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Architecture, the Indian Building Industry and Internationalization

Should one observe the structural transformations in design-supply chain in the Architecture Engineering +

Construction (AEC) industry, and take it as an indicator of what is changing in the profession, and how the

function and field of architecture as a practice are redefined; then the current transformations in the Indian

supply chains originate in a balance of payments crisis in 1991 pushed the Indian economy to near

bankruptcy, in return for an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout, controls started to be dismantled,

taxes lowered, state monopolies broke. With this impetus, the structural transformation of the architectural

system in India followed a course, as it often has since the late 1850s, of a radical departure from what was

then a current practice. From a licensed and regulated economy in trade and services, it went to an open-

ended, internationalized one, much in line with the IMF and General Agreement in Trade in Services

(GATS) dogma. A higher availability of opportunity, and capital arose, so much, that by 2001, design firms

were billing as much in India as in the Middle East.

Figure 1: Billings of the largest 25 design firms by world regions in millions of dollarsi

It is easy to reduce the effect of this scalar change, and the augmented conflict to binaries. On one hand, the

redefining of architectural professions as a Service Industry, seeing architecture practice and not only the

product, as a consumerist commodity in contrast to the Indian architects self-image of architecture

production as a high cultural one. On the other, it is a more imperative recognition that architects of the

developing countries have not sufficient capabilities to compete with the developed countries, but the

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developed nations have the capacity to do so. While India is a gross exporter in services under GATS, even

after decades of reform the Indian architectural practices have not cultivated markets in the developed

north, whereas the imprints of foreign practices are visible everywhere in India.

However, divisions of labor have become clearer under this forced transformation. Architectural practice is

now read as duality of core operational processes and routine operational tasks, resulting in hybrid servicescontracts where Indian practitioners look elsewhere for the conceptual aspects of the work, and then apply

it to their local expertise concentrations inside India. This entails, necessarily, a structural transmission of

design knowledge, methods and means, systematized in turn by mutual recognition agreements under

GATS, as Indians negotiate, formally, with international institutions. And in practice, with a steady flow of

labor especially, between export powerhouses in the Middle-East and APAC regions (figure 1).

In consequence we see a dry, functional language, emerging as we define Architecture in practice. It may

be so, that the internationalization of the design-supply chain in India has resulted in just another round of

fossilic transfers of modes, means and methods.

~ * ~

For certain, India has been at the receiving end of similar structural transmissions as early as 1820 and

1857, with the establishment of the Crown an autochthonous industry was formalized, progressively, by the

British Works departments. Post-Independence, it witnessed a policy surge towards Voluntary Modernism

in 1950s, with signature architects building major works in a newly independent nation needing to import

methods of architectural production unfettered by past ii an expression perhaps best symbolized by

Eugenio Montuoris city of Trombay, with nuclear reactors at its urban core. In the late 1970s the

Linguistic Turnarrived in force. Taking structural determination of the profession outside of its institutional

dominion and in an esoteric or multi-disciplinary situation,iii it was to engender a style of haphazard

postmodernist formulations that, while presuming to talk about Indian subjects almost always had a

referent, and a demand, elsewhere.

Figure 2: Gautam Bhatia: "Hoam Delvery. Incongruously, a contemporary house delivered to the middle classes by a typically Indian lorryiv

The identity of Indian architecture is presumed to lie somewhere in this historical series of transpositions.

Texts in past two decades evidence cultivated responses: it is (post)coloniality, and it continues in the form

of economic liberalization now. India is a soaking sponge, it is said, it adapts, it adopts, it absorbs.It is an

external cause for sure, it is said, but India can cope by internalizing the impetus. Give it sufficient time, thefamous claim goes, Chandigarh will be known as the most Indian of all cities, and Le Corbusier, the most

Indian of them all!vAnd this continues

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Texts have traditionally created self-definitions of architecture by internalizing impetus at a level of

interoperability at an international level. We evidence this as we drive through the undifferentiated mass of

newly built neighborhoods in India, it seems as if cities are formulated at a threshold where it is impossible

to adequate the Architects subject matter with the urban landscapes surrounding them. There is a

subsumption, our analysis engines at Architexturez tell us.viThe ruling tropes in texts and teaching built

around an internationally acceptable set of norms. Poverty, sustainability and heritage discourses reduce it

to a series of stereotypes where ideas of a high statistical improbability are far in-between, and it is rare to

evidence inductive processes even with a folk-psychological analysis.

It is exactly this foreclosure that precludes Indian architects from looking into its homelessness, at times

staying within it. Wondering about questions in a what is series such as What Makes India Urban? can

distract us from several transformative potentials already at work in the current structure of change. India,

we have argued elsewhere, may not anymore possess anything as taxonomically complete as an urbanism.

However, at a phylogenetic level, in a state of ignorance so evidenced in all those machinic propositions

within our discourses, it may go on in spite of usto produce A City-Machine that is entirely of a new order,

and therefore simply fascinating to observe.

Anand Bhatt and Nidhi Batra, Architexturez

" Image Source: Tombasi, P; Dave, B; Scriver, P; Routine production or symbolic analysis? India and the globalisation of architectural services. The Journal of Architecture, 1466-4410,Volume 8, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 63 94

"" Jawharlal Nehru, Indias first prime minister, in Defence of the state policies that created multiple new towns like Chandigarh, at the Indian Parliament

"""Nadir, KL: Professional Ideology, in Seminar (India) Magazine; vol 180 The Architect in India. Seminar Publications, New Delhi, 1974

"# Gautam Bhatia: Looking through Walls: Architecture in the age of McDonalds

#Correa, Charles: Chandigarh: The view from Benaras (Architecture + Design, Nov-Dec 1987, New Delhi)

viCapable of analyzing corpus changes even as they emerge in education and practice, see: Bhatt, Anand; Kishore, AVV (2008) Studying Corpus Changes in CumInCAD, Architecture in

Computro [26th eCAADe Conference Proceedings / ISBN 978-0-9541183-7-2] Antwerpen (Belgium) 17-20 September 2008, pp. 855-860