Current Issue    (Sustainability) + Pleasure, vol. 1: Culture + Architecture Number 30, Spring/Summer 2009

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Sun, Stone, Glass, and New Wealth
A Critical Overview of New Architecture in India

By Nalina Moses

On November 27, 2008, television channels around the world aired real-time coverage of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. For many people, news footage of the Taj Mahal Hotel under siege, in smoke and flames, provided a defining image of contemporary India. The attack to this ornate colonial colossus was a powerful expression of internecine strife, political instability, and physical vulnerability.

An overarching truth at odds with this imagery is that, in the last two decades, India has been in the throes of extraordinary economic development, steadily becoming a more modernized, globally connected, capitalist nation. Although the international financial downturn of 2008 has slowed growth, the expectation remains that over the next decades there will be continuous and enormous economic development in India.1 New and ambitious large-scale planning and construction efforts have gotten under way. As depicted in print and electronic media, these are immense, forward-looking design projects, and if we believe the hype, they are being led almost exclusively by foreign designers. These new buildings, neighborhoods, and cities, still in the early phases, promise to reshape the landscape and cities of India. What will this new architecture and infrastructure be?

Building in India
Unlike other emerging Asian countries, the United Arab Emirates, and the former Soviet Union—which do not have significant histories of foreign influence and collaboration—India is a deeply heterogeneous culture. It carries cultural and physical traces from the Greek, Mughal, Persian, Syrian, Dutch, and English communities that have occupied it over the centuries, as well as traces of its own indigenous traditions. As a result, India is polyglot and its architecture polymorphous. Although national politics have recently challenged long-cherished traditions of secularism, the constructed landscape remains an expression of democracy and diversity. In India, the modern sits beside the ancient, the soigné beside the disheveled, the sacred beside the honky-tonk. Perhaps no other country can support so many influences, rewritings, and authors.

Another characteristic that distinguishes India among emerging countries is its indigenous traditions of luxury and style. Centuries-old knowledge of masonry, metalworking, textiles, gemology, sculpture, and painting remain alive, and the work of artisans figures prominently in everyday life. Contemporary fashion, advertising, music, and television programs embrace sensualism and employ dense, layered effects. Indians embellish trucks, elephants, and empty walls—almost any surface left unattended. It is a commonplace to consider India a culture of ornament—and ornament an essential element of traditional Indian architecture.2 While the finest new architecture and planning projects might eschew traditional ornament, they are compelled to offer, hand in hand with physical improvements, rich and varied sensory experiences. India provides an attentive audience for new architecture.

At the same time, India presents unique and predictable technical challenges for architects. Almost any building material specified can be imported or custom-fabricated; however, Indian manufacturers that produce specialized elements like glass curtain walls are still developing, so the level of execution for these components does not yet match that in the United States. Some foreign architects have faced difficulty finding construction managers with the experience to handle large projects, and skilled installers, fabricators, and suppliers that can build to specifications. In the future, architects might need to exhibit greater flexibility in their working methods and take a more assertive approach in managing Indian consultants and contractors.3 Building codes within India vary greatly from state to state and from city to city, but in general they do not seem to be more or less restrictive than codes that govern construction in the United States. In certain aspects, such as water reclamation and conservation, Indian regulations are quite progressive. And finally, Indian clients sometimes wish to abide by traditional vastu (similar to Feng Shui) principles, which bring an additional layer of complexity to design.

Masonry traditions
Until recently, Indian architecture has developed masonry forms in stone, concrete, and brick, materials particularly suited to the Indian climate. Masonry provides a thermal lag that allows structures to remain habitable during midday and summer heat, and it provides resistance from devastating seasonal storms and floods. (Wood, while readily available, is vulnerable to moisture and insects.) All surviving pre-colonial architecture is stone. Today concrete frame with brick infill remains the most common urban construction method for both low- and high-rise structures. Additionally, the two most influential architects to build in India in the modern age, Edward Lutyens and Le Corbusier, left powerful legacies of masonry construction.

