Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai
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The program was first offered in 2002, marking a shift in formal architectural pedagogy in Mumbai. Prior to this program, there was no codified way to undertake
formal architectural study in India that focused on how architectural approaches
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The Integrated Subject 29
and practices intersected with the environment as, in Joshi’s words, “ . . . an integrated subject.”
Since creating that integrated subject can risk undermining the explanatory
power of the knowledge forms it combines, our conversation turned to the obvi-
ous challenge of providing adequate coverage of the vast intellectual terrain sig-
naled by the idea of the environment as “an integrated subject.” Joshi explained
that the key was to assemble many voices of specialized expertise, and to build
a curriculum that amplified one focused voice at a time. The functionality of the
curriculum thus relied on identifying and hearing from those specialized perspec-
tives by drawing from the extensive social and professional network each founding
faculty member maintained. Joshi explained:
We knew we would need scientists from many fields, and fortunately in Mumbai
we have several. . . . We had good social contacts. We knew excellent, experienced people. And we employed several experienced people who are working in the field
to teach different courses. And more fortunately, people were also interested in coming and sharing that knowledge. I actual y can’t say why, because monetarily it was not at all remunerative, but somehow—is it is out of luck?—for example, one Dr.
Latoo, who is renowned in botany, came regularly to give lectures about plants. And Arbinash Kubal, whom you know is the expert of Maharashtra Nature Park, he . . .
also came. It was like that. For geology and geography, the head of the department at Bombay University came. These are very (senior) people, very, very experienced.
They came. Regularly. Like that we had more than fifteen resource persons who
would come and teach specialized courses and lectures. . . . My responsibility was teaching the course that gave the basics of . . . ecology. . . . Once the ecology concepts are clear, only then can you apply them to architecture.8
The pedagogical strategy depended in part, then, on the place of its founders in that same social network of environmental specialists and practitioners, the “good social contacts” who could provide positioned expert voices to be aggregated through the
curriculum itself. Guided by the RSIEA’s specific Environmental Architecture cur-
riculum, students would cultivate the skill of weaving together specific knowledge forms, and discern which were most critical for a given environmental design decision. In this way, ecology in practice in the form of environmental architecture
involved mastering a strategy for assembling expert views deemed relevant, and
distilling those views into architectural ideas, plans, and drawings.
But Joshi’s comments pointed as well to the forces that compelled the members
of his social-expert network to participate as contributors to this integrated learning endeavor. Clear and consistent financial gain could not explain their partici-
pation; for Joshi, it pivoted instead on shared devotion to a vision of integrated environmental architectural practices that could create positive ecological outcomes. Teaching was a primary way to promote and enact this vision.
The M. Arch. (Environmental Architecture) degree is today a two-year mas-
ter’s degree program that is conducted, as its brochure and website convey, in
30 The Integrated Subject
“full time face-to-face counseling mode over four semesters of 15–18 weeks each
(with approximately twenty hours of contact sessions per week). ”9 Students who have earned a B. Arch. or its recognized equivalent are eligible to apply. The curriculum evolved slightly over the course of the project, with a revised course
program differentiated as the “new syl abus.” In both the previous and the newer
curricular formats, students complete courses across a vast interdisciplinary
landscape; they move between theory and practice, quantitative and qualitative
modes of data measurement and assessment, and wide analytical techniques at
various spatial and social scales. This remarkably broad course structure also covers specific laws, policies, and metrics that govern conventional and environmen-
tal architecture in India and worldwide. Even in its earliest form, the program is an ambitious curricular attempt to forge and teach environmental architecture as
“an integrated subject.”
If the vast content prevents students from developing rigorous theoretical or
methodological depth in any one disciplinary arena, it nevertheless exposes them
to a wide range of intersecting issues that fall under the general conceptual rubric of ecology. In a more contextualized way, it also traces a set of expert figures active in Indian environmental research and management: the same social-professional
network from which Joshi drew to run the nascent curriculum remains a major
source of visiting faculty members who staff courses each year. The integration,
then, extends beyond the curricular content of a subject area called environmental architecture; it populates the integrated subject field with a set of practitioners to whom students not only attribute the status of an expert, but also with whom the
student might be inclined to confer once graduated and practicing in the field.
Joshi framed this in terms of simultaneously knowing the limits of the architect’s capacities and cultivating the skill to discern the quality of knowledge derived
from fields outside of architecture:
In this program they get a total understanding and they learn their limitations.
