RMA Architects, established in 1990, recently completed 30 years of a robust practice that has not only designed and built architectural projects across India as well as abroad, but has also been a practice involved in various research projects in areas such as architectural as well as urban conservation, design, planning and policy formulation for the built environment, etc. Rahul Mehrotra, who founded and leads RMA Architects has himself been a figure in contemporary India’s architectural scenario playing multiple roles besides running an architecture practice – a public figure involved in various public institutions, platforms and projects, he is also an academic and a historian with an impressive line-up of lectures and publications.
The last 30 years mark a crucial history for India, as well as the world in many ways. Changing face of economic policies, new dynamics emerging in the cultural and social world of people and communities in India, dramatic shifts in urban environments and the rising concern with identity politics on one hand, to debates on heritage, belonging, and cosmopolitanism, on the other. In addition, today digital lives are shaking the ground where physical place mattered solely; new debates and formulations have emerged across the world but sharply manifest in India in particular ways.
We often wonder, in what ways does the practice and work of an architect play a role in dynamic times such as the last 30 years we have witnessed. Often it becomes easier to evaluate how times and histories reflect in the architecture that got produced in those times, however, the active role of architecture to influence the times and histories it is being produced in is often looked at unsurely and with professional scepticism. The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India co-curated by Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote, and Kaiwan Mehta also saw the question on the active ‘role of the architect’ emerging as a key issue. This set of discussions were extended in the exhibition State of Housing that was curated by the same team. In fact these two research projects sharply brought into focus the waning role of the architect in the public realm in India.
These broad and specific debates lead us to wonder what is the ‘making’ of architecture all about, and what are the critical crucible where all of this is thought through and shaped – the studio, the office, the nature of practice of an architect – what does it do, what is its shape, what is the architecture of practice?
The case of RMA Architects, with their portfolio of works and publications, histories of collaborations and engagement with multiple individuals and contexts, makes for an important study – at one level as a practice – an architecture practice in ‘contemporary’ India, on the other to open larger debates on the making of a professional practice, shaping its work and culture of designed object-worlds, environments, as well as social relationships, in the context of an ongoing history – of politics, material worlds, languages of design, communication of ideas, shaping of pedagogy as well as the responsibilities of the citizen-professional.