heritage culture and local traditions |
THE FINITE HISTORY OF A FINITE ARCHITECTURE
GANDHI AND ARCHITECTURE A TIME FOR LOW-COST HOUSING | Review by Riyaz Tayyibji
LA 69 |
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| The subject of affordable housing, one of the main contemporary issues of urban India, is explored in context of the various ideologies promoted by the Father of Nation, Mahatma Gandhi. The multidimensional discourse is extended by contextualizing the idea within the research, works and views of experts of related fields.
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| Venugopal Maddipati’s Gandhi and Architecture, A Time for Low- Cost Housing is an important book. It grapples with one of the most persistent conundrums in the modern discourse on India’s architecture: The relationship between its formal built environment and its vernacular traditions. The first constituted of institutionalized form, is most often the carrier of signs of progress and development, while the latter is a carrier of self-help modes: that of Identity, sociability, and equity. Most often [as also in the recent exhibition that opened at the MoMA], It is the formal built environment that shapes the narratives of architectural history with a positivistic discourse. Maddipati’s intricate and meticulous research instead looks at the activities and initiatives, [ranging from policy planning to construction detail, that formed the intersections between the formal and the vernacular traditions of building and that reflect on both to give us a better understanding of each.
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