Architecture is too Important to be Left to Architects Alone

It is beyond dispute that while ancient India has had a robust practice of scholarship on architecture simultaneous with the actual vocational practice of architecture, it is also largely true that, during the modern era, not much scholarship has been devoted to architecture. The primary sources of scholarly inputs in the education of architects, critical, historical or simple codification of best practices, have been European, founded on European experiences and brought in as colonial imports. It is only in the last few decades that a few architects/scholars have begun to articulate ideas with remarkable scholarly insights both on architecture as a discipline and also on the education of architects. 

Today, in India, there exist significant writings on architecture and the education of architects starting from the early decades of the 20^th century. After the mid-twentieth century, after independence and with increased exposure to global developments, the production of scholarly ideas has been significant. A cursory look at these essays raises important questions. Some of these are personal musings prompted by an individual’s desire to make public ideas that s/he thinks are significant enough to share.

Many others are papers presented in several symposia organized to deliberate some specific themes. We can group these essays into two parts distinguished by arguably the most consequential development for the profession of architecture in modern India: the adoption of the Architects’ Act, of 1972 by the Indian parliament. Before the statutory adoption of the Council, architecture was largely viewed as a vocational activity. Training of young architects was more or less a modern version of the guild system; learning the best practices from the seniors. 

Here, we must distinguish between training and education. Traditionally, people whom we refer to as professionals today, belong to the segment of society which was responsible for solving society’s myriad problems; a doctor attended to the health and physical well-being of the people; a lawyer dealt with disputes and abnormalities in the interpersonal behaviour of the people and generally, maintained the social equilibrium. A farmer’s task was to grow the food that everyone needed. And an architect had mastered the art and craft of building houses, temples, granaries and workplaces.  

Each of these activities was an independent vocation and the expertise for each was passed from one generation to another through vocational training, which was limited to mastering the required information and skills to successfully carry out that vocation. It was, at best, ‘instrumental education’ geared towards equipping the trainee with just about enough tools and skills to succeed in the chosen vocation. The questions of ethics and morality were intuitively integrated with this training and were mostly internalized. Any knowledge, at a higher level of generality and transcending the specificity of these independent vocations was outside the purview of this training. The larger and deeper questions such as what it means to be a doctor, a lawyer, or an architect, what is the nature of the world we live in, who we are, or how we relate with nature; the stuff of ‘liberal’ education, were left to the philosophers and the sages.  

Today, when we locate any of these vocations in the larger institutional domain of the university, the specific vocation (i.e. medicine, jurisprudence, or architecture) acquires the larger identity as a discipline. Instrumental training is replaced by liberal education requiring multi-disciplinary exposure, which can only be ensured by people well-versed in the profession of education. Inevitably, practising doctors, lawyers and architects will have to be involved in this for their vocational expertise and experience but with an important proviso that they are open and receptive to new ideas and questions raised by the younger generation.

The ‘Architects’ Act’ was ostensibly adopted to regulate the vocational side of the profession by establishing criteria for who can practice architecture and the relevant modalities for regulating the profession by creating a statutory body, the Council of Architecture. In 1983 the Council expanded its mandate by embracing within its domain the pedagogical issues of architectural education by declaring the “Minimum Standards of Architectural Education”. This, I believe, was a grave mistake. The Council does update these norms occasionally. Still, what should have remained within the purview of schools, colleges, and universities, most equipped to deal with pedagogical matters, has now been decided upon by a professional body whose membership represents largely vocational experiences.

Any analysis of the state of affairs in architecture, and inevitably its education, in India today, runs into a paradox, which, in turn, opens up a few broad and civilizational issues. These issues are common to all societies and civilisations though each has approached them differently. The paradox is that though the region’s traditional and highly pluralistic Indigenous practices may offer insights into the ways of approaching the problems relevant today, we still keep borrowing the ‘best practices’ from the West which are not born from our own experiences.   

One such issue is, how do we define the nature of professions and the role of professionals in modern societies. A profession, by its very nature, has a dual purpose; to serve the society (as a vocation) and at the same time, to shape the society (as a discipline).

Being a public art and a cultural construct, architecture has always had the additional onus to embody the ideas, values and beliefs considered significant at any given time. In the ancient times, this intrinsic duality, specific to architecture, where both instrumental and liberal knowledge overlap, was resolved by internalising the essential qualities of the architects in his training. Mayamatam, the 11^th-century Indian treatise on architecture demands high intellectual, moral and ethical standards for the architect. He must be a man of quality, physically sound, just, compassionate, learned in mathematics, incorruptible, familiar with ancient authors and well-versed in all forms of knowledge (Sarva Shastra visharada).  

The fact that today, we do not follow these patterns may be attributed to progress and modernism. However, beyond progress and modernism, we believe the roots of how we think and behave today and relate with the world and with each other lie elsewhere and deep in history. Unless we confront this, what we are doing and what we think we are doing are going to be two different things. We may have been prevented from knowing what we are doing precisely because of what we think we are doing.  

