“As much as this book may help young students to become good architects… it seeks to restore the idealism that was once the hallmark of the profession.”—Praveen Bavadekar reviews Five Architectural Fables

Praveen Bavadekar, in his review for Five Architectural Fables by Edgar Demello, opines how the architectural fables ingeniously critique urban design through non-human perspectives, transforming complex environmental and design challenges into provocative, imaginative storytelling.

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A mythical invisible Ogre and his cousin Moxie, take the initiative to restore a city’s urban fabric by gobbling up the crass insensitive architecture that is slowly destroying it;
A spider intervenes in the proceedings of an architectural school’s jury;
Animals and birds unite and play to their strengths to save a tree that is about to be felled by insensitive government action;
A pair of canine siblings restore sanity in an endeavour to build a small collective housing that has gone awry;
In a post-apocalyptic world, our planet, Mother Earth, herself has to intervene to restore the balance and nudge humankind to take corrective action.

The five stories that make up this book of architectural fables keep a reader engaged in the intricacies of their narrative, while also, subtly yet assertively, provoking a dialogue about issues that concern our built environment. As with any great storytelling, these fables seem to be rooted in some form of reality, and despite the disclaimer at the beginning of the book, they may have been mined and abstracted from the rich and diverse experiences that constitute Edgar’s life.

A good fable should have enough semblance with the world around us so as to make us relate to it and yet, it should take these flights of imagination where it reconstructs the familiar into something that is yet to be, or perhaps never was, thus opening us up to new worlds and constructs. Coincidentally, that can also describe what good architecture is, and so it is apt that an accomplished architect like Edgar, who has also inhabited this world as a flaneur would, could easily segue into being a writer of fables.

Challenging the Anthropocene

In the best tradition of this genre, throughout the ages and across cultures, from Panchatantra to Aesops to Alice, these architectural fables give voice and agency to other species who are otherwise disenfranchised from the very world they equally share with us.

Our present times are often referred to as the Anthropocene epoch where our world has significantly been affected by the human race and often, not in a positive manner. Architecture is a discipline that often privileges human beings, their comfort, their societies and institutions over anything else and so this is one of the rare books about architecture that is written from the perspective of non-human eyes.

The protagonists in these fables are often rooted in the urban fauna that are a part of our homes and cities, and yet, are at best, living anonymously and unobtrusively amongst us, or at worst, regarded as pests and nuisances.

By making them central to the stories, and giving them the role of change-makers, this book seeks to put a spotlight on those species who are living in our midst, by subverting and appropriating the interstices of our buildings and our cities.

Down the Rabbit Hole

What seem like simple stories at first, are actually replete with tiny details and peppered with references. Some of these are easily accessible whilst others can take one down rabbit holes which open one up to a repository of cultural knowledge in aspects ranging from art, architecture, history and even music.

The stories are mined with these little doorways taking the reader on excursions into the lives and works of several engineers, architects and even musicians. As one reads, they stumble across trivia and details ranging from Correa’s description of Bombay ‘being a beautiful city but a terrible place’, to the way Escher developed his tessellated geometry inspired by fish scales and reptile skins and one may even wonder about the identity of ‘the famous Japanese architect who named his dog after Corbusier’. There is a wonderland of fascinating history and culture out there waiting to be explored, and this book offers the doors to some of those worlds. It is also this aspect of the book which makes you revisit and re-read it in multiple ways to uncover its nuances and layers of depth.

In a way, this could be a perfect tool to introduce young architecture students to the depth and historicity of their chosen field of study, as well as to sensitise them to topics ranging from ecological degradation to the apt use of materials and resources. Educators could also easily tailor design exercises that use the storylines and the characters in the book as points of departure.

As much as this book may help young students to become good architects or even better human beings, it seeks to restore the idealism that was once the hallmark of the profession, from Vitruvian times till the nihilistic turn that marked the advent of Postmodernism.

Perhaps, after reading this, even the most battle-hardened and cynical professional amongst us would be wary of the watchful and critical gaze of the spider on the wall of their studio, as they over-engineered their latest masterpiece. ‘Does the spider approve?’ may become as potent as ‘How much does your building weigh?’

Binaries and their Interstices

As with any book of fables, there are moral lessons that could be derived at the end of each story, which are sometimes stated explicitly and are, at other times, left to interpretation. Although the tenor and the tone of the writing are neither didactic nor prescriptive, it nevertheless has a nuanced way of establishing certain binaries, while sometimes also exploring the shades of grey in between.

In the first tale about the Ogre, Groggy, an interplay is established between the rural and the urban, with urban migration being the reciprocative malaise that ails both. While the former gets denuded of its social and physical fabric, the latter suffers from the population influx and the degradation of its urban character and form, as well as the quality of life it offers. While in the villages, the buildings are being slowly abandoned and reduced to rubble, the city is being excessively populated with insensitive buildings that have little or no architectural merit.

