafeez. “It’s a factory, and all ideas come from him. You do so much work that you start thinking like him.”

Wadekar, a product of the JJ architecture programme, got grief from his classmates when he told them that Hafeez had taken him on. “Thinking along his lines was a sin,” Wadekar says, “But I was never one of those guys who used to daydream about this or that. I just wanted to do. He’s very practical. There’s really no room for sentiment. In college, we are taught that form follows function, but this is not to context. Everybody did form follows function. What he did was something else. He did cityscaping.”

Cityscaping is not the term conservationists use to describe Hafeez’s work. They oppose a large number of his ideas as harmful, if not disastrous, to the city. One of them hinted that he laughed evilly as he planned to remove a century-old staircase for renovations on a heritage structure. His proposal to reclaim 500 m on either side of Mumbai for a continuous strip of parkland, a ring road, and a line of skyscrapers facing the sea was derided. “I’m not sure that’s the solution Mumbai needs,” says Mustansir Dalvi, a professor at JJ School of Architecture. Contractor says that at the time, he was invited to Bandra’s Bandstand promenade to present his plan, and felt humiliated when his talk was cut short. “I realised they had planned this… From then, I decided only to talk if I was invited to schools.”

Over the years, the heritage committee and Hafeez have met often. One of those instances was over the small matter of Buckley Court. Described as a seedy hotel, Buckley Court was, nonetheless, a heritage building, which meant builders needed approval from a committee before they touched it. The builders wanted to construct floors over the bungalow, a move that would have destroyed the aesthetic appearance of the building. A way out was found—the new floors would be placed over a 60-80 ft gaping arch that left the hotel seemingly untouched. “He sold the idea to the other members by telling them how the old structure had influenced the new design,” says Bhatia, who was also on the committee. “Despite me lodging a protest, they bought it. Now they agree that was a mistake.” What would have been a small building turned into a skyscraper that stuck out among the shorter structures in Colaba.

Hafeez believes the only reason people object to taller buildings is that builders lobby for permissions to build them, which means someone, somewhere, is making a lot of money. “Can you believe that?” he exclaims. He wants Mumbai to be taller so that there’s room for its inhabitants. “Do you know what age I was when I got married? I was 42. I got married at that age because that was when I could finally buy this house. If I wanted to be with somebody, we had nowhere to go. A lot of these guys who protest haven’t struggled. They live in South Bombay and don’t want things to change.” He thumps his chest. “I know what it’s like. I know what it takes to buy a home.” This is more than an act. Soon after I mentioned how beautiful his neighbourhood, Parsi Colony, looked, he said, “You think it looks good now, but ask the old Parsi lady who lives on the ground floor what it was like. She’ll say it was much better earlier. This place used to be a field. But things change. I’ll tell you something. Near my house, there’s a tall building. Before it was constructed, my wife came to me with a petition she wanted me to sign. When I asked her what it was for, she said it was to protest that the building would block our ventilation and light. I told her, ‘you married me?’”

It is no secret that a lot of contemporary architecture in India is a recycled pastiche of western historical styles. Many feel that its a result of the Western colonization of India that ended only 60+ years ago. And brought about the strong undercurrent of Western influences.

Shruti Ravindran at Outlook India writes a very interesting article of how a lot of architecture today is a photocopy (“Xerox”) of buildings and monuments that are from another civilization in another part of the world and dont even belong in the previous millenium, leave alone century. She poses a very valid question today

“Why are we still emulating colonial structures? Where are our starchitects??”

Contextualism seems to be a “foreign” word to man

y architects who ape Greek and Roman architecture that even the Greeks and Romans of today dont follow. Some places would make Asterix and Obelix feel at home if they landed up in India today.

Kings of Xeroxia

By Shruti Ravindran / Outlook India [ link to article]

Critic’s View

• Greek architecture is an absurd reference for contemporary India Still, why Greek?
• This structure belongs in a filmset, not a place of learning
• Using an ancient kit of parts—a touch of the Parthenon here, a dab of Capitol Hill there—how is this a building for our times?
• Students will feel dwarfed here This is not sustainable and out of sync with Infosys’s character, based on the ideals of knowledge economy .

Counterpoint

• Mr Murthy wanted something that looked like the universities abroad
• Greek classical architecture lasted for centuries as will this institution
• The plaza, the crescent shape, the musical fountain: everything about the building shows the transformative power of education
• It’ll inculcate a sense of pride in them We have all the green gizmos. This building saves 60 per cent of energy as compared to others.