There might be something essential about masonry—in the way its broad, plastic forms are revealed in direct sunlight—that makes it especially suitable for building in India. The sun, inescapable and unforgiving, is the most extraordinary element of the Indian landscape, and the strongest projects confront it head-on. One of the great successes of Lutyen’s low-lying, stone-clad Secretariat and Parliament buildings in New Delhi is that, in response to strong sunlight, they make their statement with broad shadow, line, and profile rather than ornament.4 And their stone confers a sense of permanence and authority.

Le Corbusier’s government buildings in Chandigarh also rest comfortably under the sun, both actually and symbolically. However flawed they are in planning and execution, they present a compelling model for masonry architecture. The Parliament Building’s monumental poured-concrete piers and screens are immense, unrelieved brise soleil: They coalesce into complicated, shadowed rhythms and keep out light and heat. Its roof—with a deep, eccentric light well and immense, abstract, sundial-like structures— ties the structure to solar movements. Le Corbusier’s vocabulary, while personal and pictorial, creates a forceful solar mythology. Like Lutyen’s work in New Delhi, Le Corbusier’s work in Chandigarh responds directly to landscape and climate. Can contemporary architects employ materials like glass and steel to similar effect?

Foreign talents
A review of printed and Web-based media—which may or may not reflect broader trends—indicates that almost all the large projects under way in India today are being spearheaded by celebrated European and American designers. Shigeru Ban, David Adjaye, Richard Meier, and David Chipperfield are working with Berggruen Holdings, an international developer, to build a chain of five- star hotels. FXFOWLE was tapped by Indian-based developers Neelkamal Realtors to build a new hotel tower in Mumbai, which will be managed by Hyatt International and also house high-end restaurants, shops, and condominiums. Zaha Hadid is reworking an earlier scheme for a state-of-the-art technology park in Chennai (formerly Madras). Herzog & de Meuron has completed preliminary design for the highly anticipated Museum of Modern Art in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). And according to press reports, Norman Foster has been selected to design an office tower in Hyderabad and been hired by the Neptune group to develop a seventeen-acre office complex called Evolution, near the Bandra-Kurla Complex, outside Mumbai.5 Interestingly, images of these starchitect-driven projects have not yet been released to the media. Are the designers reluctant to build in an environment with so many physical and economic uncertainties?

That these American and European firms have received so much attention might reflect the media’s disinterest in the work of Indian-based firms.6 It might also reflect a genuine bias toward the selection of foreign designers. Over the last two decades the value of the rupee has strengthened, making it more feasible for Indian developers to retain foreign design firms. According to FXFOWLE Sudhir Jambhekar, a Senior Partner in charge of the firm’s International Studio, this is the opposite of outsourcing.7 Indian developers are leveraging the expertise of foreign designers, particularly for programmatically complex projects like airports, multiuse towers, and residential complexes. They are also leveraging the cachè of established designers to meet the demands of a well-traveled and design-literate client base. Many projects are collaborations between local and foreign developers and are fueled by foreign funds.8

Still one wonders why so many of the plum construction projects have landed in American and European design offices. Do Indian clients doubt the capabilities of local firms, or are they succumbing to cultural imperialism? While one looks forward to what masterful architects like Foster and Hadid will do in India, the circumstances are ripe for developing a new generation of Indian designers and builders that have a deep knowledge of the culture and the climate.

No icons need apply
The new architecture is linked inextricably with India’s overall economic growth. Construction of new infrastructure and buildings contributes significantly to India’s overall economy, and is also necessary to sustain growth in the service sector. A review of Web-based publicity, which highlights new luxury hotels, high-end shopping malls, and technology parks, suggests that the new construction serves only the elite. This is in part a distortion by the media, which focuses on more glamorous projects. When seen in a broader perspective, these projects appear as a small part of an immense wave that includes all varieties of infrastructural, residential, commercial, and industrial projects.

