Rahul Mehrotra is an architect and professor based in both Boston and Mumbai. He discusses several influential books in his career, including The Language of Post-Modern Architecture by Charles Jencks, which introduced him to considering multiple architectural vocabularies coexisting. Mehrotra emphasizes the importance of words alongside drawings in architecture. He has written several books on Mumbai architecture and its conservation and advocacy.

1. Rahul Mehrotra in his
private library in Boston.
Rahul Mehrotra likes to keep
an eye on the material domain.
Text
Parvinder Marwaha
Photo
Ivan Djikaev
‘If you switch
completely to
the digital world,
you become
seduced by
virtual reality’
183182 Long Section Rahul Mehrotra Bookmark Boston | USA

2. Your architectural education started in
India. What is the earliest influential book
that comes to mind?
Rahul Mehrotra: The Language of Post-
Modern Architecture by Charles Jencks [1977]
was a seminal book for me. I read it a few months
after it was published, which was lucky, because
other books published in the West took a long time
to arrive in India when I was a student in the late
1970s. The book was confusing to me at first, on
account of the richness of its disparate images,
but it added an incredible dimension to the purely
historical narratives – biased against modernism
– that we were being offered in architecture school
at that time. The book resonated with me deeply.
As students at CEPT, we saw the coexistence of
many architectural vocabularies in the Indian
urban landscape, and the arguments in Jencks’s
book were therefore familiar to us.But,fortunately,
as the implications of post-modernism became
apparent, the book taught me to watch out for the
pitfalls of the superficial caricaturing of history in
contemporary architecture.
What’s the most recent book you’ve read
that has been significant to you, and why?
I recently revisited a book by C.K. Prahalad
called The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.
The book made me rethink the potential agency
of design – that is, if we thought about the world
and about poverty from his perspective. It also
reminded me of how elitist the practice of archi-
tecture tends to get. It seems that 90 per cent of
architects are expending their energy on the archi-
tecture of indulgence; weekend homes, museums
and hotels are essentially projects commissioned
by the upper middle class. If we saw the service
of the poor as not only satisfying but also profit-
able, the profession might have a completely dif-
ferent set of priorities. Even more importantly, the
profession would be perceived by the public rather
differently.
When compared with drawings, how
important are words?
Extremely important – perhaps as impor-
tant as drawings.The wonderful thing about words
and drawings is their versatility: they can be pre-
cise, they can provoke the imagination, and they
can be open to interpretation. I suppose what I
mean is that words powerfully used and drawings
creatively deployed can offer these sorts of read-
ings simultaneously.
As an architect, you tend more towards
drawings. What made you want to write
books?
It was accidental. One thing just led to
another. But in the process of writing – I first
started writing to build awareness of the conser-
vation work I wanted to initiate at the city level – I
realized the power of the written word. To begin
with, it’s an instrument of advocacy, especially
for long-term urban questions, which allows
knowledge and experience to pass down through
generations. Secondly, it’s a way to clarify one’s
own thinking and ideas. Writing forces one to be
precise and engaging at the same time. Finally,
it’s about communication, which is very important
when you want to engage society. If writing is for
nothing else, its ability to communicate gives us
architects a reason to write more.
Were you asked to write Architecture in
India since 1990, or was the book self-
initiated?
It was self-initiated. I wrote an essay in
2010 for a Spanish architecture magazine that
had asked me to cover architecture in India over
the previous ten years or so. A few hours after
finishing the essay and sending it off for publica-
tion, I thought to myself that I could easily expand
the material to make a book. That triggered the
process of writing the book and looking for a pub-
lisher. The book captures the period from 1990
onwards, which is exactly the period of my private
practice. So in some ways the book was already in
my head – think of it as the field notes for what I’d
observed in the two decades since establishing
RMA Architects in India.
You talk about inequity and exclusion as
the main problems affecting urbanism
and design in India. How accessible are
books to people in India?