They learn that they cannot do everything on their own, so they learn how to get
resources—from where can they get the right (information) to give you, say, an ex-
ample of responsible wastewater treatment or good solid waste management. These
are both specialized fields that we present—not in detail, but how to get the exact things you require for your project. They learn that they must evaluate whether the solutions specialists offer are correct or not, good or not. They must know how to test them. So our focus is on making them understand these things on a larger scale, to evaluate according to the principles of ecology and the environment.10
There was a tension, then, between imparting the importance of consultation
among a network of appropriate experts, and cultivating the capacity to “evaluate
whether the solutions specialists offer are correct or not . . . ” As I moved through the RSIEA training experience, it became clear that we were simultaneously learning to forge a strategy for aggregating diverse knowledge forms, and to determine
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The Integrated Subject 31
which knowledge forms mattered and to what degree. This evaluative authority
derived not from a position of commensurate skil s and training, but rather from
the distinctive expert position of the environmental architect: a good environmen-
tal architect possessed and employed a capacity to think across the range of scales and biophysical processes that environmental architecture signaled. These might
encompass biophysical and social details relevant to a building site, its broader
biophysical and social context (such as a watershed or a bounded city), and a site’s interconnection with processes that nested those scales into even wider contexts
(such as an entire river system or a demographic migration pattern). Here, we
might characterize the curricular mission as fostering the capac
ity to think in an
“integrated” way across disciplinary and scaled perspectives, and to privilege this capacity over, for example, specializing in aquatic chemistry, urban sociology, or so-called conventional architecture. These green experts were first and foremost
integrators; they were not architects who had mastered environmental science or
social science or both. The sources and types of knowledge they would integrate,
and the frameworks through which the quality of that knowledge was deemed
acceptable were critical. At RSIEA, that framework was often shorthanded simply
as “good design.”
Learning to discern and undertake good design was a key intended outcome
not only of the formal experience of the curriculum, but also of the social experience of collective learning and application. As faculty and students forged and
experienced the shared conceptual space of good design, they came to share a
collective, cultivated environmental subjectivity that valued and sought to elevate the Institute’s specific approach to the built form.11 As both an integrated—that is, interdisciplinary—subject and a collective social experience of learning good
design sensibilities, then, the “integrated subject” produced an integrated sub-
jectivity. Tracing and examining this subjectivity, and noting the environmental
affinities through which it operated, is part of the work of the chapters to come, but let us mark here Joshi’s characterization of the impulse to name, define, and
employ “good design,” and its attachment, via the RSIEA curriculum, to existing
networks of expert knowledge.
Another important dimension of the RSIEA mission was the perhaps less tan-
gible, but nevertheless central, notion of devotion or commitment. This was at
times described to me in equal y integrated terms, in the sense that teaching environmental architecture and being an environmental architect were part of a “total-
izing” lifeway. Clear lines between vocation and job, personal and professional, or work and politics were always elusive. Faculty, and occasional y students, invoked their strong commitment to environmental architecture and its potential outcomes in order to explain, perhaps far better than Joshi’s characterization of it as
“luck,” why such reputable scholars and practitioners would detach their work for
RSIEA from direct and fair payment for their service. Such “commitment” was not
exclusive to guest lecturing experts who might forego an honorarium; I regularly
32 The Integrated Subject
Figure 3. Dr. Latoo talks with RSIEA students during a field study
visit. Photo by the author.
noticed faculty members devoting considerable personal time to students, to
course development, and to the Institute. Few voiced open concern for quantify-
ing the hours spent or enumerating tasks performed, and the few I observed who
did tended not to remain with the faculty.
An interconnected set of exclusions and self-selections are therefore also appar-
ent here. Those who undertook the committed practice of teaching at RSIEA were
often, though not always, already identified as experts within a specific socio-
professional network, and some were also occasional y able to forgo payment
(or accept a smaller amount than might otherwise be offered) for hours worked.
While these were not universal attributes for every faculty member, they figured
prominently, and were certainly central to the early life of the program.
• • •
One morning in July 2012 I arrived at the Institute to find the core faculty filing out of a meeting room. Their faces were unusual y somber; some bowed their heads.
Something had clearly transpired to produce collective disappointment.
I learned a few hours later that a curricular evaluation session with represen-
tatives from the Council of Architecture Certification Board had returned some
unwelcome news. In response to growing enrollments, the Institute sought to
activate a revised curriculum that would facilitate certain forms of faculty and
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The Integrated Subject 33
programmatic expansion. Yet the Council had rejected their proposal on at least
two grounds.
