Richard Meier’s Ten Factors for Architecture

It is rare that we find architects talking about holistic ideas anymore. It is fashionable to talk about materials and sustainability and whatever is the flavour of the moment, but no longer does an architect have a ten point agenda - a personal ideology, a manifesto of sorts. Ideology ends with style these days. While flaneuring in webspace a few days ago, I bumped into Richard Meier's ten factors - his ideas on creating architecture.


I will share my bias right at the beginning - Richard Alan Meier is one of my favourite architects. This is not because of the dogged stylistic route he has chosen for himself – namely his propensity for white buildings and platonic geometry, but because, given the narrowly defined palette he has restricted himself to – the amazing variations and complexities he has explored within that palette, thereby not only mastering these themes but also taking them to their furthest limits, without even once repeating or copying his own previous work. Also he has refused to be swayed by the prevalent 'isms' between the early 60s upto the present. His journey in architecture has been very personal, driven by his own convictions and his own manifesto. I salute the master.

Though Meier may seem a ‘façadist’ at first glance, obsessed with whiteness, and the materiality and formal quality of his buildings, yet it is really the spaces that he generates of which he is most concerned about. Meier talks of ‘placeness’ a great deal. He asks - “What is it that makes a space a place?” And over time, having built-up a significant oeuvre, he has crafted an answer. His answer is – the Ten factors that connect a structure to its environment and thereby hold the potential to transform space into place.

Just like Vitruvius’ Ten Books were guides for the physical ordering and creation of Architecture for a certain day and age, these ten factors, very intensely felt and personally experienced by Meier, have become his personal guides in the design process. He quantifies them as such -

(01) ‘Mode of Being’ – the factor which emphasizes the presence of a building as an independent object
(02) Establishing the structure as separate from identity
(03) Encouraging fantasy and play
(04) Encouraging ecstatic exuberance
(05) Preserving a sense of mystery and adventure
(06) Identifying ingredients which connect the building to reality
(07) Using the act of building as a link to the past
(08) Imbuing a building with the ability to evoke spontaneous feelings and emotions
(09) Facilitating spontaneous exchanges
(10) Asserting the identity of the people

For a full biography of the architect visit -
http://architect.architecture.sk/richard-meier-architect/richard-meier-architect.php

For an incomplete listing of his projects, visit -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Meier

Old Wine in New Bottle?

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Monuments are much more than signposts of history. They are mental landmarks. They establish visual maps of the city in our brains. For instance - “ take a left from the blue tomb and past the old fort.” Older monuments serve many more roles. They anchor us to the origins of our city and are physical links to a culture long gone. They talk of generations past, if we ever care to stop and listen. Their physical presence and character breaks the sterile monotony of modern concrete construction. If they are grand in their scale and vision, they often become much more than physical and mental landmarks. They become ‘ambassadors’ for the city and the country, cultural icons and symbols of sovereign nations, like brand logos almost. The Taj Mahal, the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower & the Great Wall of China fall in this category. They are loved, feted & cherished, becoming tourism pilgrimages, earning millions in foreign exchange for the countries concerned. Large sums of money, time and space are lavished on them.

But all this is old hat. We know about all this already. And I do not intend to go on and on about these ‘wonderful’ world renowned monuments. They already get more than enough attention and adulation.

I wish to talk about that little forgotten dome in the neighbourhood park. Or that baoli (step-well) in the urban village settlement that has now become a garbage dump. It is about these little known and un-thought about ‘monuments’ in the city which I would like to think about. They are like the orphans on our city streets, who come knocking on the windows of our cars, and whom we try to ignore as best as possible. In most cases even when we pass by these forlorn dilapidated structures everyday, they barely register, inconsequential dots on our visual canvas. But not so long ago (a hundred years is nothing in the life of an ancient city), these buildings (for lack of a better word) were adored and cared for. They were the centre of everyday ritual and activity. The Idgah would fill with the voices of the faithful, the women would wash their clothes and bathe at the step-well and children would splash about at the garden pavilion.

These old spaces and buildings dot the whole city. But they are all dead now. They are dead, because their link with the lives of the people is lost. Their relevance to the daily commotion of our existence has completely snapped. Since these once cherished buildings are now burdens on the city, on shrinking land, and on a burgeoning population, their very existence is under continuous threat.

No manner of enacted laws or barbed wire fences can save them, unless they are made relevant once again to the present day needs of the city. Many conservationists detest such attempts at adaptive re-use. They would much rather that these monuments lie neglected, rather than integrating them with the hubbub of the city. The critical question then is, ‘Are monuments for their own sake, or are they for the city and its people?’ What use is a monument that does not reverberate to the rhythms of a city, that does not beat in-sync with the pulse of the people?