In urban areas, very accessible. Unfor-
tunately, though, the nation’s library culture has
died down significantly. The notion of the library
as a public place urgently needs to be resurrected
in Indian society, as well as in the whole Western
world. This is due partly to the diversion to online
sources and partly to the lack of attention being
paid to public space by the neoliberal regimes that
determine the politics of many countries today.
IttookseveralattemptstopindownRahulMehrotra–
not surprising,owing to his cross-continental efforts
in both architectural practice and teaching. Born in
India,Mehrotra studied at the School of Architecture
(CEPT) in Ahmedabad and went on to earn a mas-
ter’s degree in Urban Design at the Harvard Gradu-
ate School of Design (GSD) in Boston, Massachusetts, where he is now
a professor, as well as the chair of the university’s Department of Urban
Design and Planning. Thanks to his work at Harvard, he is frequently in
Boston,but Mehrotra commutes between that city and his home in Mum-
bai, where he heads RMA Architects, the practice he founded in 1990.
I managed to get hold of the professor on both continents, as well
as in Basel,Switzerland,where he was visiting the site of an RMA project.
Although his work spans many seas, his primary interest is India and its
urban condition,a subject that appears in many of his writings.He talked
about the books that have influenced him and his motives for writing
about his experiences,which include everything from his firm’s Taj Mahal
project to research on pop-up urbanism, which he explored by studying
the Kumbh Mela, a major Indian pilgrimage taken by millions of Hindus,
who gather to bathe in the sacred rivers that mark this religious festival.
I And what do you think about the‘diversion
to online sources’?
I see the potential, but also the disad-
vantages. The great potential is the penetration
of information and knowledge into remote areas
and across a section of society that has never had
access to this material. In democracies, the diver-
sion to online sources is even more critical and
should be celebrated. The downside is perhaps
more nostalgic – I’m talking about the way people
used to read, about the pleasure of holding a book
and scanning through it, page by page, and about
surrounding oneself with many of these beautiful
artefacts.
As an architect, I deal with the mate-
rial world. It’s important to stay balanced and to
remind myself of the experience of the material. I
find that if you switch your life completely to the
digital world, you become seduced by virtual real-
ity, so I tend to use the digital world where it inter-
faces most comfortably with the material world.
Can you explain the ‘comfortable’ inter-
face in greater detail? Are you referring to
your professional or private life?
Let’s take the Nest Thermostat, for exam-
ple. It’s a device that controls the temperature and
functions of the house – an absolutely brilliant
piece of equipment that allows you to monitor your
home from anywhere in the world. It is inherently
intelligent, so it learns your patterns and prefer-
ences – totally amazing. In this case, I find the
interface between digital and material both clear
and exciting.The interfaces in construction-indus-
try fab labs are probably another good example,
but they’re not something I’ve been engaged in. If
I were in another profession, I might have allowed
myself – no doubt to my advantage – to be com-
pletely consumed, seduced or enveloped by the
digital world.
Are you writing a book at the moment?
I am currently finishing a book on the Taj
Mahal, together with Amita Baig, with whom I col-
laborated on the site management plan for the Taj
Mahal between 2000 and 2005. The book is called
Taj Mahal: Multiple Narratives; it captures all the
different stories we came across while working on
the project.The thrust of the book is to share these
narratives with people who can then view or visit
the Taj Mahal and have a richer experience.
Another book I’m working on is about the
Kumbh Mela. The Mela, or ‘gathering’, is a pilgrim-
age in which Hindus come together to bathe in a
sacred river. It occurs in different places – once
every 12 years in each place – and an entire tem-
porary city, set up for 55 days, accommodates 7
million people, with another 30 to 50 million visit-
ing the city on five auspicious dates. Kumbh Mela:
Mapping the Ephemeral Mega-City will cover the
construction and deconstruction of the city. It’s a
collaborative interdisciplinary project, and I’ll be
editing and compiling material for the book.
I understand that Kumbh Mela is one of
your larger projects and that you’re work-
ing with a team at Harvard. Where did it
start, and how did it develop?
