This analogy becomes even more pertinent if we consider Corb’s buildings and their relevance to the Indian climate. In spite of the double roofs and brise-soleil and umbrellas, Corb’s buildings in India are particularly ill-ventilated (the exception is the Sarabhai house in Ahmedabad). Yet, an architect of Corb’s inventiveness could have made considerable progress in developing a modern vocabulary that could deal with India’s climate (as was done by the great architects of the past), if only he had wanted to actually solve the problem of climate—rather than just stop at the gesture.
IV
So Corb has his failures; yet somehow, in so glorious an architecture, they do not seem to matter. Like any major artist, his idiosyncrasies are an integral part of his ouevre. Thus, one derives as much pleasure from the minor houses of Wright, the lesser plays of Shakespeare and the earlier quartets of Beethoven as one does from any of their masterworks. It is a curious point, worth a text of its own, that in art at this level a certain amount of ambiguity and error makes for reality—reality being the antithesis of slickness. The great buildings and cities of the past were a collection of a good many decisions—some right and some wrong; this is what makes them so human. And as a friend of mine said, ‘An architect should leave twenty percent to God.’
The muses of architecture ride the centuries on a pendulum. In the West the pendulum swung all the way to functionalism and now it is swinging back. This puts it exactly hundred per cent out of phase with the state of events in India. And so for the intellectuals—leave alone the public at large—Corb’s work is an enigma which they cannot comprehend. They are genuinely baffled by the enthusiastic response of architects visiting Chandigarh, for they themselves have completely the opposite reaction. They dislike his aesthetic, his lack of climate control—and more than anything else, they dislike his concrete. Recently, a New Delhi housewife said to me, ‘Those buildings in Chandigarh! They are huge, clumsy, awful athletes.’ And an American photographer cried angrily of the Assembly, ‘It’s just a very fancy jungle gym.’ (Perhaps these are both, unwittingly, compliments.) More important, perhaps, is the fact that the Governor’s Palace was never built—the Governor having rejected the design. He says he would rather stay on in his relatively safe, Jeanneret-designed bungalow.
Yet, in spite of these antagonisms and misunderstandings, there is no doubt that Corb’s work has been of considerable benefit to India. It has stimulated a whole generation of architects. And it has given them a sense of their past, because in some inexplicable way Corb is tuned to this country. It is alleged that Edward Stone’s embassy in Delhi is ‘Indian’—if so, then it is the ersatz India of tourism and Bollywood. Corb has evoked a much deeper image of a more real India—an India of the bazaars—sprawling, cruel, raucous in colour, with a grandeur and the gravitas all its own. His aesthetic evokes our history, and Chandigarh finds echoes in Fatehpur Sikri, in Jaisalmer, in Mandu. Surely this is why a building of Corb’s sits so well on Indian soil, whereas at Harvard it seems an interloper.
Perhaps Chandigarh is the last great work of Corb. In some of his other projects since, as for instance the later Unites d’habitation, he seems merely to have produced a work of ‘applied Corb’. Is this great period, the golden age, over? There will, for sure, be those who do not agree, those eyes that will not see. In Berlin, in Tokyo, on the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, they will continue to search the sky, desperately seeking the tension wire and the lonely figure of the balancing acrobat. Where has he gone? Perhaps he is old. Perhaps his act is over. Perhaps he is on earth again, amongst us.
Varying degrees of protection
A Place in the Sun
Thomas Cubitt Lecture, at the Royal Society of Arts, London, 1983
My subject here is concerned with building in a world far removed from Britain. India—where a great many things are quite different: the climate, the energy resources, the social patterns, the cultural ethos. Hence my title: ‘A Place in the Sun’. In actual fact of course, as my friend Sherban Cantacuzino has already so obligingly pointed out to me, my talk should really have been called ‘A Place in the Shade’—since that presumably is the prime purpose of shelter in India. (And had I to deliver this talk in the heat of a Delhi summer, I might well have called it just that.) However, here we are in the middle of a London winter and I rather hope that this phrase, ‘A Place in the Sun’, does what I wish it to do: namely, in one fell swoop, lift us out of this freezing northern European weather into a faraway clime, swinging us into another state of mind, into another ambience, where warm and languid breezes blow.
If we can conjure up such a fantasy in our minds, I think we might begin to experience new attitudes to many things around us: to the clothes we wear, to the room in which we are sitting—in fact, even to our manner of sitting in it. Climate makes a fundamental difference to our need for—and perception of—built-form. In the northern regions, where the cold is severe, the architect has perforce to stay within the design parameters of a totally insulated, weather-resistant box. One is either inside this box, or outside it. The transition from one condition to the other is through a hard, clearly defined, boundary: the front door. Inside and outside exist as opposites, in a simplistic duality. (A proposition lucidly expressed in the Miesian equation: a steel-and-glass box set in a sea of open space.)
Compare this to the complex manifestations of built-form in a warm climate. Between the closed box and open-to-sky space there lies a whole continuum of zones with varying definitions, and degrees of protection. One steps out of the box to find oneself . . . in a veranda, from which one moves into a courtyard, and then under a tree, and beyond that to a terrace covered by a bamboo pergola, and then perhaps back into a room and out onto a balcony . . . and so forth. The boundary lines between these various zones are not formal and sharply demarcated, but easy and amorphous. Subtle modulations of light, in the quality of ambient air, register each transition on our senses.
I believe that this pluralism, this ambiguity, is an essential characteristic of built-form in a warm climate. This is precisely the quality that classical European architecture lost as it moved from the Greek islands, up through Rome and the High Renaissance, to lodge finally among the banks of Threadneedle street. Furthermore, I believe that for us in India, an understanding of this spatial pluralism is of prime importance since it is the key to several of the most vital issues we face. This evening we shall concentrate on three of them. The first concerns our relationship with built-form; the second, energy-passive architecture; and the third, housing the urban poor—i.e., dealing with the enormous migrations which are changing cities all over the developing world, from Jakarta and Caracas to Calcutta and Bombay. Looking back on almost three decades as an architect and planner, I find these three seemingly disparate issues have been central to my work. In this survey I shall try to relate them, one to the other, and set them in the context of a fourth issue—one that is crucial to India (indeed to the entire developing world)—and that is: the nature of change.
Let us start with the first: our relationship to built-form. To summarize: life in a warm climate makes use of a much wider range of physical conditions than it does in a cold one. Furthermore, the boundaries between the various gradations along this spectrum (between room and veranda and terrace and courtyard) are blurred and casual, so that one passes easily from one zone to another.
In such a situation, people develop totally different attitudes to architecture. They find that for a great many activities, over much of the year, the ‘box’ is neither the best nor the only answer to their needs. This has profound implications—in pragmatic and functional terms, and in metaphysical ones as well. Thus, while the little red schoolhouse is the symbol for education in North America, in India (as in most of Asia) it has always been the guru sitting under a tree. Not only is this image of the Lord Buddha and the peepul tree more evocative, more conducive to