Conserving our heritage

Abha Narain Lambah

Conservation architect Abha Narain Lambah is embarking on projects to ensure heritage structures are here to stay.

If she hadn't become one of India's leading conservation architects, Abha Narain Lambah, 34, would have been in the civil services. She was expected to follow in her father's "" a retired civil servant "" footsteps but since she was so keen on architecture, she struck a deal with her parents.

She was to apply to only one architecture college "" School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), Delhi "" and if she didn't make it, she would have to do her Economics honours and go on to join the civil services.

"I remember going to our village and telling my grandfather about my admission to SPA. He was so disappointed he told me if I had become a civil servant there would have been a queue of people waiting outside my office instead of me waiting in the queue outside," she says.

It's something she always remembers, without regret, when she's waiting patiently in the corridors of municipal or government offices for a file on conserving a heritage structure to be passed from one desk to another.

"Being a conservation architect requires dogged perseverance and huge amounts of patience, especially if you want to see work translate from a masterplan into actual implementation."

Clearly the waiting's paid off, since Lambah is still the youngest member of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's heritage committee.

From a time when conservation architecture was a textbook subject for Lambah with very few projects being implemented, today she has her hands full.

She's busy with the restoration of the Sir J J School of Art in Mumbai, Mani Bhavan, the Maitreya Buddha Temple "" a 15th century earth structure "" in Ladakh, and the Chandramaulishwar temple in Hampi, among other ongoing projects.

The Maitreya Temple, she says, is the biggest challenge she's faced yet because of the fragility of the structure and building material.

She's also stepped down as director of the firm she joined 10 years back "" The Bombay Collaborative "" and is focusing on her own practice, Abha Narain Lambah Associates.

"It was time for me to switch gears and concentrate on my own practice rather than be part of a larger team," she says.

Though Lambah completed her bachelors and masters in conservation architecture from SPA in Delhi, work and marriage brought her to Mumbai.

"All the heritage buildings in the capital were government owned. There were too many conservation architects and too few projects." Most of her professors in college had degrees in conservation but no real practice.

"The Archaeological Survey of India didn't hire conservation architects to protect the buildings under its purview."

Her husband Harsh was based in New York when they married but after 20 days in the Big Apple, Lambah was homesick enough to contemplate moving back to India.

They picked Mumbai and the timing for the move seemed to be just right, since the government of Maharashtra had just passed the heritage regulations for greater Bombay in 1995.

"Mumbai was the exact opposite of Delhi; there was a lot of private initiative toconserve heritage structures, and I was the only other conservation architect in Mumbai who had a master's degree."

As a consultant with The Bombay Collaborative, the first project she worked on involved phase one of the restoration of the David Sasoon Library in Mumbai's Fort area.

Drawing up the masterplan for the restoration of the High Court building in Mumbai followed. "The public works department had a rather drastic plan of restoring the statues of Justice and Truth at the top of the building by using acid washes. I told them about other techniques better suited for the restoration," she says.

To back theory, Lambah, accepted the two month Charles Wallace Fellowship in the UK to work with different techniques on the Lincoln Cathedral.

Returning to Mumbai, she started work on the masterplan for Dadabhai Naoroji Road, off the Fort area in Mumbai. The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) set up the MMR Heritage Conservation Society to give grants for conserving heritage structures.

And the first grant to be approved was an application by Lambah to draw up a design handbook for guidelines on street furniture and signage on D N Road.

"There were no records in terms of architectural elevations available so we had to go to each building and put data together from scratch."

Though the report was presented in 1999, for the next year or so, Lambah went to each business outfit on the road to emphasise the need for the companies to be sensitive to the structure they were housed in.

Today, the signages on D N Road fall within the arches of the buildings.

It's this doggedness and her passion for conserving the past, say colleagues, that makes Lambah tick. "The most frustrating part is seeing conservation guidelines sit and rot on tables, and the government and public apathy."

But it doesn't bog her down. With the number of projects she has on hand, she's looking forward to restoring more heritage buildings and preserving what she considers the most important survivors of history.