Time Out Mumbai- Inert Deco

This piece appeared in a slightly edited version in my 'After Words' column in Time Out Mumbai,  Volume 9 Issue 21, June  7-20, 2013.

Inert Deco

It’s about time, I think, that we stopped referring to a particular type of building in Mumbai as ‘Art Deco’. This appellation only trivialises our city’s urban fabric and some of its most loved icons, and could, in fact be the cause of its ultimate ruination. We should, simply and correctly, refer to these structures and precincts as ‘Bombay’s architecture from the 30s and 40s’. Even the name- Art Deco, is anachronistic. It came into common parlance retrospectively, in the 1960s.

We tend to look at the buildings like the ones along the Oval Maidan or Marine Drive, especially at their external ornament, colour and fancy grille-work, and call this the Art Deco Style. It was hardly surprising when; very recently, a former member of the heritage committee and a senior architect made light of the Marine Drive buildings and their purported style by saying that even a coffin can be made in the Art Deco style. Such a view is superficial; it is as if Art Deco can be applied to any building, like an ointment. This implies that buildings occupied for several generations can be demolished and rebuilt, provided they are then overlaid with the selfsame external ornament, colour and fancy grille-work.

In an earlier column, I had talked about how some places in our city are well mannered. The best examples of urban etiquette in Mumbai come from the two decades leading to Indian independence. This was the time of reclamation (first the Backbay, then the Marine Drive) and the laying out of plotted precincts that led to a building boom. This resulted in a lot of architecture, not only at the Oval or the Marine Drive, but also at Mohammed Ali Road, Phirozeshah Mehta Road and the Dadar/ Matunga/ Five-Garden areas. This was a time when office buildings like the United Insurance or New India Assurance, cinema houses like the Regal, Eros and Metro, and the many new-fangled apartment blocks from Napean Sea Road to Chembur were designed as both foci and fabric. With bursts of streamlined concrete, they defined the optimism of metropolitan life, tempered with the ‘zara hatke, zara bachke’ nature of Bombay meri jaan. These harmonious ground plus three buildings lining our streets form our image of the city even today. To see them isolated of their context and re-imagined only as wallpaper is to do them a profound disservice.

What is Art Deco after all? The Oval Maidan buildings form Bombay’s most famous stretch. These twenty or so apartments (with Eros as full-stop) were all built in just three years, from 1935 to 1938. They are the most ornate, with motifs of chevrons, ziggurats and frozen fountains, painted in bright pastels. Other buildings from the 1940s are far less ‘jazzy’ but are relevant nevertheless as icons of that era. Many office buildings are formal stone piles, while cinema houses are specially designed with striking verticals and ocean-liner horizontals, punctuated with spaces for the marquee. These buildings are numerous and varied, but the one constant is not their style (whatever you want to call it) but their urban placement, the manner in which they line the streets and circles that connect the city like a neural network. In most cases these buildings abut the road directly with no setbacks or gated edges. They belong to everybody.

There was a time when several of these buildings were protected as heritage. Now, under new dispensations, individual rights completely overshadow collective responsibility, so any of these buildings may be demolished and rebuilt with all benefits accrued, should the occupants desire so. Who can stop a multi-storey building emerging out of the seventy year old harmonies of the Marine Drive? That would be depriving its inhabitants of the benefits of FSI, TDR, and other fungibles and, in any case, we can take a forty storey building and Art Decofy it, no?

That is the problem with labels and names; they tend to obscure context and relevance by offering mental shortcuts to take the place of critical thought. Give a dog a bad name and hang him. An Art Deco building is no longer inviolate. By extension, neither are any of the buildings from the 30s and 40s. Full page adverts front our newspapers every day, pushing new building proposals in the Spanish Hacienda style or the Swiss Chalet style, or the all purpose Classical style, so Art Deco is just another surface solution to assuage fears of wanton urban destruction. I would not be surprised to see proposals of skyscraper sized Art Deco coffins in tomorrow’s dailies. After all, the tallest building in the world for several decades- the Empire State Building was an Art Deco building too.

