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.
We do not talk about all architects in India. Some are well known, others, we say we ought to know well but we do not speak for the most. We have limited the space in our pantheon which is, of course, determined by our limited idea of what is good, what is desirable and what may be prescribed to our students. So our conversation is ruled by a savage topic - a Doxa1 limiting what may be acceptable and architects tend to look at themselves in good light.
On the other hand, there is gossip, in nearly-forgotten conceptualisations for South Asia, they even said we could build cities around gossip2 squares. And there are some architects who gossip for no other reason, perhaps, than to dispel myths. So we asked Sinali Ratanlal to have a look at Trombay. We speak about "Nehruvian Ideals" in architecture yet we do not speak about Mussolini's Modernism, and we do not associate Jawaharlal Nehru with Mussolini's Architect or Adolf Hitler's Aviatrix as a matter of fact.
- 1. Doxa (ancient Greek δόξα; from verb δοκεῖν dokein, "to appear", "to seem", "to think" and "to accept") is a Greek word meaning common belief or popular opinion.
- 2. Pyla, P. (2013). Gossip on the Doxiadis ‘Gossip Square’: Unpacking the Histories of an Unglamorous Public Space. Architectural Histories, 1(1), Art. 28.