In a popular telly series, the show’s character tells another that apart from all the life tips he has given him, the most important one to remember is ‘new is always better’. Now, it is just a matter of coincidence that the show’s titular character, who receives this advice, is an architect, but it seems the architects involved in our city’s buildings took it more seriously than him.

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What are we trying to achieve as architects? To add another vertical line to the city’s barcode skyline? To assert some grandiose statements? To give the world another piece of sculpture to gawk at and probably take a selfie with? I would flinch before calling any ‘new’ (read: naye naye packet mein beche humko cheez purani) building new. It would be great to live in a world where everyone is an avant gardist (without being hyper-aware of that fact), but it is miserable to live in a world where everyone deludes themselves into believing there are one.

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Is the way of creating an alternative form of architecture really a conscious effort? Is architecture a brand or a commodity that must look into the face of the consumer and declare,’ look what I just did?’ There are designers who create for the sake of creating a different product. Here, the focus is on the aesthetic and visual quality of architecture as a way to provoke. Then, another group of designers aren’t thoughtful of figuring out a new product per se, but they are looking for a new approach to the process of designing itself. (There is also another group that doesn’t believe in these groups, and those who wish to divide the world into two groups, but that’s another matter.)

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Why are buildings built in a certain way? What are they a consequence of? The architecture of today, much like the world we live in, is like a supermarket, filled with a myriad range of choices and options and has become a playground where one product can be kept beside another and another product can literally take birth just by looking at the two products at the same time. It has become so perverse and the references have become so diverse and unintentional that it is difficult to pin down a building to what we think it is a consequence of.

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In such a scenario a “design process” can iron things out. In order to make something radically different, you don’t need a client who says, ‘listen, let’s try something different this time,’ but instead the architect must approach the client and say, ’look, this is a different way F of living, of organizing space, of crafting light, of strengthening interaction, of consumption, of recycling…it might look different, but it is not why we are doing it.’ Several practicing architects have described it as a really confused process where the objective of the process isn’t to follow a linear guidebook and arrive at what will be a good building, but rather as a way of questioning and relooking at what a good building really is. Thus, alternative forms of architecture take birth in their embryonic stage.

I recently visited the Development Alternatives (DA) building, in Delhi, designed by Ashok Lall Architects. I also had the opportunity to meet Mr. Ashok Lall, the designer of this building much later and tried to inquire about the design process that he believes in and that lead to the creation of such a building. This is a very condensed version of the enlightening conversation I had with him, which delved into a range of subjects and subtexts, all of which would be impossible to furnish here. To read the unabridged interview, please don’t contact me.

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Set in a rich environment of a city forest on one side and the street on the other, the DA building confronts you as you enter the compound. But the confrontation is of a particularly amiable nature, because there is an overall sense of lightness in the surroundings. Well, it could be the pleasant, almost smiling, sand of the banks of Yamuna that the bricks are made of, but as you walk around the building in the compound, you are overcome with a vulnerability with which the building sprawls in the context.

The details on the facade give the building a human-like quality, making it one of the many living entities that reside in this place. Walls on the facade are scooped and terra- cotta pots are set inside to make shelters for birds. You also realize that the facade is not one entity but comprises of innumerable, unique, compressedFearth blocks.

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It brings to your mind the famous Baker quote: ‘ Bricks to me are like faces. All of them are made of burnt mud, but they vary slightly in shape and colour. I think these small variations give tremendous character to a wall made of thousands of bricks, so I never dream of covering such a unique and characterful creation with plaster, which is mainly dull and characterless. I like the contrast of textures of brick, of stone, of concrete, of wood.’

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And yes, you see brick, stone, concrete and wood for what they are. The wood is a bright yellow as it sits against the many-hued brick facade interspersed with bands of sombre grey of the concrete of the floor slabs. One facade is juxtaposed with a metal trellis that accommodates planters. Apart from making a soft boundary between the building and the natural setting, it also creates a microclimate that is comfortable to the users. Another side has an outdoors seating with the lush green cover as a background. The baoli, made with recycled bricks, is home to collected rainwater in the monsoon. The ground itself is set with porous bricks that help percolate water to the groundwater streams. Water bodies, plants and permeable brick tiling on the ground make the building a delight to be in.

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One of the most interesting aspects is not only the building itself, but also the process of designing it. It was a collaborative project in a true sense of the word. At every step in the design process discussions were held with the owners as well as the future workers of the building. In times where so-called ‘green’ buildings aren’t apologetic for air-conditioning every habitable space possible, a building can only do so much as make suggestions of an alternate lifestyle. The workers of DA building agreed to work in indoor temperatures of 28 degrees, whereas the standards suggest 24. They asked for better outdoor spaces, multifarious places within the compound and an environment that was ‘matt and natural, not glossy’.

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Do you undergo a similar dialogue with every project of yours?

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Ashok Lall: It depends on the nature of the project. The user is the client. We work with a group of people and undergo an intensive process. We write a brief, a result of the understanding of thoughts, aspirations and aspirations. It’s a written statement, like a book, which the clients have to read and sign on it. The process that we have followed in the DA building is applicable to institutional and commercial projects. We encourage the client to do a survey. Prospective buyers and users are interviewed. Another idea that we are interested in is trends – in which direction are things changing? Any building that is going to last for about sixty to hundred years needs to be future-proof.

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Then, the idea of context has become more than the geographical location, the culture and the climate. 

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Ashok Lall: You said it all. Context includes all the social values that are incorporated, the location and environment the building is situated in. You cannot differentiate between the environmental, cultural and social responses of a building; it must be truly holistic.

