In conversation with Bimal Patel, Managing Director at Ahmedabad-based practice HCP Design, Planning and Management Pvt. Ltd, we discuss the challenges of working in the public domain, his thoughts on education and the idea of a project in a complex and layered cultural milieu of India.
Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India, Bhat, 1986
Ahmedabad Management Association, Ahmedabad, 1997[IN]SIDE: Can you share with us some reflections from the time your father, Hasmukh C Patel led the practice? What was your interaction and initiation with the practice then?
Bimal Patel: My father commenced practice in 1960. He had completed a master’s from Cornell University. As with many of the architects who started at the time, his approach to architecture was infused with enlightenment values. When traditional norms did not make sense, they did not hesitate to forsake them. They prized innovation, reason, and rationality. They believed enthusiastically in the power of science and technology to improve the human condition. They saw themselves as professionals who, like doctors and engineers, had a skill that could be deployed to tackle problems that their clients faced. Their ambition was to invent a better and more modern way of life.
Most of my father’s early clients were private individuals and institutions, and the projects were small. He was able to use them to develop a unique architectural style. Later, he also got to work on many larger public sector projects – bank headquarters and the like. During the mid-seventies, when real estate development came to the fore in Ahmedabad, he enthusiastically took to working on commercial office and housing projects. Being a talented designer, he produced quality work even within the tight constraints that real estate projects posed. Delivering high-quality buildings, on time and within budget, was important for him.
When I joined my father’s practice, after graduating from CEPT in 1984, his firm was about 30 strong – fairly large for the time. My father was still committed to the values he had started with, even though many of his fellow travellers had gone the opposite way – advocating a search for roots and an Indian identity, romanticising rural life and craft technologies, denigrating the science and modernity and promoting the notion of the architect as an artist.
This turn in Indian architecture did not sway my father. However, perhaps because of my youth, or the tendency of children to be rebellious, I was quite taken in by it. My final year undergraduate project, a ‘City Centre’ on Ahmedabad’s riverfront, was a search for evocative architectural forms, unconstrained by any practical problem-solving. My bachelor’s thesis questioned the shunning of ornament in modern architecture. My master’s thesis attempted to derive lessons from India’s Islamic architecture that could enrich contemporary architecture. All of these were inspired by arguments that were becoming increasingly popular amongst young Indian architects. In any case, I came into my father’s office quite at odds with the values that his practice was based on, and without an appreciation of the values that it stood for. Naturally, I was not interested in working on the projects that he was excitedly working on at the time.
It was my father’s open mind, and his great love for me, that made it possible for me to work in his office. I took to working on competitions that he was invited to participate in, but had no time for. We lost the first one. Then, in 1985, after submitting our entry for the second one – a campus design for the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India – I headed off to pursue a master’s degree in Berkeley. Almost immediately after I had commenced studies in the US, we heard that we had won the EDII competition. My father insisted that I come back for a month during the Christmas break to work on the project. The office, he said, would take care of the project in the following months, and then I could come back during the summer break! I am glad that I agreed to work in this way. It meant that I was free to study as much as I wanted to at Berkeley, so long as I was back twice a year to work on my project. Soon I was working on two other projects besides EDII. It was a charmed existence. With the support of my father’s office, I was designing and building in India while having my fill of learning at Berkeley. This went on for five years. My father allowed me the space to develop my own architectural style. My early projects made overt references to Islamic and colonial architecture and made liberal use of decorative elements. This architectural language was very different from that of my father’s. By the mid-nineties, however, I was disenchanted by this counter-enlightenment approach to architecture and abandoned it.
[IN]: Tell us about your formative years at the CEPT and at Berkeley in the US. Who and what influenced your thinking at that time?
BP: If I have to reflect on teachers who influenced me, I must start with Fr. Erviti, a Spanish Jesuit priest who ran the Social Service League in our high school. From eighth grade on, for four years, I was drawn deeply into the many activities that he organised – conducting surveys in slums, building houses for slum dwellers, helping with community development initiatives, raising funds for charitable projects, leadership training, discussing the many social problems that India faced and how they might be solved. These activities got me deeply interested in social and economic development, and left me firmly committed to engaging with problems in the public realm. Fr. Erviti taught us that it was important to engage with issues, not just complain about them. In the long run, it meant that I would never be satisfied with just working in the private domain.
