How one man’s vision became the backdrop of the Republic day
VISION The R-day celebrations start from Raisina Hill, the President’s residence at Rashtrapati Bhavan along the Rajpath and past India Gate
The Republic Day celebrations start from Raisina Hill, the President’s residence at Rashtrapati Bhavan along the Rajpath and past India Gate. It is interesting how one man’s vision became our capital city and framed the backdrop for Republic Day. “Indeed the city was designed with an eye to host “national events”, given its scale what with Washington and Paris as its inspiration,” says Martin Lutyens, the Great nephew of Sir Edwin Lutyen’s, who is the chairperson of The Lutyens Trust that maintains, restores and preserves his legacy. Lutyens’ favourite building was the Rashtrapati Bhavan and this was the palace he had longed to build. As Martin Lutyens describes, when Edwin Lutyens left Rashtrapati Bhavan for the last time, he wiped the stone with his handkerchief and kissed it. “He said leaving the house felt like giving away his daughter in marriage.”
Edited excerpts from a telephonic interview with London based Martin Lutyens :
Every year on Republic Day, a grand parade is held from Raisina Hill, the President’s residence at Rashtrapati Bhavan along the Rajpath past India Gate. What was the design ethos with which Edwin Lutyens designed this area?
Edwin Lutyens strove to, and succeeded in, integrating and infusing western classical architecture with Indian historic and cultural detail. This was laid out in the grand manner on an axial vista influenced by The Mall at
Washington DC, which was designed by Major Pierre Charles L’enfant for George Washington in 1791. L’enfant had been inspired by The Champs-élysées and its gardens, originally laid out in 1667 by André Le Nôtre. New Delhi was Edwin Lutyens (EL)’S masterpiece, his greatest project.
Largely designed by Lutyens over twenty or so years, New Delhi was chosen to replace Calcutta as the seat of the British Indian government in 1912; the project was completed in 1929 and officially inaugurated in 1931. The new city contains both the Parliament buildings and government offices and was built distinctively of the local red sandstone using the traditional Mughal style. Along the city’s axis EL set outa vast rectangular mall surrounded by government offices and crowned at its far end by an imposing palace for the viceroy. Tree-lined streets radiated from this central vista and converged in hexagonal nodes. Dotting the boulevards were white bungalows, with colonnaded verandas and spacious gardens, for colonial administrators.
Any anecdote or quirk you can share while Sir Edwin Lutyens was conceptualising design or executing it. What must be his thoughts at that point of time?
Many members of Lutyens’ family had worked in India. One brother was a tea planter in Ceylon, another a soldier. Lutyens’s father-in-law was Viceroy Lord Lytton. These connections made Lutyens feel at home in India. Lutyens was critical of all other architects and all architectural styles, and Indian architecture was no exception. But you have to look at Rashtrapati Bhavan to see how much he learned from Indian buildings. Jane Ridley, author of ‘The Architect and His Wife’, a biography of Edwin Lutyens, which won the prestigious Duff Cooper Prize for best non-fiction book in 2002 said that “Lutyens’ favourite building was the Rashtrapati Bhavan. This was the palace he had longed to build. It is a building that achieves an extraordinary synthesis of East and West. When Lutyens left Rashtrapati Bhavan for the last time, he wiped the stone with his handkerchief and kissed it. He said leaving the house felt like giving away his daughter in marriage.
The sheer size and capacity that this area can accommodate is mammoth. Did size matter to Edwin Lutyens and was he budgeting for national level events here and was that an important part of his brief?
To your question whether the city was designed with an eye to “national events”, given its scale and with Washington and Paris as its inspiration, the answer surely must be “yes”. Originally projected to be a city of 700,000 in 1912, this was a city of 900,000 in his time, which has swollen to over 22 million. In fact the department of Architecture in Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture describes it as, “In the Bungalow Zone the population density is 12 to 15 people per acre; in the old walled city of Delhi it is 1,500 people per acre”.
Unlike the more traditional British architects who came before him, Lutyens was both inspired by and incorporated various features from the local and traditional Indian architecture something most clearly seen in the great drum-mounted Buddhist dome of Viceroy’s House, now Rashtrapati Bhavan. This palatial building, containing 340 rooms, is built on an area of some 330 acres and incorporates a private garden also designed by Lutyens. Nalini Thakur, an Indian preservation architect,praised Lutyens’s Delhi as “a very rare early-20th-century capital.” She noted that while the city is clothed in neo-classical garb, it was actually built with the latest technology of the day in mind, with roads designed specifically for cars – 6,000 vehicles at any one time - and an airport incorporated into the plan.