 

It makes it possible to think of the architect as one of the many ‘professionals of the built environment’, a term Ashok Lall uses, a cog in the wheel, instead of being the central axel. This means, the structure of the office can become more democratic and a diverse team begins with a wide range of information can be involved in the process.

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Ashok Lall: Working with a team always helps. We like to sit down at one table and ask each person sitting on it, ‘What is that we are after?’ We begin to align our knowledge and after a pint, we begin to help each other like mad! Commonality of objectives and sharing of objectives is most important in teamwork.

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We are told not to venture into the offices. It is a blessing in disguise, as I would realise later, because now I could see for myself how ‘open’ this building really is. While the facade in the front is relatively neutral, at the back the building starts to lose grip on its sense of ‘buildingness’. So if you give a skip to the formal entry in the front, you are free to saunter around the compound. A granite amphitheatre invites you to sit amidst the calm environs. A beautifully crafted stone staircase takes you to the office floors on the first level. The building releases into the other side, as what appeared to be a single building from the front, breaks open and allows another point of entry at the back. A sleek metal trellis crosses at the path at the floor levels, serving as a service corridor for the planter beds. You are welcomed by a beautiful void in the center of the building, or what seemed the center, with soft light trickling down the pastel colored facade and a microclimate set with the help of plants and a pools of water.

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How do you achieve such a sense of openness or publicness in the building?

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Ashok Lall: There is a cultural mindset, a business mindset that prevails, but nevertheless, you engage in this conversation and you almost don’t give up (laughs). It makes some impact. So, in the process you also learn your won value system alters, you know what you say isn’t’ the last word in any case – it can never be, but you push for it by expanding your conversation. What I was able to do was to say they way we do our site plan will not make anybody feel excluded. You don’t make a line and say this bunch goes this way and this one goes the other way. You don’t emphasize that differentiation – you soften it. After some years it just dissolves. This is part of a result of a discussion.

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The call for Modernity in India led to buildings being built with no connection to the locale and prevailing conditions. As a counterFresponse to this dry aesthetic, architects started emulating ‘styles’ of the past, indulging in plain iconography, reducing the building to an object, a caricature of an architecture that was originally sensitive and conscious of its setting. In the Development Alternatives building, there is a conscientious use of materials and spaces a sense of prudence rather than an air of pretentiousness. The choice of materials and technology is not to make allusions to a ‘green architecture’, but to demonstrate sustainability and austerity as the only way forward. It tries to reconsider the ‘latest technology’ we use to build our cities and suggests digging into the past, not in a reverential manner, but in a scientific and conscious approach.

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‘…the paradox: how to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization.’ FPaul Ricouer’s History and Truth (1961)

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Is there a predominant issue that you try to address through every building?

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Ashok Lall: I have tried to define the role of the professional of the built environment; I have stopped calling us as architects. There are professions of the built environment. What is the role of design? Design has three dimensions in a developing world. It is about the production of a cultural artifact or a cultural asset through processes that are developmental for society and conserving of the environment. So the discipline of the conception of the cultural artifact goes through the two streets of environmental responsibility and social responsibility. It cannot exist otherwise. Cultural artifacts that re produced outside these processes are not relevant to our society. They may be relevant in those contexts where neither environmental resources nor issues of social equity are not an issue. Like Taj Mahal or any of those Guggenheim museums. These are artifacts that are beautiful and very enjoyable, but these are not the things that make a difference to the world. As a professional of the built environment you are part of the economics of the built environment, you are part of the processes of habitation, you are part of the process through which natural resources are converted into built environment resources and again how built environment affects natural resources. That is where architectural action resides, mostly. There can be a few indulgent jewels, but that’s not going to be how architecture influences society.

 

Off late, green design practices have started trickling into public consciousness. Almost every building poster eulogizes how it is a ‘green’ and ‘ecoFfriendly’ and so on. LEED, GRIHA and other rating systems have become new design strategies and have created a space in which it is convenient to proclaim morality and green values. A green building code is also in the offing.

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Can good architecture be characterized by the sum of its individual parts, by a list of things that a building should adhere to? This means it will start typecasting what a ‘good building’ is supposed to be. It’s dangerous isn’t it?

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Ashok Lall: No, because developmental activity or social responsibility cannot equal the cultural artifact. There’s an understanding of space object and form into the cultural artifact. You still have to produce architecture with a capital A. 

I have found that there are three broad streams of sustainability practice. The first stream is the technological stream, which includes GRIHA, LEED, etc. The second is the alternative stream, which has two branches. One is traditionalist or vernacular and the other is the evolutionist stream, which seeks a way of evolving and growing with all the traditional knowledge that you have, including the skill resources. You can innovate from that position. The third one is the mythological stream, the vaastu guys.

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Can you define good architecture in a line?

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It’s there on my website but I can’t remember it now.

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Left-of-center, alternative, different, oblique, unconventional, unorthodox, and other words similar in tone and meaning, all define practices in fields of art, or rather praxes, which seem radical when placed beside the ordinary. It would seem as if they are hinged to the staid, conventional and mundane to define their identity. But they are, in fact, born out of critical questions about the state of architecture in society and changing lifestyles. They are as real and as relevant as any other. They don’t need the patronizing attitude with which they are regarded as alternative. In fact, we perpetrate the othering of such work by allowing the staid, conventional and mundane to be called conventional or normal. Why does the norm belong to those who aren’t intellectually stimulated? Is that really normal?