ICDPCA 15 International Conference on Reinventing Design Pedagogy and Contextual Aesthetics

Thanima

Design Pedagogy: Traditional Themes for ContemporaryContexts

Keshav Gangadhar*

Chief Architect, Eco-Design,Metro Complex, Opp. Ayurveda Hospital, H.P.O. Road, Sultanpet, Palakkad – 678001, Kerala, India

Faculty, Sneha College of Architecture, Attayampathy, Govindapuram P.O., Near Kollengode, Palakkad – 678507, Kerala, India

+ Author’s E-mail: keshav.gangadhar@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

Architecture cannot avoid assimilating the context of siteconditions, utilitarian requirements of space and the hybridculture of the increasingly urbane people for whom it is built.Buildings could be defined as an assemblage of materials builtwith prevailing technological skills, put together to shelter asmany varied human needs and activities, as there are cultures andclimes and with contexts that are both diverse and plural.Essentially, Pre-Industrial values founded on Vitruvianprinciples that architecture = firmness + utility + beauty, wereto be replaced by Industrial society’s rationale architecture =lightness + utility, where beauty became a preoccupation withtechnology, and the present Post-Industrial situation being onewhere architecture = lightness + utility + simulated style ofyour choice.

Kenneth Frampton identifies five polarities of an‘Architecture of Resistance’ or ‘Critical Regionalism’ (08) thathas much in common with Juhani Pallasmaa’s ‘Six Themes for thenext Millennium’ (09) from his RIBA lecture in 1994. Bothpostulates are based on the de-historicized chaos of much ofcontemporary architecture, reduced to self-indulgent consumeristiconography or immersed in the extreme globalization oftechnology that is far removed from the stable ground of socialrealities and the large-scale environment problems like ‘climatechange’ being faced today. Frampton’s premise is a means ofopposing the crisis and compression of ‘space-time’ with its

2

fixation on contrived two dimensional aesthetics. In order forbuildings to regain three-dimensionality, the plasticity inmaterials and the craft in construction have to be revived. Inthis respect, the built-form is more a mediatory fabric orenvironmental filter that is energy conscious and interactivewith diurnal and seasonal variations of climate and even social‘space use’ patterns. Climatology, which influences shading andcooling devices, window sizes for ventilation and illuminationlevels, wall thicknesses, materials and roof slopes are some ofthe building sciences that though part of the curriculum inarchitecture schools and found in most vernacular building,rarely find sufficient application in practice.

This paper attempts to bridge the gap between vernacularsensibilities, regionalism and design pedagogy.

Keywords: International Conference, Design Pedagogy, Critical Regionalism, Vernacular.

Context

It took nearly 50 years of debate before the Architect’s Actof 1972 was formulated to protect the interests of the professionin India and prevent unqualified quacks from selling ‘nakshas’ orplans to the people. Yet the architect’s image in society remainsin the shadows of the well-entrenched civil engineer, whileserving the marginal minority of those without monetary or spaceconstraints. Reconciling socio-economic disparities between thosein abject poverty and those with unaccountable wealth, may haveled the architect to earn his keep from the better-off. But thefact remains that the ratio of qualified architects (registeredwith the CoA) to the populace is a staggering 1:60,000, comparedto China’s relatively better 1:40,000, when Europe averages under1:2000 (with Italy at an astounding 1:400). It’s another matter,that building activity employs close to 35 million people and issecond only to agriculture, most of it mainly concentrated inurban areas, accounting for less than 30% of the total

3

population. Norma Evenson notes how ‘the growingindustrialization of building materials and the advent of moderndomestic appliances were to seal the concerns of thearchitectural profession to be keyed to the needs of theindustrial metropolis, and the tastes of the well-to-doanglicized classes’ (01). In such a scenario, it’s quitequestionable whether the architect’s concerns are little morethan peddling styl’isms and reconciling historical spare-partswith cheap labour to set up tinsel facades that are signboards ofthe growing consumer ethic. Ironically, the eclectic legacy ofpre-independence architecture was probably closer to the culturalheritage of the country in Sir Edwin Lutyen’s designs for the newimperial capital of New-Delhi in 1911, than the neo-colonialnostalgia long after the ‘British babus’ finished their tea andleft.

