Soumitri Varadarajan - May 4th
Soumitri Varadarajan, the Programme Director at RMIT Industrial Design, will present on May 4th, 7pm.
Soumitri will be discussing the entrance of modernism to indian architecture, focussing in particular on the IIT Delhi, a brutalist building by an indian architect trained at the Tennessee Valley Dam. The talk will also look at Le Corbusier's role in Nehru's vision for a modern India
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Soumitri will speak of the Project of Modern India and how this changed the privileging of architectural styles in India between 1947 -1960. The building of the Indian Institute of Technology forms a backdrop, and serves as the main illustration/symptom of the heady ideological discourse of the first two decades of the construction of Modern India.
The architects of this building were Chowdhury Gulzar Singh - two architects who worked with Corbu in Chandigarh and had done time at TVA (the Tennesse Valley Authority). So their first buildings on campus were within orthodox Brutalism - but in time this changed...
The highlight of the month was Soumitri Varadarajan’s great presentation at words@bld.50 (Melbourne).
On the topic of Le Corbusier and brutalism in India, Soumitri managed to engage the audience in a dialogue that went beyond the simple analysis of architectural aesthetics. Using a selection of music, photography and the recordings of politician’s discourses, Soumitri discussed the social/political context in which this architecture took place. Soumitri offered a challenging talk – not the type of lecture to be passively consumed, but one that stirs our curiosity for real understanding and dialogue.
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