Beyond Pretty Things

As the Indian academic year sets rolling for another annual cycle, it is always an occasion for one to begin thinking about the broader field of practice.

- Kaiwan Mehta

We educate students to become architects so that they can enter the profession and practice, as well as participate and contribute therein. However, the relationship between education and practice is more nuanced, vexed and complicated than that; education is surely not, and cannot be, subservient to practice. But often practitioners are heard grumbling loudly about how education is inadequate and does not give a readymade product — a person who from day one at the workplace can deliver all necessary tasks perfectly. And then there is the debate on whether we produce products that can fit offices, or whether we make thinkers who will hopefully, someday, contribute to the wider field of architecture. The problem is in the imagined divorce between skill and thought — not only at the level of the schools and colleges but also at the level of practice. A similar problem exists when we imagine books, journals, publications, exhibitions, colloquia, and public discussions on architecture as separate, or worse, as subservient, to practice. The former forms of practice are as much sites of production as the normative arena of practice — that of building-designing and -making. As much as the central task remains that of building production — a building is produced in brick, mortar, and steel, and concrete, as much as it is produced in discourse, the recent discourse on conservation, especially that of Modern or 20th-century structures in India, in the wake of the demolition of the buildings in Pragati Maidan, fails to understand that it is not about History as much as it is about the contemporary imagination of architecture practice today in India. Architecture in today’s times is so relegated to the world of lifestyle and intricate detailing, and falsely celebrates craft as poetic ski