The School of Architecture at CEPT provided an exciting and intimate learning environment. Just 150 strong at the time, its students came from across the country. It also had a cast of very interesting teachers who were all practising architects. Its environment was liberal, pluralistic, and cosmopolitan. Studios, classes, study tours, the well-stocked library, lectures by eminent architects, festivals, building projects, and endless conversations and arguments with other students and my teachers, all provided many opportunities to learn and develop my views. I feel very fortunate to have had such a rich undergraduate education. Many teachers at CEPT influenced my thinking. Two of them were Anant Raje and the painter Piraji Sagara. With Raje, architecture was a very serious and deeply philosophical pursuit. His architectural language was rigorous, austere, and highly formal. It was impossible not to be influenced by the seriousness with which he took the crafting of architectural forms. Piraji set an example for all of us by the disciplined manner in which he continually worked away at his art – all day, every day of the year.
Perhaps the most important experience during my undergraduate years was the eight months or so I spent in Europe for my internship. Four of those were at the Institute for Lightweight Structures at Stuttgart, led by Frei Otto. It allowed me to observe a master designer at work. Friel Otto’s leadership style was very educative. I also learned much from observing how the Institute was organised and how it functioned. Important as this was, my travels across Europe during the remaining four months were even more educative. I was astounded by European cities. I marvelled at their streets, public spaces, gardens, public transport, infrastructure, amenities and by how Europeans had managed to make their cities comfortable and productive for ordinary citizens. It fuelled in me a desire to go beyond architecture and to better understand matters at the urban level and, later, to tackle urban problems in India.
I joined UC Berkeley to pursue a master’s in architecture but quickly shifted to a dual degree program that let me study urban planning. My time at Berkeley allowed me to study far and wide – urban planning, urban design, public economics, statistics, development theory, Marxist theory, development politics and so on. I had the opportunity to study under and work with great teachers, including the urban designer Allan Jacobs, the historian of urban planning Sir Peter Hall, the sociologist Manuel Castells, the geographer Richard Walker, and many others. It was an intoxicating five years during which I was able to read far and wide and expand my conceptual repertoire and intellectual horizons. I returned to India after completing my doctoral exams.
CG Road Development, Ahmedabad, 1994
CG Road Redevelopment, Ahmedabad, 2019[IN]: Your office works on projects of a wide array of scales – from the houses to large urban renewal projects. What is your method to realise projects at these scales?
BP: Tackling small scale problems is not difficult – even if one’s management skills are not well honed. However, tackling large scale projects requires one to build an effective organization. Projects like the Sabarmati Riverfront Development, Mumbai Port Development or the Central Vista Project pose the most complex challenges. They require large multi-disciplinary teams of experts, located across a network of firms to work collaboratively, on and off, over long periods of time.
It has taken us years of work to build HCP into an organization that can deliver the kind of projects that it does today. When I joined my father’s practice it was small and focused on architectural projects. It had no experience of working with government. It also had no expertise in urban design or urban planning. To build capacity to work on urban projects I set up a separate not-for-profit company. It was separate, because I wanted to incubate a new culture of work. It was not-for-profit because of the prevailing socialist ideology of the time. At that time, government viewed the motivations of private sector actors with suspicion, even more than it does today. On account of this the formulation of urban planning policy was seen as the preserve of government. Our not-for-profit company was incorporated in 1996 and was called Environmental Planning Collaborative(EPC). It is here that I started drawing in young urban planners and urban designers and working on small public realm projects.
As our experience and credibility increased, we started being assigned progressively larger and more challenging urban design projects. Within a few years we were also working on statutory planning projects. It was truly exhilarating when, in 1999, we were commissioned to work on Ahmedabad’s statutory Development Plan. No private company had ever been asked to do so before. It was a small opening in the wall that government had built around urban planning. However, because of it more expertise could now be brought to the making of urban plans in Gujarat. Within a decade, on account of the pioneering efforts made by EPC and a change in the climate of opinion, it was no longer necessary for a firm providing urban planning services to be a non-profit. At this stage, many people from EPC moved to HCP and HCP started working on urban projects.