This September, two supposed marvels of institutional architecture were unveiled before the public. The first, in honour of the fast-approaching Commonwealth Games, was a Lutyens-style makeover—large white pillars and incongruous purple-black glass—for the Ajmeri Gate side of New Delhi railway station. The second was the spanking-new addition to the Infosys Mysore campus: the classical Greek architecture-inspired Global Education Centre-2 (GEC-2).

Inaugurated by a radiant, admiring Sonia Gandhi who said she wouldn’t mind “bunking party politics” to study there, it was hyperbolically proclaimed by Infosys chief mentor Narayana Murthy to be “the largest monolith classical building of post-independent India”. The GEC-2 might win the awe of its young executive trainees, and the New Delhi railway station the glancing attention (or dismay) of those hurrying through it, but these two buildings nevertheless throw up a few questions about the practice of institutional architecture in India.

Is imitating the architecture of the past—including colonial styles intended to intimidate and subjugate us—really the way to engage a contemporary public? Why does institutional architecture in India invariably entail ransacking the past and reducing it to a bunch of carefully traced out columns and pediments? Is it possible to adapt historic references to modern uses in a responsible, low-impact manner?

All is not bleak in our urban skyline. There is, for instance, Charles Correa’s marvellous use of open spaces.

Consider the public architecture around us: imposing colonial railway stations, universities, hospitals, and museums. Then, the newer additions darkening the horizon: no less imposing office complexes and malls—those temples of consumption that double as public squares. The past gave us bossily grandiose Indo-Saracenic colonial confections, pre-Independence cinema halls and hotels with Art Deco ornaments, and the boxy utilitarian sarkari bhawans of ’50s Delhi.

Then, there’s the internationally trained modernists who ‘made it new’ for us in the ’60s, giving us well-ventilated, geometric forms, free of the flourishes that expressed the ‘vanity of the ruling class’, as architect Achyut Kanvinde put it. But how do we characterise buildings that contemporary India has given us—the New Galactic, as seen in the futuristic glass-and-steel gated palaces of IT companies, or the Histrionic Historic, represented by towering malls with imperial facades slapped on to their faces, as well as the GEC-2 and the New Delhi railway station?

Or, in the same derivative spirit, the ethnic kitsch of Goa University and the Vikasa Soudha in Bangalore—a hotchpotch of styles that’s been dubbed ‘Indo-Dravidian’. These buildings have one thing in common, says architect and researcher Himanshu Burte, “These are institutions that aren’t interested in engaging the individual. This is just architecture as a marketing strategy. It’s less about the functions inside; more about the surface impact of image.” That’s why these monuments look best when they’re emptied of people. “Architects rush to photograph buildings before they’ve been occupied,” observes architect and critic Gautam Bhatia, “so they can have remote, timeless photographs with no life inside or outside them.”

Infosys’s timeless photo-op was dreamed up by Bombay-based architect Hafeez Contractor, often described as “India’s busiest architect” and the “enfant terrible” of his profession. Contractor is also behind Infosys’s fantastical facilities in other cities, from Bangalore and Pune to far-flung Hangzhou. The inspirations for these appear to be derived from spaceships, Gruyere cheese, origami, pyramids and giant eggs.

The other option for the station was worse, says duac’s Ravindran. “They wanted to copy-paste the Postdamer Platz.”

Contractor staunchly defends this shape-shifting. “Every one of those shapes and forms is for a purpose. The spaceship form (of the Pune Infosys building) was for a purpose; the classical Greek form for GEC-2 was for a purpose. That’s why you’re talking to me: because this purpose was successful.” The ‘purpose’ of the GEC-2, with its colonnades, and a relief as dominating as the Acropolis, is patently clear to Contractor. “When people see the crescent-shaped building, the large plaza in front, the musical fountain, we want them to feel that education can transform everything; that it’s the most important thing in the world.”

Burte, on the other hand, considers Contractor’s attention-grabbing oeuvre ‘the Bollywoodisation of architecture’. “Contractor treats architecture as if it’s a film,” says Burte. “Sometimes he makes a period piece, or a thriller, or a sci-fi film. It’s not a broader vision for society, just a very theatrical effect; entertainment.” And that underlines the way architecture is increasingly being viewed in corporate culture: as towering, lasting press releases, blotting out the sky.