China offers a revealing contrast. Like India, China is an ancient culture with an immense landscape in the midst of rapid development. Yet in China, architecture is frequently pressed into service by a strong central government. The buildings constructed for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, for example, highlighted China’s entrance into contemporary global consciousness. Each was conceived, through telegenics and pop iconography, to dissolve instantly into a national symbol. The new architecture in India anticipates something quite different.

Unlike other fast-developing countries, including China, where the economy continues to evolve predictably from an agricultural to a manufacturing to a service economy, in India the economy leapfrogged, shifting directly from an agricultural to a service economy. It was the ambition of Nehru and other independence leaders to shape a modern, postindustrial nation. So India did not realize its full manufacturing capabilities, and does not yet possess a fully developed infrastructure of roads, railways, ports, and electrical grids.9 As a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute has observed, “India is going through all three industrial revolutions at once.”10 The new architecture must address these deficiencies.

The space and services the new buildings provide are essential for India’s continuing economic strength and growth.11 Consequently, they do not aim primarily to brand India through images but to meet immense, immediate needs for space and infrastructure, and to provide efficient shelter from extreme heat. The strongest new projects respond to the twin demands of program and climate directly and achieve solid, stalwart good looks, proposing forms rooted in the facts of the landscape. These buildings are less noteworthy as icons than as handsome, functional structures. Their appeal often arises from this pragmatism.

New amenities
Infrastructure projects, including power plants, highways, and airports, are crucial: They pave the way for residential and commercial development. The Airports Authority of India, in response to increased demand, is constructing airports throughout the country. SOM is designing the international terminal in Mumbai, and New York-based Frederic Schwartz Architects, in collaboration with Gensler, is designing terminals in Chennai, Vadodara, and Raipur.12 The need for new airports in India is so great that it might seem irrelevant what the buildings look like, but to maintain a consistent, modern image, the authority has required that each new terminal be fully enclosed and air-conditioned, with glass facades and a large, columnless interior.13

The Chennai terminal by Schwartz Architects is now under construction. Despite sensitivities in design and planning, its overall image, following the authority’s guidelines, is elegant but generic. Sited adjacent to the existing terminal, this slender, shell-like building is oriented west-east, with full-height glass facades along its north and south sides and a dramatically curved metal roof. The airport design incorporates "green" ideas. The roof juts out at the south side to shield direct sunlight from hitting the glass and pitches along its spine to direct rainwater into underground cisterns for reuse. Immense courtyards with lush foliage lie at the heart of the structure, intended to integrate the interior with the exterior. Yet the greenery remains inaccessible behind glass. And because of the large, sealed expanses of glass in its facades, the terminal will require continuous air-conditioning. Here, although promoting "green" strategies, a governmental agency might be impeding a more sensible, sustainable design.

The terminal’s design is culturally specific. Departure areas are much larger than they would be at an American airport to accommodate the large families who typically see off family travelers; a network of VIP entrances and lounges provides the increased security that wealthy passengers expect. Yet one has a hard time imagining the structure perched on the dry reddish soil characteristic of south India. Sunlight will bounce off metal and glass surfaces, effectively dematerializing them. The exterior landscaping, perhaps because it is not yet fully developed, does not create a home for the structure. The terminal seems groundless, as if it might float away.

New towers
There has been little interest in creating an iconic skyscraper that might stand for all of India. Yet because land is so precious, skyscrapers will rise over India’s major cities in coming decades. SOM has designed towers in Mumbai and Hyderabad; Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in Hyderabad; and FXFOWLE in Noida, Gurgaon, and Mumbai. In 2007 a local developer announced that Norman Foster’s firm would design a 100-story office tower for the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure Corporation in Hyderabad, a hub of the nation’s burgeoning software industry.14 Yet none of the designs that have been released for these towers has a strong iconic presence.

Many less publicized and ambitious object-towers are being planned as landmarks within new commercial and residential developments in smaller cities.15 Their architects are rarely identified, and the architecture is rarely distinguished. A local developer in Hyderabad, for instance, has proposed a 121-story tower within a new residential complex called Lanco Hills. Marketing materials show a slender, leaning pyramid-like structure clad entirely in glass. The tower has a strange, apparently arbitrary shape, with no connection, stylistic or sculptural, to the surrounding buildings. It is attention grabbing, yet serves real estate marketing more than urban fabric and life.

