Cities and Craft Traditions

John Haber
in New York City

The Project of Independence: South Asian Architecture

Renew Reuse Recycle: Chinese Architecture Today

"The Project of Independence" would be an ambitious name even for a show about politics—and it lacks for nothing if not ambition. It brings together the work of more than two dozen architects, with some two hundred objects from four countries. It covers much of a continent and nearly forty years in the lives of South Asia. Its subtitle speaks of "Architectures of Decolonization," in the plural.

Plural or not, it fills a single room and entryway —its sole partition a good excuse to display more. It shows architects at work and nations in progress. They are creating whole new cities and a sense of identity, in the aftermath of the British Empire. This truly is an ongoing project. It complements the work of contemporary Chinese architects downstairs, with much the same Western models and craft traditions. Together, the exhibitions raise a pressing question—how much architecture can change how people live.

Transformative potential

The question hovers over any history of architecture. One takes for granted that Baron Haussmann achieved nothing less than urban renewal with the boulevards of Paris. Great buildings from across centuries stick in the mind as if they opened today. People call for their preservation, while blaming gentrification for the destruction of communities. Sixty years ago, Jane Jacobs looked to New York architecture under Robert Moses to explain "the death and life of great American cities." If only enough people recognized the impact of highways and public housing—and, thanks to her, now they do.

South Asia faced much the same issues with the end of British India in 1947, partitioned into India and Pakistan. The imperial colony of Ceylon became Sri Lanka, and an independent Bangladesh followed in 1972, as the former East Pakistan. They saw the creation of Chandigarh out of almost nothing, as the capital of Punjab in India, and the founding of Islamabad in Pakistan, as a city dedicated to Islam and the nation's capital. They invited optimism. Yet they came after years of violence, and displacement could only continue in a new political landscape. A photograph by Margaret Bourke-White captures the exodus. People dressed for a mix of Western and local customs carry children and clothing on their heads, to hold onto what they knew.

For all that, the turmoil underscores the ambition. The show's wild layout reflects that, in its dark walls and museum traffic, quite as much as its crowded installation and photographs packed with people and places. It has sections for new cities, affordable housing, places of worship and places of entertainment, universities, seats of government, and offices, factories, and agriculture. Wall text speaks of political spaces, industry, and infrastructure. Its themes could well be aspects of a single project, from urban planning to working institutions. One can enter anywhere and try to find one's place.

It may not be easy, but then people at the time felt the same way. The show brings a semblance of order, relying on photos by Randhir Singh and models in blond wood from students at Cooper Union. MoMA commissioned both. As curators, Martino Stierli, Anoma Pieris, and Sean Anderson (with Evangelos Kotsioris) see the entirety as a display of "decolonization and self-determination." They speak of architecture's "transformative potential." If that runs up against present-day poverty and polluted cities, the transformation is merely incomplete.

One may not see familiar names, but that, too, is part of the story. Balkrishna V. Doshi is still the only South Asian winner of the Pritzker Prize in architecture. And even he appears only briefly, with designs for a school of architecture. Lesser-known faces come and go, but ordinary people are part of the story, too. In the catalogue's cover photo, they climb a scaffolding of metal rods like playground equipment, taking to the air. On video, unrecorded names contribute to architecture as well, handing materials upward the old-fashioned way.

Can architecture supply what MoMA calls "templates for living"? As a brochure from the time asks, Are Slums Inevitable? One still cannot help asking, and the question gives a distant history a greater relevance. Nor is it strictly Asian history, just as Latin American architecture has a European and North American history. The brochure's author, Lori Baker, was British, and a French architect, Roger Anger, contributes a striking urban plan, a tight spiral. Minnette de Silva, the first woman architect of Sri Lanka, exchanged postcards with Le Corbusier. Still, that interchange, too, is the story.

Inside and out

Like everything else about the show, the Western influence begins with individuals. Louis I. Kahn helped design the nation's parliament and Joseph Allen Stein, best known for his work in the Bay Area, a factory. Charles and Ray Eames taught at India's National Institute of Design. Still, they appear among others, in a spirit of collaboration. India's first modern architecture, before 1947, was an ashram, where members worked together on its design. Collaboration, though, does not end with individuals and collectives. It is also a matter of style.

It involves tons of concrete barely broken by rows of windows. Modernism's glass house meets Brutalism's impenetrable façade and implacable weight. Is that a turning outward or inward? Surely both, and that conundrum points, too, to tradition. They begin with what MoMA calls "material culture." Concrete, brick and vegetation introduce textured surfaces. Kahn's parliament itself has a mottled gray.

