Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai Read online

  professional field itself re-scaled the undertaking so as to render it more legible to institutions whose principles of value and indicators of merit clashed with

  what Yehuda called RSIEA’s “culture.” With legibility came new layers of scrutiny, potential sanction, and frictions between an idealized, integrated learning domain and the regulatory structures that extended from the political economic context

  beyond Rachana Sansad.

  • • •

  Many RSIEA faculty members brought to that moment a shared, decades-long

  history of creating and operationalizing their vocational curricular mission.

  Udyavar Yehuda’s reference to “devotion” captured a prevalent characteristic of

  their interactive mode as colleagues and as teachers. Many were also constant

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  The Integrated Subject 35

  col aborating practitioners and close personal friends. Their work together was

  often organized in professional terms, but also functioned between with the many

  textures of sociality: close friendships, shared projects, and the ubiquitous shared mission made it difficult to regard RSIEA faculty as simply a collection of environmental architecture teachers. Indeed, at times these social textures could be

  accurately framed as quietly political—a kind of professionalized, but tempered,

  environmental activism.

  In addition to teaching, a subgroup of RSIEA faculty worked as practitioners

  under the auspices of the Institute’s Research and Design Cel . 17 On a day spent walking the urban landscape together in the Matunga neighborhood of Mumbai,

  Yehuda remarked to me that between teaching together and working on projects

  together, the faculty was “practical y like family.” 18 In a separate meeting months before, she’d mentioned with pride that India’s Outlook magazine had recently ranked Rachana Sansad fifth among architecture academies in India. What made

  RSIEA completely distinctive, she told me then, was its faculty and their extraor-

  dinary commitment to the subject and the mission. “We work together in every

  way,” she said at that time; “We’re like a functioning family. ”19

  Many faculty members repeated strains of this sentiment; the shared mission

  reinforced the quality of the personal and professional relationships through

  which it was enacted. Their devotion to the integrated subject reflected an inte-

  grated subjectivity, albeit in a different register. At the same time, we rarely spoke of the few faculty members who joined the faculty during my research but decided

  to leave. That they existed reminds us that the interpersonal and professional affinity, and the standards of “devotion” and commitment were neither automatical y

  desirable nor universal y possible to meet.

  • • •

  But how and when does one move from the more bounded category of a quali-

  fied teacher of some aspect of environmental architecture into the “totalizing” life-world of RSIEA’s “integrated” subjectivity? When I asked the Program Head when

  she first began to sense that for her, environmental architecture would transcend

  a simple job, she traced her response to a single figure from her past. Decades earlier, Yehuda had worked with an organization headed by the Indian environmental

  activist Rashmi Mayur. Mayur was the founder of India’s International Institute for a Sustainable Future, and had served as an advisory figure in the key UN Meetings

  that had shaped the international environmental policy agenda in the early

  nineteen-nineties. This was a time of new forms of environmental thinking and

  discourse at the international scale; emboldened by the formulation of sustain-

  ability espoused in the pivotal Bruntland Report, landmark meetings like the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero (1992) and the Habitat Summit in Istanbul (1996)

  carved new concepts for understanding the interface of environmental change and

  socioeconomic development. A whol y reworked agenda for global-scale issues

  36 The Integrated Subject

  including poverty alleviation, biodiversity preservation, and environmental con-

  servation followed in their work. Mayer was present and active in international

  environmental policy circles in this moment, and Yehuda recalled her experience

  of working with him as deeply formative.

  In a letter to me that accompanied a gift copy of Survival at Stake, the anthology of Mayur’s work that she co-edited with a colleague in 2006, Yehuda described him as:

  . . . known to everyone—from the Prime Ministers of several countries to vil agers.

  He was very popular, as he had worked on some major environmental movements,

  including the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, and he was responsible for the closing of some

  large pol uting industries. It was on the invitation of Indira Gandhi some time in the early 1970s that he came back to India after completing his doctorate studies and

  joined as Director (of the organization).20

  In her introduction to Survival at Stake, she called Mayur a “visionary” whose:

  . . . spirit lives on in the souls of thousands whom he inspired to tread his path.

  Popularly known in India as the “doomsday professor,” Rashmi Mayur prophesied

  that if human beings continue on their present reckless path of mindless develop-

  ment, the earth’s ecological systems would col apse and the human race will become extinct. (He wrote) “The consequences of the war that has been waged against this

  planet for the last two hundred years by human beings, may be that we may have no

  human inhabitants in the future.” However, unlike many crusaders who relinquished

  hope and left the battlefield, and others who refuse to recognize the symptoms of a diseased planet, Rashmi loved it enough to see it with the eyes of truth. He was too optimistic to be biblical. “Nonetheless, we cannot be immobilized by the ugly reality.

