Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts Designed by

Ralph Lerner's model: Careful selection

The Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, which was allotted 25 acres of prime land along the lush India Gate Lawns in Delhi last year, was plunged into controversy last fortnight over its International Architectural Design Competition for the centre.

The ambitious competition, with big prize money, attracted architects from the world over. It received 926 applications, 620 from 36 overseas nations. Finally 194 submitted detailed designs for assessment. Following a meticulous screening process, five winners were announced by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi who, Oscar-ceremony-style, opened sealed envelopes containing the names of the winners.

The coveted first prize of Rs 10 lakhs went to Ralph Lerner, director of graduate studies at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA who will also be awarded the Rs 60 crore contract for the design and supervision of the centre. The second prize of Rs 5 lakh went to Gautam Bhatia of India, and the third, of Rs 3 lakh, was shared equally between Francoise-Helene Jourda of Lyons, France, Alexandres Tombazis of Athens, and David Jeremy of London.

The fact that four of the five prize winners are foreigners invited the immediate wrath of their Indian counterparts. Fumed one: "We're not designing a skyscraper stretching into the clouds where the westerners would have an edge; we're designing a building depicting Indian culture." Most architects said in interviews that there was no need to spend precious foreign exchange when designs as good or even better could be procured in India.

But Kapila Vatsyayan, secretary in the Department of Art and Culture, who is also the operational head at the centre, brushes off this criticism saying: "Take the logic one step further. They are trying to say that Indian architects should not take part in any international competition abroad."

The other points on which the competition is generating a lot of heat in the capital's advancing winter are:

• that the jury did not include some of the best Indian architects: Charles Correa who was initially involved in the project was inexplicably dropped;
• that the competition did not draw the better known names in Indian and international architecture;
• that the jury's decision was influenced greatly by the superior materials used in the display models of foreign entries;
• that the competition was restricted only to the affluent. Being a one-stage competition it involved an expenditure of a minimum of Rs 40,000 by each contestant to prepare models and design sheets according to the criteria laid down in the competition rule book (which itself was priced at an exorbitant Rs 500). If, as the jury report indicates, there were four clear stages of screening, it would have saved a lot of money if display models and expensive elaborate layouts were called for only at the later stages.

"The debate is too late, they should have spoken up when we announced the competition last year," says Vatsyayan. As regards dropping Charles Correa from the jury, the irrepressible Vatsyayan adds: "If I want to be a minister and I am not made one, it does not mean that I have been dropped." Correa, she asserted, was in the discussion group for the project, but when the prime minister selected the names for the jury, he picked Achyut Kanvinde and Balkrishna Doshi as the Indian architects.

Kapila Vatsyayan and Pupul Jayakar were the other Indian members but Jayakar was later replaced by Habib Rehman, a reserve member. Those from abroad included James Sterling from the United Kingdom, Fumihiko Maki from Japan, and Olufemi Majekodunmi from Nigeria, who was the nominee of the International Union of Architects.

On the national front, some of the better-known names who sent in entries were Raj Rewal, who designed the Asian Games Village in Delhi, Jeet Malhotra, who worked with Le Corbusier and is now chief architect of the New Delhi Municipal Corporation, Sumit and Suchitra Ghosh who won the prestigious contract for the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration recently, and Roopak N. Kothari of Kothari and Associates.

On the international scene, the entrants included Henning Larsen from Denmark, who won the Aga Khan award for the secretariat building in Saudi Arabia, Frank Woods, partner in Chamberlin, Powell, Bon and Woods of the UK, who designed the Barbican complex in London, William Porter of the US, who is the head of the Joint Harvard-MIT programme for architectural studies, Minoru Takiyama from Japan, Sumet Jumsai from Thailand, and several well-known names from other countries like Sweden and Australia. Says Ranjit Sabikhi, professional adviser for the competition: "Even if some big names at home did not take part, we are thrilled with the response as a whole."

