A Visual Archive of South Asia’s Modernist Heritage
The Modern South Asia (MSA) series is dedicated to exploring modern architecture of historic importance in South Asia through photography-based books. The series will focus on architecture from the 20th century, designed and built by regional and international architects. Each book will provide the reader with an in-depth visual exploration of the architecture through contemporary photographs, architectural drawings, and newly commissioned writing by architects, thinkers, and academics.
The MSA series is edited and photographed by Randhir Singh. The project is supported and published by Arthshila Trust.
Charles Correa & Mahendra Raj, Sardar Patel Stadium, Ahmedabad, India
The Opportunity
The MSA series intends to address three significant opportunities
- Project specific books
- Contemporary photography
- Contemporary critical writing and translation
Geoffrey Bawa, Steel Corporation Offices, Oruwala, Sri Lanka
Project specific books
Across South Asia, books on architecture tend to focus on the region’s wealth of traditional architecture, its colonial heritage or on the work of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. A select few regional architects, such as B.V. Doshi, Geoffrey Bawa and Charles Correa, have career spanning monographs providing a general overview of their work.
Missing from this context are books that delve a little deeper into the actual buildings designed by these architects. An architect or student interested in Achyut Kanvinde’s seminal Dudhsagar Dairy would need to find the out-of-print 2017 monograph “Achyut Kanvinde Akar” in which the project is discussed over just 6 pages with a few archival photographs. For many other important architects, the situation is much more dire. There are no published books on Joseph Stein or Kuldip Singh’s work. The same holds true for Jane Drew prize winning Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari and most other architects. The work these architects have done will fade away unless a concerted effort is made to photograph and publish.
Anwar Said, Type B Mosque, Islamabad, Pakistan
Contemporary photography
Photography plays a critical role in how we study and understand architecture. Since its invention in the 19th century, photography has moved beyond its traditional and subordinate role in documenting architecture, to a more symbiotic relationship. Architects relying on the photograph to convey their ideas and, photographs, along with drawings, are the primary visual tool in the education of architects. Ezra Stoller’s striking black and white photographs are critical to our understanding of modern American architecture as are Julius Schulman’s photographs of the Case Study Houses program in California. This places the photographer in a unique position as the one subjectively translating the three dimensional world of architectural space into the two dimensional world of the photograph. Photographs are then sequenced and placed into series creating new meanings in the architecture. While buildings are often reduced to the single iconic image, understanding architecture requires an in-depth exploration through a series of photographs.
Many of the projects that will be featured in this series have never been photographed in any meaningful way and are not well known. A few were photographed when they were first completed and are consequently better known across the sub-continent. For all, photography remains the primary means through which we understand the architecture and the creation of a visual archive remains the best way to preserve this legacy. The use of contemporary photography in this series grounds the projects in the present. These buildings are not fossilised records of a bygone era but rather, actively used buildings with decades of history behind them and, hopefully, a rich future ahead.
The MSA series recognises a sense of urgency in photographing this modernist legacy. Numerous buildings that could have been included in the series no longer exist and several others face the threat of demolition. Much of Minette de Silva’s work in Sri Lanka has vanished. Richard Neutra’s U.S. Embassy building in Karachi has been sitting vacant for close to a decade with an uncertain fate. The Daniel Dunham and Robert Boughey designed Kamalapur Railway Station in Dhaka is facing demolition and Raj Rewal’s Hall of Nations and Nehru Pavilion in New Delhi were demolished in 2017.
Habib Rahman, Netaji Nagar Housing, New Delhi
Critical writing
The MSA series will commission a new thought provoking essay for each issue. This writing will provide an opportunity for a fresh assessment of the architecture, based both on the history of the building but also on its current state. Each essay will be translated into multiple languages to expand the reach of the books across the subcontinent. The aim is to build up an archive of critical writing on architecture available in multiple regional languages.
Laurie Baker, Indian Coffee House, Trivandrum, India