Christopher Benninger regarded as a legendary figure of Indian and international architecture, had built a great legacy which will keep inspiring generations. Great Expectations: Notes to an Architect, his most recent and final book, published posthumously in October 2024, is a sequel of sorts to his bestselling 2011 title, Letters to a Young Architect, and a philosophical retrospective of his distinguished career. Following is an excerpt from this book. The Chapter is called Note 4- Future of Architectural Education in India: Crisis and Challenge
A profession is distinguished by the quality of its practitioners distinguishes a profession. It is their record of contribution to society that makes our profession of architecture profoundly important.
Architectural education in India is a hundred years old. As a centre of architectural education, India is young. While one could define India as one of the oldest civilisations in the world, it is amongst the youngest societies on Earth, in every way one can imagine, including the age of its citizens!
I am thus tempted to look at the future of architectural education, rather than its past. I am tempted to place the mantle of the present crisis I see in the architectural profession, and the challenges this crisis offers, on the shoulders of a few great institutions, and on some of the dynamic emerging new schools and their leadership.
At Independence, there were only two or three architecture courses in the whole of India. When I arrived in India as a Fulbright Scholar two decades later there were only nine schools of architecture, and now there are more than 400! Their number is growing at the rate of more than one new school each week!
There is amazing energy in action here, a true gharana of architecture, like a nuclear ball of fire growing larger and larger, as it expands outwards ever further. We now have more than 25,000 members in our Indian Institute of Architects, and about 1,20,000 registered architects, and we will have more than 10,000 new students of architecture joining our fellowship as first-year students in the coming academic year! This raises the question of whether this explosive energy has grown out of control. Can we manage and direct this energy towards the good of mankind?
Is this crisis so large that we need to invent a new definition of an architect? Where do we go from here? How do we create the teachers to teach architects? These are questions in the minds of all thought leaders who are concerned about the future of the profession and the nation.
What we are talking about is the life or death of our profession.
If we sleep on this, within five years we will all belong to a small minority of professionals in a sea of screaming and yelling, uneducated and illiterate, yet officially qualified architects. They will simply use their democratic majority to push all that we believe in aside, and throw it out of the window!
Ancient philosophers have said, “If you are depressed you are living in the past; if you are anxious, you are living in the future; and if you are peaceful, you are living in the present.” But I say we must learn from the past, to formulate actions in the present that change the future. That is what architects are educated to do. That is what architects must do! Architects are the thinker-doers entrusted with the task of re-configuring the environments within which they live. Architects are called professionals because in thinking and in doing they profess a system of values that motivates them to change the world.
No other profession has this mandate or this unique mindset that makes them always think of alternative futures for humanity! I repeat, no other. Let us also be clear that we are ‘technologists’. What we do in our studios is laboratory work: analysing rational functions and logical interconnections, studying measurable site and climatic conditions, stating problems clearly and making hypotheses of possible options to resolve those problems, defining performance criteria and evaluating which design option best provides the answers to questions posed by the context. We study engineered materials and structural systems that support and span a variety of spaces. We give patterns to networks of water supply and drainage, electrical and IT cables, and we decide on air quality and management. We analyse enclosing envelopes, applying systems analysis to select the best fit, simulating hundreds of components, elements and parts!
Does our education prepare us for this kind of scientific analysis? Should we not be approaching design and fabrication like aeronautical engineers, and marine architects who create great aircraft or sea ships? Can our teachers and our professors think like this, as simulation analysts, resolving complex puzzles? I fear not. This speaks of a crisis!
It is important that we critically analyse our past to chart an appropriate course of action for the future. So, let us take a quick look at the past and some of the critical assumptions that we need to revisit. We must understand those key areas of change in order to comprehend the challenges that face our profession and our role in society.
One: We must move from individualistic artists to thoughtful technologists
We have projected architecture as an act of idiosyncratic creation, rather than an act of promoting the useful arts, through rational procedures and logical methods. In moulding schools of architecture, we have seen institution building in terms of individuals and star performers, rather than as creating programmes, procedures and systems. We have neglected the team nature of our empirical processes and the importance of managing complex processes. Our failure in this area has opened the door to large contractors, and project management consultants, jumping into our professional work applying only value such as cost cutting, schedule shrinking, and ‘pleasing the client’. We must be leaders in making architecture a holistic, scientific and humane profession.
Two: We must move from the ‘Great Man’ theory to moulding capable professionals
We have projected the architect as a persona: a great man, a singular individual who will become an immortal genius. We followed the Western Renaissance model of putting an individual man in the centre of the universe, instead of our great tradition of gharanas. Rather than passing a body of knowledge down from guru to student, improving and contextualising it incrementally, we began to believe that each generation produces its unique, contemporary wisdom, embodied in a few select geniuses.
We thought that buildings must yell and scream like anal-retentive babies grabbing for attention and claiming to be new revelations! We are all just doing our jobs, and we try to do our jobs well! We can lead the way in bringing the image of the architect down to earth. While doing this we can also inculcate poetry, hope and art into the fabric of our environment.
Three: We must move from Romanticism to Objective Reality
We have neglected Objective Reality in favour of Romanticism. We never saw the slums mushrooming up all around us, and we rarely noticed the villages that are the very fabric of this great nation. We imagined the architect sitting in a colourful air-conditioned studio, designing beach houses, mountain retreats, iconic museums and monuments, instead of analysing society’s problems and solving them through relevant built fabric. We architects have the collective capacity to design systems of access to shelter; create educational facilities and health services for all; make offices, workplaces and industries that drive the economy; detail out streets, footpaths and transport nodes; and, plan our townships and cities. For example, like the Special Economic Zones, where the government acquires vast tracts of land for industry, we as architects can design Special Habitat Zones, where the government can make the common person a shareholder in housing integrated with amenities, educational facilities, and work places; creating holistic humane habitats and boosting the nation’s development all in one concept. Our thought leaders can buck the trend of making pretty little artefacts and focus design on the creation of humane habitats that help reclaim our place in society
Feature Image: Representational; Generated by Dall.I
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