Building a legacy

Apologies for ignoring this blog. Have been swamped with work with very little time to do some exclusive blog writing. Will try and be more consistent now onwards. Below is a Q&A with the eminent Delhi architect Raj Rewal who's left his unique mark on contemporary Delhi. Read on:

As a young boy in Hoshiarpur village in pre-Independence India, Raj Rewal loved drawing. In a few years, his meandering sketches grew into comic strips for Shankar’s Weekly, a journal of political cartoons. Fifty years later, Rewal’s further sketches have produced some of Delhi’s most prominent buildings, including the Asian Games Village, the State Trading Corporation and the Parliament Library. This  fortnight, the India International Centre will screen Resonance: Raj Rewal and Tradition, a film shot by Rewal’s filmmaker son Manu, centred on the construction of the Parliament Library. Rewal talks to Time Out about Delhi’s architecture and working with builders who are “architecturally illiterate”.

What’s fascinating about your work is the unconventional, striking shapes of some buildings. How do you design those projects?

All our buildings or design projects are related to a context. The Hall of Nations [at Pragati Maidan] was built to commemorate the 25th anniversary of India’s independence. It was 1972, I was very young and I wanted to project the idea of intermediate technology… that we could do a lot with our own labour, use concrete and similar material, and create a building which, at 256 ft, was one of the largest span structures in the world at that time. When model was shown to Mrs Gandhi, she was very quiet. Later, Ms [Pupul] Jayakar explained that the reason she didn’t express herself was that if she liked it, the bureaucracy would go on and on about it, and if she didn’t, they’d run me down.


After studying in Paris, what was it like beginning your practice in Delhi?

The context here is very different. When I returned, we were not an industrialised country. We had to find our own idiom and grammar of design, which incorporates what is theoretically possible with what can be implemented by our own means. I used a lot of stone because we have brilliant stone-workers. Nobody had used stone much before I began doing it.

Have architects since developed an Indian idiom of design and do they pay a lot of attention to context?

[Chuckles] Well, some of them are sensitive enough to our own situation. We have temperatures rising right up to 45 degrees, so it’s absurd to make buildings all glass – that too in a way that the cost of air-conditioning increases four-fold. So there are those architects, particularly younger ones under international influence, who make bad copies of bad architecture. But there are also those who are interested in finding a vocabulary suitable to our climate.

How do you incorporate the cultural ethos of the city in your work when you design a building or public area?

You know, Delhi is a very lucky city because it has great historical buildings and Mughal architecture. I lived in front of Humayun’s Tomb for around ten years, so it seeped into me. My work, in a way, is influenced and inspired by it [Mughal architecture], but it doesn’t copy it. It’s not a pastiche, ki vahaan se utha kar vahaan laga diya [you lifted it from here and pasted it there]. But it carries it further in different directions to suit different requirements. The World Bank building at Lodhi Road is next to Lodhi Gardens, so it carries the theme forward but doesn’t look like it. It’s the essence I’m after, not a cheap  copy.

What do you mean by the “essence of Mughal architecture,”?

I would say it’s geometrically very balanced. It’s built around courtyards, gardens, etcetera and that’s what I’d like to carry forward.

You designed government buildings through the ’70s and ’80s. Were you given a free hand to do your own thing or was there interference from the government?

Things were much better at that time, because the Government of India awarded work only to Indian architects. The projects were awarded based on architecture competitions, mostly judged by our peers and seniors. So it was architects assessing the work of others. This process was carried to the implementation stage, which wasn’t always great, but at least they wouldn’t interefere with the design ideas. Frankly, even with the Parliament library there was no interference. The then Speaker Shivraj Patil just said it should be in harmony with what we [the MPs] are doing, and that was that.

Nowadays, a lot of work is done through promoters and builders who are architecturally illiterate. Their main aim is to make fast money, so they don’t cater to architectural values. There’s been a transition from architect’s architecture to promoter’s architecture. 


Photo Courtesy: Shiv Ahuja


A version of this first appeared in the TimeOut Delhi magazine.