Trains.Architecture.Culture.Life
This eulogy has a unique chronology.
The first part was written, at Bruno’s behest, in the last two months.
The second, after his [Bruno Dias Souza] passing.
I have retained the present tense of the former.
1. Not far from the peak
of the Panjim Hill (the Altinho) in Goa, with a 270-degree view of the city and its breathtaking surroundings, lives a centenarian-in-waiting. It is Professor Bruno Dias Souza; architect, designer, urbanist, and educator. The house he, his wife Edna, and son Claude, live in, was designed by him over six decades ago. It still feels full of the creative energy that it must have exuded at that time.
I imagine a young Bruno looking at a heritage Goan home (probably the one he grew up in) through his magic prism; loosening up the planes here, shifting volumes there and adding dashes of colour here and there to create a unique spatial articulation. If only architecture could come with a magic prism! This house, magical as it is, is the result of a very fertile imagination and a passion for his twin disciplines of architecture and urban design. And for life itself! Each time I entered the house I had a different experience; including once, when I thought I was walking through the pages of a book by the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
2. But not strangely,
it didn’t feel like I was experiencing the architecture of magical realism (like the book’s genre) but that of magical abstraction. That was to be expected, of course; Bruno has always been an unabashed modernist. There is no concession to pastiche, no surfeit of theatrics. No copycat transfers from tradition; but transformation, yes, and in good measure. It is, simply put, an extraordinarily contemporary Goan home. Comfortable in its place and in its time; then and now. In one word, timeless.
But it doesn’t stop there. The house’s relationship to its distant and immediate landscape, and to its elevation of perhaps fifty meters above sea level, is remarkable. Like a constantly shifting automobile gauge, what unfolds is a panorama of coconut groves and paddy fields, the ocean and the River Mandovi, at a point where they become one. And finally, parts of his beloved city of Panjim. While doing so receiving muted light and gentle breezes from its many outdoor spaces; the courtyards, skylights and many a clerestory.
It is indeed the theatre of life!
3. With a few more months
for him to get into triple digits Professor Bruno is still in possession of a coherent, curious and cultivated mind. A mind that he has shared with countless students at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi where he was a teacher for over twenty years; and later its Director. In his home, one sees paintings, sculptures, tapestries, folk art, and books strewn all over, the signs of music are apparent in a piano and some stereo equipment, and along with travel, things that make one an architect in full, as he had told me when I was briefly his student.
But not one to pander to the administrative authority, he moved on, in mid-life, to take up assignments with some of the numerous UN agencies, living in various parts of the world where that particular agency had an office. One of them, is the Housing and Human Settlements, if I recollect. Not just living at headquarters—New York, Geneva or Paris—but also in developing countries, mostly in Africa. With his working knowledge of French and Spanish, he was able to connect with people and share his desire to bring change through ideas and advocacy.
4. The developed world
wasn’t new to him. He is the product of a blue-chip architectural education. First at Columbia in New York, where he completed his undergraduate studies and then at Harvard for his Master’s. But there are no chips on his shoulders.
His informality, his candour, and easy body language straight away put one at ease. When he speaks, you are compelled to listen to a man who has many a story to tell—stories of his teachers, some the masters of the Modern Movement, and of his visits to their built work across that country, Walter Gropius and José Luis Sert who taught there and some who visited, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer, amongst others… Some of those masters were just arriving (some of them fleeing) from the war-torn old world. A world fractured by despotic ideologies and megalomania.
Bruno was often distressed, when I sat with him, about the continuing inequities of the world—especially for him, in education and literacy. In his own way, he strode the world to make a difference but sadly it was never enough. The more the world changes, the more it stays the same—was his oft-repeated refrain.
5. But what always gave him great joy,
other than design, were books, classical music and his family. Not in that order (it’s alphabetical!). I was, or at least felt, co-opted as part of the family. I visited now and again as I had a second home in the Fontainhas for some years. It was just a short drive away. He looked forward to the folios, posters and calendars I brought him that we produced at the Architecture Gallery & Bookshop of which I was curator.
I started it in the year 2000 in Bangalore where I live and work. These meetings triggered countless stories of his (and mine!) student days and of the great masters that had taught him. He was very close to Prof. Sert whom he considered a great combination of a practitioner (in urban design) and an academic. He wondered why I didn’t include him in the poster INTERROGATIONS which was a provocative inquiry into the overlapping of practice and pedagogy. It was a sort of interrogation alright! Though always laced with humour and mutual respect. He called those gifts (I think ten or eleven in all) ‘an education, in small format’.
With all that he had imbibed from his universal exposure, Professor Bruno never lost his trademark humility.
6. Those were the five paragraphs
I began writing after I received a phone call from Edna whilst returning from their home to mine in Benaulim last December. I had just presented him with my second book: Five Architecture Fables. “Bruno wants you to write his Obituary”, she said agitatedly. I had to pull up to ingest the gravitas of that request. Overwhelmed I was for sure, for two reasons; one, that he trusted me with interpreting his long and eventful life and two, that he had a premonition that his journey on planet earth was slowly ending.