The GEC-2, to Burte, is a missed opportunity for Infosys to provide a counterpoint to the wasteful, power-guzzling, glass-faced cut-rate copies of Singaporean skyscrapers that have now become synonymous with IT sector buildings. “This overblown rhetoric is a letdown considering what we know to be Infosys’s progressive work culture, and their emphasis on a knowledge economy,” says Burte. “A low-impact, climate-sensitive, energy-efficient, sensible building; a vision of sustainable corporate living and working, would be commensurate with the image we have of them.”

Ravindra Kumar is part of the Bangalore firm that designed previous Infosys campuses, and he had mixed feelings about the GEC-2 when he saw it. “So far as the quality of its construction, landscape, facilities and cuisine goes, I say ‘Hats off’ to NRM (Murthy)!” Kumar says. “But when you bring in an architectural style that’s not rooted to the land or its context, but taken out from a kit of ancient parts, it becomes a pastiche. A fascination with ornamentation doesn’t necessarily complement the sensibility of an institution.” This inordinate preference for ornamentation over utility is also why Delhi-based architect Abhimanyu Dalal is less than enamoured with the New Delhi railway station’s Lutyens-like facade.

“Why does a building that’s supposed to support modern train travel go back 50 years for inspiration? It’s not like we’re going to have horse-drawn carriages draw up to them. There’s a total disconnect between facade and function. I don’t think the architects who design this are thinking people.” It’s hard not to agree if you’ve had a look at the “revamping”: dust is already caking the purplish glass front of the station, which casts a melancholy bluish light on the waiting passengers dwarfed beneath the towering pillars—looks straight out of a film set. Buggy!:

The new New Delhi station facade The original, much-vaunted Rs 5,000 crore plan to turn the station into a “world-class” one proposed by two Hong Kong-based firms and an Indian one was far worse, says K.T. Ravindran, head of the Delhi Urban Arts Commission. “It was the Postdamer Platz (station in Berlin) plan copy-pasted on to the New Delhi railway station,” recalls Ravindran, somewhat incredulously. “It had astonishingly little relevance to our context. It was unsustainable, an insult to this country.” When four separate subcommittees rejected the plans, the railway ministry hastily devised a plan B: “facade improvement”.

Correa Chic: Salt Lake City Centre,

Calcutta All is not bleak in the Indian skyline. There are some instances of public architecture which are quite comfortably inhabited by the public and the Indian elements: Bimal Patel’s elegantly laid out extension to Louis Kahn’s masterful IIM-Ahmedabad; Charles Correa’s Salt Lake City Centre and its marvelous use of open spaces; Ashok B. Lall’s innovative, low-impact Delhi headquarters for the NGO Development Alternatives. Nubian fortress?:

The Khalsa Memorial Museum coming up in Anandpur Sahib For the most part, though, our inability to develop our own architectural languages inspired by fast-changing contemporary realities leave the field wide open for internationally renowned ‘starchitects’ to conjure up ambitious projects; future icons of contemporary India. The Swiss Herzog and de Meuron—of the Bird’s Nest Stadium fame—will unveil a no-less-spectacular Kolkata Museum of Modern Art (KMOMA) next year. Another dramatic project, the Khalsa Memorial Museum, is taking shape in Anandpur Sahib.

Its architect is Moshe Safdie—a former Louis Kahn student, known for his striking curved arrays of geometric patterns. When will we evolve our own ‘starchitects’ and icon-makers? “When we stop being imitative and become inventive,” says Bhatia. “Right now, we see ourselves as second-rate; our approach is just to play catch-up to other cultures—the Chinese, the Europeans, or Lutyens. It’s about time we followed our own instincts.” Click here to see the article in its standard web format

[Hat Tip: Mickie Sorabjee]

“What will happen to our cities after 20 years? We have no public realm, no urban development, no museums, no civic spaces and no institutions to inspire us,” the Padmashri awardee lamented while speaking at an interactive session organised by Ambuja Realty at the CII Suresh Neotia Centre of Excellence for Leadership on Tuesday evening.

Doshi gave the city its first “large-format, socio-economically tiered” housing in the shape of Udayan, The Condoville. The architect, who had worked for four years (1951-54) with Le Corbusier as senior designer in Paris, and then in India to supervise Corbusier’s projects in Ahmedabad and Chandigarh, felt modern India wasn’t creating any architectural heritage we could be proud of 20 years on.

“We should have more mixed-use clusters instead of segregated commercial, residential and administrative districts,” Doshi said. He called upon students in the audience to draw inspiration from our ancient architecture, which “was sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the people”

Original article here.

THE world has become so accustomed to labelling India as one of the world’s great engines of growth — alongside China — that it comes as a bit of a shock to discover that the reality is a little less dazzling.