A New Column on Urbanism

This is the first of a new column on urbanism I will be writing for Network 18's Mumbai section of firstpost.com , which I should be doing every three weeks or so. To read the full piece, please click on the title below:

Urbanism: 
What makes Shivaji Park more accessible than Oval Maidan

Every unauthorized shop-owner needs a peg on which to hang his wares. So does every squatter. Give someone a backrest and they will fashion a home out of it. Every physical subdivision, every border or fence in Mumbai’s public realm provides a multitude of pegs, made available for appropriation by the private anxieties of its legal occupants. The urbanist Jane Jacobs, more than half a century ago, spoke of how borders, while being dismissed as passive objects, or matter-of-factly as edges, actually exert an active influence. Every new wall physically and existentially divides its denizens. You are who you are depending on which side of it you belong. Take care of your own then; forget what goes on outside. 

The emerging city of Mumbailopolis arrays its spanking new buildings, all barricaded against Mumbai, Open City. Lower Parel’s Peninsula is a fairly generic corporate park, laid out classically in gridlike blocks. Situated at the junction of Ganpatrao Kadam and Senapati Bapat Marg, Peninsula is surrounded by walls that visually deny views on both sides. There is nothing the city gives to the park and in turn it gives nothing back. On the inside is a befountained evocation of urban order, quite suited to totalitarian big brotherly Singapore. Manufactured havens such as these have strongly filtered accesses; but outside, le deluge. 

High-rise residential towers under construction are pictured behind an old residential building in central Mumbai September 9, 2011. Reuters Beyond its perimeter are narrow encroached footpaths, streets with high vehicle density and the diagonal slash of a flyover, all jostling for space. The wall outside is a vast plane of nothingness, suitable erecting political hoardings or, of course, for easy use as a peg. The Peninsula is only a current example, but similar circumstances pervade over most of the new ‘re’developments in brown-field spaces. 

Building walls today reflect setbacks, mandated by law, applicable across the city irrespective of specific circumstances. Open spaces all around buildings are therefore judiciously guarded by the plot owners. These spaces, cut off from the city outside because of their relative narrowness, tend to remain unused, and only alienate those inside. 

Surprisingly, no lessons have been learnt from the very urbane Ballard Estate, designed as a series of building blocks placed right on streets that define the urban fabric. The City Improvement Trust in the early part of the last century defined building by footprints. This led to common building lines and uniform pedestrian ways. Building fronts were placed squarely on the roads; entrances were obvious and accessed straight off the streets. Windows overlooked life outside as it happened at all times, forming what Jacobs calls ‘eyes on the street’, empowering those inside to take charge of their own concerns of safety and still preserve good urban manners. 

For a city starved of public spaces, the Oval Maidan is an exemplar of barriers destroying urbanity. In order, presumably, to preserve the grounds from the depredations of undesirables, the Oval is fenced off with railings that put you in mind of a penitentiary no matter which side you are on. Inside, a few cricket pitches are tended to for a filtered few to use. The narrow ‘public’ path joining the Art Deco to the Neo-Gothic stretch only emphasizes the impression of one being out of place. The railings along Veer Nariman Road are variously adapted as pegs for street vendors. The corner near the statue of BR Ambedkar is desolate enough for both women and men to prefer taking the opposite side of Madame Cama Road. What could have been, in the absence of the railings, a positive social space, a ‘living room for the city’, for all those with purpose and for flaneurs in general, is now fossilized for the rather vapid pleasure of viewing from the balconies of Deco residences. 

Compare this with the ‘katta’ culture of Shivaji Park, a maidan truly loved by all who live around it. Its unfiltered access from all sides allows an extended neighborhood to occupy it and call their own. A simple kerb edging forms a makeshift seat for everyone regardless, and can be easily monitored for abuse. Shivaji Park demonstrates that plot boundaries can be defined in ways other than erecting barriers. Simple changes in flooring, building low curbs, installing street furniture or well located trees can be used to allow unrestricted visual and physical access. In several European cities, even main thoroughfares do not differentiate between foot path and driveable roads. Lines of streetlights or a different sort of paving suffice as indicators.

Walls, defying conventional wisdom, are anachronistic in today’s surveillance obsessed society. Walls form blind corners. Walls create narrow undefined spaces that usually lie fallow. Walls form ready scaffolding for easy encroachment. Today, strategically located CCTV’s can do the same job a wall does, even better perhaps, and most definitely at a lower price. The employment of personnel from private security agencies, now becoming increasingly acceptable can have more value in preserving and protecting than a dormant fence. 

Every owner of real estate, even in these One-Lakh-Rupees-per-square-foot times, can give back a certain part of their property to the city for public use. The edges of buildings, not the anonymity of railings are a far more cordial urban interface between inhabitants and pedestrians. Robert Frost once said: ‘something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down’. Quite possibly, in spirit, he lives in Mumbai somewhere.