The basis on which Ralph Lerner's model was chosen is spelt out in detail in the jury report. According to them, what stood out in his design was his absorption of the vision that Edwin Lutyens had in mind when he designed New Delhi. In his dossier accompanying his model, Lerner says Lutyens' Delhi had "an unusual and somewhat paradoxical pairing" of a tradition of treating Delhi as an extensive garden with blocks treated as individual parterres and the tradition of monumentality and axiality presenting a clear hierarchical organisation of various buildings.

"The architectural point of departure for our project is the juncture of these two traditions," says Lerner. The model draws its styles from various forms of traditional and historical architecture in India, including those of the Mundeshwari Temple at Ramgarh, Brihadisvara Temple at Tanjore, Keshava Temple at Somnathpur, Lingaraja Temple at Bhubaneswar. and the Fatehpur Sikri, Mandu and Gopuram forms. "The architecture," he says, "reiterates the role of the centre whose purpose is to encompass all arts across boundaries of time, region and social grouping."

The centre will be divided into five major courts clearly demarcating the different activities for which the centre is being created. The Kala Nidhi would have a reference library with a national data bank and informatics system on art and culture, the Kala Kosha would have the infrastructure for research studies aimed at creating an encyclopaedia on the arts, the Kala Darshana would house the National Theatre and a number of venues for projecting visual arts, the Janapada Sampada would document and project folk and tribal arts, and the Sutradhara would be the administrative and policy-making wing of the centre.

Each of these, according to the Lerner model, would be ranged along the axis parallel to Rajpath and, though monumental in scale, will be scattered across the sprawling lawns.

Lerner will soon be awarded the contract for the architectural works at the centre, according to the competition rules which even specify that if for some reason the contract is not signed within a year of the announcement of the results, the first prize winner would be compensated with a sum equivalent to the value of the first prize.

But the question being raised today is whether Lerner or Bhatia, who have not really built any major buildings so far, would be able to ca try out a project on this scale. Scuttling these doubts, Malay Chatterjee, associate professional adviser for the competition, points out that some of the best Indian architects began with competitions that they won in their mid '20s. "That is what competitions are meant for," says Sabikhi. "To unearth unknown talent."

However, the competition rules provide an escape route if the going gets too hot: if the first prize winner is unable, for reasons of distance or inexperience, to satisfy the jury of his ability to carry out the work, the jury may require him to collaborate with another architect of their approval. And should the architect fail to abide by the provisions of the contract, the promoter reserves the right to engage the second prize winner in consultation with the jury.

GAUTAM BHATIA: ORIGINAL ENTRY

Gautam Bhatia with his prize winning model

Gautam Bhatia, incorrigibly irreverent at 34, is better known for his articles on architecture than for architecture itself. He tripped into architecture because he failed in medicine. "I keep blaming the buildings that housed the medical laboratories in the university (in Washington) for my failure in medicine," he says. "I used to keep staring at them all day."

He completed his Masters in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, but soon tired of what he calls "catalogue-shopping" architecture in the West. He came back to India to dabble in mud. As project architect for a rural mud housing scheme under the Naujhil Integrated Rural Development Programme in Mathura district, Bhatia has no major building to his name so far and has had all the time for critiques on "Punjabi Gothic" and "Bania Baroque" architecture. In awarding him the second prize, the jury appreciated his "original and informal approach".

In his presentation, Bhatia invited the jury to imagine that Rajpath is a river and that the centre takes the form of "a journey along the river" using symbols like the street, the ghats lining the riverfront that is Rajpath. His buildings are viewed as a kind of stage set awaiting a cultural scenario. His project merges partially sheltered indoor spaces with semi-outdoor areas which then flow into completely outdoor places with steps leading down to the "river-side". His project was rushed - he began only in August - and in his hurry his display model could only be in cardboard as against the fancy materials used by the others.

But it was his vivid imagination that cornered the prize. And today, this imagination is running wild thinking of what to do with his windfall prize money. No sound investments in architecture, he says emphatically. "Maybe I'll fund my way through another attempt at medicine, maybe I'll use it to fund my planned audio-visual spoof on Delhi, maybe I'll just rush down to the first Maruti showroom."

Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts Designed by

Source: https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/living/story/19861215-ignga-lands-in-controversy-over-its-international-architectural-design-competition-801517-1986-12-15

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