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    • The shortage of architects did not prevent

    2018-10-22

    The shortage of architects did not prevent metropolitan Indian architecture from being up to date in azilsartan medoxomil as well as construction. In the last years before World War II, a streamlined Art Deco most often associated with cinema architecture, but also used for office buildings and apartment blocks, was commonly employed across major cities. Architects designed many of the most sophisticated examples, like the apartment buildings and hotels lining Bombay’s Marine Drive (Evenson, 1989). It was also widely employed in the low rise, middle class housing being constructed long before independence in the railways suburbs of the subcontinent’s major cities (Rao, 2013). In both cases, a version of Le Corbusier\'s Domino scheme predominated. A concrete frame was filled in with masonry walls, and the distinction between the two obscured with a layer of stucco, often sporting subdued decorative details. Concrete in mid-twentieth-century South Asian architecture was thus mostly a convenience, offering solidity at relatively modest cost.
    Concrete in post-independence south Asia Following the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, the subcontinent became a showcase for the most modern architecture of the 1950s and sixties, much of it built by imported experts out of reinforced concrete. Across the subcontinent the leaders of newly independent countries used up to date architecture, much of it designed by imported experts, to signal the modernity of their new states. New cities abounded, including in India alone the new capitals of Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, and Gandhinagar. The new Pakistani capital of Islamabad was designed with the assistance of a raft of European and American architects, including Constantinos Doxiadis and Edward Durrell Stone (Doxiadis, 1965; James-Chakraborty, 2008). A 1964 report supplied to Kahn by an employee of the Pakistani Public Works Department spelled out the way in which concrete was typically used there: This way of using concrete had a long history within as well as outside the modern movement in architecture, which had developed in part to exploit the kinds of spaces it made possible. Le Corbusier’s Masion Domino scheme of 1914 was an early and particularly lucid European articulation of this system (Curtis, 1986) (Figure 2). Three rectangular floor slabs, the bottom one supported on four low blocks, are connected by columns in each corner and the center of the long facades, and by a pair of staircases rising along one short end. How the infill was or was not to be detailed was left completely open. No acquaintance, however, with the celebrated architect was necessary for the many builders around the world who employed similar frames to construct structures that owed nothing to his brilliantly experimental spaces, of which the Villa Savoye (1928–1931) is justly the most celebrated (Forty, 2012). Instead the basic system identified, but not invented, by the famous Swiss architect became ubiquitous in the developing world because it was both inexpensive and flexible. One of the original advantages of concrete had been that it could be sculpted into a wide array of forms, whose monumentality offered a welcome contrast to the relatively flimsy appearance of ferrous framing. For instance, the Centennial Hall erected in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), between 1911 and 1913 combined unprecedented clear spans with a much appreciated dignity, arising from the solidity and obvious weight of the material employed (Forty, 2012; Ilkosz, 2006; James-Chakraborty, 2000; Simonnet, 2005) (Figure 3). The collaboration of Max Berg, an architect, and Willi Gehler, a structural engineer, employed by the builders Weyss and Freytag, produced a approach that was not, however, universally welcomed by the next generation. Writing in 1923, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe explicitly challenged the earlier emphasis on plasticity: Monolithic concrete made a comeback after the war in part because it was inexpensive and in part because of its association with Le Corbusier. The Swiss-born architect’ss beton brut for the Unité d’Habitation outside Marseilles (1947–1952), set the tone for set the tone for a new generation of rugged construction Although Le Corbusier and his disciples often made use of concrete’s plasticity, they insisted as well on palpable weight married in many cases to aggressively rough finishes (Banham, 1966). Nowhere was this model employed more enthusiastically than in the new capital of the Indian Punjab (Figure 4). Le Corbusier laid out the city and designed its major civic structures. Here, as in Marseilles, the emphasis on sculptural plasticity over a high degree of finish eased the process of coordinating a large and not always highly skilled labor force (Prakash, 2002).