building. And you will teach the client that it is smarter than racking up points.”
Good design, then, demanded an agentive stance: it implied both the capacity and
the responsibility to “teach” the client, and it demanded that the architect work with, but move beyond, the procedures that followed from protocols and codes. Practicing good design was not following a recipe; it demanded, in fact, the opposite stance.
The central theme of Deshpande’s session that day was the importance of using
standard metrics as “tools for checking and reference,” but never as guidelines. To elaborate, he gave an example: differentiating between COC (costs of construction) and OC (operating costs), Deshpande supposed that a “typical Mumbai building”
carries normal construction costs across a range of INRs 1,700–2,000 per square
meter. A student quickly offered that “building green” would increase the cost to
at least INRs 2,400 per square meter. “Can we reduce this first cost?” Deshpande
asked. “How can we capture and convey to the client that there is a payback in the long term? If we start from the notion that the first cost of good design will always be higher than conventional design, then we will never do green work.”
Despite what seemed to be an obvious impasse born of economic realities, the
instructor pressed on. “Be creative,” he urged. “What if you, as the architect, just give it a (cost) cap? What if I say design a green building and keep the cost down to INRs 1,200 per square meter? Could you do it?” The room was silent. “It’s up
to you, the architect. You can take the lead in making good design decisions.” No
obstacle, he implied, even an economic one, should be stronger than good design.
In both sessions, Ravishankar and Deshpande ascribed almost infinite poten-
tial agency to individual Indian architects armed with good design; the moral
58 Ecology in Practice
imperative then rested with each student to simply perfect and employ it. To fail
to do so signaled, in large measure, the weakness of the architect alone. The sug-
gestion that one can design one’s own materials protocol whilst proactively con-
sulting a full range of international metric tools was at the core of Ravishankar’s blackboard laden with lists, while Deshpande left students with the clear directive
“It’s up to you.” If a process seemed too expensive, the architect could make it
affordable. Metrics and protocols were heuristics rather than guides. “You can take the lead,” Deshpande assured them, and the power seemed to rest with the hybrid
expertise of good design. Suhasini’s lecture back in Auroville was not only echoed in the classroom, then; it was squarely reinforced. Recall:
Remember that architecture is a profession that is more than a service. We have a
say, and we have to be responsible for it. We need to be there as projects are being formulated . . . (and use our) position of tremendous influence. 22
A final example to supplement those drawn from Auroville and the Prabha
Devi lecture hall can be drawn from the tours of green building sites that were
included on our various study tours. On an RSIEA visit to green architecture sites in Chennai, the first was the India corporate headquarters of Grundfos Pump
Manufacturers. The building was India’s first-ever LEED-certified gold building; at that time, “gold” was the highest LEED rating yet awarded in India (though this would change almost immediately afterward).
At our first stop after several hours of driving, the group streamed out of the
bus and filed through the building’s front entryway. Some paused, taking note of
the prominent plaque directly to the right of the entrance. This was the marker
that certified the building’s gold LEED certification. At its center was a cluster of leaves, and written in large print around this image were the words, “U.S. Green
Building Council” and “LEED,” along with the certification designation—in this
case, the gold medal.
A lingering student soon turned to me and, in an ironic tone, made explicit
the obvious question that I imagined we pondered collectively. “Why does the US
Green Building Council determine what is sustainable in Chennai?” Why should
appropriate parameters for defining sustainability here come from there? “It’s not ecological,” the student said; “the climate and the materials—and real y everything—these are different from construction in the U.S. A gold building there is
not sustainable here.”
Grundfos Headquarters itself, which for our purposes was a study site, was
simultaneously a material link to transnational circuits of sustainability defini-
tion and assessment, and a staging area for formulating and articulating claims about, and the stakes of, precisely what good design is and how it is enacted. As
we walked its corridors and observed its features, the building was itself a kind of provocation to define good design in place and time, an invitation to assess the
sustainability achievement signaled by gold certification.
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Ecology in Practice 59
As the formal tour unfolded, aspects of the meaning of, and work performed
by, gold certification revealed a particularly corporate inflection that up to that point we hadn’t engaged in classroom lectures. Just beyond the doorway, a greeter
addressed our group in a large, light- and plant-filled foyer. One wall listed the Grundfos official code of conduct; alongside it was a comprehensive list of the
building’s green technical features. Together, they professed deep commitment to
a version of sustainability that embraced a specific kind of eco-capitalist morality, one that echoed many of the standard principles of so-called green capitalism.
