Mondays, 3:10 pm to 4:30 pm CEST via Big Blue Button, Moodle.

22nd May 2023 - "Role of Bauhaus in the post-independence and nation-building narrative through architecture in the capital city of New Delhi" by Jinisha Jain, Conservation Architect. 

The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in the German city of Weimar, by a Prussian architect called Walter Gropius. After the art school was shut in 1933, many former students and teachers fanned out of Germany to spread the ideas, architecture, and ethos of Bauhaus to the rest of the world, including former India, amongst other countries. Early Academic study in India was largely based on Western ideologies and European aesthetics and technique. This is exemplified by the colonial enterprise in building a new identity for British India, seen through the works of 19th century architects like Charles Mant, Robert Fellowes Chisholm and later Lutyens. India  Post-Indepence,  consciously strove to look beyond the Colonial British Precedent. Some Young architectural students made their way overseas.  Amongst them were Achyut Kanvinde and Habib Rehman who were taught by Gropius in the USA and they were instrumental in bringing the Bauhaus ideology to the capital city of New Delhi in several significant public new buildings that the talk throws light on.

15th May 2023 -  "Postcolonial architectural developments in the Erstwhile Presidency Town of Madras: Challenging Colonial Legacy in the 1970s to 1990s." by Jayaraman Subramanian, Veteran Architect. 

The seminar will briefly touch upon the Architecture of India during the Precolonial period, also which was predominantly Indo-Islamic followed by Moghul. When the British came to India, they started building several public buildings such as courts, corporate houses, administrative offices, etc. - relatively a new typology - in colonial, neo-classical, Indo-Saracenic, and Art Deco styles; particularly in Chennai (the then Madras) where I spent my formative years and also studied architecture (1960 - 1965). There were few schools of architecture in the region and also access to information and knowledge which was mostly limited to teachers and libraries. I was particularly influenced by the works and philosophy advanced by some of the great Masters like Mies Van der Rohe, Pierre Luigi Nervi, Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson, and Walter Gropius; which were punctuated by the integrity of expression (through the fusion of Art & Technology) resulting in a new grammar of aesthetics that was refreshingly different from what were and was happening around. This also affected developments in other parts of the country through architects like Corbusier, Kanvinde, Charles Correa, Raj Rewal, Louis I. Kahn, etc., In my talk, I shall present some of my major works done during this period (1970 - 1990) in India that will bear evidence of these influences.