Architecture

One of India’s true green architects Manit Rastogi of MD Morphogenesis has just been profiled in the London Guardian newspaper. Rastogi’s work - which includes the hull shaped headquarters for Ernst & Young in Gurgaon - has been recognized for being “cool” in more ways than one…

In a sizzling property market, architect Manit Rastogi at MD Morphogenesis has created some of India’s coolest buildings, using recycled water, wells, wind tunnels and sun screens to chill work places and slash energy costs.
Thanks to his designs, students in a Jaipur fashion school mill around classrooms cooled to around 25 degrees Celsius (77 F) without air conditioners, while the desert bakes at nearly double that temperature outside.
And guests at the Swabhumi Hotel in Kolkata feel a breeze as they step out of a building resembling sliced mushrooms fused together, and inspired by the way trees trap wind.

And then according to the man himself…

“In India’s booming real estate market, there are not enough professionals. And because mediocrity sells, it’s easier to do that,” Rastogi said in an interview in Hong Kong. “Architects are just doing what developers want. If you start taking them down the sustainable route, people start getting nervous,” he said. “They see it as wasted expense.”….
“When they move away from the standard box, we have to tell them it’s more efficient,” Rastogi said. “Many say fine, you’ve convinced us, but how do we convince the market?”

He seems to have overcome these challenges well…read the full article here

In case you ever begin to feel that we creative types could never make it in a really big way or have a real impact on the world, there is comfort in the knowledge that India’s most pioneering and successful entrepreneur Ratan Tata trained as an Architect at Cornell before turning to revolutionize his family’s business. OK, he was given a silver spoon to start with but just look at how big he went and made it…a grand vision from steel to the Nano and Jaguar…Vision….something he picked up in design school perhaps.

While most of the residents of Chandigarh are critical at worst or ambivalent at best about their “modernist” architecture, the rest of the world has slowly been stealing its unknown treasures and making a killing at international auction houses like Christies.

Furniture designed by Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret - both were responsible for the city’s unique plan and its official buildings and many of its residences - which normally would be considered junk in Chandigarh and sold for a few hundred rupees were fetching prices of over $8,000 in some cases.

According to an article in the International Herald Tribune:

A handful of antique dealers from around the world have become regular visitors to government junkyards in Chandigarh, the experimental modernist city 250 kilometers, or 155 miles, north of New Delhi, conceived by the architect Le Corbusier in the 1950s. They buy up disused stocks of furniture that was specially created by Corbusier’s colleagues to fit out the new city.

The disappearance of large quantities of these distinctive, ultrafunctional tables and chairs - most of them designed by Jeanneret, Le Corbusier’s cousin, for the city’s government offices, courtrooms and colleges - has begun in recent months to alarm architects and some government officials in the city.

Citizens of Chandigarh should wake up to the potential goldmine they are sitting on and begin appreciating their heritage no matter how ugly it may seem to many. The city is suddenly worth millions on the art market.

Read this fascinating article here.