contemporary museum for architecture in india
domus 16
March 2013
A portrait of the architect as an immigrant As an outsider, Karl Malte von Heinz remarkably interpreted the labyrinth of culture through the kaleidoscope of a free pluralistic society — conceiving an architecture specific to a ‘new’ situation and far removed from contextual trappings
Text & Images
Suprio Bhattacharjee This spread: Jamia Middle School Buildings, New Delhi
Driving by the retreating monolith of the Viceroy’s Palace on the way to New Delhi’s Connaught Place in the early-November haze can be a vastly disorienting urban experience. As one approaches the hulking mass of Kuldip Singh’s iconic Pallika Kendra building, its impenetrable grimness can be foreboding. The dulled-out sun’s reach cannot enliven this tired, alien hull. Concurrent, though yes, more dramatic than precedents elsewhere1 , this building stands as a sentinel to a delusional vision of the future — a monumentally vacuous dream that is at odds with a disturbing urban reality. I watch this building, unmoved. The earlier days were spent at the architectural creations of Karl Malte von Heinz, which straddle across both the colonial and post-independence periods. The November haze had already been a constant companion by then. The sunlight was dull too. But the buildings were alive. Their mysterious affability and exuberance bear testimony to another vision, but one that (still) can be representative, actually, of where we stand today, as a nation, and where we come from. My journey culminated fittingly at the buildings of the Jamia Middle School2 , and like Walter Benjamin’s vivid account of the angel in Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, this complex throws its viewers into the future by contemplating the past.3 As narrated previously4 , one sees the wide amplitude of Heinz’s work immediately. His work raises a number of valid and intriguing questions. This essay seeks to gain an insight into the works of this significant 20th-century Indian architect. The Immigrant Heinz came to India, perhaps in the late 1920s, and established an early reputation by building a number of significant residences for the bourgeoisie and the Nawabs. Of Germanic5 origin, he subsequently became a naturalised Indian. A sense of freedom as an immigrant allowed him to conceive of architecture specific to a ‘new’ situation, as an ‘outsider’, far removed from contextual trappings. This would have enabled him to view the country’s architectural heritage in an unbiased and delightfully new way. As an Anglo-Saxon he must not have been removed from the influence of the politically-motivated and socially-driven 'liberated' architectures conceived there in the early part of the century6 leading him to deeply empathise with the socio-political currents in the Indian subcontinent. Shaping a body of work Prof S M Akhtar describes Heinz’s work as ‘experimental’ and ‘versatile’.7 Indeed his work is free from dogma and the compulsions of ‘era’. Stylistic precedents are never mimicked and neither are his works mere facsimiles. Appropriateness seemingly came from an assertion of a certain cultural influence — and his architecture became a mise en scène — for each context gave rise to a performance of events to be conducted under the watchful gaze of his buildings. 84
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A portrait of the architect as an immigrant I Plans of West End twin house showing traces of marks made during the construction process. Note the thickened and inflected walls
Suprio Bhattacharjee
II A view of the staircase in West End twin house. One of the beguiling ‘grotto’ spaceswalls
III & V Faculty of Education, 1940s. Sunny, light-filled entrance hallway in an unmistakably Art-Deco manner. Notice the impossibly twisted newel post finished in terrazzo
domus 16 IV Pataudi Palace. The ascent culminates in a bridge leading to an open-to-sky colonnade through which the landscape beyond becomes visible
VI Pakistan High Commission, late-1950s. Blue-tiled central ‘fantasy dome’ as seen through the Delhi haze with its fluted base and triangular motifs
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VII Pataudi Palace, 1930s. As glimpsed through the trees — a layered form surrounded by verandahs
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This necessitated a specificity of architectural language the sources of which could be diverse — whether the urge for a vision of national integrity by referencing the country’s vast historic building culture within a decisively modern and ‘syncretic’ construct (the Jamia), an exploration in a region’s geography (the Deori Mahdi Nawaz Jung in Hyderabad8), or the representation of identity through an inferred and fantasised iconographic syntax (the Vatican and Pakistan embassies). But these were not ‘duplitectures’9 or mere copycat constructions. The Heinz Grammar By no means was Heinz a Taxonomist’s delight, as the 'hand of the architect' is not really visible — representing a lack of superficial ‘style' — as such each project can be seen as a studied engagement with a situation. Heinz’s works are distinctly anti-monumental despite their immense presence. The buildings are ground-hugging and nonintrusive — one may miss