Working on public realm projects requires knowledge of how government works. We built this knowledge gradually, by working on larger and larger projects. Our first real engagement with government was on a tiny street design project in Ahmedabad, which we also helped the municipal corporation to manage. This not only taught us a lot about how government works it also built our credibility. This led to work on the much larger Sabarmati Riverfront Project. Here too, we helped manage the project. We were then able to work with Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority on statutory planning projects. This enabled us to work with the State Government on the post-earthquake reconstruction of Bhuj. We are now working with many state governments and the central government on very large projects.
New Academic Building at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Ongoing
Many urban projects also require specialised technical knowledge. For example, it is not possible to think of public space design without a clear understanding of cadastral and property law. Riverfront projects require an understanding of hydraulics and soil mechanics. Urban redevelopment projects require an understanding of planning law, real estate development and finance. We built our technical capacities by working on diverse projects and collaborating with an extensive network of other firms and experts – firms dealing with, for example, relocation and rehabilitation, project financing, environmental regulations, ecological impact assessments, geotechnical engineering, urban infrastructure, traffic and transportation and river hydraulics.
Building an organization also requires building the capacities of its members and expanding their imagination. My imagination had been built through travel and first-hand experience of cities in Europe, the US, and South-East Asia. To ensure that people working with me had similar exposure, we started sending people abroad to see what well-planned, well-managed, liveable and efficient cities are like. Later, I also started sponsoring graduate education in good universities abroad for promising team members.
Urban projects take long to realise. This meant that we had to build the capacity to track and manage complex projects over long periods of time. We also had to build a large portfolio of projects to ensure that when some projects were dormant, revenue from others would keep us alive. It has been an endless process of learning and building capacity that continues to this day!
[IN]: How is your practice organised? What aspects of work are you personally involved with?
BP: HCP has grown slowly over the last sixty years. Its growth has enabled a division of labour within it that was not possible when the practice was small. Earlier, most of the people within HCP had to take on multiple responsibilities. As we grew, it became possible for people to focus on what they did best and liked to do.
The practice now comprises loose groups focused on building and maintaining expertise in domains such as architecture, urban design, planning, interiors, and project management. These groups are led by people with deep expertise in their domains. The practice also comprises more specialist functional groups focused on computer visualisation, quantity surveying, communications, etc. The practice’s internal expertise is complemented by a vast network of specialised consultants and advisors spread out across the country and crucial to our work.
Work on projects is undertaken by transient multi-disciplinary project teams. These teams are anchored by project architects, urban designers, or planners and project managers. Together they are responsible for coordinating and shepherding work on the projects they oversee. They are supported by mentors drawn from amongst the most experienced professionals in the office and the specialist functional groups of the office.
My work, at the broadest level, is to provide leadership to the practice – articulating and anchoring its philosophy, establishing its priorities, supporting the growth and development of individuals, being the face of the practice and so on. I continue to be involved in projects, especially when they are being conceptualised. I also front a few high-profile projects where my presence is crucial for taking them through.
[IN]: In the public projects you design, do you take the political impact of your design into account?
BP: Of course. Public projects cannot be realised without considering the political impacts of one’s design. To understand what I mean, consider what happens when one places one places a sewage treatment plant at one end of a plot and a garden on the other end. The area around the sewage plant becomes less desirable than the area around the garden increases in value. If the plot is privately owned, the inequity generated by the design does not pose a problem. All the benefits and costs engendered by the design accrue to the private owner. The situation changes completely if the plot is publicly owned. People who own land in the vicinity of the sewage plant, or even make more use of it compared to others, are likely to feel aggrieved and protest the location of the sewage plant. They are also likely to protest the benefits accruing to those near the garden.
In a democracy, the prospect of such oppositional politics cannot be ignored. A public project has to be designed to minimise likely opposition, by minimising inequities in the distribution of costs and benefits. When it is not possible to eliminate inequities, ways have to be found to compensate those bearing an unequal burden of the costs, and to charge those unequally benefiting from the project. Keeping in mind the inequities generated by one’s design and minimising them is therefore absolutely essential when one is designing public projects.
