Reflections on Form & Space

Date: 5 Dec 24

Time: 6.00pm onwards

Location: KNMA Saket

Martand Khosla in conversation with Kaiwan Mehta around Indian Modernism.

Tracing whether the Indian architectural modernity that began in the early 20th century, fostering new design practices directly challenged the social order and values invested in the building traditions of the past?

Martand & Kaiwan will present ideas that shaped the architecture of India in the 20th century and early modernist projects that came to be, with the exhibition of Eckart Muthesius and Manikbagh, Pioneering Modernism in India, on view at KNMA Saket. 

This talk is an effort to understand the origin of modern architecture, factors responsible for its development and its architectural vocabulary in India in 20th century, and how Classical architecture inspired modernism in India. 

Works of foreign modernist masters’ in India impacted a generation of Indian architects. 

The modern architecture, planning and nation-building efforts that took place in India following the country's independence in 1947 are widely regarded as exemplary of the internationalization of modernism in the mid-twentieth century. India became the prominent site for the works of some of the most important modernist masters, including Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Jane B Drew, Maxwell Fry and Louis Kahn, as well as the focus of numerous lesser-known practitioners.

About the Speakers:

Martand Khosla lives and works in New Delhi, India. His art practice explores urban continuity and transformation, as both complement and counter to his experience building in contemporary India. Having founded and run an award-winning architecture studio for over fifteen years (Romi Khosla Design Studios). Martand initially pursued art to explore how construction-fueled employment shapes identities and nostalgia. Situated as both participant and observer, he employed tools of the State, such as the ubiquitous rubber stamp, to render its imprint on lives within traditional definitions of power and dispossession. Brick dust collected from his construction sites became a language of tension, allowing material to pay tribute to both the temporary and permanent, to construction and demolition.

An architect’s natural preoccupation with space inevitably emerges in his work, not as a challenge to ‘build’ – but rather to foreground an object’s intrinsic potentiality. His works traverse the lines between sculpture and object, movement and remnant, material and memory. Inspired by his studies of repetition and the human churning of industrialization, he replicates the micro-processes of macro-construction. And simultaneously, he moves from the lens of authoritarian power to its dispersion, exploring the transformations that lay in between.

Born 1975, New Delhi, India

Lives and works in New Delhi

Kaiwan Mehta

Born 1975 in Mumbai/India.

He studied architecture (Bachelor of Architecture) at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture, English literature (Master of Arts) at the Institute of Distance Education and Indian aesthetics (postgraduate diploma from the Department of Philosophy) at the University of Mumbai. He also completed a postgraduate diploma in cultural studies at the Center for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore/India.

Since 1999 Mehta teaches as senior lecturer and examiner at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and was a lecturer at several universities, including the South Asian Center in Bangalore of Long Island University, USA and at the Interior Design Department of the SNDT Women’s University in Mumbai. As an editor he writes for the Indian Council of Architecture’s magazine »Architecture – Time, Space and People« (2004-2006) and since 2006 for »Indian Architect and Builder«. Selected texts and projects: »Reading Plaster, Drawing Maps«, paper for the conference »On Sharing Architecture Cultures across the Maghreb and India« at the University of Evora/Portugal (2006); »Bombay/Mumbai – City: Text and Textures«, public lecture at the University of Coimbra/Portugal (2006); »Youth, Urban Communities and Revolutions – From Premiji to Rang de … «, public lecture at the PUKAR Monson Workshop, Mumbai (2006); »Maps and Motifs«, solo exhibition of the oral history project on the »Native Town« of colonial Bombay, Sir J. J. College of Architecture, Mumbai (2006).

He is currently working on a book on the sites and stories of colonial Bombay’s.

Education

AA Diploma – The Architectural Association, London, 2001