Now at a time when production standards aspire for the ISOmark of certification in a liberalized economy that has joinedthe global market, perhaps the post-independence generation ofarchitects will find justification for following the blueprintsleft behind by the gurus of the modern movement in India; LouisKahn and Le Corbusier. More influences from Europe and the USwere introduced in the fifties by architects returning from theirpursuit of higher education. Technical advancement and socialprogress were equated to Corbu’s sculptural ‘pilotis’ andconcrete, Kahn’s rigorous brickwork and the ‘InternationalStyle’. Correspondingly, cohesive community structures and jointfamilies disintegrated into communal ‘gated’ colonies and nuclearfamilies in the melting pot of urbanization. The generation ofB.V. Doshi, Charles Correa, Shirish Beri and others were inspiredby the more vernacular paradigms of form and function anddesigned with gusto many fine campuses, housing complexes andbeach resorts in the late sixties and seventies. In the eighties,the second generation of the likes of Uttam Jain, Raj Rewal andSarto Almeida explored new idioms of expression even as the firstsigns of the malaise of ‘post modernist’ references began tocreep in. Schools of architecture emerged sporadically as theodd, bearded, khadi clad ‘jholawala’ crusaded the leftist counter-culture of the barefoot architect, two decades after the flowerchildren did during anti-war and educational reformist protestsin the west. They were then overtaken in the 90’s by the morematerial ‘pundits of presentation’ with ‘post-modern’ vibes. ‘Lesswas more’ for the rationalists and later the minimalists, until

4

post-modernists like Robert Venturi, Michael Graves and theMuseum of Modern Art (MoMA), announced ‘less is a bore’. Throughwhat Gautam Bhatia calls ‘frayed magazine associations’, Indianarchitects, seemed to concur with that point of view. Though thesituation is common to most developing countries of the Thirdworld facing the problematique of Paul Ricoeur’s paradox; ‘… howto become modern and return to sources; how to revive an olddormant civilization and yet take part in universalcivilization’(02).

In the west, the International Style had by then fissured intoinnumerable, discrete schools of thought; the Metabolists (BuckyFuller, Archigram, Arata Isozaki, Kurokawa, Kishitawa ) withtheir mobile plug-in architecture; the High-Tech’nocrats (RichardRogers, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Santiago Calatrava) withtheir exposed services on ‘state-of-the-art’ structures; thePoMo campus academics (Philip Johnson, Robert Venturi, MichaelGraves) with their witty neo-classical references for the façadeand; the Deconstructivist rebels (Peter Eisenmann Frank Gehry, DanielLibeskind, Zaha Hadid) with their anti-grid, anti-forms.Essentially, Pre-Industrial values founded on Vitruvianprinciples that architecture = firmness + utility + beauty, were to bereplaced by Industrial society’s rationale architecture = lightness +utility, where beauty became a preoccupation with technology, andthe present Post-Industrial situation being one where architecture =lightness + utility + simulated style of your choice. Universal technology withimproved mobility and the information revolution has little to dowith local culture or cumulative knowledge, ensuring that ‘whenin Rome, you never did what the Romans did…’So what if it’s Greek ?. ‘It’s hardly surprising that theartist’s relation to history has shifted,’writes David Harvey, ‘that in the era of mass television therehas emerged attachment to surfaces rather than roots, to collagethan in-depth work, to super-imposed quoted images rather thanworked surfaces, to a collapsed sense of time and space ratherthan solidly achieved cultural artifact’(03).

Conflicts

However, ‘the times are a changing’ in the west too, wherethe construction industry is looking up from recession. PeterDavey decries both Post-modernism and Deconstructive schools ofarchitectural philosophy which ‘are founded on the proposition

5

that we are powerless to resist the pressures of ephemeralculture, that ethics are meaningless, and we had better get inand swim with the invincible tide, to earn our cash like everyoneelse by forswearing any notions that any activity has a greaterpurpose than gratifying immediate desires and cash flows’ (04).Closer home the structural clarity of R.C.C. has already turnedinto a-la-carte chicken wire-mesh obsessions of pediments,entablatures, columns and other simulated garnishing, in a searchfor order (what Bhatia termed as Punjabi Baroque or Bania Gothic …) ina confused kitsch from bygone eras. Amidst the chaos, SusannahHagan argues that there is little doubt ‘that architecture hasalways borne and continues to bear cultural meaning, that meaningis, in fact, unavoidable – even if all you manage to say is thatthere is no meaning’(05).

