Travel time for ideas on construction and technology to percolate into India is gratifyingly slow. (So slow that it allows architects to talk with authority about Gandhian ideals of mud construction at seminars). When they do come — usually via eastern Europe and Dubai — they fall squarely in the hands of the PWD, and watered down versions then appear in large-scale public projects. The AIIMS interchange in Delhi, for instance, was seen as pathbreaking design — allowing motorists to smoothly change directions without stopping. But as with many such projects, the self-adulation ignored the many other conditions which the flyover failed to address: pedestrian links between roads, its proximity to the city’s most crowded public hospitals, the need for overbridges, and all the secondary undercurrents that dictate traffic flow in an Indian city. Acutely aware of these shortcomings, the Delhi government initiated stern action. A Rs. 3 crore steel sculpture has been sanctioned on the grounds around the roadways, so that motorists can stop to admire it, and have an ice-cream before proceeding!

While urban art is itself a sound idea, its promotion within the cityscape must be carefully controlled by selective exposure. Moreover the government must recognise the temporal nature of public art. Not as a finite and permanent construction, but a perennially altering form that engages with the public. A windowless wall on a prominent Boston building is regularly repainted by scenes of what artists imagine may be happening inside the building. A similar exercise with a government structure in Delhi may be fruitful from several perspectives.

... contd.