Making buildings is an expensive and time consuming process. In the times of yore, it was even more so. Every building was a labour of love, and crafted with attention to detail. Therefore, pulling them down, is neither imperative nor in most cases an imperative. There can be many ingenious ways of adapting them for new uses. These buildings provide a resource rather than an irritation and should be assessed for the qualities they can bring. Cities like London, Rome, Barcelona & Venice are wonderful examples of such adaptive ingenuity and planning prowess.

In Delhi, the Lodi Gardens (the erstwhile Lady Willingdon Park) is an early example of how old monuments can successfully become part of the present. The Lodi Gardens is both a pleasant joggers’ paradise/ picnic spot as well as a nostalgia evoking historical necropolis, showcasing the architecture of the Sayyid and Lodi dynasties of 16th century Delhi . Most monuments will not even demand such extravagant swathes of land in the heart of the city. They will only demand imagination. The basement of the Mehrangarh fort in Jodhpur is a beautiful illustration of how a little joie-de-vivre can transform a dreary, damp and very medieval basement into a swank and chic boutique (see picture). The Neemrana Fort revitalization was a laudable attempt by entrepreneurs Aman Nath & Francis Wacziarg to find new use for an old and derelict monument. Twenty years ago, the preserve of owls and bats, today it is a cultural & holiday hotspot, hosting literary festivals and various manner of pageants. It has provided employment to the neighbouring village and helped to improve the economy of the area. All over Rajasthan, havelis and palaces are being remodelled into hotels, resorts & museums, transforming them from unwanted and neglected ruins into treasured assets for the economy.



We treat our monuments like very old people. But they are really like our children. They must not be allowed to sit in corners and sulk by themselves. They must be encouraged to laugh and play, enriching our city and infusing joy into the lives of its people. They may be active participants, or lively backgrounds, on which we paint new creations. They can participate in our festivals, in our protest marches, in our spiritual quests, in our fitness regimens, in our shopping sprees and even in our eating out adventures. A disused stepwell could become a themed discotheque, a fallen mosque a sunday market, and a group of chhatris(pavilions) the backdrop for cultural shows. Each monument is a unique child and must be treated differently. But city must make them participate in its frenzy.

As our cities stride right into the middle of the new millennia, new and ritzy glass monsters mushroom everywhere, grey concrete replaces old brick, and polished chrome metro-lines and international airports swoon in the delirious city. It will be these little monuments here and there, which, like miniature gems, will provide context and anchorage to a "faceless-international-modern" city. They will form new nuclei for cultural regeneration & vigour in local neighbourhoods. From liabilities and dens of anti-social activity, they will become assets for the city. And by finding new roles for the forgotten monuments, we will only enrich the cultural weft & weave of the city. We don’t need to make Gods out of our monuments or put them on haloed pedestals (out of bounds and fenced in), we only need to treat them as members of our family, loved and useful. City development agencies must wake up to this golden opportunity. We are seeing the first sparks of this in areas like Nizamuddin and Chandni Chowk in Delhi, in the work of the Aga Khan Trust and others like them. This spark must spread far and wide and become a fire. We cannot leave our widespread monumental heritage behind. It must bask with us, in the sunshine, of the new millennium, and a new resurgent India.

Why Architecture Critic?

If you are not an architect or urban designer, I implore you NOT to leave before having read this entry fully from end to end. This rant is an attempt at questioning the void (no, the post collision World Trade Centre sized hole!) that exists in our media (print or otherwise). Have you ever seen or read or come across a species called an Architecture critic in any Indian newspaper or news channel ever?

What in the dickens is an architecture critic you might ask?

It is not your fault at all. You have obviously read and heard a lot of art critics, film critics and literary critics in your time. Every Sunday supplement is full of their rants and bored cynicism. But scratch your head all you want, I am sure you have never probably read architectural criticism. In spite of the fact that you probably live in a house which is in a residential colony, that there are marketplaces somewhere in the vicinity, there is an entire neighbourhood of places to eat, shop, play, catch a movie, attend a marriage, entertain friends and so on and so forth. There is probably a network of streets all around your house or apartment complex that take you to where you want to go (or sometimes, take you to where you don’t want to go!). The point I am trying to make is, you are surrounded by Architecture! And in a much more tangible and real way, than you are surrounded by books, cinema or art. You live inside architecture, you work inside architecture, you traverse through architecture, almost all your activities are in the living breathing presence of architecture! And some of this architecture is literally shit, isn’t it? Yet you suffer in silence and never ever raise your voice even a teeny-weeny bit against the complete lack of informed debate about architecture in this country. Why?