Figure 1. The Crisis of Contemporary Chaos © Keshav Gangadhar

Quite unlike the other arts of painting, music or literaturewhich are largely recreational in nature, architecture has alwaysbeen related to the practical needs of shelter and rooted incontext, where space, form and function are married to reflectthe general structure and cultural values of society at any giventime. Just as archaeologists dig up and reveal extantcivilizations of the past, a century hence, they will have to getthrough the garbage of a synthetic culture and plastic bags, tofind what..? One and a half centuries ago, Victor Hugo in ‘TheNotre Dame de Paris’, had foreseen that the Gutenberg press and the‘printed word’ would bury the building, but it appears instead that

6

the mass media might. Painting might have survived the inventionof photography by abandoning realism and becoming introspectivelyabstract, but ever since the 80’s much of architect designedbuilding appears to be equally lost in the woods. Advertisingcame of age along with television, video and the print media andthe combined forces of ‘the visual image’ threaten to drawarchitecture into the vortex of the visual arts. This was alsothe period which saw the demise of the ‘middle class’ groundedparallel cinema movement in tandem with the degeneration ofBollywood music, into plagiarized ‘dabchick’ versions of thedisco beat. Advertising made inroads into cinematic technique,music and literature, evinced by Mani Ratnam movies, A.R.Rehman’s music and Arundhati Roy’s ‘God of Small Things’. If thepainting can be taken off the wall, the television switched offand the printed word returned to the shelf, architecture cannotbe avoided – for you are either in the inside or the outside ofit. If interiors can be created and recreated to carry transientimages susceptible to the fancies of fashion, buildings areslower to create, consume more resources and have longer lifespans or shelf-life. In terms of space and time, the mass mediaand other art forms that are symptomatic of ‘the aesthetic of themoment’ follows the notion of the linear time scale that beganwith Modernism, and is progressively divergent from the cultureof the past. While on the other hand, architecture cannot avoidassimilating the context of site conditions, utilitarianrequirements of space and the hybrid culture of the increasinglyurbane people for whom it is built. Buildings could be defined asan assemblage of materials built with prevailing technologicalskills, put together to shelter as many varied human needs andactivities, as there are cultures and climes. They are symbolswith contexts that are both diverse and plural.

The grandiose town planning scale of Le Corbusier’s utopianRadiant City and Chandigarh or Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia addressedthe perceived population problems of the so-called Third World,through the language of modern industrialized building.Monotonous ‘brise-soleil’ blocks with repetitive floor plans weresuperimposed on street grids for the automobile, as architecturewas to become the ‘machine for living’. If high land values inhigh density urban areas brought high-rise commercial space withexpensive mechanical services (HVAC), residential apartments werestacked in much the same way, resulting in barren and

7

inhospitable public open spaces on the ground and unsocialhousing with ‘streets-in-the-air’. J.G. Ballard’s futuristicnovel ‘High Rise’ portrayed the maniacal breakdown of sociallystratified residents boxed in a forty storey tower, where ‘allthe evidence accumulated over several decades cast a criticallight on the high-rise as a viable social structure. But cost-effectiveness in the area of public housing and highprofitability in the private sector kept pushing these verticaltownships into the sky, against the real needs of the occupants’(06). The most extreme case of this being the demolition of thePruit-Igoe apartments in St.Louis, Missouri, USA, due to crimeand vandalism in 1972.

Beginning as it did with the universal appeal of speeding-up the construction process with the skeleton frame of ‘pilotis’,factory prefabrication and the hypothetically flexible free planwith steel and glass skins, the International Style was consumedby its own rigid methods – an outcome of the rationale of modernscientific progress. Frampton points out how this predispositionbecame formalistic where specified conditions, be they climatic,cultural, political or economic could not support the applicationof advanced lightweight technology (heavyweight in the case oferstwhile Eastern Europe and the USSR). Global concerns havesince moved on to the ‘Post-Industrial Revolution’ and to moreserious issues of our times like sustainable development,population control and poverty to name a few. And if we are tooffer anything of value out of the debris of a civilization thatwas the crucible of much of Oriental philosophy and tradition,then as the Mexican poet Octavio Paz says, ‘we must resist modernrelativism and the deconstruction of reality into nothingness andmoral indifference. Reason must be our guide in this resistance…reason that must be able to criticize itself’ (07).

