Focusing on RMA Architects' thirty-year journey, the narrative intertwines various aspects of architectural practice, including teaching, research, and documentation. It explores themes of interior architecture, critical conservation, and the interplay between global and local contexts. By showcasing selected projects, the book highlights the challenges architects face in India amid rapid urbanization and global capital influences. Mumbai serves as a pivotal backdrop for examining how the practice has evolved, questioning conventional architectural models and the significance of context.
Rahul Mehrotra is the founder of RMA Architects, which emerged in Mumbai in 1990 and has studios in Mumbai and Boston. Currently he is the chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Havard GSD and has had a long-term engagement with and analyses of urbanism in India which has given rise to a new conceptualization of the city. The Kinetic City, the counterpart to the Static City familiar to most of us from conventional city maps, is perceived in terms of patterns of occupation and associative values attributed to space. The framework is established in this publication by Rahul Mehrotra's anchor essay, which draws out its potential to "allow a better understanding of the blurred lines of contemporary urbanism and the changing roles of people and spaces in urban society." The emerging urban Indian condition, of which the Kinetic City is symbolic, is examined in this publication through this anchor essay as well as an expansive complimentary photo essay. The theory is solidified by a series of essays from different points of Rahul Mehrotra's career as an architect, urban designer and educator. From case studies such as 'Evolution, Involution and the City's Future; A Perspective on Bombay's Urban Form', to more generally appliable ruminations such as 'Our Home in the World', the book will offer an in-depth look at the last thirty years of theory behind Mehrotra's work.
Affiliated with top university research, this book is the most up-to-date
exploration of the relationship between ephemerality and permanence in the
city.
Pluralism, fusion and hybridity are the dominant traits of cultural change in twenty-first-century India. The resultant architecture reflects this fabric of one of the world's largest and most populous nation states. Architect, educator and author Rahul Mehrotra has been at the forefront of the Indian contemporary architecture scene for more than two decades, and Architecture in India is his unique take on the topic across four themed chapters: "Global Practice: Expression of (Impatient) Capital"; "Regional Modernism"; "Alternative Practice: Towards Sustainability"; and "Counter Modernism: Resurfacing of the Ancient." Each chapter introduces exponents of these distinct genres of architectural expression, examining the work of more than 60 contemporary architects in more than 500 photographs. Architects, students, academics, architecture buffs and admirers of India's famed heritage of architectural pioneering will find this volume a rich trove of design ideas. -- Book Description.