Lutyens Delhi architecture is celebrated as a marriage of East meeting West. What were the striking oriental and occidental elements that he incorporated?
Working from 1912 to 1931 Lutyens forged a new style of architecture for the city, combining the neo-classical with accents borrowed from India’s Mughal and Buddhist past. In winning the commission to construct the new capital, Lutyens was presented with the biggest architectural opportunity offered to any British architect since his hero Sir Christopher Wren set about rebuilding London after the Great Fire. Like Wren, Lutyens was a champion of the classical at a time when his contemporaries were still building in Gothic; and Lutyens, like Wren, found himself under great pressure to build New Delhi in a style he abhorred. In Lutyens’ case, the architect was initially ordered to build the new capital in the strange Anglomughal hybrid known as Tropical Gothic, a style whose latticed screens and pseudo-oriental borrowings filled Lutyens with horror.
As he put it in a letter: “They want me to Hindoo, Hindon’t I say...” Although Lutyens might have started off prejudiced against the forms of mock-indian - the “Indo-saracenic style” then prevalent in Bombay and Calcutta - architecture, he soon came to appreciate their beauty and found ways of incorporating many Indian features into buildings that nevertheless obeyed many of the essential rules of classical architecture. The result was a fusion that combined European, classical Buddhist and Islamic ideas in a wholly original way. Lutyens thus solved a problem whose solution had been eluding British architects for 300 years: how to build in a style that combined the best of east and west, and at the same time create something both impressive and original. He incorporated Mughal elements into his blueprints for his Indian buildings: chattris (pavilions), stone lattice screens, courtyards, zennanas, water fountains and runnels, carved images of elephants (he was very fond of elephants) and the Buddhist dome. He also invented his own “Delhi Order” of neo-classical columns that fuse Greek and Indian elements.the Master Plan of Delhi has identified this area as a Heritage Precinct along with other Mughal and Sultanate neighbourhoods of the city. Its historic significance is therefore acknowledged in several ways by contemporary society. Finally I want to quote what historian William Dalrymple said- “The British arrived in a country full of beautiful architecture and left all kinds of horrors. The one thing we can be proud of is Lutyens’s Delhi — the buildings, the trees, the streets. It is the best thing the British ever did in colonial architecture.”
MUMBAI: Embassy Group on Tuesday said it will invest around ₹2,000 crore to set up co-living or shared accommodation facilities across top six cities in India, targeting the growing millennial workforce and students in the country. The Bengaluru-based real estate firm, which builds commercial office spaces, residential projects and also operates Wework co-working offices in India, announced that it will operate its co-living business under the brand ‘Olive’. It plans to launch two centres each in Bengaluru and Chennai this year with a total of 2500 beds. “It is complimentary to what we do right now. Our office parks have about almost half million people. More than 60% of that population are migrants. Over 30 million people are moving into the metros every year. Urbanisation is growing exponentially and we want to cater to their needs of living in these cities,” said Aditya Virwani, chief operating officer, Embassy Group and Cofounder Olive, over the phone.
After the first two projects in Bengaluru and Chennai, the company plans to expand to Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, and Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), and also eventually take the brand overseas in the next few years. In total it plans to launch around 20,000 beds in the first phase. Each project would comprise 500-5,000 beds and would be customized with “diverse formats and priced competitively to suit respective markets.” Monthly rentals for each bed would range from ₹10,000-20,000 depending on the location. “Depending on the demand and funding, we could easily have 1 lakh beds in the next five years,” Virwani said, adding that all the projects would be greenfield and has no plan to acquire any existing co-living facilities. The group plans to invest around ₹2,000 crore primarily on acquiring land and construction of the facilities. While the initial funding would come from the group, it would also look at raising money from various investors including its existing partners to fund the business. “We are funding on our own for this year, but we will look at partnering with investment firms and raise money as we go on,” Virwani said. At present, Embassy is backed by global private equity firms Blackstone and Warburg Pincus at the group and project levels. The group has over 54 million sq. ft. of prime commercial, residential and industrial space in India. Last year, Blackstone along with Embassy launched India’s first real estate investment trust (REIT).