I have always been moved by the power of architecture. Good architecture elevates the soul, rekindles the spirit and makes one believe in a better today and tomorrow. During my student days in Boston, I was lucky to live amidst buildings like the Frank Gehry-designed Stata Center and the Eero Saarinen-designed MIT Chapel and Kresge Auditorium. I’ve also been privileged to have visited iconic structures like the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and the Louvre glass pyramid in Paris, both designed by IM Pei, or the Jorn Utzon-designed Sydney Opera House, or Herzog and de Meuron’s Tate Modern in London, and closer home, spaces such as the Louis Kahn-designed IIM campus in Ahmedabad, the Charles Correa- designed National Crafts Museum in Delhi and the BV Doshi-designed Husain-Doshi Gufa in Ahmedabad. My experience in these spaces has sometimes moved me to silence and sometimes, to tears.

Tadao Ando’s Mumbai visit was an occasion for both of these – silence and tears. I was stunned when I first heard that he was coming to the city on a private visit as the guest of Parmeshwar and Pirojsha Godrej, and speechless when we managed to schedule a public lecture by him in the city, through the Godrej India Culture Lab that I run. The tears came from the attendees at the talk – a blend of architects, professors, architecture students and key invitees from the city’s intelligentsia. We invited 350 guests and kept the details of the visit very low key, still about 550 showed up at the venue on the day of the talk, with many students and architects flying in from other cities like Ahmedabad and Bengaluru. Such is the power of Ando, the super-star architect who jet-sets around the world and counts among his friends people like U2’s lead singer Bono, fashion designers Tom Ford and Giorgio Armani, and artists like Yayoi Kusuma, but continues to be at heart, as I found out over the two days that I spent with him, completely child-like and simple. His Mumbai talk had the audience spell bound with its wisdom and humour and there were quite a few wet eyes in the audience as he finished.

If at this point, you’re going Tadao Ando, who, then *facepalm* and *deep sigh* and this paragraph is for you. (Everyone else can skip forward to the next one!) Tadao Ando is one of the world’s greatest living architects and the only architect to have won the discipline’s four most prestigious prizes: the Pritzker, Carlsberg, Praemium Imperiale, and Kyoto Prize. Combining influences from Japanese tradition with the best of Modernism, Ando has over the years developed a completely unique building aesthetic that makes use of concrete, wood, water, light, space, and nature in a way that has never been witnessed in architecture. He has designed award-winning private homes, churches, museums, apartment complexes, and cultural spaces throughout Japan, as well as in France, Italy, Spain, and the USA.

The unique combination of hardness and softness, of concrete and Zen-like natural surroundings, and of minimalism and breathtaking complexity, make Ando’s works very moving as well as still. What is fascinating is that Ando didn’t train as an architect. He grew up poor in Osaka, and tried different professions in his youth, including that of a professional boxer, before becoming a self-taught architect in the 1960s, and the rest, is well, architectural history.

Ando’s recent large works are extraordinary, such as the Punta Della Dogana’s renovation in Venice, Italy (a state-owned 15th-century customs house located on the shore opposite the Piazza San Marco has been converted into a museum of contemporary art), the Modern Art Museum at Fort Worth in Texas, USA, and the Langen Foundation in Neuss, Germany. My favourite buildings by him though, remain the small ones that he designed mostly earlier in his career, all located in Japan. These include the Azuma Row House in Sumiyoshi (1975), the Kobe 4X4 house (2003), and Osaka’s Church of the Light (1988). The Church of the Light is particularly special, and Ando signed off each book that he autographed in Mumbai, with a felt-pen sketched version of this church, his most famous landmark, which is quite simply, a box of a structure of concrete into which the shape of a cross has been cut out, to allow natural light to flood in. Small, yet extraordinarily powerful.

Architecture is not about creating buildings but communities, Ando told us in his lecture, adding that architects should use their practice to intervene in society. This plea is of special relevance to us in India. As Rahul Mehrotra notes in the preface of his book Architecture in India Since 1990 (Pictor Publications, 2011), there are only about 180 schools of architecture in India that produce 4000 graduates each year, and the Council of Architects has only 30,000 registered architects. These are strikingly low figures in a country with one billion people. So how might such a low base of architects exert any influence on the built environment around us? At the very least, it is important to be inspired, and channelling his feisty boxer avatar from his earlier days, Ando urged all the architects and the to-be architects in his Mumbai audience to take on the big challenges in life – in our society and in our communities.

Come to think of it, the lecture was less about architecture and more about having an operating system with which to manage one’s life. Here’s what Ando offered me as his success mantras over a splendid Italian lunch the next day, at the Oberoi’s Vetro.
1. Do what you believe in.
2. Realise that life may not always go your way and that’s ok.
3. Always be on time.
4. Always keep your word.
5. Take care of your parents, and the rest of your family.

Small lessons, with big values. Among the audience present at the lecture in Vikhroli, I was especially thrilled to see young architects like Zameer Basrai, who, together with his brother Ayaz, runs the new Busride design studio, which has already accumulated an impressive roster of clients in Mumbai, at least in the restaurant design space. These include Salt Water Café, Prithvi Café, The Elbo Room, Smoke House Deli and Café Zoe. I’m also a big fan of Ayaz’s tiny apartment in Bandra’s 400-year-old Ranwar village. See the pictures in this column to see how sensible architecture (including sliding wall partitions), clever design and colour blocked walls can magically transform a 160-square-foot (yes you read that right!) room into a magazine-worthy studio apartment. Small is beautiful, indeed.

