Hall of Nations. ITPO doesn't want it, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry thinks it holds no currency, and the Delhi Government's Heritage Conservation Ccommittee see no heritage in it. So are there other ways to save it? With this in view, Architexturez sent out a call over social media, we asked anyone, everyone, to 'save' the buildings by placing them everywhere in our imaginary, to see, if the universal values embodied in here can allow it to find new sites in our imagining - if they will endure.
These are unique structures, we know, by chance and incident - they embody ambitions that characterise a moment in India's nation-building processes. What if the construction systems so well adapted for conditions of work and divisions of labour that obtained at the time, Mahendra Raj's innovations were replicated, as intended?1
We asked Shubhra Raje, who is an architect in Denver and Ahmedabad, to see if they fit2 around Launch Pad Four at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, if ISRO is to send somebody into space soon as expected, this will be the site of it and a site of National Pride in late 2010s, just as Pragati Maidan was in its day.
- 1. see for example: Ghosh, Sumit, and Suchitra Ghosh. Talkatora Pool. New Delhi: S. Ghosh & Associates, 1978.
- 2. ... but then, why stop on earth? Shubhra and Vrinda Jariwala extended the idea, to see if the buildings 'fit' into fictional universes and literature of the period, linked from below