In the December meeting, he was incoherent and harder of hearing than usual, but his mind was as sharp as ever. I arrived last Saturday to meet him again, as planned, to continue our conversation. Then I got another phone call the next day, from Edna, “Bruno collapsed about an hour ago and is no more.” A chill down my spine and a lump in my throat is the best I can describe my reaction; I was to meet him the next day!
My last project with him remained incomplete. In the process of its completion, I have had to switch very sadly, from the present tense I have used till now, to the past tense. And I write this not as an Obituary but as an Eulogy to a man of many passions: A Universal Man…
7. No doubt his education in the US
—in New York and Cambridge—gave him an edge with the UN agencies that were looking for bright, idealistic professionals who wanted to change the world order. So after spending almost a decade in the New World and two in India, he was sent to Africa. And that is where the idea of advocacy developed within him. Here, he worked tirelessly on various projects connected to the upliftment of marginalised communities: designing housing, schools and health facilities. He was always on the move organising conferences and seminars and sitting on committees evaluating development work.
But his country and Goa beckoned and he returned to shift his focus to the local. He met often with his friend Charles Correa who had just built the Verem row houses and who periodically came from Bombay to de-stress in one of them. And then return, after a recharge with the clean salty air at the place where the River Mandovi becomes the sea. Charles and Monika met with Bruno and Edna often, as they lived just across the river. Of course ‘just across’ meant 5 km! I can well imagine the intensity of those conversations: art, craft, architecture, music, films, politics, literature, poetry, and naturally, the state of the city.
8. But they were men
of very different temperaments. One had the capacity to cut the arrogant to size, whoever they may be, bureaucrat or CEO; especially when they feigned knowledge. The other, expected them to be as passionate about the work being entrusted to him. Bruno had a different sort of battle to fight, especially in the rabbit holes of our sometimes opaque bureaucracy. He was not always successful. But as part of two important organisations in New Delhi he brought some of his international exposure to them. The Urban Arts Commission as well as the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) were infused with new ways of seeing and doing.
On shifting to Goa he went wholeheartedly into a late practice. Completing, over the years, a range of projects that included churches, schools, public housing and a flurry of competitions. For his architectural work and his continuing advocacy in several parts of the world he was awarded the Sócio Honórario—Ordem dos Arquitectos from Portugal. In fact, Portugal had earlier tried to persuade him to stay and be part of the architectural school in Porto. But it was time to return so he gracefully declined.
9. Some years ago
I had taken a group of about a dozen classmates to Goa to celebrate a milestone of our graduation from the SPA. Being the only Goan, I was asked to ‘curate’ the trip. I had planned it, not around places but, around people: Bruno, Monika, Gerard, Dean, Armenio; sadly Charles and Wendell had passed on and Arvind was travelling. We were also at the Charles Correa Foundation (CCF) in the Fontainhas, being shown the intense level of it’s engagement with the city. The pre-lunch soirée thereafter, at the Sousa house, has been deeply etched in our collective psyche.
Although we had insisted that all arrangements would be made by us, Edna’s most effortless hospitality was unparalleled. Claude, although overwhelmed by this architectural invasion, made a happy conversation. Bruno was in his element, showing extreme happiness at meeting the lot of us after 45 years! After I had raised a small toast to the ‘man of many qualities’, he spoke quite passionately of his journey across the globe and his return to a place that didn’t seem to understand, let alone acknowledge, the deep-seated reasons for his return—to go back to his drawing board and help in transforming the beautiful city of Panjim into a liveable place!
A lot of his planning ideas lie in dusty drawers somewhere in government offices, that will perhaps one day fall into the right hands.
10. And some already have!
Those hands of his, along with his mind, are making a difference to the people who realise his worth and the value of his ideas. Architects and students come to the CCF in the Fontainhas to look through those ideas for the city (especially the conservation plan for the Fontainhas) that Bruno initiated years ago. And the ones Charles and the Foundation have put forth, for the city at large, to the various officials in power. The same scenario is enacted with the planning and development agencies, year after year, until an enlightened bureaucrat arrives.
I had, in my book Architecture Travelogues, written about the artist F.N. Souza and his need to escape his village of Saligao, because it seemed too small to contain his genius. For him, the world was his stage. Somewhere I also detected in Bruno a desire for a larger stage; one that could hold together the many strands of his concerns in architecture and urban design, concerns that had people at the centre of his thinking.
11. And why did I put trains
as part of the sub-title, you might want to ask? Here again, both Charles and Bruno were passionate, from a very early age, about toy trains, their tracks and the power that energised their movement. Someone once asked me if that was a Goan thing. I realised then, that the first time I saw any type of train was when I left Goa for Bangalore as an eight-year-old. And it wasn’t a toy train!
I still recollect the very first time I visited him he showed me those trains. He was like a little boy once again. At Bruno’s they had their own pride of place opposite the entrance on a lower floor. A whole room to themselves. The rest of the house was above. It was like a rite of passage:
- first experience, in miniature, the story of trains
- then climb the ‘hill’, stairs that is, to the piano nobilè
- finally experience, full size, the unfolding of a life…
Bruno Dias Souza’s and that of his family.
Bruno, bon voyage into the afterlife. I’m sure you’ve hopped onto the St. Peter’s Express! You’re late, he must be saying. Just tell him we weren’t letting you go!