The obligation to take the political impacts of one’s design into consideration is sometimes specified in law. For example, when a statutory urban development plan is made, the planning authority is required by law to publish the plan and invite ‘objections and suggestions’. It is then required to properly consider the objections and suggestions and amend the plan. It is also required to document its reasoning. Following this, it is required to reinvite invite objections and suggestions on the revisions to the plan. It is then required to once again properly consider the objections and suggestions, amend the plan and document its reasoning. We are used to functioning in this manner and seek feedback on all our plans even when we are not statutorily required to do so.
There is also another dimension of political impacts that needs to be mentioned. Public projects are aimed at solving practical problems facing the public. However, for politicians who are promoting them, they are also aimed at improving their own political prospects and furthering their ideological objectives. This is natural, inevitable and cannot be wished away. Our wanting to work on public projects and our designs for the same, however, are not driven by these objectives. Our philosophy is to remain squarely focused on solving practical problems. It is this stance that allows us to maintain a professional distance and allows us to work on the urgent problems that are plaguing our towns and cities. It also allows us to collaborate with people, within government and outside, who have divergent political and ideological persuasions. On many occasions, the fact that our projects are resolutely focused on practical problem solving and infrastructure improvements, has also allowed them to survive changes in political dispensations.
[IN]: How does the politics around the project affect the spatial aspects of the project?
BP: Let me use the example of our design for the Mumbai Port Redevelopment to answer this question. Mumbai Port runs along the entire eastern coast of Mumbai’s island city and covers an area of about 10 sq km. It was established in late nineteenth century and was the engine for Mumbai’s growth. Eventually however, as has happened to many ports across the world, Mumbai’s growth led to the decline of Mumbai’s port – it became too costly to transport goods from the port, through the congested city, to the hinterland. The decline was further propelled by the rise of containerisation. In 1989, a new container terminal was built across the bay from Mumbai. Soon much of the shipping traffic shifted there. Today, much of Mumbai Port Trust’s land is underutilised and crying out for redevelopment.
When we were commissioned in 2017 to plan the redevelopment, the first thought that came to my mind was that Mumbai Port faced a similar situation as Mumbai’s defunct textile mills faced in the 80s. Like the Port, Mumbai’s mills were economically unviable but sitting on precious centre-city land. The owners wanted to monetise the land, but many influential activists in Mumbai felt that the government should appropriate a large portion of the defunct mills’ land for public uses. They felt that the owners should not be allowed to monetise all the land. This led to a political stand-off and a long battle in court, which the activists lost. Today, the mill lands are being developed, but in a way that does not significantly contribute to the public realm.
I was certain that the proposal to redevelop Mumbai Port would face the same political dynamic as Mumbai’s defunct textile mills faced. The central government, which owned Mumbai Port, would want to monetise the land to raise money for the central exchequer and Mumbai activists would oppose this in the name of Mumbai’s citizens. They would want a large portion of the land to improve Mumbai – for public parks and other amenities. Our design for the redevelopment was formulated in anticipation of this political dynamic and by a desire to find a ‘design solution’ that could meet both the seemingly irreconcilable demands. Could the entire land be monetised while leaving a large portion available for public use? Could our design covert a potential zero-sum stand-off into a win-win situation? We soon realised that the answer lay in adopting a pattern of land use that was unlike the typical pattern of land use in Indian cities. We also realised that to be able to do this we would have to develop a new regime of building regulations. What I mean by this is the following.
Typically, a fifth of the land in Indian cities is devoted to the public realm – streets, parks, and amenities. Another fifth is covered by buildings. A substantial portion – almost three fifths – is land that building regulations require private owners to leave open as setbacks, land for parking, and for private gardens. This land, within private compounds, is fragmented and irregular in shape. It neither confers public benefits nor can it be well-used by its private owners.
For Mumbai Port’s redevelopment, we developed an urban pattern that practically eliminated the need for land to be left within private compounds. It proposed that one-third of the land be used for streets, another third for parks, and the remaining third be put up for sale. On the third meant for sale, we proposed the construction of as much floor space as was traditionally allowed on four-fifths of the land. This meant that we were able to realise the entire value of the land by selling only a third of the land. The other two thirds would remain in the public domain in the form of streets and parks. This was thrice the amount normally allocated to the public domain in Indian cities! Our design allowed the central government to realise the full value of the Port’s land and allowed Mumbai to keep two-thirds of it in the public domain!