If that is imposing, it is also an ideal, of architecture as an enclave and a garden. de Silva and Yasmeen Lari, the first woman architect of Pakistan, brought it to housing in with formidable walls and cramped common areas, but also split-level living rooms and comfortable kitchens. Kahn's parliament has a central circular area as well, as a focal point. The same ideal motivates ceilings broken by additional open space, as with a home by de Silva with Kahn's circular space seemingly lofted above. Latticed ceilings enliven corporate offices by Geoffrey Bawa and a theater—so that audiences can find the time and space to contemplate not just the performance, but also themselves. Where a contemporary museum might insist on a tall atrium apart from the display of art, they bring a decorative impulse to essential spaces.

The same dichotomy turns inside out and outside in. That, too, is what MoMA calls "modern architecture in localized conditions." Bawa's Ceylon Steel Corporation nestles beneath trees beside a lake, like a resting point to itself. Valentine Gunasekara uses exterior stairs for a hotel and Charles Correa with Mahendra Raj for a municipal stadium. Bawa and Correa, arguably the show's stars, appear in practically every section. Bawa also designed a Montessori school, just in case one forgot about Western values and experiments.

The style has one last driver, need. Things were moving fast, and architecture had to keep up, as in the fearsome painted world of Cui Jie. It also had to scale up, and not just affordable housing is modular. Identical components break up solid geometries for Raj Rewal's Hall of Nations in New Delhi and Anwar Said's "C-style mosque," creating spaces for private prayer. For the National Cooperative Development offices in New Delhi, Kuldip Singh designed two sets of components, each stacked with setbacks. Their zigzags meet in the middle above a window-less support, as a triumphal arch without the triumph.

An enclave, however precious, is not often welcoming. A raised walkway connects an institute of higher education by Achyut Kanvinde, while admitting air and light. Yet his MPKV University amounts to masses isolated in a seeming desert. A 1969 monument to Mohandas K. Gandhi by Habib Rahman, like an upside-down claw hammer, reaches for the sky. Yet I would not want to live in the egg crates of his Ramakrishna Flats. Maybe architecture's transformation will never be complete, but its success and failure matter more than ever.

Recycling Brutalism

As China clamps down on westerners and dissidents yet again, artists must wonder what is in store for them. And as China moves to harness capitalism to assert its regime's political power and global reach, they must wonder what that could mean for their own. Architecture is as visible a form of expression as they come, and it can demand a great deal in turn. After all, it can leave a mark many stories tall. The eight projects at MoMA have seemingly modest but sweeping goals, for themselves, their clients, and the entire country. In the words of the show's title, they are out to "Renew Reuse Recycle."

On the surface, this architecture is not out for trouble. As capitalism might demand, MoMA supplies the names of its seven firms, with the principal architects in parentheses, if that. They position themselves in opposition to repression, but of an older and harsher kind. They may not all be old enough to remember the Cultural Revolution and the forced relocation to major cities, but these and Tiananmen Square have become cultural memories, and the show responds loud and clear. Like "Literally Means Collapse" at SculptureCenter, it calls on architects not to think of a nation as a "tabula rasa," waiting for the world to begin anew, and it calls them to smaller cities and rural communities. It draws on "ancient construction techniques" and modern ones alike.

Clients for these projects celebrate just that. Amateur Architecture Studio (Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu) designs a new home for a ceramic museum, with an entire wall of ceramic samples as potential materials and colors. Zhu Pei revives an Imperial Kiln Museum. Note, though, what that formula omits. It speaks of techniques, not ancient forms. Architects are reconceiving the modern city, without a pagoda in sight.

They look to Brutalism and the West a generation ago, not the many traditions of traditional Asian art and contemporary Asian art. They favor massive façades over glass boxes, broken only by creative architecture. ZAO/standardarchitecture (Zhang Ke) uses sheer wear and tear to enliven concrete or brick. Large windows with angled sides could be right out of a Brutalist classic, the former Whitney Museum. The red brick of the kiln museum, vaulted like airplane hangars, has ancient models, but it recalls more insistently the tube-like Kimball Museum by Kahn himself, while pulling it gently apart. One tube ends halfway, like a broken arch.

Recycling here looks back, but also forward to a healthier planet, with a foot bridge and planted roof by DnA_Design (Xu Tiantian) and the conversion by Atelier Deshaus (Liu Yichun and Chen Yifeng) of a coal wharf into a museum. Archi-Union Architects (Philip F. Yuan) builds on what it destroys, with gray-green bricks under a jagged roof. Their color hints at ecological concerns as well. Vector Architects (Dong Gong) converts a former sugar mill into housing. ZAO constructs housing as well, in a close juxtaposition of cantilevers and diagonals. For them, living units are part of a living community.

Community is a priority for them when it comes to the arts as well. Those gray-green bricks belong to a gallery founded as an artist's collective, and Amateur Architecture also contributes Wenium Village, an architecture park. Architecture is here to support art, as with the kiln and ceramic museums. That leaves open just how far it can transform a brutal political reality. These architects are as playful as their firm names and umbrella arches—and as serious. Will that prove enough?

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Architectures of Decolonization" ran at The Museum of Modern Art through July 2, 2022, "Renew Reuse Recycle" through July 4.