the Jamia from the street. The West End single residence has an intimate scale and a fragmented nature akin to European townhouses — now consumed by an overgrown Bougainvillea. There is a humane-ness of scale in his embassy buildings as well — which are barely noticeable from the street. Other than its blue dome and chhatris, no other aspect of the Pakistan embassy is visible. His buildings also offer intriguing ways of connecting the inside and the outside, through the inclusion of the verandah device (the Pataudi), or in many cases “by the old tradition of enclosed and contrasted inside space”10 – such that “the inside is different from the outside.”11 As described in my earlier essay, the engagement with the inside often comes as unexpected and of surprise, and makes for a riveting spatial drama. In that sense, a thickened wall (the poché space) serves the same function as a verandah — allowing for the perception of an outside that is distinctly different from the inside.12 The architectural promenade assumes importance — each work encompasses an experiential journey, and for Heinz, these become some of the most dramatic spatial entities offering surprise and anticipation.13 Each journey leads to the presence of landscape — ending at an ‘in-between’ condition — a verandah (the Vatican Embassy), a terrace (the West End houses), or an open-to-sky colonnade atop the building (the Pataudi). Within this promenade, the ‘grotto’ assumes significance. At the Vatican, the journey commences from a narrow entranceway, inflected into the building in the manner of the Baroque. At both the West End houses, the journey leads one through a set of such ‘compressed’ spaces. The Pataudi’s dramatic ‘promenade architecturale’ loops
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the experiencer through a series of spatial enclosures of intense contrast — there is a moment when one suspects the staircase just hasn’t enough headroom. Of course all these gestures masterfully choreograph a succession of spaces of diminutive scale and explosive volume. There is no doubt that Heinz enjoyed making the mundane routine of transition an exciting affair. Many works allude to classical influences — the axial, symmetrical plan at times (the Jamia, the TTI14 , the embassy buildings) or the ‘pavilion in the landscape’ (the Jamia, the Pataudi, the West End twin house — which has a free plan with inflected ‘Baroque’ walls that amplify the spatial experience of the interior). Materials and textures play an important role — the stucco plaster of the West End houses and the Pakistan Embassy, the unmistakable trademark terrazzo floors to achieve a continuous unbroken horizontal surface in all his projects, or the masterful brick surfaces of the Jamia. Certain buildings belie the advanced construction techniques used (for their time and context) — reinforced brick in the Jamia buildings and the precast concrete blocks of the TTI building. Another recurring trademark is the distinct fireplace. Ornamentation appears in inexplicable flourishes from sources that can be vaguely discerned, but in a discreet manner that dissolves within the overall perceptual effect. A lexicon of iconography evolves for each project that is not in the manner of flaccid eclecticism or mere decorative scenography15 but rather an attempt to connect each building to a specific cultural source within a decontextualised urban vacuum — such that each building can be seen not “disconnected but, rather, contaminated with culture.”16 For Heinz, each building had a semiotic function through the mechanism of the ornament, although this may be confused with the intellectualised “mask determined a priori to create specific meanings.”17 The key difference is the nature of making: Heinz’s architecture stems from the visceral and intuitive, and hence allows for a multiplicity of connotations and inferences. This is also true of motifs such as jaalis and chhatris. In the courtyard of the Jamia, a pair of diminutive chhatris stretches one’s gaze upward from within the small space. In the Pakistan Embassy, the chhatri emphasises each corner, in a traditional manner. There is also evidence of discreet craftsmanship in the wrought iron work and timber detailing. Heinz and our contentious ‘modern’ history There are many questions which arise upon witnessing Heinz’s oeuvre. One of them concerns the need for his wider ‘inclusion’ in India’s 20th century architectural history. An enduring VII
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A portrait of the architect as an immigrant
Suprio Bhattacharjee
