Building for keeps

Are Indian architects watching?

Paris, and its contiguous Ile-de-France metropolitan area, has some of the most distinctive, radical structures built in the last 50 years or so. Think of the Pompidou Centre wrapped in exposed, colour-coded service pipes, which created a stir when it opened in 1977. Or the glass pyramid entrance to the Louvre and the spectacular Grand Arch that reinterprets the classical aesthetics of the Arc De Triomphe in a 20th century vocabulary of glass and steel. Le Corbusier, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, I M Pei, Renzo Piano — some of the most eminent architects of the last century left their mark on the city, which saw a lot of re-building activity in the post-war years and again, under François Mitterrand.

 

The French enthusiasm for extraordinary buildings continues into the 21st century, as was amply seen at Architecture=Sustainable, a travelling exhibition compiled by the Pavilion De L’Arsenal (the agency that exhibits, documents and disseminates information about the architecture of Paris). In Delhi till January 31, it is a part of the Bonjour India festival of France in India.

Architecture= Sustainable showcases 30 concepts and buildings that interpret the idea of sustainability. Elaborate wooden scale models, blow-ups of artistic impressions on canvas, elaborate charts explaining the context and the concept, and a video loop playing interviews with the architects are used to bring alive the buildings, which are either being built or still on the drawing board.

“Sustainability” is quite the buzz word these days. More so in the construction sector, which causes a huge drain on the earth’s resources (consider what marble quarrying has done to the Aravallis). In India, especially, where real estate is one of the main drivers of growth, “green” architecture has really caught on with an estimated “green” footprint of 224 million sqft and 327 buildings.

But for the French, the principle of “sustainability” runs deeper. Jean Nouvel, the eminent architect whose winning design for the Philharmonie de Paris is included in the show, says sustainability is nothing less than “creating buildings we want to keep”.

Jacques Ferrier, architect and curator of Architecture=Sustainable, elaborates: “A sustainable building is one that can survive the use for which it was designed and can adapt to the evolution of the family.” Ferrier considered seven things when curating the show — “urbanity, implementation, morphology, material and spatial concepts, systems and performance”. He doesn’t speak of one more, ineffable yet obvious, criterion — aesthetics.

And it’s the aesthetics that makes the architecture concepts on show at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts so radical. Look at Ferrier’s (and Philippe Chiambaretta’s) design for the urban centre at Issy-Les-Moulineaux, a densely-populated suburb southwest of Paris. The two acre site that now houses the R&D facilities of France Telenet will, post the improvements in 2012, have a 10,000 sqm green space, a high-rise commercial centre, a 1,000 seater convention centre, etc. All that’s commonplace for such city centre renewal projects, but what gives Ferrier’s plan distinction is the “fishnet” facade on the high-rise, which not just adds to the aesthetics, but also provides shade and has load-bearing functions. Similarly the wind turbines on top perform a dual function — they’re decorative and also generate power.

A similarly out-of-the-box aesthetic permeates Nouvel’s design for the Paris Philharmonie. Clad in aluminium, the 2,400 seater auditorium resembles a stack of plates, piled one on top of the other. Integrated into the landscape, people can walk over the jutting planes which become an extension of the public spaces — bringing in a new excitement. Aesthetics and green consciousness are thus symbiotic — one reinforces the other.

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