Now lets look at The New York Times. The iconic Ada Louise Huxtable, the Pulitzer prize winning Paul Goldberger, the inimitable Herbert Muschamp and now Nicolai Ouroussoff all form a long line of distinguished and seasoned voices who made architecture the topic of conversation in New York homes, and got people involved in discussing their city, their surroundings and how citizens can and should have a decisive say in the shaping of the environment in which they live.

Let us now shift our gaze to our venerable ‘The Times of India’ (since 1838, no less). The Indian behemoth that claims its superiority in Indian readership. From time to time, there are guest voices that raise topical issues about architecture in single pieces and then die down. The issue of the BRT corridor in Delhi is being taken up these days because it is the hot topic right now and will catch eyeballs. But there is really no sustained interest in dialogue and polemics about the most important architecture issues that affect the lives of millions of city dwellers who read the Times of India. Issues that affect your life and mine, significantly more than the parties featured on page three of Delhi Times or Bombay Times for that matter. And I am definitely not talking about the Vaastu of your home!

I am talking about the spreading of our cities like gangrenous cancers on the surrounding countryside, in the name of suburban growth. I am talking about the three precious hours of your day, that you criminally waste commuting up and down from home to your place of work and back, every day, day after day. If you multiply three hours by six (for the six working days) it comes to eighteen! Imagine! Almost one whole day of your precious life you just give away every week sitting around in traffic jams, inhaling exhaust fumes, generally cursing your bad luck. 18 hours. How much you could have accomplished in that time. It is literally two full nights of restful sleep. And all because of the way your living environment is planned (or not planned!) Its architecture’s fault, and you should definitely have a say.

We who make the city a living thriving entity, suffer in quiet disquiet, when it comes to issues of architecture in the city. We do not have any say in the shaping of our living environment. Why?
For a very long time, we have assumed that only the powerful and wealthy can make change. The government can do as it pleases, passing arbitrary laws, picking up ad-hoc parcels of land for piecemeal development wherever it pleases with no accountability whatsoever to the citizens whose lives are inflicted with misery and discomfort by these rash government decisions. The wealthy developers buy huge parcels of land using money and manipulation and then transform these into jungles of glass and concrete. For a burgeoning population - no doubt, we need more houses, more shops, more this and more that, but shouldn’t there be a debate in the public realm at least about how we should do it? Shouldn’t we as citizens of a democratic country have a more prominent say in the architecture that shapes our lives?

Why do artists and writers go out into the world with their work and demand that society take note, criticise their oeuvre, engage in dialogue and all that? And why do architects and urban designers huddle together in ‘Architects Only’ conferences, sharing their ideas and thoughts with a select professional few, when the work they do actually and physically affects the lives of millions?

Lets take a simple test. How many illustrious writers can you name? I am sure a score at least. How many famed artists can you recall? Again, at least a dozen I am sure. Now lets get to architects. How many city altering architects come to mind? Do you know who designed the city of Chandigarh? Do you know whose brainchild was the network of circles and hexagons in Central Delhi? Do you know who has almost single-handedly transformed the landscape of Gurgaon? For better or for worse? No, obviously you don’t. I am sure you do not know about the architect who has affected your life so profoundly, you would wince in discomfort if you realized it.

If you are a resident of South Delhi, and you have spent many a pleasant evening at Dilli Haat, than you have, say, by reading Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’, then it is my pleasure to tell you that the architect of Dilli Haat is Pradip Sachdev. Pity, you knew Arundhati Roy, whose book you most probably haven’t read (kudos if you have read it!), but didn’t know Pradip Sachdev, who has given you a place to enjoy numerous pleasant evenings. If you still haven’t been to Dilli Haat, you should go there as soon as possible – it is an idyllic pedestrian plaza of arty shops and open air plazas and food places to while away an hour or two.

I am not blaming you for not knowing Pradip Sachdev. Its not your fault. And the idea of this rant is not to massage the egos of architects. Far from it. The burning idea is to bring architecture into the very midst of our thoughts. Because it affects us in more ways than I would like to re-iterate again and again. Why must we tolerate ugly glass monsters and badly planned marketplaces as we do all the time? Why should we not be involved in shaping our cities as we see fit? Why does our opinion not count? It is time, the fourth estate, namely the media, start taking up issues of architectural design and urbanity on a sustained basis, clearing the deck for the powers that be, to sit up and take notice.

Our cities, towns & living habitats can no longer remain at the mercy of corrupt development authorities, thoughtless laws, venal politicians and ruthless private cartels. And the first step is awareness of what architecture is, how it is practised, what constitutes good architecture & what each one of us, what YOU, can do to make better architecture.