Over the last few years I have been working
on The Kinetic City, a series of essays on ephem-
eral landscapes in urban India. They are based on
the premise that we should pay more attention to
the temporal landscape in urban India when dis-
cussing urban planning. I used the Kumbh River
as an example of pop-up urbanism, and mapping
the Kumbh Mela soon became a dream of mine.
Things fell into place when I suggested the idea to
the school as a cross-university interdisciplinary
project. If all goes well, we will launch the book in
April 2015.
You’ve written a lot about Mumbai and
conservation there. What led you to want
to explore the city in such depth? Was it
more a case of practicality, as you live
there?
In large part, it had to do with giving agency
to my advocacy work in Mumbai. The books
became instruments for this advocacy. Thus they
ranged from serious and scholarly accounts of the
history of the city to books on walking tours and
more local histories of different areas in Mumbai.
But it was all squarely linked to the mission of pre-
serving buildings and historical areas within the
city.
Has any of your written work translated
into reality? It must be difficult to get your
ideas from paper to architecture.
I have been lucky, because that has hap-
pened. In 1994 I coedited a compilation of material
consisting of essays and the results of research
from a book we did on the historic Fort Precinct
in Mumbai. The government actually adopted our
recommendations to institute the first urban-
conservation legislation in India in 1995.
Fiction or nonfiction?
Nonfiction. Magazines and journals are my
prime source of information. I use them more than
books to navigate the world. Fiction is not as inter-
esting – I prefer films.
And what’s the most memorable film
you’ve seen recently?
The Lunchbox. It’s about the lunch-delivery
system in Mumbai and is a memorable film for
several reasons. It’s a wonderful portrayal of
middle-class life in Mumbai – the struggles and
hopes, as well as the hopelessness. The film is
also a wonderful portrayal of spaces in the city:
living, work and public space. Many studies have
been done of these lunch-delivery systems –
called dabbawalas – but I’d never seen this very
particular Mumbai service as an element that is
embedded in the life of the city. It’s usually studied
more or less abstractly as an urban system.
The film offers a good insight into eve-
ryday life in India. What book would you
recommend to people who want to learn
about the experience of living there? I’m
always told Shantaram by Gregory David
Roberts.
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. It’s the
best portrayal of life in contemporary India that I
have read. It describes issues such as economic
mobility, inequity and class systems – those that
are emerging and others that are breaking down.
It straddles rural and urban India, the rich and the
poor, human emotions – and does so brilliantly.
Can you name a few books on the reading
list you give your students?
The list varies from course to course, but
two books that I urge them all to read are H2O
and the Waters of Forgetfulness by Ivan Illich and
The Necessity for Ruins by J.B. Jackson. These
are great books that cut across whatever subject
matter a student might have to cover in a particu-
lar course. Just their titles are an education in
itself.
Other books that have
influenced Rahul Mehrotra
James L. Adams, Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide
to Better Ideas, first edition, W.H. Freeman & Co., San
Francisco, 1975
This book showed me how to think outside the box.
The author systematically deconstructs the taboos
that condition our thinking – taboos that often limit
creativity on account of the biases embedded in our
minds.
Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language:Towns,
Buildings, Construction, first edition, Oxford University
Press, 1977
This book is a classic in that, through abstraction,
Alexander blurs the boundaries that separate the
vernacular, the timeless, the modern, and the everyday,
as well as those between architecture and the way
people inhabit space.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for
Spaceship Earth, E.P. Dutton & Co., New York, c. 1963
The mind-blowing thing about this book is that besides
communicating through its title the finite nature of
our planet and its resources – something that took
the world many decades to articulate – it provides an
amazing insight into how systems are interconnected
and into the synergies that are critical to creating a
sustainable and efficient management of the planet.
Laurence J. Peter, The Peter Plan: A Proposal for
Survival, W. Morrow, New York, 1976
In some sense, this was my introduction to ecology,
environmentalism and optimistic thinking. A wonderful
format of quotes, stories, ideas and projections of the
future collide in this little paperback.
‘90 per cent of architects expend
their energy on an upper middle
class architecture of indulgence’
185184 Long Section Rahul Mehrotra Bookmark Boston | USA