On the one hand, it is refreshing that Indians do not feel compelled to build a national skyscraper or compete with super-high buildings in China and in Dubai. But on the other hand, the proliferation of towers in secondary cities points to a lack of ambition and overall vision at the level of city planning. If plans for a Foster tower go forward, wouldn’t it be best situated in a city like Mumbai, where there are already pockets of vertical construction? Economic development in India moves forward in a less structured way than it has in other countries, including China; it is guided by the ambitions of individual developers rather than a federal program.16

But some designs for new mid-height buildings show great promise. Studio Gang’s design for a residential tower in Hyderabad has strong ties to the landscape. It is emboldened by its association with the earth rather than the sky. The tower’s primary 25-story volume is cleft by vertical passages that carry breezes through to exterior courtyards and interior units. Its facade is hung with full-height concrete screens, which shade and conceal the apartments’ porches. While the tower opens to the landscape in all directions, it also turns inward to central courtyards and corridors, fostering privacy. It has a massive, muscular exterior and a calm, secretive interior. Shaped by the forces of sun and wind, it is finely calibrated to climate and site. It might be a fertile model for other construction in the city.17

New cities
In response to immense needs, many huge projects are currently under way in India. Most pressing is the lack of adequate urban housing. The published figures vary, but it is understood that nationwide about 20 million people need homes. In Mumbai, it has been estimated that nearly a quarter of the city’s population of 18 million lives in “informal housing,” squatting either in unused structures or on sidewalks and streets.18 Other published figures state that as many as two-thirds of the people in the city live in informal housing.19 And the population of the cities continues to swell, as economic hardships displace agricultural workers from family-owned farms: About 10 million people move from rural areas to the major cities each year.20 Moreover, the growth of white-collar jobs has increased the demand for middle-class housing.

The most significant building projects in India aim to reshape some larger part of the landscape, to build an entire community at once. While urban land has always been at a premium, over the last two decades property values have risen dramatically due to increased demand.21 Many major cities have been built sporadically, over centuries, with inconsistent regulations, resulting in large areas of sprawling low- and mid-rise structures. These same areas have been targeted for denser redevelopment. In most cities the infrastructure is already challenged: Water, sewage, electricity, and transportation systems need expanding. Rather than burden these systems with new buildings, developers sometimes consider it more effective to build, along with them, a strengthened base of utilities and transportation.

Outside the larger cities, new satellite communities and townships are being established, and existing ones extended, to expand the city’s fabric in orderly parcels. This is linked to the Indian government’s creation of SEZs (Special Economic Zones)—specially designated precincts in and outside existing cities, governed by strategic business and tax laws to stimulate local industry, investment, and trade. In selecting these zones, often in underused exurban locations, the government has promoted eccentric physical development, shaping new city centers with independent infrastructures and amenities.22

At different SEZs in Gurgaon, a suburb southwest of New Delhi, Robert A.M. Stern Architects and SOM have planned mixed-use commercial developments, and HOK has designed a high-end residential development. HOK and FXFOWLE have both designed residential communities within SEZs in Greater Noida, southeast of New Delhi. And HOK has completed an award-winning design for a residential community within Mahindra World City, an SEZ outside Chennai.23

HOK’s renderings for Mahindra World City show a fabric of low-lying structures dispersed around a promenade of large, open lawns. Despite the dramatic riverside site, the entire development has a sanitized suburban air. It offers no sense of place or particularity in the landscaping or architecture. It might be a speculative housing development in New England or a New Urbanist city in Florida. The heat of the Indian climate makes it difficult to enjoy shadeless outdoor spaces; people linger at plazas, parks, and beaches only after sunset. The lawns at the heart of this development will be underused and difficult to maintain. It seems inappropriate to develop a loose, sprawling fabric of detached low-level structures just outside a large city. Building higher and in a more compressed way over parts of the site would increase the number of housing units and preserve some of the vitality of existing city life.