Concrete and chaos are the best words to describe India today, as I discovered from a visit earlier this month. The concrete is the building activity you see everywhere, the chaos is the sense you quickly get that things are barely under control.

A typical Indian scene is a large construction site, cement mixers grinding and cranes toiling, while sacred cows munch the grass alongside and a torrent of battered cars, rickshaws and filthy trucks crashes by on the pitted roads. The air is full of noise and grit, but out of it will rise the gleaming headquarters of some new Indian corporate giant.

India’s economic progress is far from smooth, and its future is not assured. The country has suffered from the global crisis: growth is down from 8% to 6%, and its banks are bracing themselves for a wave of bad debts as the downturn takes its toll on high levels of personal and business borrowing. The government hopes to get growth back up to 7% by the end of the year, but the pessimists see more shrinkage ahead. Any major slowdown would be a disaster for a country so hooked on growth, and for its world image as a model emerging economy.

But it is not just the near-term business outlook that clouds India’s future. Structural problems have to be sorted out before the country could be said to be on a sustainable economic path.

The boom India has enjoyed so far has come from its decision in 1991 to “deregulate” its stagnant economy and make a dash for growth. The architect of the deregulation was Manmohan Singh, then India’s finance minister and now its prime minister, which is why he has a reputation as a “reformist”.

But after the initial boost, there has been little further reform. The Indian economy remains far from open: there are tight caps on foreign investment which protect inefficient — often monopolistic — domestic industries, and discourage the inflow of capital and technology. Large parts of the economy — notably the banking system — remain under state control. And the whole country labours under the dead weight of a large bureaucracy.

At the same time, the disparity between the economic winners and the millions of losers scratching a living in the slums and on the land, continues to grow. Only last week, the charity Save the Children reported that India had the worst child mortality rate in the world. This in a country that sends rockets into space and builds nuclear submarines.

Why is Singh not pressing ahead with his reforms? Opinions differ. Some argue that he is, though in a low-key way designed to minimise disruption, and win support within India’s federalised political system. Others think he has yielded to his conservative instincts: his policies strongly favour rural communities at the expense of the towns, which holds back change. A huge problem is farmers’ refusal to sell land for industrial development. AcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel company, has just joined the lengthening list of companies that are threatening to move elsewhere because it cannot build a 20bn plant.

This rural resistance must be symptomatic of a country that is growing too fast, where social change has to catch up with economic progress.

Of course, if India only manages 6% a year for a couple of years instead of 8%, that will still put it at the top of the world growth leagues, and with 1,2-billion people that counts for a lot. But the big difference between India and China is that the Chinese leadership is bent on development and can deliver, while the Indians seems more hesitant, and less able to bring the country along with it.

That may explain why, from a position 20 years ago where they were about equal, China’s gross domestic product per capita is now twice that of India’s and its economic clout very much greater. When people talk about India as a global economic power, that prospect is still some way off.

Lascelles is senior fellow of the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation in London, and a former banking editor of the Financial Times.

The government has accused top officers at the COA, India’s apex architectural body, of criminal misconduct. BRIJESH PANDEY tracks the issues as the CBI investigates

IN A move that could change the face of the study and practice of architecture in India, the Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD) has recommended a CBI probe against the president, registrar and four members of the executive committee of the Council of Architecture (COA). The COA is a regulatory body constituted by the Architects Act of 1972, which accredits and licenses educational institutions to teach architecture in India. Moreover, every architect working in India has to be registered with the COA.

In a letter to the CBI dated August 27, 2009 (DO No. C-1301168/2009-Vig) — from the Joint Secretary and Chief Vigilance Officer (CVO) of the MHRD, Sunil Kumar — requested the investigation of six top officials of the COA, namely, the President, Vijay Sohoni, the Registrar, Vinod Kumar and four members of the Executive Committee: KB Mohapatra, Uday C Godkari, IJS Bakhsi and Prakash Deshmukh. In the letter (a copy of which is with TEHELKA) the Joint Secretary alleges that:

• People at the helm of affairs of the COA are misusing the authority of the Council to levy fees that are not authorised by the Architects Act.

• Institutions that refuse to pay the unauthorised fees are being threatened with de-recognition.

• Council memberships and COA executive committee memberships are being manipulated and members are being allowed to continue beyond their terms.

• Prestigious institutions such as the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), NIT Patna, the Lucknow College of Architecture and the Chandigarh College of Architecture are singled out for punishment, while private Institutes such as Chitkara Institute in Punjab and the Piloo Mody College of Architecture in Orissa are given preferential treatment by these individuals despite having inferior facilities and fewer, less qualified faculty.