In an allegorical reference to our environment’s capacity to recycle, Groggy, who subsists on a diet of building materials, finds the highly processed junk, such as glass and aluminium, that constitutes the city’s buildings hard to digest. He is used to his rural diet of whole foods such as laterite, stone and wood. In another tale, a flock of pigeons have to carefully navigate their way around a building’s defensive bird nets. It is in these subtleties, such as Groggy’s diet or the way birds have to contend with hostile architecture, that the book transcends from being a collection of straightforward stories told simply, to something that makes one ponder about myriad aspects of the built environment that we are constantly creating and shaping as well as inhabiting.

"As much as this book may help young students to become good architects... it seeks to restore the idealism that was once the hallmark of the profession."—Praveen Bavadekar reviews Five Architectural Fables 2
Illustration from Architecture Fables. © Edgar Demello

The binaries of two ways of looking at biomimetics in architecture, either as analogous derivations or merely metaphorical lookalikes, is explored in the second tale about a spider who is aptly named ‘PR’ by his parents, as a tribute to Peter Rice. Here, the structures of Cecil Balmond and Peter Rice are used as a counterpoint and stand as a contrast to buildings such as the Birds Nest by Herzog and DeMeuron or many of Calatrava’s structures. A case is made, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek manner, about how design indeed needs to be more than just skin deep.

Whereas each of the stories is populated with its own set of characters, there are overlaps to be found in the tropes that they explore. If the tale about Groggy gobbling the city’s ugly buildings could be about erasure as a device for renewal, ‘The White Owl Who Saw Red’ explores aspects of conservation of our built as well as natural heritage.

Similarly one can find these overlaps between the last two fables of the compendium. In a way, both explore an oft-visited trope in literature as well as architecture—that of community living and Utopia. The penultimate tale is about the tribulations of seven friends who are trying to build a collective housing for their own use but find themselves in a situation that none could have foreseen. It is only with the active intervention of a pair of canine siblings that sanity is restored. This tale also reinforces the fact that a building is ultimately the manifested reality of a long-drawn process that involves several stakeholders including clients, contractors, builders and architects, and many a time, they are pulling in different directions.

The last fable, 2084: New Beginning, takes on a larger goal and it almost reads as a manifesto. The collective here is not just a group of friends, but rather the whole human race. This also breaks the stylistic structure of the book by being rendered mostly in verse, except for the preamble.

In its vision and intent, it seeks to offer a counter-narrative to the dystopian nature of Orwell’s 1984 by proposing a post-dystopian utopia that can still be possible. As revealed by Edgar, this was written in the wake of the last pandemic and the abject despondency and existential crisis that accompanied it. The pandemic’s aftermath has also revealed that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Here, the narrative takes an unexpected turn where the ‘Earth Mother’ asserts herself as a sentient being who is exasperated with her abuse by human societies. The Earth Mother realises that it would take more drastic repercussions than climate change or even a pandemic to get humans out of their complacency and suspends one of the core natural phenomena that underpins our entire technological and digital backbone.

Here, in the last fable, the best among humans in the form of philosophers, anthropologists, artists, architects and even scientists have to step in to save the day. However, this story overlooks the fact that some of these very disciplines were harnessed by the forces of senseless capitalism and greed to reduce the earth to be just a resource to be exploited, and if there is one lesson that the previous fable would teach, it is that the ideal of a collective enterprise takes just one rotten apple to fall apart. This tale is, in a way, a lament for the way things are and yet tries to paint a brighter future than what the present would suggest, and so it is an apt conclusion to a book that is essentially about questioning some of the status quo that exists in our society and our institutions.

The Book as a Mirror of the Author’s Personality

Throughout the book, what comes across is Edgar’s erudite personality, peppered as the book is, with cultural references ranging from Western classical music to literature to art. Edgar’s previous book on his travelogues provided a window to the rich tapestry of experiences that he has collated through his years of exploring the world, and it is this richness and depth of his own life that makes these fables so simple in their telling and yet so layered in their meaning.

The language, whether as prose or in verse, is impeccable and has a natural flow to it. The characters have been shaped with just the right little nuggets of their backstories and these are often rooted in some delightful architectural or a larger cultural reference. Complementing the written word in the book are the potent sketches and illustrations by Gayatri Ganesh, which are works of art in their own right.

Edgar dedicates this book to his two grandmothers, one from Saligao and the other from Assagao, who enthralled his childhood days with their stories about ants and insects, as well as saints and closet sinners. It must have been a charmed childhood in the bucolic villages of Goa, and though his grandmothers may have long gone and so are the Saligao and Assagao of yore, gentrified as they are, due to the avarice of our times, the power of a story or a fable to influence human thought and behaviour remains unchanged.

That faith in the power of a story is what this book ultimately celebrates.

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