FXFOWLE’s design for group housing in Greater Noida is an intriguing collision of urban and rural models. This rolling 47-acre site is populated with tall, slender apartment towers. Each has two high concrete shear walls that support stacked apartment units in between. This inventive structural system shapes individual floor-deep apartment units that are all south-facing, fully shaded, column-free, and cross-ventilated. Strong sculptural rhythms enliven the array of towers on the site and the stacking of units within each tower. The towers have a bold, figural presence and exploit the drama of reduced masonry forms. The open lawn provides spatial relief and visual freedom, although it also feels strangely blank. One hopes that the final design for the housing can include more developed landscaping and provisions for usable public space.24

Old communities
With considerable controversy, some Indian developers have turned to American design offices for master plans to rebuild slums. In Mumbai, SOM is working with a local developer to rebuild a Santa Cruz slum in a way that is both formally ambitious and socially aware. SOM worked closely with a sociologist who had lived in the slum for eighteen months to understand its culture. As a result, the new plan sets mid-rise commercial and residential buildings along the neighborhood’s existing curving commercial thoroughfare, Alibag Road, widening and enhancing it with bright plazas. SOM intends for the new community, Santa City, to have design standards and amenities on par with those at Canary Wharf in London and Roppongi Hills in Tokyo. Renderings show an immaculate Modernist landscape with blazing white stucco buildings.25

The chic design belies the social and physical displacement that lies at the heart of the plan. By city law this new community must accommodate the slum’s some 120,000 inhabitants and provide them with interim housing during construction. Families will eventually receive units in their own apartment blocks, which have been designed with courtyards and wide internal corridors to mimic the winding, open-air passages of the slum. One of the striking features of the existing slum is how business and residential spaces are so tightly integrated, often opening directly out on to exterior passageways. The new design displaces people from their homes and segregates them within the new upscale community. SOM director Mark Igou, who is overseeing the project, has acknowledged that this requires slum dwellers to learn an entirely new way of life.26

The firms implementing planning projects in India profess good intentions and appear conscientious in their research and responses. Yet the projects are driven by a desire to increase the value of slum property and not the desire to improve slum dwellers’ lives. One wonders how even the most skillful planning can alleviate fundamental economic and social disparities. One wonders too if a designed community can ever replace the gritty vibrancy of the existing slums. Slums like those in Santa Cruz, Dharavi, and Mumbai, sustain thriving intertwined communities and informal economies three or more generations old. Strikingly, these low-income communities exist in the center of the city. Some Indian planners have suggested that communities like Dharavi might actually serve as models for development in other Indian neighborhoods.27 Rebuilding slums based on foreign planning models, they argue, denies the unique life of these neighborhoods and provides only superficial improvements.28 Yet many slum areas remain in need of basic amenities like sewage, water, and electricity. A better architectural strategy might be to strengthen these communities from within, to transform them without razing them.

New city centers
As the national economy shifted away from agriculture, the service sector has become the dominant contributor to the national economy, dramatically increasing the number of white-collar industries.29 Finding suitable space for them is a new challenge. Some larger companies have chosen to build commercial and technology parks, centers for off-shore service work, the software industry, and trading. Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects is building a technology park for Tata Consultancy Services in Mumbai. FXFOWLE is completing design for a tech park in Noida, HOK for one in Bangalore, and Pei Cobb Freed & Partners for one in Hyderabad.

As for many new residential communities, the location for new commercial parks is often the result of a government-designated SEZ. Typically the architecture that follows is inward-looking, isolating workers in a campus-like environment. At Wave Rock, an office park Pei Cobb Freed & Partners has designed in Hyderabad, two super-scaled linear buildings provide 2.2 million square feet of leasable office space. The purpose of these buildings is to provide massive amounts of generic space, and the architecture obliges. The forms in both the architecture and the master plan seem to have been derived entirely from geometry; they offer no character or sense of place. The buildings are anonymous glass-faced slabs, one straight and one wave-like, with flat, unrelieved elevations. Even the playful curves in the larger building, when executed at such an immense, unreasonable scale, appear ominous.