The European Enlightenment project from the 17^th to 19^th centuries laid the foundation of the epistemological revolution in the West. This entailed a three-way split of the Western intellectual life into sciences, humanities and arts from the earlier holistic knowledge system wherein sciences (reason and logic), humanities (ethics, morality and spirituality) and art (expression and sensibilities) were integrated, though largely dictated by the church and the prevailing metaphysics. Thus, liberated from this metaphysics, science propelled the technological advances giving the European societies tools for wealth creation by industrialisation and military power which allowed them to forcibly occupy colonies and exploit their rich resources. This wealth creation was accompanied by a robust intellectual revolution called Enlightenment modernism.  

But the problem with this revolution was that, science was prioritised over humanities, and the humanistic concerns, i.e. ethics, morality and the general spiritual dimensions of the human condition were relegated as secondary. It relied disproportionately on the rational faculty of mankind, a supposedly universal attribute. The individual, a rationally thinking being, occupied the pivotal position of this worldview. With the ascendency of this Cartesian and Kantian worldview, it has become received wisdom that reality is measurable. Anything that cannot be measured or cannot be described in measurable terms is not real. With this, all knowledge had to be subjected to strict scrutiny for its verifiability against empirical reason. Science and technology, which embody this measurable reality, are the guiding beacons of this age. Architecture too should be aligned with science and technology in this age of reason and industrialization. The machine, as well as the operational processes of machines, became the metaphors for inventing these new aesthetics in order to make architecture relevant for this new age. A house is, thus, a machine to live in. 

Past, from now onward, is to be confined to libraries and museums. American and European architects and planners were guided in this new modernism by two powerful revolutionary myths: the myth of inevitability and the myth of universality. Both these myths are rooted in the historical consciousness that has gripped Europe since the 19^th century. The first, inevitability, postulated that a section of humankind (European and American) has reached the promised utopia, and the future is just more of the present. The laws of history are known, and there are no alternatives. Whichever societies have not yet attained this ideal state will eventually and inevitably do so. There may be minor variations due to local conditions, but, by and large, the universal visual language of modern architecture is determined. 

Its twin myth, universality, assumes that the social and cultural differentiations will, over time, be flattened out by the singular human attribute of reason and that all humanity will ultimately acquire the same form of modernity. History brought us science and technology, which brought machines, which should now be the metaphor for the unique language of this age. Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, universality places one civilisation, the Western, at the centre of the development story as the fountainhead for all values. Reason is supreme, and all sentimental attachment to the past must give way to the forward march. The declaration of “The End of History” was, thus, preordained. The origin of this later development rests with the intellectual and cultural revolution called Enlightenment. These two revolutionary ideas, inevitability and universality, coalesced into high modernism and what came to be known as the International Style, a myth of a universal theoretical monolith imagined by Philip Johnson, an architect, and Henry Russel Hitchcock, a historian. 

The universality of the human faculty of reason implied that this aesthetic language will appeal to all humanity irrespective of geographical or cultural variations. All a-rational, emotional and traditional vocabulary should be purged from the architectural lexicon. Flattening out the peaks and valleys of rich and differentiated architectural styles globally, this assumed that the new modern architecture represents the whole of humanity and is truly the international language of architecture. 

It is this false universality and the inevitability of modernism, mistakenly projected as the “International Style”, though discredited elsewhere, that is still seen as the normative architectural language in many parts of the world and many schools of architecture. This prevents us from conceiving new forms of modernity born of the indigenous, though highly pluralistic, patterns of life and experiences and the epistemologies associated with them. Where else can this happen except in the schools of architecture?

This is not as easy as it sounds. A university-based professional school is charged with two seemingly irreconcilable missions. On the one hand, the school is required to serve its profession by training young people for practice; an activity that presumes allegiance to established professional standards and procedures. On the other hand, the school is expected to shape its profession by advancing knowledge in the field: an activity that is inevitably critical of practice and often subversive of prevailing belief systems in the profession. To promote both of these missions—to resolve this paradox without excluding either of its terms is the central task confronting the faculty of a professional school. 

This brings us to questions such as how do we imagine our schools? Who conceives and supports them? How to regulate and nurture them? Education falls under that large and somewhat ambiguous category of Greater Common Good—“The Commons”. This is the repository of public resources whose sole purpose is the upliftment of the society at large. Every society, every civilisation in every epoch has recognized the significance of education of its new generations for the betterment of all as part of the ‘Greater Common Good’. How has this been addressed under modern conditions?  

Along with the primacy of science and technology, modernism also altered the cultural economy and the relationship between the cumulative wealth of society and the assurance of the greater common good. Capitalism, and the rise of autonomous individual entrepreneurs, ensured that the enormous wealth created through industrialisation remained in the hands of the wealthy. Public resources increasingly came to be privatised and, with that, also the onus of supporting public causes, including education, through donations or endowments, came to be privatized. This is true also of the profession at large; capitalism tends to replace state sponsorship of architecture with private philanthropy. One of the consequences of the separation of science and humanities mentioned earlier is that while capitalism is focused on wealth creation, ethical philanthropy is rare and limited, if any, to only the ultra-wealthy entrepreneurs. The norm is that for educational institutions donations have strings attached and investments come with the expectations of returns. Even state support is often accompanied by a lot of bureaucratic oversight.  