I am convinced that as designers we should first focus on finding design solutions to complex social and political problems. Only if this is not possible should we consider taking on the mantel of political activism.
[IN]: The large urban projects your practice does have many diverse stakeholders and impact groups. Here, consensus building is important. What are your views on this? How do you manage consensus building? What methods do you use?
BP: I gave a part of the answer to this question earlier, when I said that one has to design public projects to be fair – costs and benefits must be evenly distributed. This reduces the likelihood of opposition to projects and improves the prospect of building consensus around them. In addition to this, projects have to be designed to be worthwhile. People have to agree that it is worth spending public resources on the project. In a resource starved country like ours, focusing on finding rational and economical solutions to urgent practical problems that a lot of people are facing makes it easier to build widespread support for projects. This is why, for example, our various riverfront projects are focused on urgent problems like flood control, pollution control, ensuring public access, creation of public space, rehabilitating slum dwellers and the like. We shy away from objectives that are divisive, not urgent or those that appeal only to a few people.
Central Vista Plan, New Delhi, 1931
Central Vista Plan, New Delhi, 2019
Central Vista Plan, New Delhi, Proposed (Ongoing)We also put in a lot of effort, at the design stage, to consult people by using clear, elaborate, and explanatory presentations. This has required building the capacity to produce high-quality explanatory materials – drawings, diagrams, visualisations, animations, models, brochures, write-ups, and so on. We also often use full-scale samples to solicit reactions. For example, I personally showed over fifty diverse people the sample stretch built along Rajpath for the Central Vista Avenue project. Most of these people were critics of the projects. The interactions were one hour long, one-on-one sessions, where I explained our design and solicited comments.
Personally, I enjoy doing project presentations and explaining our proposals – especially to sceptical audiences. I never refuse if I am asked to present my projects, in any forum. One recent such engagement was at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), where I was requested to present the Central Vista Project. I was curious to know what people, who are ideologically opposed to the government, had to say about the practical problem-solving that the project is focused on. Meeting people one-on-one and soliciting comments is the most productive way of getting feedback. Many of my colleagues at HCP also relish such engagements.
At the project implementation stage we shift from the consultative mode to an information dissemination mode. We use a variety of means to explain the design to people: public presentations; public exhibitions of drawings, models, and visualisations; websites; social media; press briefings and others. For example, to ensure that the press had sufficient information about the Gandhi Ashram project, we, along with Gujarat Government officials, went to every newspaper and TV office in Ahmedabad and a few in Delhi, and explained the project to them. This takes up a lot of time, but it is very effective in building consensus around the projects. Keeping the media informed ensures that they are not easily swayed by project detractors who simply want to use the project as a political football. Such detractors thrive when sufficient information about the project is not publicly available. They are then able to fabricate or twist facts and mislead the public.
[IN]: From whom do you seek criticism consciously? Are there people within and outside the practice whose opinion or critical feedback you seek and value?
BP: I seek criticism from a wide range of people. Foremost are people who are going to use the project. It is absolutely crucial to hear what they have to say about one’s design if one hopes to get it right. One memorable session of this type was on the sample stretch we had built when we designed the CG Road over 25 years ago. It had the then Mayor of Ahmedabad, Ms Bhavna Dave, calling people from shops and houses along to the street to tell me just what they thought about what we were proposing. As I remember it, it was a chastening and educative experience. My colleagues and I have done many such sessions since then. We strongly believe that the best way of improving designs is by getting direct feedback from prospective users and insist on getting such feedback. We do not always succeed and our designs are not faultless, but we certainly get fewer things wrong. For our public projects, we also seek feedback and criticism from a wide range of laypeople by conducting presentations, discussions, and one-on-one sessions. This is most educative, helps improve designs, and helps build consensus around projects.