One of the few new developments with strong civic intentions is the Kolkata International Convention Centre, a new commercial and cultural complex designed by the Hong Kong office of the British firm RMJM. Yet the entire center feels strangely placeless. The huge convention building anchors clusters of residential, commercial, retail, and hotel buildings. The 100-acre site, at the eastern edge of the city, lies within the Ganges delta plane and is linked, literally and symbolically, with that river’s tributaries through interior waterways and pools. Yet the water elements depicted in renderings are scaleless and placid; they carry none of the frisson of the mythological river. The development’s generically formatted city blocks and the architecture’s flat volumes, glass skins, and parabolic forms are empty abstractions. The convention building’s pilotis, rather than opening the ground below for activity, seem to disconnect the buildings and the life inside them from the landscape. The renderings convey a surreal isolation.

One wonders if it is possible for contemporary architecture to have a strong presence on the Indian landscape, to really shape places. It does not serve India well for architects to ape vernacular forms or interpret traditional precedents in contemporary materials. However sensitive their execution, often these elements seem like timid gestures, grace notes in projects that otherwise do not recognize the brute force of the sun. At Banyan Park in Mumbai, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects has taken the essence of certain traditional Indian architectural forms—their ability to modulate sunlight—and integrated them convincingly into a contemporary design. At this woodland campus twelve low-rise structures are delicately interconnected by a system of covered walkways and courtyards. Traditional Indian sunshading elements such as chujjas (long roof overhangs), jaalis (screened walls), and havelis (terraced facades) have been incorporated throughout, recast in an elemental language of concrete volumes.

Other exterior and interior architectural elements, including textile wall hangings, ceramic tiles, steel door handles, and metal handrails, have been custom-made by local artisans. According to project manager Paul Schulhof, the firm designed these elements in collaboration with the artisans, through an iterative process of prototyping and review.30 These finely realized details, embedded in buildings throughout the complex, might create a compelling system of ornament. This way of working, sensitive to construction’s smaller scales and the skills of artisans, is a thoughtful counterpoint to the larger moves of master planning. These buildings promise to be rich in character of the place.

New strains
Concurrent with these large planning and construction projects, other strains of new architecture have taken hold. These projects tend to be smaller, quieter, and more personal. Their designers have a multivalent outlook—flickering seamlessly between Indian and other influences—and their designs encompass a broad range of contemporary and traditional aesthetics and materials. These architects are not so much reacting to the larger projects as they are working around and in-between them, building in their shadows.

At Studio Mumbai, architect Bijoy Jain leads a co-op of local craftsmen and builders. Rather than fixing a design through drawings, the architects allow it to evolve as they work on-site with craftsmen to determine what materials are available locally and what forms are possible. The architecture is not driven by image but by its locale, materials, and construction methods. The resulting buildings—such as a small stone-walled spa on a cliff in Pune and a house built from palm wood on the beach in Alibag—have an intimate, timeless feeling. They are at once delicately imagined and sumptuously realized. So far Studio Mumbai has completed only smaller projects; one wonders if its approach can be implemented successfully on a larger scale.31



The Kolkata-based design collective (re)DO, which includes both Indian and American architects, approaches each new building design with extensive research, allowing forms to emerge naturally from unique site conditions and programmatic demands. Their method is gentle and open-ended, allowing for change and chance. For the Kolkata International Foundation Center for the Arts competition, the firm submitted a design that does not specify what the building will look like but only describes its inner structure and character. Almost perversely, the submission proclaims that the building will have a “rather subdued exterior. . . . The skin will evolve [later] out of an intense research of materials and construction methods.”32 The accompanying drawings present a structure with enigmatically blank facades. Architectural form is being generated by how the building is conceived and constructed rather than by overall image. What the building is has become more important than what the building looks like.