Ayaz’s apartment is, to me, the precursor of another underlying trend: the return of the studio apartment. For way too long, our cities have been seeing new buildings coming up that start with two-bedroom-hall apartments. But what about all the people who are single, or couples without kids, who don’t want all that space? Mumbai and other cities in India once used to have places for these kinds of people. Then one day, they stopped being made. I have a feeling that they’re on their way back, and when they do, it will be in interesting ways as with Ayaz’s place, which is also an attempt to live in, and preserve heritage ecosystems like Ranwar village, which is now under threat from builders who want to gobble it up and build ugly high-rises. What Ayaz has done seems radical today, but if the trend catches on, think of how much fun it will be and how creatively, it will help historical parts of our cities to re-invent themselves for the present without losing their past?

I don’t think that it is a coincide-nce that the studio apartment has also caught Anupa Mehta’s fancy. Anupa has decided to modify Loft, her art gallery, into a studio apartment for one year. Her inaugural show is also about smallness; curator Himali Singh Soin has invited nine edgy artists to create 1x1x1 white cubes on display in the gallery. During the rest of the year Anupa plans to invite artists to live and work in her ‘studio apartment’. I love experiments like this and will be revisiting through the year to see how the place transforms itself with each encounter.

From small apartments to small films. Will 2012 be the year of the Indian small film, finally? This year, big films like Agent Vinod have flopped (I thought it wasn’t so bad actually, despite Saif looking like, what a friend of mine cattily called Ageing Vinod!) while Vicky Donor is a roaring hit. Given that sperm donation has now taken off in India, I’m excited by films like Love Wrinkle Free that deals with among others, anti-ageing love, and edible underwear. It’s a pretty sweet little film about a dysfunctional family, the Monteiros, set in Goa and its got a gorgeous fresh look, a stellar cast of theatre veterans (Sohran Ardehshir, Shernaz Patel, Ash Chandler), and great music, including the very catchy Momo song. I was very impressed when I met the film’s quiet, confident director, Sandeep Mohan, who, like Onir with his National Award winning I Am, used the crowd-funding model successfully to finance and shoot his film in just 21 days in Goa. Catch Love Wrinkle Free if you can; it should be playing in your city this month. To me, the power of small cinema especially is best experienced on the big screen and I’d much rather give my multiplex money to a Sandeep Mohan than to a Sajid Khan any day!

I’d also rather give my book reading money to buying gems of books like Sathya Saran’s Ten Years with Guru Dutt: Abrar Alvi’s Journey, and Sidharth Bhatia’s Cinema Modern – than the usual rubbish on the bestseller lists. Especially in the 100th year of Indian cinema! I’m so glad that we’re finally getting some scholarly writing on the subject. I hosted both Sathya and Sidharth at my Lab to read excerpts from their respective books and also to connect the act of biography to that of history and historicising and asked ex-Verve writer and now Mint’s books editor, Supriya Nair, to moderate the talk. How do we tell the stories of our times, our industry and our cities? Bhatia and Saran’s books when read in parallel make for interesting intersecting journeys. Among the many common points are Guru Dutt who, of course, was Abrar’s boss, and Dev Anand’s friend and contemporary. Interesting nuggets like how the two men met (their dhobi exchanged their shirts by mistake!) were shared.

Unfortunately, today’s Bollywood brigade isn’t doing much to celebrate its centenary. (They’re so involved in getting into fist-fights, or showing off their butts; where is the time, yaar?) Thank heavens, in this context, for Madhushree Datta and her Majlis, and their collaborators like Rohan Shivkumar from Kamala Raheja College of Architecture who have put together a superb exhibition called Project Cinema City. Much more than an exhibition, Project Cinema City is a project to document, archive and re-read cinema producing cities like Mumbai through images and narratives within cinema and the impact and manifestations of these in the world around us. The project involves collaborative research (between film theory and architecture for example) as well as art and media productions and a calendar of film screenings – all woven around the interconnected themes of cinema and cities. The issues that are brought forward include labour, imagination, desire, access, spacing and locations, materiality and language hybridity, and not in a heavy, but in an extremely clever and playful sense.

Madhushree has already taken this project to Berlin and to Pune, at the FTII and it finally opens in Mumbai, the birthplace of Indian cinema this month at the NGMA. Not only is the actual exhibition a must-see and must listen (Pushpamala’s Phantom Lady returns, Atul Dodiya is in crackling form, Shreyas Karle creates a museum shop of fetish objects under the museum’s dome, and Paromita Vohra creates a sound installation with STD booths, among the several delights!) but also the films that will be screened throughout this month every Saturday and Sunday between 1-5 p.m., are quite special. (These include Fried Fish, Chicken Soup and a Premiere Show by Mamta Murthy, Certified Universal by Avijit Mukul Kishore, Have you Dreamt Cinema? by Hansa Thapliyal and Dhanajay Kulkarni ‘Chandragupt’ by Rrivu Laha). I urge you all to go take a look, and let the power of our cinema blow you away with a stronger force than the imminent monsoon rains.

VERVE EDITOR-AT-LARGE PARMESH SHAHANI HEADS THE GODREJ-INDIA CULTURE LAB. HE IS A TED FELLOW, THE AUTHOR OF THE NON-FICTION BOOK GAY BOMBAY (2008) AND OFTEN SPEAKS ABOUT INDIAN CULTURAL SHIFTS AT CONFERENCES ALL OVER THE WORLD.

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