Is anybody at the Times of India or NDTV reading this?
52 thoughts of an Architecture Critic
(1) Why are there so few public toilets in our cities? (The economics and politics of public toilets)
(2) Why are there hardly any pedestrian plazas in my city?
(3) After cutting trees for building roads and bridges, why are new saplings planted tens of kilometres away? Hasn’t anyone heard of a concept called micro-climate?
(4) Do we need glass buildings?
(5) Do you like the 20 feet tall hoardings in your city?
(6) Why do I have to commute 20 kilometres to work everyday?
(7) There are hardly any cheap and legal office spaces for small practices and young professionals in the city. This is the equivalent of stifling the young entrepreneurial spirit of the country. How is the MCD sealing drive in Delhi related to this? (Why we must build more offices and less shopping malls.)
(8) Who needs stupid byelaws? The laws and why people break them.
(9) We should all have small gardens in our homes (yes, even those of us who live in apartments.)
(10) Who says Delhi can’t go high-rise? (City densities and morphology)
(11) Where are public gardens? Why are there more and more roads and less and less greens?
(12) Why isn’t anyone taking up rain-water harvesting seriously? The economics and politics of water distribution.
(13) The concept of self sustaining neighbourhoods
(14) Why are our residential colonies so ugly?
(15) The Yamuna riverfront : the economics & history of riverfront development
(16) The Dharavi slum settlement generates $450 milllions in manufacturing revenues (you read right!) Time to change our world-view of what slums are, and why slums become. And what we can do about them.
(17) The Brihanmumbai Corporation is going to redevelop the Crawford market. What is our attitude to old historical buildings in the city? What can we do about these buildings without compromising development?
(18) The suburb : what it means to live in the suburbs.
(19) Why are the malls coming up in our cities ugly as hell? Which idiots are building these energy guzzling monstrosities and why?
(20) Why does nobody in our country ever go visiting museums? Why are our museums falling apart?
(21) What a truly beautiful street really is…
(22) Why is Lajpat Nagar so bloody ugly? Can’t a marketplace be a beautiful place? What we need to do.
(23) How the government is systematically wasting public money on flyovers, and where the main problem lies.
(24) Do you want to die while trying to cross the road? Why the city is no longer meant for pedestrians.
(25) We can no longer go on cycling trips in our city. Who cares for cycling anymore?
(26) Why are there so many coffee shops, but so few libraries? Does no one read anymore?
(27) I love my bhutta (corncob) and my golgappa. What we can do to save our neighbourhood thelawaala.
(28) What happens to the waste we produce everyday? And why should we care.
(29) What we can do about Chandni Chowk…
(30) Do you know what an Urban village is? A fascinating glimpse into an alternate history and a new way of living in the city
(31) Places for sport : clubs, stadia and playgrounds
(32) What is the Delhi Masterplan 2021, and how it affects our lives…also, what does ‘land-use’ mean?
(33) Maps and new ways of seeing..
(34) The Metro…a history of mass rapid transport in cities of the developed world, and what we can learn from them.
(35) What things to look out for while buying an apartment…
(36) Why it is criminal to have more than two cars per household
(37) Tips for lucky people who own their own plot of land and are planning to build a house
(38) Spaces for women and children in the city.
(39) Nehru Place. Urban nightmare? Or brilliant opportunity?
(40) Art in the city. How expressions of art need to be out there, in the midst of our daily lives, not tucked away in inaccessible art galleries
(41) What’s in a name? The naming and renaming of places in a city.
(42) The geometry of our cities
(43) The concept of the city forest
(44) A lake in every neighbourhood. Water in our lives.
(45) Buses and autorickshaws and us. Where are the rickshaws of yore?
(46) Pigeons on my rooftop. Animals in the city. What architecture can do to look after them…
(47) What can we do about the cows roaming our streets?
(48) When does the countryside end and the city begin? Why we need more than dirt, filth & chaos to define the boundaries of a city.
(49) Alternatives to fully air-conditioned spaces
(50) Where will our servants and domestic help live? Buildings for the poor
(51) What do you feel about the new building coming up next to where you work or live? Does your voice count?
(52) What’s wrong with our airports and railway stations?

I have spent my entire life in Delhi, and therefore my questions have a focus on issues to do with Delhi, more than of other cities. But these thoughts are as pertinent for Kolkata or Pune, as they are for Delhi. All Indian cities are facing the same problems, and architects and citizens are grappling with similar concerns everywhere in the country. Let’s become more sensitive to our environment, our habitat.

So, let’s ask the question : What’s wrong with our architecture? And also, what's right?