22: DOA - The Death of Architecture with Aniket Bhagwat and Riyaz Tayyibji

““There just are more and more types of efforts to practice emerging...It’s a very live space to be a part of at this time.””

We discuss the “Death of Architecture” with designers Anikat Bhagwat and Riyaz Tayyibji. DOA, the title of their exhibition currently touring in India, examines the state of architectural thinking and practice in India today including grappling with ideas about cities, time, preservation and the public. Bhagwat, a landscape architect, and Tayyibji, an architect, are both based in Ahmedabad, India. They engage humor and critical thinking to assess the discourse of contemporary design.

Timestamp Outline

1:18 DOA: Death of Architecture / “dead on arrival”
4:17 Projects to engage with the community: Architect’s Retreat, Spade magazine, etc
7:56 Urban planning and bylaws “killing the city”
9:17 On preservation: “What we are replacing it with doesn’t seem worthy with what we are losing.”
11:40 The city as a palimpsest, layered by the generations of inhabitants
12:06 13 invited participants and conceptual projects
14:12 Ownership obscured: “There’s nothing unique about the issues that we are bringing to the table. We are just wanting to bring them together in a manner in which they are grouped and bunched together to allow us to talk about it.”
14:47 Last mention of DOA: Charles Jencks announced “death of modern architecture” with the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing structure
17:04 On the importance of humor in critique: the carnivalesque, Rabelais, Cervantes, Don Quixote
23:01 “Death of the Nehruvian nation-state”
24:07 DOA “suspends any sense of utopia...but doesn’t take away optimism.”
27:27 What has been the public reaction to the exhibition?
33:00 Exhibitions: Stepwells of Ahmedabad, In the Name of Housing, When Is Space?
35:01 “There just are more and more types of efforts to practice emerging, and therefore at this point you can’t say you had the singular architectural practice of the nation-building time. It’s no longer like that. That also means that there are many ways and many efforts to look at what it means to practice in India at this time. It’s a very live space to be a part of at this time.”
37:32 DOA as a swagger for the questioning
40:11 Riyaz and Anthill Design’s contribution: “Our interest was in the notion of time in architecture and how it’s shifting.”
42:44 “Architecture seems to be this island where you can explore an idea only if you’re in a private space. What happens is you collapse all the grand ideas - you start bringing them into interior designs of particular small projects - and that becomes the arena through which architects can explore this. So there’s a kind of collapse of time in the way that the profession is structuring itself.”
44:01 Aniket the designated editor: lost architects, protest poetry, and death by a thousand cuts