Dr. Vikramaditya Prakash is an architect, architectural historian and theorist. He is Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, and is the host of Architecture Talk, a podcast based on curated conversations on the future of the built environment. Widely published, he works on issues of modernism, postcolonialism, global history, fashion and transdisciplinary thinking.
In the summer of 1951, Le Corbusier joined CIAM 8, which was held about 20 miles north of London in the suburban village of Hoddesdon. The conference was just the third to follow the close of WWII, after CIAM 6 in Bridgwater, England in 1947, and CIAM 7 in Bergamo, Italy in 1949. The climate in England in 1951 was undoubtedly more optimistic than elsewhere in Europe: while the gloomy atmosphere of war still loomed over bombed- out city centres on the continent, the Festival of Britain, which opened two months before CIAM 8, enthusiastically celebrated the promise of recovery, progress, and faith in the future.
It was in this context that Aditya Prakash (born in 1924 in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh) made his life in London, where he had moved in early August 1947. Unlike his architect colleagues from South Asia who had been present at CIAM meetings-Sinhalese architect Minnette de Silva had attended CIAM 6 in Bridgwater, while Indian designer Balkrishna Doshi took part in CIAM 8 in Hoddesdon-Prakash never joined the conference. Nevertheless, he had become acutely aware of the discourse on planning the modern city advocated in the Athens Charter through his acquaintance Maxwell Fry, who had been a founding member of the MARS group (the British chapter of CIAM) known for its innovative master plan for London.
The Hoddesdon conference marked the apex of CIAM's research into community urbanism and functional planning that was to revitalize war-torn city centres. It saw the attendance of delegates from twenty-two official groups, a few individual members representing chapters under reorganization or still in formation, and an unknown number of students.
The resulting publication, CIAM 8 The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanization of Urban Life, edited by J. Tyrwhitt, J.L. Sert, and E. N. Rogers, represented the architects' and planners' effort to enhance the dignity of human life and to integrate diverse facets of human experience into the design of cities. The book came out in record time, just one year after the congress, and was one of the finest produced by CIAM, giving evidence of the maturity of thought that had been developed over the preceding decades of activity. It was within this fecund intellectual context that Prakash developed his architectural and urbanistic point of view. The robust network of modern architects forged through CIAM had established a fertile ground for rethinking the city, one which was best revealed in CIAM 8 The Heart of the City, and one which would prove deeply influential for the young Prakash.
Aditya Prakash belonged to the first generation of Indian modernists, the lodestar group of civil servants that took on the reins of responsibility in India under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru immediately after Independence in 1947. He worked most of his life as a salaried employee of the Government of India, but his work and his life were not circumscribed by the hierarchy- bound limitations of government service. To be sure, he considered his status as a state employee to be a profound responsibility; the work of the government was believed to be by many of his generation to be the true work of and for the people of India. The free spirit of the Independence movement was still in play, and the connectivity between city, citizen, and nation seemed vivid and self-evident. The Government of India was the nation's hope, and the Nehruvian nation-state was the torchbearer to a newly-independent people's aspirations. Authorship, identity-building and ego- mongering were not the purpose of the salaried employee. Rather, the paramount aspiration for many young professionals was to be subsumed within and become an instrumental part of the rising waters of the nation-state.
At the same time, there can be no doubt that Aditya Prakash modelled his personal aspirations after the most colossal individualist working in Chandigarh at that time. Like Le Corbusier, Prakash did not consider anything beyond his reach. Ignoring disciplinary boundaries, he viewed all aspects of his work be multiple dimensions of a single quest-hour to understand the purpose of life, enjoy it, and keep the interests of the poorest at heart. This is the "one continuous line" that is referred to in the title of this book. In the modernist mould, the purpose of architecture (and a life lived in architecture) was to provide innovative solutions to the problems of living. "Just get on with it" was one of his life's mottos, and he never hesitated to set out his solutions to the smallest problem that he saw to the largest- from improvements to the design of the rehris, the small mobile shops that still ply the roads of India, to reimagining a new form of urbanism for India in the form of an infinite, self-sustaining linear city.
The "one continuous line" also refers to Prakash's keen interest in exploring the possibilities of generating form using, literally, one continuous line. Repeatedly, Prakash would return to the one continuous, twisting and turning line to create art, explore geometric proportion, and even design furniture. Something about a line that could effortlessly thread difference appealed to his imagination, and induced a sense of satisfaction in having resolved a formal puzzle.
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