I received a phone call from an old college friend yesterday. She was a year junior to me in college. Although, we hadn't been in touch, with her call we spoke with an ease only fast friends can. We updated each other on our current ventures. She has been doing a lot of architectural projects in Nashik and no one could be more happier than me for her work. This is the same girl who with her grit and determination proved everyone wrong in college after an unfortunate loss of a school year. She went on to complete her Architecture Internship under the great Laurie Baker's tutelage firm COSTFORD in Trivandrum. Any sensitive architecture student in India knows the importance of low cost building methods and techniques. Aditi, my friend gathered valuable experiences and utilised them at Pune where she was involved with environmental planning and designing. Her architectural maturity is evident from the fact that she encourages Eco-sensitive architecture practices everywhere around her. What we spoke yesterday revolved a lot around alternative careers architects have been adopting lately. Our friends from the Architecture fraternity have started their own ventures in Pyrography, Decoupage, Origami as means of creative expression for school kids to forming a group of dedicated individuals working for disaster-hit regions throughout the country. I have seen them all working very hard on these ventures and it fills me with extreme pride and encouragement to see their efforts and outputs bearing good fruits. My conversation with Aditi also resulted in a possible collaboration on documentation of ecological architecture projects that she has worked on. It is a refreshing arena for me to be a part of sustainable green housing and commercial projects. My previous work assignments have been mostly in urban areas and the prospect of working in semi-urban towns has me all excited.
I have always lamented the fact that us Architects don't document projects seriously. Mere photographs of building interiors with glossy page write ups on lighting and materials is not Architectural documentation. With the advent of semi-urbanised towns embracing an awakened architectural expansion and experimentation, hopefully Aditi and I will be able to steer something new in the way Architecture is presently seen by the masses; stripped off its glamour and interior design affection still prevalent among people. Since some professions have an age old aura about them, often it's difficult to convince about their current role in society's changing traditional systems. Architecture in India is looked upon as a commercially viable profession but one which is also very stagnant with little growth observed past the post- Independence period. While there has been a steady rise in the number of Architecture firms providing services and solutions in urban areas, the semi-urbanised and rural areas are still bereft of the technological advancements in building systems. Keeping in mind these differences and dearth of modern practices while eliminating haphazard material usage and sub-standard quality of housing and commercial built spaces, we hope to try our best in documenting what reaches closer to the existing natural and greener habitat present.
Our age old urban planning methods and their expansion with regards to city planning needs a definite new change. With just yesterday's terrible disaster of the Chemical company blasts in the MIDC (Maharashtra Industrial and Development Corporation) area in Dombivli, a suburb of Mumbai, the proximity of residential housing around industrial spaces needs to be rethought and restructured. With the over-expansion of cities, cordoning off of Industrial areas especially those dealing with hazardous chemical and pharmaceutical productions is a must without affecting the built environment of these given areas. It's very amusing to see such ignorance regarding our sensibilities for built and un-built spaces. Land crunch in a metropolis like Mumbai now results in urban farming alongside railway tracks running through drainage gutters. Yet, our consciousness as a society is zero towards the apparent ill-health effects these practices are drawing us in, often confusing the parallel access & comparison of elite and the poor to these basic requirements while living. Urban Planning needs to undergo a major shift in its operations and implementation of solutions nationwide. One can hope that mere theoretical criticism and analysis won't serve the purpose of these growing issues and problems tackled in workshops and seminars but practical, ground breaking ideas will bring the much needed change. Let's work towards that change.
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