Critical Regionalism

8

Fig. 2. Sky-rocketing Densitiesfor Skyscrapers © Keshav

Gangadhar

Then what emerges from‘the conflicts of confluence’and the ‘polarities ofplurality’ will be what thearchitectural critic KennethFrampton calls “The Architecture ofResistance” or “Critical regionalism”.Without falling into the trap

of esoteric intellectual-‘isms’and the abstract theorizing ofarchitectural circles, Framptonwill perhaps be best understoodagainst the backdrop of the‘International Style. In as much asthe failure of attempts atindustrializing buildingproduction in most Third Worldcountries, architecture stillhas that intrinsic advantage ofbeing able to resist the forcesof mass media and commodity-consumer culture. Framptonidentifies five polarities ofan ‘Architecture of Resistance’ or‘Critical Regionalism’ that has muchin common with JuhaniPallasmaa’s ‘Six Themes for the nextMillennium’ from his RIBA lecturein 1994. Both postulates arebased on the de-historicizedchaos of much of contemporaryarchitecture, reduced to self-indulgent consumeristiconography or immersed in theextreme globalization oftechnology that is far removedfrom the stable ground ofsocial realities and the largescale environment problems like‘climate change’ being facedtoday. Kenneth Frampton’s

premise is a means of opposing the crisis and compression of‘space-time’ with its fixation on contrived two dimensionalaesthetics. Firstly, by rediscovering the building’s contextualrootedness or cultural identity in ‘place’, rather than as auniversal ‘product’ that is a free-standing, exclusivelytechnical or aesthetic object. Secondly, Frampton argues thatwhile building ‘typologies’ are part of universal civilizationwhich also admits rooted culture, the site-specific ‘topography’accounts for the ecological, climatological and symbolic aspects

9

of any pre-existing environment. Thirdly, the building is notonly constructed as a technological, structural or cosmetictreatment but a built-form that is durable and expressive ‘withregard to the erosive agencies of climate and time.’(08) In thisrespect, Pallasmaa’s RIBA lecture decries the flatness and visualbias of contemporary architecture that is partly due to itstechno-economic requirement for thinness, lightness andtemporality. In order for buildings to regain three-dimensionality, the plasticity in materials and the craft inconstruction have to be revived. Pallasmaa observes that ‘thearchitectural profession at large has turned into a paperprofession that thinks and communicates through lines on paperrather than through bodily and physical participation’ (09), lackof which explains the civil engineer’s ‘on-site’ presence overthe ‘office bound’ architect. Fourthly, Frampton points that wetend to forget ‘how universal civilization, or universaltechnology in the form of modern mechanical services (air-conditioning, artificial lighting, etc.) tends towards theelimination of exactly those features which would otherwiserelate the outer membrane of a given fabric to a particular placeand specific culture’.(08) In this respect the built-form is morea mediatory fabric or environmental filter, that is energyconscious and interactive with diurnal and seasonal variations ofclimate and even social ‘space use’ patterns. Climatology, thatinfluences shading and cooling devices, widow sizes forventilation and illumination levels, wall thicknesses, materialsand roof slopes are some of the building sciences that thoughpart of the curriculum in architecture schools and found in mosttraditional or vernacular building, rarely finds sufficientapplication in practice. Frampton’s fifth point succinctlyaddresses the potential of materials and surfaces to be part ofan overall tactile perception of architecture, beyond just thenarrow visual experience where ‘air movement, acoustics, ambienttemperature and smell, are factors that affect our experience ofspace’. (08) Pallasmaa endorses this view and asserts ‘it is thetask of architecture to provide the stable and reliable groundfor perceiving the world as a continuum of time and culture’.(09)

Contradictions

10

All that theorizing gave me the terra firma to establish myprivate practice in a relatively medium-sized town in Kerala, mystate of origin. In the past 16 years, I have mostly had theopportunity to design residences for nuclear families, where landvalues were low enough for people to be able to inherit or affordto buy. About a decade ago, I began to teach as visiting facultyfor Design Studio from second to final years, in an ISO 9001:2000certified M.E.S. School of Architecture, Kuttipuram, the closestinstitution that I could teach at, still about 3 hours away fromwhere I lived. In effect, I had to travel 6 hours to givecriticisms or crits for 6 hours, something that was only viablewith fortnightly frequency. Until about three years ago, thesudden nationwide trend saw schools of architecture mushroomingacross the Indian landscape, as a viable investment forprofessional education when engineers and even managementgraduates had concurrently saturated the job market. WithinKerala alone, 6 schools of architecture in 2011 had grown to 24by 2014, with 10 more having been approved by the Council ofArchitecture (CoA) to begin by the next academic year, 2015-16.However necessary it is for a quantum increase to address thearchitect: population ratio, the quality of design education isunfortunately paying the price. This for me, ensured morefrequent forays as visiting faculty to at least 2 newinstitutions in Palakkad District in the past two years, where Ibegan to teach Theory of Design and give more regular crits in DesignStudio. A situation that ensured that I could practice what Ipreached. More especially after Rahul Mehrotra validated the roleof an Alternative Practice: Towards Sustainability as a category of modern-day practice in his recently published book Architecture in India: since1990.