Super-scale projects might be a sound response to immediate needs, but one seeks out with special interest the smaller, stealth projects rising nearby. These fresh, idiosyncratic expressions can open a new way for architecture. They suggest that India will be best built one structure at a time, by architects and builders attuned to its rhythms, acutely aware of what is already there.

A new architecture
Some have lamented that after Lutyens and Le Corbusier—which is to say after colonialism and Modernism—Indians were left entirely disconnected from traditions, lacking an authentic language of architecture and construction.33 The present moment holds tremendous promise, as a wave of new projects gets under way, even in poor global economic conditions. Collectively, these projects might reshape the landscape and the image of the country; they might make a new architecture. This new architecture will not be rooted in traditions or trends but in the facts of the landscape, climate, and culture. It will reject facile symbolism for richer sensory associations. It will be pragmatic and delightful.

Notes
1. Unni Krishnan, “India Can Sustain 9–10 Percent GDP Growth,” International Business Times, January 9, 2008. For the years 2003 to 2004, the GDP increased an average of 8.6% annually. Forecasts predict that for the following years the GDP will increase less dramatically.
2. G.H.R. Tillotson, The Tradition of Indian Architecture: Continuity, Change, and the Politics of Style since 1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
3. India Knowledge@Wharton, “India’s Construction Boom: Boon or Bust?” November 1, 2007, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/article.cfm?articleid=4237. All the architects I interviewed acknowledged that limitations existed, but felt that none dictated design decisions.
4. Philip Davies, Splendours of the Raj: British Architecture in India, 1660–1947 (London: J. Murray, 1985).
5. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/3019899.cms.
6. Neelam Raaj, “Foreign Hands Building India,” The Times of India, June 15, 2008.
7. Sudhir Jambhekar, phone interview, October 31, 2008.
8. It remains illegal for foreign businesses to own land in India, so many foreign developers have partnered with local developers to invest in projects.
9. Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 340.
10. Mira Kamdar, Planet India: How the Fastest-Growing Democracy Is Transforming America and the World (New York: Scribner, 2007), 230.
11. Manjeet Kripalani, “Indian Land Grab,” BusinessWeek, September 19, 2005.
12. http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/070828chennai.asp.
13. Luke Mullins, “Investing in India’s Roads, Rails, and Airports,” U.S. News & World Report, February 2, 2008.
14. Ninad Siddhaye, "Hyderabad May Have Its First Iconic Superstructure," DNA India, December 18, 2008, www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1214948.
15. There is considerable interest in these buildings; a lively Weblog, SkyScraperCity, is devoted to new high-rise construction in India, http://www.skyscrapercity.com.
16. Foster + Partners have not yet confirmed that the firm has been retained for this project, and no images of the design have been released.
17. Jeanne Gang, principal of Studio Gang, e-mail interview, November 4, 2008.
18. Mira Kamdar, Planet India, 195.
19. Prakash M. Apte, “Dharavi, India’s Model Slum,” Planetizen.com, September 29, 2008, http://www.planetizen.com/node/35269
20. Kamdar, 244.
21. Manjeet Kripalani, “Indian Land Grab.”
22. S. Majumder, “India Needs a Unique SEZ Model,” Hindu Business Line, April 24, 2007, http://www.thehindubusinessline.co/2007/04/24/stories/2007042400520900.htm
23. Robert A.M. Stern, HOK, and KPF have all issued press releases for these projects.
24. Sudhir Jambhekar interview.
25. Mark Igou, interview, November 3, 2008.
26. Ibid.
27. Prakash M. Apte, “Dharavi, India’s Model Slum.”
28. Gautam Bhatia, “Cities without Ideas,” IndianExpress.com, November 5, 2008, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/cities-without-ideas/381562.
29. Wu, Yanrui, Service Sector Growth in China and India: A Comparison, China: An International Journal, March 2007, http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/china/v005/5.1wu.html.
30. Paul Schulhof, phone interview, November 10, 2008.
31. http://www.studiomumbai.com.
32. http://www.researchdesignoffice.com.
33. G.H.R. Tillotson, The Tradition of Indian Architecture, 135.