As an architect in the public realm, one is obliged to explain one’s projects to the public. Fortunately, I enjoy this sort of interaction and hardly ever miss an opportunity to explain my projects to people. I also seek out and deliberately engage in conversations with those opposed to my projects – in the hope of learning from them or turning them into supporters. I believe that talking, explaining, arguing, agreeing, and disagreeing, are all part of the lifeblood of a democracy and an essential part of engaging in public discourse around public projects.
Let me also say that if one wants to work in the public realm one must learn how to listen to criticism, however harsh or discomforting it may be. It can be highly educative and lead to many project improvements. However, one also cannot afford to be derailed by controversies. What gets said in public is often politically and ideologically motivated and unmoored in facts. Using projects as political footballs, or obstructing projects by taking extreme positions instead of coming up with workable alternatives, is fair game for many people. For professionals, it is important to learn how to pay attention to good faith critics and to remain unperturbed by criticism made in bad faith.
[IN]: Large projects of national importance often raise questions of justice. As someone who designs these projects, are you convinced that the projects are fundamentally just?
BP: Certainly, I am convinced that all the projects I have worked on are fundamentally just. This does not mean that everything about their design or implementation is perfect. They contain flaws – some as a result of ignorance, others attributable to contextual constraints and yet others resulting from a combination of the two. Nonetheless, I do not hesitate to say that the projects I worked on are fundamentally just.
I would also like to add that this has not come about automatically. The process of decision making in the public realm is complicated and messy, more so than in the private sector. Many more actors are involved and accountability is far more diffused. It is easy for projects to go in the wrong direction without anyone feeling particularly responsible. Therefore, the architect or designer must keep constant vigil and make considerable effort to steer projects in the right direction. We have made considerable such effort on all our projects, and, while we have not always succeeded, on the whole, we have been able to steer projects in the correct direction.
Vishwanath Dham (Drone Photograph), Varanasi, 2022Let me give you an example that illustrates this point. At one stage in the Sabarmati project, much to our horror, the authorities decided that the streets that we were designing along both banks of the river should be six lanes wide – three in either direction. While this would have been much appreciated by vehicle owners who wanted to rapidly traverse the city it would have been disastrous for neighbourhoods along the riverfront. Six lane streets with high speed traffic would have become dangerous barriers for pedestrians wanting to access the riverfront and cut the city off from the riverfront.
We tried explaining this many times to the people in charge but we were repeatedly overruled. It seemed impossible to convince them. At this stage, we could simply have given up. However, we continued our efforts to have the decision reversed. An opportunity presented itself when Enrique Penalosa, ex mayor of Bogota and an advocate for pedestrian-oriented cities, visited Ahmedabad. Through some stealthy manoeuvring we had him make a presentation to the Chief Minister. Fortunately, he was able to impress the Chief Minister who had the decision to build wide streets reversed. Thanks to this Ahmedabad now has narrower, more traversable, and more pedestrian friendly streets along its riverfront.
It is not easy to keep projects on track. It takes a lot of effort to kill bad ideas and I think we have put in much such effort in all our projects. I am not saying that we always know what is right and just. There have been occasions when public authorities have prevailed upon us to do their bidding and where we have had to later acknowledge that they were right. But, by and large, I am willing to stand by all the key decisions in my projects and believe that they are just. In fact, I would go a step further and claim that our projects have advanced many important progressive attitudes and values.
First, they have all tried to reverse the apathy and despondency that has plagued our country since the 70s. Projects like the Sabarmati Riverfront Development or Vishwanath Dham challenge the notion that our urban problems are too complex and can never be solved. They also challenge the idea that our democracy or our lack of resources makes it impossible to improve our towns and cities.
Second, all our projects advance the idea of fairness. In India, fairness has often been sacrificed to advance public objectives. Strategies that distribute costs and benefits unevenly are routinely justified in the name of public interest. Likewise, policies that dispossess both rich and poor people of their properties are also routinely justified by claiming that they are meant to create public benefits. Projects such as the Sabarmati Riverfront Development, post-earthquake redevelopment of Bhuj Walled City, and Vishwanath Dham, all involved vast amounts of relocation of people, land appropriation, and the creation of public benefits. If their designs were ‘unfair’, all these projects would have quickly got mired in protests or in the courts. Their success, in large measure, is because they were designed to be fair.