An unfortunate development in this period of time wasfurther validation of the ‘globally homogenized’ modernistmovement with minimalist flat roofs (inaccessible and withoutparapets) in lieu of sloping roofs in high rainfall areas likeKerala. This was illustrated in the case of an award of the bestresidential design to an architect with a project as described, fiftyyears after civil engineers had done the same (with usableterraces that had parapets) when RCC made inroads intoconstruction practice. Over the course of time, thesenecessitated steel trusses with G.I./Steel/Aluminium sheets toprevent the ensuing leakage problem that had developed with flatroofs. This was a case of history repeating itself, by a body no

11

less than the Indian Institute of Architects (IIA), Kerala Chapter, in theirannual Award for Excellence in Architecture a couple of years back, evenwhen civil engineers do not find any reason to award themselvesfor blunders they might have committed. Embarrasingly, it wasawarded to an ex-student of mine, who seemed to have been misledhaving taught infrequently @ MES School of Architecture, and whocontinues to receive awards by the same mentioned body ofarchitects till the present day. This laurel went from the fryingpan into the fire; when the same architect’s best residential design inKerala went on to win the national award in the same category,awarded by the national forum of the IIA!. The late, well-knownregionalist Padma Shri Laurie Baker would surely turn in his gravefrom any knowledge of this (to no longer ‘rest-in-peace’) havingadvocated the economical use of local material, labour and thebuilding’s contextual response to site topography, climate andculture for nearly half-a-century of his professional life.Baker’s ‘low-cost’ adaptation of the vernacular sloping roof withR.C.C. ‘Mangalore tile’ infill sloping roofs and the ‘rat trap’ bondwere some of his contextually appropriate and affordableinnovations.

Common Sense

Baker’s Do’s & Don’ts from Cost Cuts for Affordable Housing

As Gautam Bhatia notes,‘In every respect, Baker’swork is in startling contrastto architectural practice inpractically every part of thecountry. Years of colonialrule and the architecture ofCorbusier has effectivelyensured that buildings inpost- independent India havelittle basis in thearchitecture of the past… itis from this climate ofaesthetic uncertainty thatarchitects have sought reliefin decoration and pop-iconography’.(10) LaurieBaker’s terminology ofbuilding or using technologyas the great ‘leveler’ between

12

the disparities of rich andpoor. A widespread applicationof the principles he hasevolved are universallyapplicable for any type ofbuilding anywhere in India.Baker’s principles andideologies were influenced byhis chance encounter with

Mahatma Gandhi, and naturallyproduce an architecture thatis modern in its purest sense:having simple and minimalconstruction and utilizingonly those materials that areavailable in proximity andabsolutely essential for

enclosure (10). Little wonder that his methods for building wereadopted by the Government of India proposal to spread the craftand technology of his cost-effectiveness through setting up NirmithiKendras or Building Centres in every district of the country. Oreven the introduction of an elective in the IIIrd year of theArchitecture course in University of Calicut’s syllabus in Cost-Effective Technology in Building Construction, which I now teach as well.Baker’s views on the need for a frugal vernacular architecturevalidate that ’there’s no oil, our forests are already denuded ofwood; we have coal reserves only for another 30 years and withthis high-tech stuff, nobody has been able to come up withsolutions that are energy conscious both in the production ofmaterials, and how they are assembled.’(11) As he adds, ’perhapsspeed has been one of the major contributing factors leading tothat catastrophic break with tradition. It probably took athousand years for us to find out how to make a mud wallimpervious to rain and wind, another thousand years to learn howto keep termites out of it and another two or three thousandyears to learn how to build multi-storeyed mud buildings. Now‘developed communications’ has taken the ‘wonder material’ to allcorners of the earth, and we have succumbed to it like childrenfalling upon a dish of instant hot cakes’(12) or instant noodlesif you wish ? There are parallels between the work of LaurieBaker, John Turner in Latin America and that of the Egyptianarchitect Hassan Fathy, the latter having resurrected mud as aviable modern material and promoted traditional crafts andskills. Next door, there’s the work of Geoffrey Bawa, who wasvery rooted in the vernacular traditions of Sri Lanka. JosephAllen Stein, the American architect who practiced from Delhiobserved almost three decades ago how ‘regional identity can onlygrow out of an environmental context. The basic orientation inSchools of Architecture has been wrong. Too much emphasis andattention is paid to so-called ‘originality’ and too little paid

