Category Archives: Frame Conclave

Frame Conclave, Lectures

On Drawing

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NÍALL MCLAUGHLIN

A Recorded Lecture from FRAME CONCLAVE 2025 —
[AUTHORING 01: TO DRAW]

In this lecture, Níall McLaughlin talks about drawing and building as verbs, not nouns, arguing that their real purpose is not to produce perfect objects but to pull people together. Drawing from his own projects and collaborative drawing experiments, he makes a case for architecture as a social act that binds communities across time, especially as technology transforms the discipline.

The lecture series presents the full set of talks from the conclave. The published text is an edited transcript (adapted from spoken presentations) rather than a formal essay written by the author themselves. For complete documentation including visual material and video, please refer to the recording.

Edited Transcript

[01:43] What was extraordinary about the day today for me was that it began with these extraordinary, expansive descriptions of the fertility of everyday life, and all its particulars, through drawing. The contrast between those morning projects, which are about these spare templates which describe absence, blockage, and loss through drawing, to the last presentation, which was about a kind of spawning, expressive techno-optimism, all embodied through the idea of drawing.

For me, the fulcrum point of the day, listening to it, was that moment when we had the two sign painters in Hanif Kureshi‘s film. Referring to a choice of fonts between Arial and Helvetica, one of them said, “Arial,” because “When I have a choice of typing A-I-R or H-E-L, I find it easier to type H-E-L.” The other one was still holding on to the beauty of the painted sign, its durability, the colours, the way they worked with each other, and pleading that these objects were superior objects to the other ones, but the thing he said at the side to me was much more important.

He looked around and said, “I used to have 20 people working here,” and I do not know how you all feel, but a shadow passed over me when I thought about that, because what technology can do to a sign painter, it can do to an architect.

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Frame Conclave, Lectures, Modern Heritage

The Architecture of Golconde

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Pankaj Vir Gupta

A Recorded Lecture from FRAME Conclave 2019: Modern Heritage

In this lecture, Pankaj Vir Gupta discusses the conception of Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. Gupta delves into the architectural history of this structure, highlighting its pioneering use of concrete in India. He recounts his personal experiences at Golconde, sharing vivid details about the architecture and its unique features.

Edited Transcript

It is a particular privilege to be presenting a project with which we started our practice in 2003 and in the office archives, this is project 001 (referring to image 01). So, this morning to wake everyone up, I think it is important to understand why we are here to talk about this building and I will try and make it as energizing for you as possible.

My name is Pankaj Vir Gupta, and with my partner, Christine Mueller, I run a practice in New Delhi called Vir-Mueller Architects. I am also a professor of architecture at the University of Virginia, where I run what is called the Yamuna River Project, a multi-disciplinary research project, looking at ecology and urbanity in the megacities of the world. But to go back to how we started our practice, I was leading a study abroad program with some students from the University of Texas and we happened to be visiting Pondicherry, to look at the urban fabric of the city (referring to image 02), and we came across this extraordinary building (referring to image 02) and it was a surprise to me personally, because in several years of architectural education and research, I had never come across this building in any writing or any publication, at least not in the curricular work that we had been exposed to in our education.

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Frame Conclave, Modern Heritage

NID’s Early Years: An Indian Experiment of Global Relevance

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Ashoke Chatterjee

A Recorded Lecture from FRAME Conclave 2019: Modern Heritage

In this lecture, Ashoke Chatterjee talks about the inception of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, its formative years, the pedagogy provided to the students, the experiments with the curriculum, the challenges, successes, and failures it faced in becoming the ‘world-class’ institute it sought out to be today.

Edited Transcript

I am delighted to have this opportunity to be back in Goa after forty-one years. The last time I came here, it was to assist the Government of Goa with a study of its ‘carrying capacity’ for tourism: how would Goa manage the growth of tourism in coming years? This might mean tough decisions of planning and control. I need not tell you that my report was trashed long before the Hall of Nations. Goa is clearly still struggling with those issues, but it is good to be back. I am grateful to the organizers, to FRAME Conclave for inviting me.

Let me start by indicating that this talk will be a very personal view of one part of contemporary Indian design history. It will focus on the experience of one institution, the National Institute of Design, its educators, and those who studied there. It will cover some years of a larger institutional history as well as design in modern India. Yet NID has been a catalyst, so it is valid to draw on an experience which has been unique not only in India but in a global context.

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Frame Conclave, Modern Heritage

INDIA: MANY MODERNITIES – THE JOURNEY OF INDIAN RASAS

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Frame Conclave, Modern Heritage

LE CORBUSIER AND M K GANDHI: AN UNLIKELY DIALOGUE

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Riyaz Tayyibji

A Recorded Lecture from FRAME Conclave 2019: Modern Heritage

In this lecture, Riyaz Tayyibji speaks about a fictional conversation between M K Gandhi and Le Corbusier. Through the dialogue, he discusses their relationship with work and lifestyle, and their intimate connection with the inside and the outside.

Edited Transcript

Before I get to the two gentlemen that I would like to talk about today, a short note about the method I have used of juxtaposing two seemingly unrelated people together; this was a method that was first introduced to us as students of Prof. A.D. Raje, who would give students an exercise to imagine a conversation between, say Louis Kahn and Mimar Sinan at a coffee shop in Istanbul. This is certainly not a historian’s method; it is an architect’s method. An approach that would not only require the rigours of research to imagine the content of the conversation but would allow you to play with these ‘facts’ and their interpretations. In Raje’s exercise, the hypothetical context, the coffee shop was important. You had to define the hypothetical time in which the conversation was taking place. Somewhere in the process, it would emerge that this ‘hypothetical time’ was really a mirror of our own time.

Often the narrative of the present in which our history is written remains covert. One of the things that I enjoy about this method is that it ensures that the preoccupations of our own time are integrated into the narrative while always remaining explicit. Given the formality of our gathering today, I have chosen the form of a dialogue between one, Mr. M.K. Gandhi and another, Le Corbusier rather than a causal chat in a Byzantine café. 

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