Up to this point, mid-2012, work and excitement surrounding the Institute’s
expansion had been part of the everyday atmosphere among faculty. Countless
hours, meetings, and discussions had brought the collective project of develop-
ing a new curriculum into the center of an already crowded workload, but people
proceeded with confidence that a new course and scheduling sequence would
enable more in-person contact between students and faculty, and more effective
experiential learning. The new curricular design would place stronger emphasis
on individual student projects, and culminate in an independent final thesis. New
policies would make course attendance compulsory and admissions decisions
whol y merit-based. Although faculty members voiced a commitment to keep
tuition fees at a level competitive with like programs in Mumbai, it was clear that new teaching staff would have to be hired, and so a tuition increase was imminent.
Having witnessed doubled enrollments over only a few years, enacting these
changes carried a certain urgency. But the impasse at the CoA meeting seemed to
indicate that something had gone wrong; institutionalized structural requirements
had somehow clashed with the program expansion proposal.
After everyone had settled back at their desks or rushed off to classrooms, I
shuffled into Roshni Udyavar Yehuda’s office. She explained that the CoA objec-
tions related to violations of some of the basic requirements for academic degree
programs in any kind of architecture in India. The first objection was that current Institute faculty were not paid the Council of Architecture’s regulation salary, and in order to hire new faculty, all compensation levels would have to be adjusted to those regulation levels. Even with proposed tuition increases, Yehuda explained
to me, this was completely unfeasible. “We simply can’t afford it,” she said plainly.
The core issue was more than a matter of budgetary calculus, however. Yehuda
lamented that reducing the value of teaching environmental architecture to its price in INR diminished what was an otherwise expansive endeavor “far beyond economics.” She repeated that the RSIEA faculty had, since its inception, taught “out of devotion to the subject,” 12 emphasizing that the faculty had never joined because of the lure of the salary. Furthermore, she argued, “How can we say that someone who
makes less in salary is less competent, or less valuable? By that score a volunteer, or someone who comes for the sheer passion of the teaching, is automatical y not
competent in the eyes of the CoA.” 13 Her voice betrayed exasperation.
She continued: “It’s the culture of this program that we teach here because we
are committed to the subject. The salary is not a measure; it has never been the
reason we teach this.” 14 While for her this was a way of ensuring that those who taught at RSIEA were ful y committed to the mission, it might have also prevented
those without prior material security from considering it, regardless of their passion and commitment.
34 The Integrated Subject
Yehuda’s reaction to the Council’s concern arose in large measure from a frus-
trating collision with the structural limits of what, up to that moment, had been
a differently regulated collective space, one centered
on a shared willingness to
accept benefits other than money in exchange for environmental architecture
teaching work. There existed no metric for capturing, conveying, and affirming
this kind of value for the Council, leaving the faculty “devotion” so central to
teaching at the Institute supplanted by a more powerful, if external, regulatory
protocol. The failure of monetary metrics to capture the myriad forms of value
represented by the environment is a longstanding theme in environmental studies;
indeed, the problem of “commensurability” forms an important basis for a wide
array of critiques in political ecological theory.15 In this instance, the externalities were social. Yehuda lamented the absence of adequate metrics for seeing and valuing a collective social mission; while faculty members were official y laborers, they were social y fellow devotees. Of course, in the eyes of the CoA, such conditions
simply constituted labor exploitation, and could not proceed.
A second Council objection underscored the incommensurability of the “inte-
grated subject” and the CoA’s measures of professorial fitness and curricular integrity. Regulations defined faculty eligibility strictly according to degree status, such that appointed faculty must hold degrees in architecture. Perhaps ironical y, this disqualified nearly everyone on the faculty and left only three core faculty members. Despite accomplishment or expertise in their given disciplines, most profes-
sors could not, by this definition, remain eligible to teach at RSIEA. Again, the
regulations presented a structural obstacle to a core principle of the integrated
subject: “Our strength and uniqueness is the fact that this program is not only one discipline. We depend on that,” Yehuda said. “Its entire future is threatened now.”
I asked naively if anyone had expected this challenge to the Institute’s expansion proposal. The response was a troubled, almost blank stare. “No. ”16
The integrative improvisation that had marked the Institute’s inception and
so much of its history was possible at a different scale, with smaller enrollment
numbers. Bustling enrollments, ever-growing demand, and the expansion of the