Reflections on architecture—Its meaning and purpose

The book "Listening to Stillness", a compilation of transcribed lectures and conversations of Prof. Neelkanth Chhaya on architecture, put together with loving care by team Akarmaa, is a wellspring of critical and reflective thinking, brilliant insights and plural world views about the discourse and its practice.

- P VENUGOPAL

The book "Listening to Stillness", a compilation of transcribed lectures and conversations of Prof. Neelkanth Chhaya on architecture, put together with loving care by team Akarmaa, is a wellspring of critical and reflective thinking, brilliant insights and plural world views about the discourse and its practice. His talks are qualified by reverence for human life, nature, our planet, Gandhian ideals and a passionate inquiry into how architecture can subtly mediate these realms and concerns and celebrate our existence.

Prof. Chhaya's talks, informed by existential, social and ecological consciousness, locate the goals for architectural discourse and its practice in an expansive canvas of moral and ethical responsibility.

In the preface to the book, Prof. Chhaya critiques the prevalent rational worldview, which he explains considers nature, our planet, all materials and resources as objects for human consumption, and writes, "Our world system, arising out of these colonizing, extractive, exploitative and consumerist outlooks, is set for ecological disasters, which we are in the midst of." In contrast, he points to learning from biotic ecosystems that he explains invariably follow not a linear but a circular process of absorption, use and waste.

Against this backdrop, explaining Aldo Van Eyck's profound observation, "Architecture need do no more, nor should it ever do less, than assist man's homecoming", Prof. Neelkanth Chhaya writes, "Feeling at home perhaps arises out of a sense of being at rest, of being at peace, of being relaxed and in harmonious relationship with the world". He further writes, "In consequence, architecture works with the poetry of interconnectedness" and continues, "Architecture can make the unpredictable and ever-surprising play of material, light, sound, texture and smell remind us of the wonder of existence."