Contextures: RMA and The Practice of Embedded Architecture

Contextures: The Embedded Architecture of RMA focuses on six recent projects designed and executed by the architect and urban designer Rahul Mehrotra (b. 1959) and his studio. These projects include three museums and three buildings situated within university complexes. Under the first rubric come the CSMVS museum estate in Mumbai, embracing the east wing insertion, the Visitors’ Centre, and the Children’s Museum (1998-2018); the Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum, Ahmedabad (2014-2017); and the Zirad Art & Heritage Foundation’s museum, Vismaya, Alibaug (2016-2022). Under the second rubric come the ⁠Lilavati Lalbhai Library at CEPT University, Ahmedabad (2015-2017); the Ahmedabad University’s School of Arts and Sciences (2016-2020); and the JSW School of Public Policy at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (2022).

Each of these projects is a cradle for sociality, a crucible for the activation of new publics, a space for encounter and conversation. Each attests to the close professional engagement that RMA has nurtured with public institutions, and to Mehrotra’s own long-term participation in the processes of public reason, education and cultural production. From the early 1990s onward, Mehrotra has led the way in expanding and re-defining the role of the architect in India, beyond the remit of built form and extending into the public sphere through the practices of criticism, pedagogy, advocacy, conservation, curatorial intervention, and civic activism. As such, RMA’s practice has expanded far beyond the technical and functional remit of the profession, to assert the active, self-aware embeddedness of architectural practice in the social, cultural, economic, and political urgencies of its context, experienced in all their turbulence and exhilaration. To this stance, Mehrotra, Kaiwan Mehta and I have – in our unfolding State of Architecture programme – accorded the name of a ‘radical contextuality’.

Mehrotra’s intellectual genealogy connects him, as I have argued elsewhere, to four visionary architects, planners, and thinkers on social questions and urban design who made Bombay/ Mumbai their home for varying durations, some of them visitors, others lifelong residents. These figures include Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), the Scottish geographer, town planner and sociologist who founded the University of Bombay’s Department of Sociology in 1919;  Claude Batley (1879-1956), practising English architect and Principal of the Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy College of Architecture from 1923 to 1943, who settled in Bombay and whose buildings form an iconic part of his chosen city; Charles Correa (1930-2015), the magisterial Indian modernist who practised both in India and internationally, and who was one of the co-authors of the New Bombay Plan; and Kamu Iyer (1932-2020), a living archive of his city’s architectural lore and an advocate of heritage status for the achievements of 20th-century architecture. RMA carries this tradition of dissenters, critics, pioneers and pragmatic, institution-building idealists forward.

The exhibition is intended as a platform to discuss the historical contexts of RMA’s practice, and as a means of reading the conceptual framework that this studio has evolved, the formal and material vocabulary it has crafted. RMA rejects the heroic confrontation with nature and assertion of style that architects are meant to express in the classical account. Its approach might, perhaps, be described as ameliorative: it diagnoses, seeks remedy, improves a situation. The architecture this studio introduces into any site is programmatically non-monumental. Rather, it proceeds through a dialogue with the site and its histories, through discreet and reversible interventions, empathetic surveys and subtle surgeries. A fundamental humility towards the universe is interwoven, in RMA’s practice, with an affirmation of supple solutions that manage the present and are geared for the future through a return to the most fundamental elements of architecture: a play of scale that offers surprise and joy, an attentiveness to inventive processes, a gift for choosing appropriate rather than flamboyant materials, and a stoic ability to orchestrate materials with varying life cycles into a provisional yet memorable symphony.