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Mustansir Dalvi |
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Project Title - Buildings as Text: reading Semiotic Meaning into Bombay’s Architecture (1920-1959) Supervisor: Prof Ravi Poovaiah The intent of my PhD research is to critically examine the language of Bombay’s architecture from the 1920s to the 1950s to gain semiotic understanding about its aesthetic and its form. Current research is largely historical, and tends to look at Bombay’s architecture in the penultimate decades before Indian independence, as a ‘waiting room’- a transitory phase in the larger history of practice before National Statehood. By retrospectively describing this architecture as ‘Art Deco’ (the term came into common currency from the ‘60s), this period has been studied as a stylistic label, with the baggage of colonialism (the copying of a foreign architecture) and revivalism weighing it down. Such an approach regards all the buildings of time as more or less homogeneous, and built out of the same common motivating factors. What has not been researched so far are the buildings themselves as primary texts; independent of the aforementioned baggage. There is a need to address this lacuna by a direct and critical analysis of this architecture in its specifics, observable in a great variety and diversity of building types all over Bombay (and India) at the time. What has not been analyzed so far is the nature and cause of this variety. My PhD thesis is an attempt to occupy this space. I hope to examine these buildings as the billboards of their age, as metonymic representation of the whole, and read them as contemporary texts. In previous work done on the subject this vital component has not been tackled and my intention is to research into these buildings as rich semiotic/semantic texts. My research will look at these buildings as objects in themselves, to seek out the ‘Art Deco-ness’ in the Art Deco buildings in Bombay. I intend to do this by comparing the buildings in Bombay with, both, those in the rest of India and internationally. The processes, methods and tools adopted to attempt this shall be semiotic/semantic, and the objects/buildings shall be examined and analyzed synchronously and (largely) from an ahistoric standpoint. |
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