Master- Planning and Landscape Strategies
Smarting Cities: CG City and Awadh Vihar
Martin Rein- Cano
For Topotek 1, collaborations lead to a common strategy and new ways of thinking. We believe that cooperations between different cultures and disciplines— as between Archohm and Topotek 1— can potentiate creativity as a source of mutual inspiration and create unique special outcomes. The general context was thus the most important factor for the collaboration of Archohm and Topotek 1 – whatever was happening to us at that time of working together, what we were seeing, the themes we were discussing— all of these things influenced our decisions. It is
the process leading to the outcome that is as decisive as the result. That is the reason why collaborating with the architects was so joyful: we learned a lot about India by having both an inside and outside view of the projects at the same time. In the projects’ concepts and implementations, all political, economic, social, and cultural contexts that we shared during our collaboration became readable and visible.
Working in India always is an everyday experience since the distance between abstraction and reality is much shorter compared to Europe. People work much more hands- on and thus, workshops form a good basis to discuss and develop ideas on the “living object” instead of abstracting it down. It is the mentioned mutual interaction and inspiration that we were able to develop during our workshops in Berlin as well as in
Delhi and Noida. They strongly influenced the projects CG City and Awadh Vihar. Both projects were developed through an extensive exchange while we contributed its experiences from a European perspective as well as from the discipline of landscape architecture. The architects contributed their architectural background from an Indian perspective. So for both projects, it was most relevant to live this culture of cooperation and collaboration as part of the design process.
Eventually, our collaboration is comparable to a relationship with three main levels of interest: first, it was extremely interesting to discover a discipline that I know very well — the discipline of landscape architecture — in another cultural context. It was an enriching experience to understand what architecture and landscape architecture means in India. Where clearly set areas mostly characterise public space in Europe, there are practically no boundaries in India. Functions flow and complement each other. Our collaboration was such an incredible learning process.
I was confronted with situations and factors I would not have thought about before — mentioning the strong contrasts regarding political, economic, social, and cultural factors. This was a very intense but also a refreshing experience. Third, it was a gift to have Archohm as a “translator” to these contrasts who were taking us by the hand. Vice versa, I tried to do the same with the architects by explaining our way of work as well as the elements that we stand for within European culture. That way, both sides strongly benefit and learned from each other and each other’s culture. In short, I really enjoyed working with Archohm as an inspiring learning experience.
The key principle of both projects namely CG City and Awadh Vihar is the contextual respect to the possibilities of realising ideas in India that you could not realise in Germany or Europe. We tried to be respectful of what we found, not only to the culture of making things but also of the manner to deal with the given circumstances in a non- ingratiating way; in Europe, most products are produced mechanically. So it was mainly the strong use of natural materials, the idea of implementing natural stone and, of course, the hands and craft culture of Indian labor that deeply influenced both projects and that constitute the mentioned learning experience. The idea of working with handmade materials was mainly processed in CG City where we worked a lot with natural stone to aim approximation to the given building and
living culture. This also holds for the project Awadh Vihar; it was much more of a greener project, containing the green rink. While designing the master plan, this project was of another scale as CG City, but we tried to combine our knowledge about green connections from Europe and the special contexts given in India just the same. The collaboration and outcomes developed with the architects are thus characterised by a wide ( cultural) heterogeneity and a lived eclecticism referring to material language
and the vocabulary of form and references.
Factfile
Design Team: Sourabh Gupta, Anindya Ghosh,
Girdhar Rautella, Tracy Kikon, Nitin Gupta, Girdhar Singh Rautella,
Prashant Gupta, Shekhar Gurga Pal, Gagan Kumari, Topotek 1