  As long as we are alive, as long as we have vision and as long as we think of the future of the earth and our children, we must hope that sanity and wisdom will prevail. ”21

  The essay continues to narrate Mayur’s basic biography, and emphasizes in par-

  ticular his place as a “world citizen” whose commitment to amplifying environ-

  mental causes had lasting effects in India.

  That RSIEA’s Head traced her own devotion to her work with a distinguished

  environmental activist in India and at the United Nations is consequential for

  understanding the form and mission of the Institute itself. The challenge to which RSIEA’s version of environmental architecture was a response was, as noted, a

  “war that has been waged against this planet for the last 200 years”; overcoming

  that war required a professional commitment that could transcend the consid-

  erable labor it implied. Thus Yehuda described total commitment as central to

  making RSIEA faculty work meaningful; its consequences did not end with the

  individual students who would train there. They would extend to fulfilling her

  own role in combatting the ecological problems that in her own generation had

  only worsened. Her work simply followed Mayur’s example, she told me, in which

  responsible environmental work was accomplished only when it was enfolded in

  one’s sense of identity. She described her work as ideal y reaching far beyond the

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  The Integrated Subject 37

  classroom, perhaps influencing, if even in a very small way, environmental condi-

  tions in India, and perhaps even the broader world. The sometimes-India-specific,

  sometimes-globally-focused RS
IEA curriculum reflected this almost nested sense

  of the environmental architect’s mission: however remotely, it was connected to a

  global environmental crisis and its appropriate suite of solutions. It also seemed to underline a rather crucial sense of defiant hope, here elaborated as a refusal to be “immobilized by the ugly reality.” It was only through such refusal—enacted as

  ecology in practice—that the environmental architect could maintain the capacity

  to both envision and operationalize a future of good design.

  • • •

  The “ugliness” of present conditions was quite real, and the challenge they sig-

  naled immense. Mumbai’s staggering growth projections, extreme air and water

  pol ution, deep and enduring asymmetries in housing conditions and material

  wealth, and a multi-faceted but oft-repeated story of urban development in exclu-

  sive service of land speculation, coastal degradation, and rampant disregard for

  human rights or ecological concerns made the very suggestion that architects—or

  any other collective of urban professionals who sat on the margins of the nexus

  of urban development power—could have an impact on the city’s environmental

  present and future at best naive and at worst perhaps destructive. My everyday

  conversations in Mumbai regularly cast doubt on the actual “real world” potential

  of a collective of architects studying environmental design. How, I was repeatedly asked, could figures other than builders, bureaucrats, and politicians influence the development trajectory of Mumbai?

  Yet from a social position inside RSIEA’s world of good design, I learned to see

  a persistent and almost dismissive confidence. Obvious and tenacious obstacles—

  historical, bureaucratic, political, economic, and geographic—could either give

  way, or were already giving way, to positive change. To my voiced expression of

  doubt, Dr. Joshi assured me that a real and discernable architectural-environmen-

  tal change was in fact already happening, but in order to see it, one needed to

  adopt a historical perspective. With halting optimism, he met my skepticism with

  a personal sort of evidence, one anchored to a certain view of the arc of urban

  development in Mumbai:

  What I have seen is that demand (for environmental architecture) is improving, and scope is improving. But you have to learn to see the changes; they may not be what you are expecting. There are many (increments), some of which are very smal . Like providing a place for waste processing or using a certain design aspect to improve the quality of ventilation or light. And today the changes are there: people in Mumbai are more aware and conscious of the environment. They are willing to do new things.

  Still unconvinced, I asked whether these incremental changes were sufficient to

  open the kinds of opportunities for practitioners of environmental architecture

  38 The Integrated Subject

  that would yield both power and autonomy (two things quite clearly missing in the

  Mumbai of the present). In response, he repeated the entreaty to “see” in a particular way—to notice attributes of change that escape the metrics and usual framings

  of maldevelopment in Mumbai.

  What is happening is that the number of environmental y certified buildings is very few. But this is because it involves cost and some of the requirements are difficult to meet. However, many builders are including more individual (environmental) features, like recycling water and using it for flushing or for terrace gardens and vertical gardens. Or like keeping more open space. . . . These small aspects are being

  implemented, but (builders) are not going for certification because it requires lots of things—use of nonconventional energy or energy-efficient equipment, and things

  like this. At least you can say that 50% of what is required for a green building is being implemented on a regular basis in Mumbai. And environmental architects are

  very important here.

