The Great Nation

Like every Indian worth his salt, I too had a fascination for America. Technically a foreign trip from India could as well be made to Dhakka, but apart from the Parliament Building designed by Louis Kahn, Dhakka has little else to stir your imagination. And then the title 'Dhakka returned' would have as great significance here as when you remarked in Pune that once you did a project in Vadgaon Budruk.

But when I really made the great leap forward (without tripping on my feet), what I encountered was an anti-climax. My son lives in Florida, where the climate is similar to Kerala-very hot & humid. But the houses all over the place remind you of England, except that the walls (instead of brick) are in closed wood planks, there is no provision for ventilation, no sun-shades and all the houses have steep sloping roofs with dormers to boot (is it one more example of a mixed metaphor?) For an architect & teacher accustomed to grilling generations of students to take care of the climate in the design you just can not digest anything which so blatantly disregards the climate of the place.

The thing that worries me is nobody thinks that there is anything amiss in all this. I talked to some of the people who live in here, and the response was pretty casual as if nothing mattered. If you find that the house is too hot, there is always airconditioning. In a place where the electricity is considered as coming from God (as free as the air, water & thunderstorms), it is a bit awkward to introduce the motif of saving energy if you wish to retain the attention of the audience.

Not that people are unaware of ecology. But it seems so distant from everyday life that when you talk about ecology, people presume you are talking of the wild africa, or the tropical rain forests. That architecture has anything to do with it would seem a far fetched idea. And this is a land where F. L. Wright lived & worked. No wonder he was labled as eccentric, when he started talking about organic architecture.