Building the Future

At the company I'm working, I'm helping train four young people, three 'ladies' and one man. On the second or third day here, they asked me what my favorite thing about India was so far. I don't know if I quite answered their question, but I told them how I was interested in their architecture.

The buildings are interesting; I haven't figured out what I mean yet. It's really a second-world situation, where many unique or interesting-looking buildings are, when you get close to them, more facsimiles or imitations of the Modern - high technology in looks pitched together with duct tape and rusting iron. Peel back the glass and metal-paneled skin and you will find hand-kilned bricks and hand-poured concrete casts.

A current popular style, whether office building, hotel, apartment complex or school, resembles a sort of mid-century Art Moderne: Clean lines with clearly delineated geometric shapes for detailing, usually around the entries (triangles, circles, trapezoids), assymmetrically-placed square windows, an emphasis on the horizontal, with flat roofs and parapets or cornices with geometric shapes cut into them like swiss cheese.

At first I thought these buildings with their dingy and spackled concrete were holdovers from the 1950s and 1960s, only to see cornerstones with dates within the last ten years. Evidence of both India's explosive economic growth and its sub-tropic weather, a nearly new building appears moldy and cracks as if it has existed at least fifty years in no time at all.

I'm fascinated by the construction - which is everywhere. Teams of workers work the rebars by hand to create a shell of columns, floors and ceilings, and stairs. It takes them a long time to do, and they work from sun-up to sun-down, all seven days. Columns and walls are held by metal and those are also made to fit by hand. THen they hand-pour the concrete, and smooth it into place and let it dry for several days. Ceilings are held in place by tree-twigs, so thickly placed as to create its own impenetrable thicket. Scaffoldings, too, are of the flimsiest-looking, top-heavy and imbalanced limbs, held by twine.

Once the concrete sets, the concrete infrastructure is filled with brick. Brick wraps the concrete columns, fill the interior walls, and but for windows, fills the exterior walls between the floors. Building materials give off the feeling of perpetual damp - the concrete never fades from a dark grey and the bricks look a wet red.

Over the top goes the 'skin' - concrete or stucco skim. I'm particularly fascinated by the corporate headquarter buildings - how a bulky bunker of a building can transform into an airy confection by adding a glass, enamelled-panel and brightly-painted skin.

Being in this outlying village that is transforming itself overnight into a Silicon Valley, I haven't seen the type of urban proverty you read about India having since leaving Mumbai. By American standards, great proverty exists here too, but the shacks made from corrugated metal with earth floors and no water and surrounded by piles of stinking garbage are populated by the hordes of construction workers and their families. When I watch the men carrying by hand pails of wet concrete up the stairs, women squat by pyramids of bricks around the foundation of the future headquarters, tin cooking pots buried in twig fires, children chasing each other nearby.

"When we have asked others what their favorite things was about India," says one of folks, "They always mention the mountains. They did not mention the architecture." And they look at each other as if they think me odd. Which is probably true.