The shopping mall is everywhere—glassy, glitzy and brash; the architecture of conspicuous consumption that has redrawn the landscape of arriviste new India. And it’s not a pretty picture. Squat buildings of glass and aluminum or soaring behemoths in garish tones, malls are both visible and contentious symbols of affluence.  

“Why should they be otherwise?” asks Rohtas Goel, CMD, Omaxe Constructions. Malls, goes the logic, are meant for shopping. Aesthetics be damned. But as the well-heeled middle-class traipses into insular, air-conditioned boxes more to spend time and less for retail therapy, the mall has also become urban India’s new civic zone, the glass-eyed logo of a new, restless and, perhaps, insular zeitgeist.

In 1999, India got its first shopping mall, Crossroads, Mumbai and since then, a rash of “container buildings” has sprouted across cities. Says Mohit Gujral, head of Design Plus, “Malls came to India at a time when the real estate industry was going through a major phase of recession. Developers rushed in to grab spaces that would help them sell. The outcome was these arbitrary retail spaces called malls.” Agrees Sidharth Bhardwaj, director, Morphogenesis Architecture Studio. “The international format was imported in a hurry but was not customised to suit the requirements of Indian customers.”

So out went the spirit of the bustling bazaar. Instead you had sky-kissing towers that peddled size and steel as modernity, that offered little space for a community to get together. “What makes these structures uninteresting is the inadequate architectural vocabulary, limited to glass and aluminium. These huge chunks take away a lot from their surroundings by increasing both vehicular and human traffic,” says a member of the Delhi Urban Arts Commission. Malls are, for the most, spaces that do not promote a sense of community (an exception would be City Centre, Kolkata).

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