The letter states bluntly that the preferential treatment of private institutes suggests that bribes have been paid to those named above. Letters written by Anjali Bhawar, vice-chancellor of Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar (GNDU) and Kamal Singh Chahal, head of GNDU’s Department of Architecture to the MHRD seem to corroborate this. Bhawar writes that while an expert committee of the COA had allowed GNDU to admit 40 students to the architecture course, the Executive Committee of the same Council refused to accept the recommendation of its own expert committee. Chahal’s letter reveals that while GNDU had declared 14 faculty members in the prescribed form submitted to the COA, that figure was mysteriously reduced to 10 in the COA’s report. The Joint Secretary states that this was done “perhaps to show private institutes that if the COA wasn’t sparing government institutions, private institutions had better fall in line and cough up money” to avoid de-recognition.

THE HEADS of the department of two premier architectural institutes stated on condition of anonymity that the Council uses frequent inspections and the threat of de-recognition to extort and intimidate. On top of that, institutes have been charged exorbitant fees by the COA for inspections and for periodic extensions of recognition. The prestigious Jamia Millia Islamia, for example, was charged a whopping Rs 40,000 for a three-day inspection in 2008. While the law provides for an inspection once in five years (without permitting the COA to charge for them), several premier institutes faced yearly COA inspections, while, for arbitrary reasons, other institutes escaped. After several complaints to the MHRD, Deputy Secretary Harvinder Singh admitted on March 16, 2009 that the COA could not take money for inspections or for the extension of recognition and asked the COA to adhere to the five-year interval between inspections. Significantly, former COA Vice-President Vijay Uppal wrote in October 2005 to the MHRD, objecting against Sohoni’s role in appointing inspectors and approving their reports, but to no avail.

And where did all this money go? Shockingly, according to Prof SM Akhtar, the HoD of Architecture, Jamia Millia Islamia, “There has never been an audit of the funds of the COA.” The Architects Act clearly states that the COA has to go through an annual audit.

Another instance which has had universities and the COA at loggerheads is the National Aptitude Test for Architecture (NATA). The COA declared that from 2007, the NATA would not only be mandatory for all institutes, but exclusive as well. In other words, institutes would be forced to discontinue any other entrance examinations or procedures they had in place and accept candidates who passed the NATA. Significantly, the NATA is a computer-based test, a fact which would have made the manipulation of results extremely easy to commit and difficult to detect. Premier institutes such as the SPA, the JJ College of Arts, Mumbai, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Roorkee, Jamia Millia Islamia and Jadavpur University were up in arms at this, claiming that forcing them to use the NATA alone would dilute their high entrance standards. Unfazed, the COA asked the MHRD to de-recognise the SPA and 19 other premier institutes. When TEHELKA spoke to Vijay Sohoni about this, he said, “I had to act only because these so-called premier institutes have an abysmal studentteacher ratio. We look at facts and figures rather than the prestige of the institution.” After a fierce legal battle, the de-recognition of the institutes was lifted and the NATA no longer made an exclusive entrance test.

UNAUTHORISED FEES WOULD BE CHARGED BY THE COA FOR INSPECTIONS AND RECOGNITION

For a stickler for rules and someone so seemingly particular about de-recognition, Sohoni is curiously lax when it comes to himself. One of the most damning allegations in Kumar’s letter to the CBI is that while the Vidya Vardhan Institute of Design Environment and Architecture, Goa, of which Sohoni is the president, is shown on the COA’s website as an institute affiliated to the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), the Vice-Chancellor of IGNOU has categorically denied any such affiliation. Kumar states bluntly that this amounts to cheating the public. The letter states that since “Sohoni is fleecing the students by collecting fees though the college is not recognised as per the Architects Act, the position of the President of the COA is thus being misused by him with criminal intent.”

However, when confronted with these allegations by TEHELKA, Sohoni denied them all. He rubbished charges of financial irregularity and stated, “I haven’t even received any complaint. The mandate of the COA is to ensure that there should be no compromise on the quality of architectural education, regardless of the name and fame of the institute. We take action only when there is a fall in the mandated student-faculty ratio. If the ministry has received any complaint, they should come to us, but sadly, this was not done.”

Ever since the CBI began its investigation into the case in the first week of September, there is a huge sense of relief among architects and at various schools of architecture. They believe that this investigation will ensure that instead of being focused on placating a rampant COA, they can now concentrate on architecture in India.

Original article here.