It is evident from the above that while we in India have overcome political colonisation, economic and epistemic colonisation still prevails. This is the paradox we referred to in the beginning. Mimicking the idea of being modern from elsewhere results in a world where the peaks and valleys of the global cultural landscape are flattened out; it can only be achieved by giving away a people’s civilizational identity. What we need to do is to imagine an education system engendered by the best in our civilizational ethos, and with which we can enter into dialogues with the rest of the world as equally, but differently, modern people. False syncretism can be opposed by communication, i.e. a situation in which each civilisation confronts the others with what is the most vibrant and living in them to be received by them in their own imagination. As Paul Ricoeur puts it eloquently, “No one can say what will become of our civilisation when it has really met different civilisations by means other than the shock of conquest and domination. But we have to admit that this encounter has not yet taken place at the level of an authentic dialogue.”

I want to argue that the authentic dialogue, which Ricoeur is asking for, cannot happen unless we overcome the false representations of our own past and arrive at a shared imagination of an education system engendered by the best in our civilisational ethos. I also want to argue that we are prevented from doing so precisely by the way we have imagined, conceived, run and regulated architectural education today.  

Still, it was modelled on the “Architects (Registration) Act, 1931/38” (originally drafted by RIBA) of the United Kingdom. One of the past presidents of the Council once observed that the number of architects in India, as a percentage of the total population, is very small compared to that of doctors or lawyers. He used this as a rationale for increasing the number of schools of architecture in the country from Approx. 120 to more than 300 during his tenure. That pattern continues and now we have more than 500 schools. Almost all are privately funded, lack quality teachers and do not have a vision of why they exist and what is expected of them as part of ‘The Commons’. Or, for that matter, what is the nature of ‘The Commons’ in the social, cultural and environmental context of the region?  

But more importantly, it is the rationale for this proliferation of schools and, as a consequence, that of a large number of poorly educated young architects that does a disservice to the profession and its education. Comparing professions, purely based on their numerical representation in society, misses a crucial point; neither are all professions similar in their role in society nor are their internal structures and logic. For example, for both medicine and jurisprudence, the past, in the form of precedence, is extremely important; precedence sets the norms for the new action. And this relationship with the past is universal for both medicine and law. On the other hand, this relationship between the past and the present is dynamic in architecture. As T.S. Eliot has explained, “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, and values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” 

The forms we create, too, have to be impregnated with meanings deeply rooted in the intellectual, material and cultural milieu of our present society and cannot be seen as independent autonomous objects, subject to the principles of visual composition and adherence to utilitarian demands. Architectural education, then, must be viewed as liberal education and not instrumental education, as in vocational training. Modernism may have separated sciences, humanities and arts as autonomous knowledge streams, but it must be recognized that architecture still exists at the overlap of these three fields of knowledge. At the zone of the materiality of the building, it requires precise logic of science and technology. At the same time, a building is a human intention expressed in architectural and poetic terms. Through the architect, man’s collective memory of all the past houses we have lived in should be related to the individuality of the owner’s life, which is inextricably connected with her social and cultural milieu. Thus a true work of architecture, within a common language of the society, becomes unique and incapable of being reproduced. All great architecture has existed in that zone of intersubjectivity between the architect and the person/s for whom she is designing. 

The objective of the British Act was to ‘modernise’ the practice of architecture in tune with what was by then the pinnacle of modernism, and when the separation of sciences, humanity, and arts was complete. This is borne out by the fact that a building is conceived as an isolated physical object, subject to the laws of nature and expected to function as efficiently as a machine. The principles of organization of its elements must also adhere to the 19^th-century notions of aesthetic composition that imagined the object as independent and outside the realm of culturally conditioned subjective psychological experiences. The modes of architectural practice, and by extension, its education, were supposed to be geared to fulfil this objective. By adopting this model for India, the framers of the “Architects’ Act 1972” neither understood its underlying philosophical strata nor questioned its appropriateness for India and generally for the South Asian civilization.  

Could this be corrected by simply adding a few courses of humanity and arts to the existing curriculum? Or by weighing the emphasis of the curriculum in favour of either arts, technology or social sciences?  I think not. The entire architectural curriculum needs to be seen as a whole undivided entity, made up of interconnected elements of science and technology (reason, logic), humanities (ethics, morality, spirituality) and arts (symbolic representation). Today, all these three streams run parallel and we expect the students to find connections. This is akin to looking at the human body anatomically as made up of independent organs to be studied for their functions, or dysfunctions, independent of the other organs. (Interestingly, ancient Indian medical thought never saw our body anatomically; anatomy was, and still is, an alien concept in Ayurveda).  

This will bring into play ideas that have informed architecture throughout history and in all civilisations. We will learn to reinterpret those ancient buildings in light of how we think today and discover new meanings in them and, at the same time, apply that knowledge to critically evaluate our contemporary choices, which may otherwise be habitual. This can only happen in academia. But, for this to happen, we will have to transcend the established boundaries of architecture and make seamless connections with humanities and arts.