Emerging Exchanges: New Architectures of India
April 30, 2009 – May 1, 2009
India’s architectural and urban landscape is being remade in unexpected and exuberant ways at this defining moment in its history. New economic growth, proliferation of media technologies, transnational modes of production, as well as new state and social dynamics are presenting challenges to the entrenched traditions and extraordinary diversity of India. Modern architecture in India, represented by the seminal practices of Balkrishna Doshi, Charles Correa, Raj Rewal and others have long been on a world stage, however the present moment is marked by new ideological and ideational shifts away from early modernist positions. The Delhi/Ahmedabad axis has moved east and south to Mumbai and Bangalore, which now includes a new generation of architects, both Indian and international, who are involved in a diverse range of practices and productions that are re-imagining entrenched histories of both modernities and traditions. Centrifugal and centripetal dynamics characterizes contemporary practices where many architects look to balance global and transnational imperatives as well as more situated approaches to building. The circulation of these inward and outward movements has resulted in both the glittering towers that reproduce the Special Economic Zones of Shanghai or Dubai as an enclave in a landscape of contested territories and economic disparities. At the same time, some architects are engaged in emplaced material practices related to landscape, siting, local building fabrication, and programming, which has led to reconsidering new regionalisms and the informal sector.
The Architectural League of New York, the India China Institute and Parsons The New School for Design plan a two-day conference to probe these material economies and territorial intersections in Indian architecture today. These circuits and realignments will be examined by keynote speakers, project presentations and interdisciplinary panels in order to present a body of emerging architectural practices, while unraveling the forces of the larger cultural and social dynamics that these projects generate, concentrate and disperse.