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problem with history concerns taxonomy. Heinz’s work makes a classification and qualification into the existing ‘silos’ difficult. Free from being a stylistic ‘creator’ with a visually identifiable parti, his works cannot harmonise into extant academic discourses. Another concerns the question of the ‘canonical’ building. The problem with most historical overviews on Indian architecture is the lopsided focus on grand gestures and symbolic monuments. This is evidenced in the scant attention, for instance, paid to domestic architectures of the period — the Viceroy's Palace by Lutyens is, for obvious reasons then, an exception, built in an imperialist hybrid style to fulfil a political agenda of apparent ‘native inclusion’ to appease a dissenting populace. Our sense of history itself becomes ‘colonised’ — as an extension our definition of the ‘canonical’ from that period is rarely re-framed. The Jamia buildings are neither patronising, nor could they be seen as vehicles of a ruling political propaganda. They were distinctly anti-colonial in their stance. In the growing Hindu nationalist sentiment that began in the pre-colonial years (and found favour with the British administration), a ‘quizzical’ and unfamiliar building within a perceived ‘Islamic Institution’18 that seemed to disregard any reference to architectural puritanism of any sort, too, must have seemed at odds with most historians and postindependence reviewers19. Another specific concern is the broad absence of the Jamia in discourses on the country’s ‘modern‘ architecture. This ties in with more significant debates on the very definitions of ‘modern’ and ‘indigenous’ and their association with building culture in our country. 88
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Modernism in Indian architecture is oft wrongly considered to be a post-independence occurrence20, when Nehruvian ideals found their imported manifestation in Corbusier’s Chandigarh and his many imitators. Though in retrospect, these Brutalist monuments echo deafeningly with borrowed voices and derived syntax, one that stems from an ideological position of enforcing a historical amnesia in the hope of fast-forwarding to a technological, machinist and egalitarian future. While this may have found favour with Nehru’s vision of an urban and industrialised nation, it stood at great odds with the cultural and social reality of the situation. In a post-colonial nation already suffering a rupture in cultural evolution and an edited historiography, Modernism and its imported value-system came as another blanket of intellectual colonisation, and often instigated knee-jerk attempts at reclaiming a ‘past’ through revivalist gestures or a ‘romanticised’ modernism — as can be seen in the Ashoka Hotel with its overscaled Rajasthani and Mughal-inspired features pasted on an otherwise ‘modernist’ box. Perhaps what the above discussion indicates is a necessity to reframe an understanding of our own history and its application to our present. This is valid even for our post-global situation. This would mean a complete revisiting of the lens through which we view architecture in our own country as well as an investigation into our understanding of ‘Indian-ness’. Pioneering an alternative argument for the future “. . . whether or not India was, is or ever will become a cohesive cultural entity, depends on the differences and similarities in the
I Pataudi Palace. An ethereal whitewashed ‘pavilion in the landscape’ II House, Hyderabad, 1936. The heavy influence of ArtDeco is evident. (used under permission from the MIT Dome Archives) III, V & VI Jamia Middle School Buildings, New Delhi IV The stark, crisp exterior of the late-1960s West End twin house. The original stucco plaster is in fine condition. There is a trace of the Rationalism prevalent in the international debate during the 1960s
cultures of the people who have inhabited the sub-continent for centuries […] So is India Indian? It’s a tough question. Let’s just say we’re an ancient people learning to live in a recent nation.”21 Does ‘modern’ necessarily imply an exclusion of anything that is perceived as ‘indigenous’? Heinz’s architecture can be seen as attempts to deal with a nation’s vast architectural heritage — something greatly overlooked and sidelined in post-independent India. In an ‘either-or’ discourse of the modern and the indigenous there is always a conflict. But if we evolve to a ‘both-and’ argument, the subsequent understandings are much richer and one aims at a cultural continuity. A ‘modern’ India meant an inclusive, heterogeneous, secular and free nation, mindful of its past richness and regardful of its place within an international debate. Heinz’s architecture, whether in the Jamia, the Pataudi or the embassies of the Vatican and Pakistan urge us to adopt a worldview that is inclusive and is accepting of difference. In that sense it stands as an anti-thesis to modernist ideals of exclusion and historical rejection. But this does not in any sense lead to a ‘nostalgia’ — rather it becomes a tool to reconcile conflicting positions and ensure their co-existence within the same framework of inclusivity by treating each value equally, without any one ever overshadowing the other. In a sense one could say that though his lens was European, his buildings can be viewed as having a ‘multi-local’ response — thus leading to a vocabulary that is specific and true to that instance — a kind of implied authenticity. The language of diversity Heinz’s work can be seen as reflective of the immense diversity of the country’s cultural influences as well as their heterogeneous nature. As an outsider, Heinz remarkably interpreted the labyrinth of culture through the kaleidoscope of a free pluralistic society. In this worldview, buildings resonate with influences that are as much ‘modern’ as they stem from an attempt to engage with a vast treasure-trove of root ideas to find a suitable language. And that language cannot be singular — but that of diversity — perhaps what he saw fit for a country of such extraordinary cultural richness - and which, post-independence was under the threat of being 'homogenised' by an imported imagery of aspirational modernist values — that was at odds with the reality of society post-independence. In many ways, Heinz’s architecture is reflective of ‘the difficult unity through inclusion rather than the easy unity through exclusion.’22 — Suprio Bhattacharjee Architect