The tour itself was a highly stylized and technology-savvy presentation. In addi-
tion to its environmental y sound design features, our guide told us, the building also made a positive “social contribution.” Laborers here did their jobs in the most light-filled and fulfilling of spatial settings, which in turn produced, he claimed,
“much happier, more productive workers.” Here, “social” good was assessed
directly as increased production, and quite clearly, higher profit for the company.
Our visit eventual y led to the office of the regional CEO for Grundfos, who
elaborated more ful y the specific transnational corporate culture within which
the “message” of the building was nested. The Indian Regional CEO of this Danish
company spoke from an office desk decorated with miniature Indian and Danish
flags; behind him an enormous Danish flag draped across an entire wal .
The CEO opened his remarks by assuring us that Grundfos is “very profit ori-
ented.” But, he continued, “the important question is how we generate that profit.
We don’t want to be number one; we want people to know us by our commit-
ment to the environment. ”23 The company’s mode of conveying that commitment involved the global vocabulary of sustainability, namely USGBC LEED certification. The LEED gold building stood for the presence of certain types and numbers
of technical features, but also for its place in an international corporate geography of a specific kind of capitalist commitment.
The students were especial y interested in the design features that had “earned”
this building its LEED gold status. Each time the tour guide identified something, small groups seemed to join around the feature and discuss it. The tension between our guide’s narrative emphasis on “scoring points” and the students’ general desire to understand why certain design approaches were chosen over other
s eventual y produced an almost palpable unease, exacerbated when the guide explained
that most of the strategies employed to maximize LEED certification points were
those that were easiest to undertake. At every instance, the design team avoided
approaches or materials that would alter the cost, challenge conventional mate-
rials mixes, or dramatical y modify standard construction and design practices.
Grundfos had simply gathered all of the proverbial low hanging fruit, and the
result was the visibility enabled by LEED gold status. After al , we too were there at the headquarters.
As we completed the tour, our guide moved swiftly between pride in a kind of
moral achievement and pride in “getting the gold” without exerting much effort.
60 Ecology in Practice
In blatant contrast to the modality of good design emphasized in the RSIEA class-
room, the stewards of this building seemed to mark environmental architecture
attributes only when they turned on questions of profit: energy efficiency saved
the company money, for instance, and worker productivity boosted profits. This
sort of “green” building was a rather transparent, strategic capitalist strategy rather than an example of good design. Several students later labeled the tour, with disgust, as “greenwashing.”
At the lunch break, Professor Rajeev Taschete and a group of students talked
through the part of the tour we had just completed. A spirited conversation heard
students listing item after objectionable, and often absurd, item. “This is just a checklist,” one student said; “it’s not good design at al . It fails in all the ways that matter! If this is the example, LEED gold means nothing for India.” 24
The tour of India’s first LEED gold building was not, then, a study of how to
follow in this champion’s footsteps. On the contrary, it unfolded as a systematic
critical exercise in which nearly every built form aspect that earned LEED points
was debunked as somehow contrary to good design. In practice, then, neither the
“follow the protocol” approach, nor the outside metric, lived up to the standards
of good design.
• • •
Emboldened with the hybrid knowledge form derived from classroom lectures,
and the confidence in their agentive potential reinforced across the curriculum,
students who reached the last part of the RSIEA program enrolled in a capstone-
style course called Environmental Architecture Studio (also called Design Studio).
Offered in three consecutive parts, the three courses assembled under the rubric
combined classroom time with a design project assignment undertaken in student
teams. Part lecture, but mostly field-based, this course gave students their sole
opportunity to practice good design under the guidance of RSIEA faculty.
Design Studio courses posed a design challenge that came from an actual cli-
ent, and the proposals that student teams created were presented to that client at the end of the three course sequence. In 2012, the brief involved designing a set of vil as for an art resort development at Pali, about 40 km from Popoli, and a nearly two hour drive from Mumbai. The students were directed to design twelve residential vil as over 6.5 acres of land that we were told was “undeveloped.” An agent for the developer visited the classroom as our course got underway to convey the
resort owner’s vision.
