Making Places, Not Buildings

S.P.A Design could well represent a set of younger studios in India that have achieved a sizeable amount of built projects and reached a measure of maturity, working through times of economic boom as well as uncertain geographies and unclear landscapes. To review such a body of work through detailed drawings and sketches, photos and notes, is akin to researching an archive of the contemporary. The exhibition presents the contemporary in architecture — in its built and breathing avatar, as flesh and blood of our times. Architecture as mode and style appears scattered in the current context, but in exhibitions such as these, the strands can actually help us weave a story, even if only a provisional or limited one for now. Photos Amit Pasricha

 

NOTE ON THE EXHIBITION

The mode of production of architecture is never disconnected from geography. Despite global design corporations pretending to be able to construct anything anywhere, India has been ambiguous if not reluctant to this new kind of technical colonisation that comes with the globalisation of architecture. In a place where times are multiple, the idea of progress is complex and conflictual. India has allowed separate streams of technology to coexist, a unique generosity; laissez-faire too, that makes it so peculiar.