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In this concluding episode of the two-part feature on Karl Malte von Heinz, we further investigate the body of this architect's work exploring its status and position in the context of architecture history in twentieth century India. When the architect responds to what s/he sees around her/him and the specific context of the project without bothering about the larger themes that history and professional debates demand, or rather expect, s/he runs the risk of falling through the cracks. In an attempt to notate the work of Heinz and insert its presence in the larger narrative of history, it in fact makes us much more aware of the atmospheres and its nuances, and the various ideas that exist in a historical period and the ways in which architecture can possibly exist. The themes of monumentality, ornamentation and style need to be thought through once again when a body of work deals with it fairly differently, than the expected production in the contemporary period. The values associated with classification of architectural objects and practices are not generous, and they select through pre-determined ideas often, rather than developing the signification-system based on the struggles of practice. This section itself is a space for teasing out signification-systems and the relationships architectural (and other) objects share with time and history-writing processes, and to think through objects rather than defined system protocols, or values. — KM
For instance, Chicago’s First National Plaza (now the Chase Tower) began construction a year before the Pallika Kendra (or the NDCC New Delhi Civic Centre) was conceived. The NDCC uncannily shares the same base and top width dimensions as the Chase Tower, strongly indicating its derivative nature 2 Henceforth, I shall refer to the Jamia Middle School buildings as ‘the Jamia’ 3 Also quoted in Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (Thames & Hudson, London, 4th ed. 2007); 8 4 See 'The Heinz Oeuvre', Domus India, January 2013 5 Dr Omar Khalidi and Dr Margit Franz, 'Karl Malte von Heinz: Austrian Architect in India,' Architecture & Interiors 23 (2009): 92-95 6 One can trace influences — the Secessionists (particularly the work of Joseph Maria Olbrich), the Expressionists (the work of Michel de Klerk) and to some extent Art Nouveau besides of course the streamlined formalist refinement of Art Deco. An interesting, if more conservative influence can be seen in Peter Behrens’ doricist German Embassy, St. Petersburg, 1912 7 Conversation with Dr S M Akhtar, Dean of Jamia Milia Islamia University’s Faculty of Architecture and Ekistics, on 31 October 2012 8 See the mention of ‘Kohistan’ in my earlier article 9 See ‘Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China,’ Bianca Bosker, University of Hawaii Press, 2013 10 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1966); 70 11 Juan Antonio Cortes, Building the Mould of Space, in El Croquis No.154. This insightful essay uses various readings from history, including that of Robert Venturi, to propose ideas on space creation 1
Ibid See 'The Heinz Oeuvre', Domus India, January 2013 14 Refers to the Faculty of Education building at the Jamia University 15 See Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (Thames & Hudson, London, 4th ed. 2007); 292-293 for an understanding of Post-Modernism of the 1970s-80s, much later than Heinz 16 See Farshid Moussavi and Michael Kubo, The Function of Ornament (Actar, Barcelona, 2006); 5-9 17 Ibid 18 The Jamia Milia was originally conceived as a secular institution 19 See 'The Heinz Oeuvre', Domus India, January 2013 20 Antonin Raymond’s exceptional Golconde Ashram was built in Pondicherry in 1935 (then part of ‘French India’) — a manifestation of the architect’s brilliant vision of western Modernism tempered by eastern (here Japanese) spatial thinking — though in a cultural and sociopolitical context removed from British India. I refer to ‘Modernism’ here as a product of ‘objectivity’ derived from the manifesto of the International Style and its predecessor, ‘Die Neue Sachlichkeit’ and on its emphasis on an ‘unsentimental approach to the nature of society’ — to quote historian Kenneth Frampton. What this implies was a thorough rejection of the past, of historic building cultures and the values that they bring 21 Arundhati Roy, The Algebra of Infinite Justice (London, HarperCollins, 2002); 25–26. Quoted in Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism by Peter Morey and Alex Tickell (New York, Rodopi, 2005); ix 22 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1966); 88 12 13
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