The third value that our public projects have tried to advance is the importance of expanding and enriching spaces that we collectively use – public spaces. We have neglected this for very long. Indian architects and landscape architects have primarily focused their energies on private spaces for elite consumption. But good and just cities are ones where people share spaces in common; where ordinary people can also enjoy parks, gardens, safety and security. The Central Vista Project is a prime example of this objective being advanced. Not only are the gardens on both sides of Rajpath being expanded, they are also being refurbished with high quality walkways, lighting, signage, amenities and infrastructure.
Fourth, our projects have all promoted the idea that development, when undertaken sensitively, need not be opposed to the protection of our heritage or environment. Many urgently needed urban development projects in India have languished on account of extreme positions taken by heritage and environmental protection advocates. Our projects show a more practical and realisable approach to reconciling development with heritage and environmental protection.
[IN]: When you were approached to lead CEPT, you had a thriving practice. What was your motivation for getting involved with the school?
BP: When I was approached to take over CEPT, it was a fifty-year-old institution with a remarkable history, a strong reputation, many fine teachers and alums and a well-meaning Board. But it was stuck in the past, facing some very serious problems. I could see this clearly because of what I had learnt during my five years at the University of California, Berkeley. There I had the opportunity to understand how modern institutions, committed to excellence in teaching and research, work. I knew that if CEPT continued to function in the way it was doing, it would soon lose whatever reputation it had. I was keen on tackling CEPT’s problems and creating a contemporary Indian example of a design and planning institution committed to excellence.
However, this opportunity was not the only reason why I was motivated to get involved with CEPT. CEPT was my alma mater and an institution that my father had helped nurture. He started teaching at the School of Architecture at CEPT in the early sixties – a couple of years after it was founded. Later he was asked to lead the architecture school. A few years later, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, CEPT’s Chairman, asked him to lead CEPT as a whole, which he did for ten years. Owing to my father’s long association with CEPT, and my association with it as an alum, I had an emotional connection with the institution. This connection further fuelled my motivation to tackle CEPT’s problems.
I did not view my working at CEPT as being in conflict with my practice because I think of practice more broadly than running an office or studio. I believe that professionals have a responsibility to contribute to the well-being of their professions – this is a part of what ‘being in practice’ means. By working on CEPT I simply saw myself as discharging that responsibility.
When I was approached to lead CEPT, I saw many important and challenging issues that needed to be solved. One of the most serious problems at CEPT was that there had been a severe decline in the average quality of student work over the past decade. Drawings were often crude and amateurish, models were shoddy, arguments were poorly communicated and lacked rigour or substantiation. Those in charge were either in denial of the issue altogether or were convinced that it was not CEPT’s fault.
Second, CEPT graduates were losing regard amongst employers. They were acquiring the reputation of being better at talking and arguing than drawing or designing – more adept at coming up with woke arguments than designing solutions to architectural problems. This problem was in part a result of influential teachers at CEPT being more interested in moulding students’ preferences than in building their skills and abilities. This was not always the case at CEPT. One could not get away by echoing one’s teachers’ moral, political, and aesthetic values, or aesthetic preferences. To win accolades and honours, one had to demonstrate proficiency in drawing and designing.
The shift in focus from building abilities to moulding preferences was tied to the fact that most CEPT teachers were no longer drawn from practice. Teaching at CEPT was dominated by a relatively homogenous body of full-time academics. Compounding this homogeneity was the fact that the student body at the undergraduate level had also become homogenous over the years. Most students were from Gujarat and, amongst them, most from Ahmedabad.
All of the above was a result of the fact that pedagogy at CEPT had not been reviewed since the 70s. Instead of changing with the times, CEPT was romanticising its past and clinging on to it. Over time its pedagogy had become increasingly convoluted and confusing. It needed a comprehensive rethink.
CEPT had also become financially unsustainable. The central government had unilaterally stopped disbursing grants, which it had been giving for over two decades for running the planning programs at CEPT. The state government’s grant for running CEPT’s undergraduate programs had not been increased for years and therefore, it had become woefully inadequate for meeting program expenses. To make up for the shortfall, CEPT had started charging student fees. However, since the student fees were also pegged at unrealistically low levels, they were unable to make up the shortfall. Many other challenges arose from the financial problems at CEPT. It was unable to attract good staff, provide support to needy students, invest in equipment and capacity building, and so on. Its infrastructure and facilities were of very poor quality, had not been well-maintained for long and, despite a doubling of student strength, they had not been expanded for many years.
