It could very well be TS Eliot’s Unreal City where death had undone so many and each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Over the last seven years, Delhi has seen numerous demolitions. JCBs, bulldozers and weak heritage laws have made it possible to raze down structures overnight, creating a vacuum in the country’s modern heritage landscape. So, when a show comes to town that tells us what we’ve lost, we must sit up and listen.
At the STIR Gallery in Delhi is the exhibition “Memorial to Socialist Modernity” by urban architect Rohit Raj Mehndiratta. Examines 3 public spaces that have been demolished: the Sarojini Nagar government settlement, the Hall of Nations and the Hindon River generators in Ghaziabad. Rohit uses photographs, structural drawings, and debris to provide what historian Narayani Gupta calls “industrial archaeology. ” While the exhibition commemorates the Hall of Nations and the Hindon River Mills building, designed by Rohit’s father Mahendra Raj, the highly acclaimed Engineer who collaborated with leading architects to build these iconic structures, Sarojini’s contract Nagar is a memory card of how other people used their most intimate position: their home. Rohit and his wife Vandini Mehta run Studio VanRO, a design and research company. in New Delhi and the SVR Foundation are committed to the fields of architecture, urban plans and art.
This show, which ends on February 27, can be seen as a counterweight to the destruction and redevelopment of the city. With the transversal nature of the swing in time, it is urgent to see the offer through the demolition of the past. In April 2017, the 108-foot-tall Palais des Nations was demolished to make way for the multi-million-meter Pragati Maidan tunnel, which today poses a potential risk to life due to water infiltration and cracks in the concrete. How do we do this and come to a conclusion? Rohit said in his note.
It becomes his way of dealing with the anger of demolition. “That’s when this idea of the megaphone abstraction emerged, where one is shouting and nobody is listening.” He has framed four photographs, within bullhorn-like objects, taken on the morning of the demolition of the Hall of Nations, and a visitor is encouraged to use a torch to spotlight the dark cavernous space within which we see the pink rubble of the truncated pyramid structure. In the background are Raj’s structural drawings of the 108-ft high building, superimposed with images of construction techniques and the bamboo work. “The aim was to memorialise everyone including the labourers, the architect, the contractor, and talk about it as something that can never be repeated. It was a sophisticated building, where frugality and economics of the situation which governed India allowed for innovations to happen. The Hall of Nations cannot be built today because we have the luxury of so many materials and we will never do a cast in-situ. Here you can see concrete taken up the staircase,” says Rohit, “Likewise a Hindon River Mills will never happen again because you can now put steel girders and get the span instead of creating arches as Mr Raj did,” he says.
When the Hindon River Mills building was demolished in 2020, Rohit managed to collect the remains of the building. The design of 1973 is a mental exercise and an optimal use of resources. New York photographer Stella Snead captured the raw beauty of concrete arches. as they passed through the structure, offering uninterrupted factory space within the structure. Images of Rohit’s demolition reveal the secret of its fortress. “The bent plate edge gutters were designed to work throughout construction to provide lateral stability. They connected “the double columns that supported the double arches. Before, they weren’t visual, like reinforcements, they were hidden. It’s almost like photographing an invisible construction,” says Rohit.
He quotes the Italian engineer and architect Pier Luigi Nervi, one of Raj’s main influences on his professional life: “The metal trend should have an aesthetic quality and give the impression of being a nervous formula capable of giving life to a dead mass. “of concrete. ” So, to reinforce the way Raj lived out this principle, the black metal trays feature metal anchors sourced from the site, while the reclaimed high-strength cables, cast in resin, are stories waiting to be told about their technical prowess and precision. .
With the Sarojini Nagar exhibit, Rohit presents its dreams and its fears in a series of photographs – of house numbers, of how government allotments are done, of bold wall colours and naked brick walls – taken across three years as the colony was being demolished. Suddenly through the holes in the walls that once held doors and windows, we see trees staking claim to the interiors, cob-web corners lit up with sunlight streaming into a half-eaten plaster. “This is also a reflection of our own aspirations. We can’t blame the government. We run the cycle of capital. We aspire and we force erasure. So we too, are implicated in this process,” says Rohit. In this exhibit, he presents “platters of lived memories”, where he has created a bento box of plastered rubble, cast in resin, as a take on the fast-food recycling of human habitat, where people no longer take ownership of the city.
It is in this “disarticulation of memory,” as the architect-historian Amit Srivastava calls it, that a call to discussion and a hope for “what can be” resides. Especially at a time when post-independence buildings are at risk of being destroyed. After the demolition, with the addition of Ahmedabad’s Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and the Sanskar Kendra Stadium, this exhibition has the potential to be a starting point for a verbal exchange around images, sounds, tastes and the reuse of public spaces.
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