Modern South Asia | thinkMATTER

The Street As Stage: Charles Correa’s Kala Academy Goa

Essay by Rohan Shivkumar
Photographs by Randhir Singh

This could be a sequence from a Buster Keaton silent-era comedy. One summer evening, a man is sitting on the edge of the river, sipping his coffee. There is a warm breeze drifting over the water as the sun sets. He hears the gentle strains of a piano playing Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ over the sound of the waves lapping the shore. Caught in its spell, he walks towards the music. He must find out who is playing. In a daze, humming to himself, he climbs the steps of an amphitheatre to a blue-tiled terrace. In one of the rooms, he sees a woman playing the piano. A student stands over her shoulder watching her hands. The man wants to get as close as he can to the music. He walks straight towards her and collides directly into a pane of glass. The glass shatters. He falls. Everyone rushes to help him – the piano teacher, the watchmen of the building and other people enjoying the evening breeze off the river. Befuddled, he sits up. Luckily, he is not injured. Only his nose is a little bruised, and so is his pride.

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MODERN SOUTH ASIA
A Visual Archive of South Asia’s Modernist Heritage

The Modern South Asia (MSA) series is dedicated to exploring modern architecture of historic importance in South Asia through photography-based books. The series will focus on architecture from the 20^th century, designed and built by regional and international architects. Each book will provide the reader with an in-depth visual exploration of the architecture through contemporary photographs, architectural drawings, and newly commissioned writing by architects, thinkers, and academics.

The MSA series is edited and photographed by Randhir Singh. The project is supported and published by Arthshila Trust.

NATIONAL COOPERATIVE DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION (NCDC)
Kuldip Singh, Mahendra Raj

COLLABORATIVE INVENTION AND THE ETHIC OF FRUGALITY: National Cooperative Development Corporation

Essay by Amit Srivastava & Peter Scriver
Photographs by Randhir Singh

When it was built in the southern outskirts of metropolitan Delhi in the late 1970s, the National Cooperative Development Corporation (NCDC) headquarters was one of the relatively few new buildings that stood out, or even above, the sea of low-rise residential development that was then just beginning to expand the national capital beyond its first ring of post-colonial suburbs. But this was not just a taller structure and far from a merely generic modern office block. ‘Architecture’, modern or not, was still a relatively unfamiliar concept that few of the uninitiated public understood to apply to anything less exalted than the monumental tombs and ruined historic forts and palaces that dotted Delhi’s urban hinterland, such as in the neighbouring Siri Fort area. If ‘engineering’ had any better grip on the popular imagination, it was understood to be the equally heavy but more utilitarian stuff of infrastructure and industry that was progressing and building the young Indian nation’s economic capacity. Yet there was something about this strange, almost ungainly concrete edifice that defied categorisation; it was both monumental and ingeniously light-footed at the same time. Growing up in South Delhi in the 1990s, where the NCDC offices stood opposite the gates of the housing colony in which one of the present authors lived, it was the first and most conspicuous example to which an untutored prospective student of architecture could look with both awe and fascination.

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