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THE PAST AND PRESENT

The Past as Present:
Pedagogical Practices in Architecture at the Bombay School of Art

an exhibition curated by Mustansir Dalvi

4th to 27th February, 2016
The Claude Batley Gallery, Sir JJ College of Architecture

This exhibition traces the influences of documentation, decoration and design on architectural pedagogy and architectural practices in India in the late 19th and early 20th century at the Sir JJ School of Art, Bombay. The many original drawings and images on display explore this interaction.

Architectural portfolios like the Jeypore Portfolio by Swinton Jacob (1890), the Batley Portfolio (The Design Development of Indian Architecture by Claude Batley) and Bannister Fletcher’s canonical A History of... Architecture on the Comparative Method (1921) amongst others were a significant part of architectural learning, and their use in the studio forms a fulcrum around which the pedagogical practices can be understood.

A special feature is a portfolio of drawings made by Achyut Kanvinde as a student of the Sir JJ School of Art, which, placed between the dichotomy of tradition and modernism provides a glimpse into design churnings prevalent at the cusp of Indian independence.
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DECO ON THE OVAL

Sir JJ College of Architecture has documented the architectural facades of the Art Deco Buildings that form a stretch on the Oval Maidan. These building fronts are metonymous with Bombay’s Art Deco Architecture that flourished from the 1930s to the 1950s. Bombay, even today has the largest number of Art Deco buildings in a city outside of Miami. The Oval Maidan buildings are the most ornamented and patterned and display the flourishes of architecture made possible by the use of Reinforced Cement Concrete.
Taking freely from Art-Deco motifs worldwide, these facades are a mix of geometrical and symbolic representations, reflecting the optimism and modernity of a flourishing port city on the rise. The motifs symbolize speed, power, transportation, the sea and the tropics as well as nod to the imperial presence by commemorating them in their names- Windsor Court, Empress Court, Queens Court.
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These buildings were also possible only because of one phase of the Backbay Reclamations that were completed around 1929. Plots were clearly demarcated and the City Improvement Trust laid down guidelines that resulted in an extremely uniform positioning of the buildings on the neighborhood, matching frontage lines, and floor heights. Yet for all that there is an amazing diversity of elements and motifs on the facades, from the straitlaced to the ludic. It is little wonder that they are amongst the best loved buildings in the island city.

Students of Sir JJ College of Architecture, along with Professor Mustansir Dalvi have recreated the facades of 18 buildings that form the Art-Deco stretch on the Oval Maidan. Using older drawings (first made in 1996) and images contemporary to their construction, they have redrawn the facades in the form they were when first constructed in the latter half of the 1930s. This exhibition of elevations also has details of architectural ornament on display, and vintage images of a few of the buildings, pristine in their newly constructed glory.

Mumbai is set to put forward the Oval Maidan Precinct with its collection of Neo Gothic and Art Deco buildings UNESCO as a potential world heritage city. This exhibition makes a sound case for this inclusion into the list.

Prof. Mustansir Dalvi
Curator