  More importantly, he told me, the scope for future environmental design oppor-

  tunities was improving because Mumbai’s specific urban-cultural sensibility was

  in part about example-setting, and in part about taking risks. In the context of

  India, he suggested, Mumbai is a city unlike any other; here, a portion of the

  public had the capacity to invest in the things they wanted, which increasingly

  included environmental vitality. He referred, of course, to only an elite subset of Mumbai’s wider population, but within that subset Joshi saw qualities specific

  to the city. This logic placed Mumbai in a powerful cultural and economic posi-

  tion to adopt patterns of environmental improvement as evidence of progress. He

  explained:

  People in Mumbai have money power. They are willing to spend money and become

  an example. The culture in this city is entirely different (from the rest of India). They don’t bother worrying—if a client in Mumbai decides, “I want this,” then they go for it. . . . Outside Mumbai, (most) people are not that ready to spend money. They are more conservative and frugal. Mumbai has got tremendous purchasing power. . . .

  And also, people talk. . . . They may not go and look and study an issue themselves . . .

  but whatever a hundred people are talking (about), they will talk about the same

  thing. And I personal y have worked with many projects in which it is clear that

  mental y people in Mumbai have already accepted this concept of the need for green buildings. And whatever is possible they want to do. . . . So there are good things you can see, and the willingness is there. Clients say, “if you give us the good and fool-proof technology and ensure that no problem will be created by this design, we are willing to accept it.” The spaces are constrained in Mumbai, but money and willingness are not a concern. The scope for environmental architecture here is good, and it is getting better and better.

  For Joshi, then, the same forces associated with the city’s urban development

  dynamics—greed, power, and conspicuous consumption—could be construed

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  The Integrated Subject 39

  as sources of hope; indeed, these could be understood as real-time evidence that

  environmental architecture was taking root and would eventual y flourish.

  • • •

  Through convictions derived from a shared, integrated subjectivity and devo-

  tion to an integrated subject, RSIEA’s faculty worked and taught in ways that both depended upon, and yet quietly defied, Mumbai’s urban political economy and

  development trajectory. Joshi’s logic of “money power” even construed the politi-

  cal economic status quo as central to his logic of change; the very force that had driven so much ecological destruction could be imagined as its own undoing.

  Over time, I came to realize that Joshi was not alone in his full expectation of dramatic shifts, not only in urban development patterns and built forms, but also in

  the political economy that suspended them in its web.

  Through curricular design, shared architectural practice, and modeling an

  environmental architectural community that was the discernable product of their

  work together, the core faculty of RSIEA sought to train, inspire, and support the architects who would forge the good design of a better urban future. The environmental architect could not be an expert in every disciplinary dimension relevant

  to good design, but by learning to see an interconnected system of processes and

  considerations, she would ideal y be prepared to identify, assemble, and criti-

  cal y assess the diagnostic work of socioenvironmental reinvention. This integra-

  tive s
ensibility formed the core of producing design prescriptions worthy of the

  good design designation. RSIEA’s formulation of environmental architecture thus

  promised to turn the destruction of conventional architecture into the promise

  of stewardship. Teaching it as a vocation allowed its adherents a sense that they

  were transforming architecture itself from environmental destroyer to, at the very least, its benign enhancement, and at the very best, that same destruction’s direct socioenvironmental remedy.

  3

  Ecology in Practice

  Environmental Architecture as Good Design

  “Most of what we need to learn we can only know from visiting the building

  site. The rest we can learn from Indian history and a spiritual focus.”

  —Dr. Doddaswmy Ravishankar

  “To look at pre-independence buildings is to see sustainable design staring

  back at you.”

  —Suhasini, Auroville

  “Take this very seriously, and remember that this whole semester is about val-

  ues. You’re questioning what is right. You’re moving way beyond architecture.”

  —Ar. Priti Bandari

  It was with great anticipation and curiosity that I joined a new cohort of RSIEA

  students for a formal welcoming ceremony and lecture program in the winter of

  2013. The full day agenda began with a film, followed by lectures from several

  RSIEA faculty, guest speakers, and alumni. In between, we learned some of the

  everyday logistics to expect from the next two years of student life, but for most of the day, our group of architects-newly-turned-students was invited to contem-plate the urgency, purpose, and responsibilities that would accompany a Rachana

  Sansad degree in environmental architecture.

  I arrived at the large auditorium in time to greet some of the faculty members

  and settle into one of the room’s red plush theater seats. I scanned the printed

  agenda, a bit surprised to see a familiar film title at the top of the program. As new students shuffled into the now packed auditorium, the lights dimmed, a film

  screen descended, and former Vice President Al Gore quipped, “I’m Al Gore, and