Looking at the little things is what helps build great cities
Who says size does not matter? Engaged in the race for the tallest skyscraper, largest stadium, longest bridge and widest highway, architecture remains obsessed with the ‘macro’ in a show of power and achievement. Can you ever recall wondering where the smallest home was, a six-foot wide structure in Amsterdam or perhaps a four-feet diameter drainpipe in Navi Mumbai? Though the world is shrinking into nano particles that carry secrets of the universe within them, architecture today relies on ‘the big picture’ in the hope that it will eventually percolate down to its ‘lesser counterparts’. Words such as pivots and drivers are associated with the building industry that assumes differentiators are created not in the detail but in the colossal. The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Burj Dubai, the Allianz arena in Munich, much like the Pyramids and Taj Mahal are few examples of larger than life productions that have inspired and even conspired to build imagery that is evocative and inspirational of its time.
Yet, they are all aberrations on the face of the urban plate and emerge as pointed fractals diverging and even denying the horizontal scale that lies around it. They are markers of the ‘unusual’ . Unfortunately, this malaise it is not limited only to buildings that occupy skyline in Indian cities but to the intricate web of infrastructure they sit on, where the grand gesture is applauded.
What is the point of possessing one of the swankiest air terminuses (T3 in New Delhi) in the world but not having even a ramped verge in the causeway outside to allow people to take their baggage trolleys to the car? Or, building state-of-the-art expressways without bicycle lanes or designing cutting-edge hospitals with no concern for the families that accompany the patient or having railway platforms without adequate hygienic drinking water and sanitation? One planner audaciously commented that constructing underground metros and BRT corridors without incorporating interchange and access to and from them them keeps us alert as a people. Surely then, the lack of enforced pedestrian crossings on a long stretch of road is so that we develop a sixth sense! All this reeks of indifference, for the space itself as well as the users the facility is built for.
Perhaps, what we need here is ‘micro-tecture’ — an architecture that uses the mundane as both starting point and building block, for ‘India design’ to be more about ‘India common’ than the exceptional. Like any industry, city buildings should involve an overall vision after which the micro takes lead. Planning has often been seen as an exercise in bold strokes where economics, fiscal statistics and desire for the ‘iconic’ lines tends to overwhelm. It is time now to read between these lines, to allow an emergence from the roots of society, from the growing needs of the people and its manifestation in their lives to then evolve into the collage that forms the Indian city. While India will change, the whole family will still line up at the airport to welcome a single guest, we will still marry amid loud dancing processions on public roads, sleep on floors outside an ICU keeping watch on a loved one and immerse our Gods in the sea.
Mies van de Rohe once said that ‘God is in the details’ and this is perhaps true for both architecture and planning, for though the scales are variable, the end user remains a human being! It is, thus, the comprehension of human uniformity and vagaries, apprehensions and habits that need to inform the physical realms of the city. Micro-tecture is needed to ask not only ‘what we are building?’ but also ‘how’ and ‘why’. And these answers must not simply be incorporated in design, we have to actually build on them.
[Suparna Bhalla is a Delhi-based architect]