Introducing herself as Shilpa, the middle-aged, fashionably dressed agent
described the developer as “young, adventurous, and (wanting) to change the
typical attitude.” He envisioned a resort that would provide an “escape to nature,”
she told us; he believed that “when someone comes from the city and gets a natu-
ral experience, it changes the state of mind.” To further frame the context, she
asked students to imagine a setting in which the surrounding vil ages grow rice,
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Ecology in Practice 61
mango trees populate the hil s, and “you feel nature.” The terrain was rich with
boulders, red soil, basalt, and “lots of trees.” On a separate, but adjacent, lot, other land owners would eventual y construct forty private homes, making the site a
“nature escape” that was quickly transforming, becoming more and more a visibly
connected node in an urban-rural continuum.
The resort was to be called Serenity Vil as; in their Design Studio assignment,
the students would divide into teams, each developing a plan for twelve cottages
of three to five hundred square feet. A swimming pool, bar, and restaurant were
also planned for the resort complex; an amphitheater would be built at its center.
Little was said, or asked, about the people who were already living in the vil-
lages surrounding the assignment site, or the land use and land tenure conditions
that preceded the making of the Serenity Vil as plot. Shilpa emphasized the city-
folk who would journey from Mumbai to patronize the resort instead, describing
them as “people in fancy cars who want to experience nature,” and “people who are
thirsty for nature but they don’t know how to enjoy it.” As her project description concluded, we learned that the following week’s class meeting would take place
on the site in Pali. We should plan to walk the land and conduct our first site
assessments. This was it: our newly gleaned, hybrid knowledge form would be
put to experiential test. The room was giddy with excited chatter as Shilpa bade
us farewel .
The faculty coordinator for the Design Studio that semester, Professor Priti
Bhandari, had herself trained at RSIEA years earlier. She had gone on to prac-
tice environmental architecture in Mumbai with some amount of success. Once
Shilpa had departed, Bhandari turned to us with a kind of urgent sincerity. This
project brief, she said, would be the culmination of everything we had done at
RSIEA. Short of our independent thesis projects, the Design Studio project was
“the most important work” we would undertake. If the developer was convinced
by our designs, he was likely to actual y build one of them, so of course we needed to “take this very seriously.” Then, as if to underline that good design implied far more than protocols, templates, or metrics, she said, “and remember that this
whole semester is about values. You’re questioning what is right. You’re moving
way beyond architecture.” 25
Our next course meeting found us assembled at the site in Pali. The instructor
divided us into teams, each charged with a set of data collection tasks that the class could aggregate into a full social and ecological contextual picture of the site. This would be our first experiential attempt to derive the “integrated knowledge” that
we would need to undertake good design. A sense of the breadth of biophysical
and social data we expected to consider by this advanced point in our training
can be gleaned from the assignments delivered to students in that first field visit.
Working independently in their respective teams, each was charged with prepar-
ing a presentation for the other students on one element of the comprehensive site assessment below. Expectations for the depth and sophistication with which we
62 Ecology in Practice
Figure 5. RSIEA Design Studio students explore the Pali project site.
Photo by the author.
would complete each list were minimal; what mattered was assuming its attendant,
expansive view—viewing the site of
our design brief in a ful y integrated way.
• • •
The RSIEA curriculum reflected its primary objective: to impart to architects the
capacity to understand the environment as an integrated subject. From the opening
day lectures through the design studio experience, we learned that environmental
architecture in the form of good design could never be reduced to the mastery of
prefabricated tools or metrics; it depended instead on developing proper values
and an agentive stance not only to conceptualize a practice that could transcend
existing structural limits like costs or codes, but to actual y do the same in practice. Good design depended on a hybrid knowledge form that was both global y
sanctioned and anchored to being “Indian.” It assumed few limits to architects’
agentive potential.
Through RSIEA training, an active and shared notion of architecture’s environ-
mental object was constructed, defined, and translated into a modality of responsible practice. We found that environment, in its fullest sense, in places far flung from Mumbai: from the Pali study site to the tours I will discuss more ful y in chapters to follow, environmental concepts gleaned in the classroom were reinforced quite
afield from the dense human presence and built development of the city itself.
The vast terrain of political economic and power differences that the good design
practitioner would traverse, and the extent to which the architect’s work—even as
an environmental architect—might reinforce or exacerbate its inevitable forms
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Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai Page 12