CEPT’s consulting activities were poorly structured and insufficiently regulated. It was possible for many academics to neglect their responsibilities and focus instead on consulting work. CEPT could be used to channel work to private offices. CEPT was losing money from consulting. These problems are common to many academic institutions in India, but very few of them have been able to structure their research, advisory and consulting activities in a way that works synergistically with their teaching activities. Having led a consulting firm for over two decades, I knew that CEPT’s poorly regulated consulting activities could be much better structured.
Lastly, one of the most challenging problems that CEPT faced was how it was governed. The formal head of the institution could not operate autonomously because of outside pulls and pressures. The lack of clarity in leadership led to much confusion in decision making and undermined accountability at all levels. No one was entirely in charge, and reporting structures were poorly defined. Roles, responsibilities, appointment procedures, and tenures were unclear. There were no formal policies and procedures. Informal governance, the lack of a proper organisational structure and lack of clear policies lay at the bottom of most other problems, undermining a once good institution.
To me, all these problems presented opportunities. Clarifying CEPT’s pedagogic philosophy and its academic systems could ratchet up the quality of its teaching and research. Improving its accounting systems and making more efficient use of its resources could make it financially sustainable. Weaning it away from grants could strengthen its autonomy. Providing it with proper leadership and improving its governance systems could improve accountability. CEPT could demonstrate what a well-functioning formally structured Indian institution could be like. It could also demonstrate how such an institution could pursue excellence in teaching, research, and advisory work.
I knew that all of this would require radically restructuring CEPT and that this would be a particularly difficult challenge to tackle. In restructuring CEPT, I would have to rein in the powers and interests of many people at CEPT whom I personally knew or otherwise respected. Though this was a very unpleasant prospect, I was motivated to take up the challenge because of the promise of renewing a remarkable institution that I deeply cared for.
[IN]: Through your engagement with CEPT and with your practice, what is your reading of contemporary architecture in India?
BP: India is undergoing an epochal transformation. From a country that lived in its villages, it is becoming a country that lives in its towns and cities. Its economy, its politics, its technological capacities, and people’s lifestyle and world view are all rapidly evolving and modernising. Architects have a very important role to play in facilitating and shaping this transformation.
This is not the moment to be stuck in the past, reminiscing about the glorious, wonderful work done in the post-independence era. This is also not the moment to yearn for a time when architecture was all about creating symbols of modernity to serve a splendid elite consensus. Snootily looking down one’s nose at the urgent, aspirational, and sometimes unsophisticated demands generated by our deepening democracy will also not help. The architectural and urban design challenges that face us are massive and complicated. They cannot be answered by tiny, boutique solutions that are not scalable or rapidly replicable. They will also not be answered if we disengage and wait for better times, or turn ourselves into intellectuals, critics or activists. The great Charles Correa once said to me: “I keep telling all these chaps: we are not social scientists! We cannot just keep analysing things and presenting our criticisms and theories! We architects, we are like engineers and doctors. We have to come up with a solution to problems. It is only by presenting better and better solutions that the profession can be advanced”. He couldn’t have been more right⊗
Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (Project Team), Bhat, 1986, with Dr. Bimal Patel (third from right), and Dr. Hasmukh C Patel (fourth from right).DR BIMAL PATEL is an architect, urbanist and academician and heads HCP, an Ahmedabad-based architecture, planning and design office as its Chairman and Managing Director. Bimal Patel received a Diploma in Architecture from the CEPT, Ahmedabad, in 1984. He received a Master’s in Architecture and a Masters in City Planning in 1988 and a PhD in City and Regional Planning in 1995 from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1996, Bimal founded Environmental Planning Collaborative (EPC), a not-for-profit consultancy and policy-research and advocacy organization. Since 2012, he has also been heading CEPT University as President. His work has received numerous awards, including the Padma Shri in 2019, which is amongst the highest civilian honours conferred by India.
This conversation was recorded in December 2021.