13

to research. Schools should be developing local regionalvocabularies through research. For example, there should be aschool for mountain architecture, one for desert architecture,and so on’. (13) As Aishwarya Tipnis observes,’ the yellowsandstone havelis along the streets in Jaisalmer, the floatinghouseboats of Kashmir, the bamboo construction in Bengal andAssam, are all architectural masterpieces and provide distinctiveidentity to a place. Every region therefore has evolved anarchitecture that is a unique combination that is a response tothe climate, imaginative use of local materials, resources,technology, traditional knowledge and skills, religious andsocial customs, and represents the way of life through collectiveexperience of generations’(14). Most of vernacular architectureneeds to be systematically documented by proliferating schools ofarchitecture for posterity, since they have evolved as responsesto locally available materials, crafts, climate and culture.While at the other end of the spectrum – there is computer-aideddesign software that seamlessly integrates energy-efficient,active and passive tools in the design process. It then is aquestion of adapting a design pedagogy that acknowledges the roleof real hands-on craftsmanship with head and heart as much as virtual,state-of-the-art simulation software.

In conclusion, if Goethe the German philosopher calledarchitecture frozen music and if great architecture evokestimelessness and contemplative silence, can we say thatcontemporary architecture celebrates these qualities? Does itmanifest values that express beauty in the cognitive human scaleor enrich the environment in harmony with natural, socio-economic, technological and cultural contexts? Do architects showenough social responsibility to address these contemporarycontradictions and serve larger economic groups than just the‘financial crust’ or 2-10% of the Indian Diaspora that can affordthem? Will the sensibilities of vernacular architecture evolvedthrough centuries of trial and error ‘for the people, by the peopleand of the people’ traditionally, find expression in sustainableand equitable habitats bridging the haves with the have-nots, elsewe be damned for it, because – don’t mind please, what to do: weare like this only ?. In which case, Common Sense has now becomefashionably uncommon or rather unfashionable.

14

References:

01. Norma Evenson, 1989, The Indian Metropolis: A View Towards the West, YaleUniversity Press.

02. Paul Ricoeur, 1961, Universal Civilization & National Cultures.

03. David Harvey, 1990, The Condition of Post Modernity, Blackwell,Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.

04. Peter Davey, 1994, Materiality & Resistance, The ArchitecturalReview.

05. Susannah Hagan, 1994, Whatever happened to Regionalism?, TheArchitectural Review.

06. J.G. Ballard, 1975, High Rise, Jonathan Cape.

07. Octavio Paz Interviewed by Nathan Gardels, 1993, Time withoutMeasure, Times of India.

08. Kenneth Frampton, 1986, “Place, Form & Cultural Identity”from Design after Modernism, Ed. John Thackara, Thames & Hudson,U.K.

09. Juhani Pallasmaa, 1994, Six Themes for the next Millennium, TheArchitectural Review.

10. Gautam Bhatia, 1991, Laurie Baker - Life, Work, Writings, Penguin BooksIndia (P) Ltd.

11. Gautam Bhatia, 1987, Baker in Kerala, The Architectural Review.

12. Laurie Baker, 1986, ‘Is a Modern Indian Architecture Possible?’, SpazioSocieta, Milan.

13. Viewpoints on Architectural Education: Excerpts from ResearchInterviews, conducted over Dec. 1984-June 1985, Architecture InIndia, Edited by Raj Rewal, Jean-Louis Véret and Ram Sharma.Catalogue of exhibition held at École Nationale Supérieure desBeaux-Arts de Paris, 1985-86. Paris and Milan: ElectaMoniteur, 1985.

14. Aishwarya Tipnis, 2012, Vernacular Traditions, Contemporary Architecture,The Energy Research Institute (TERI), New-Delhi.