The New Face of Architecture: Analysing the advent of technology with Vivek Gupta and Manish Gulati

Technology has revolutionised the world of design and architecture. The influx of technology has altered both the process and the result. From computational design, 3D printing, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, and now AI, the architectural landscape has certainly witnessed a tectonic shift. From increasing efficiency, reducing time, aiding collaboration to opening up a window of possibilities that could not have been imagined just a decade ago, technology has certainly altered the world of architecture. While some believe that technology has deprived architecture of its intuitiveness, others believe that it has truly accelerated the process, increased accuracy, and even the longevity of the buildings. There are some architects who are apprehensive about embracing technology; there are others who are constantly experimenting, adopting and adapting to the changing landscape.

In this segment of Design Dialogues, our topic of discussion is the impact of technology in the field of design. We bring together two design visionaries—Vivek Gupta, Principal Architect, Arvind Vivek Associates and Manish Gulati, Founder, Manifestation of Fluid Architecture (M.OFA) to engage in a discussion on how technology has led, aided, or accelerated the evolution of architecture. Is it a tool for advancement? Is it the bane of imagination, creativity and intuitiveness? Can we envision a future where technology seamlessly integrates with architecture to create sustainable, intelligent, and beautiful spaces?
We will let Vivek and Manish answer these questions. Read on…

The Impact of Technology

Manish Gulati (MG): We use the tools that are available to us. Every architectural practice in the world has used the context and the tools available to them. Twenty years ago, there were three parallel lines—design, engineering and construction. They never converged. In the past two decades, with the advent of technology, those lines have converged.

Vivek Gupta (VG): I couldn’t agree more. I am technologically challenged and I’ve remained so. There are some people who can easily adapt to technology. But I’ve always been a little resistant. So, when you talk about technology, I really am clueless. But having said that, taking a cue from what you said, we were always three parallel lines. And as an architect, I felt at that point in time and even today that I was wearing all the three hats. It gave me complete autonomy over the project; it did not allow my control over the project to slip from a human being to a machine, which I feel is happening today.

We are losing the EQ of the project. You are brilliant with your calculations, your parameters and you’re mathematically accurate. But the emotional quotient that comes because of your intuition in architecture is irreplaceable. And that’s why I’m a very intuitive architect. I don’t have a preconceived notion. I don’t have a design philosophy, except for the fact that I’m creating for the context and the climate. So, these have become my tools. I am not the one who is actually looking at any other tool, except the fact that I am into problem solving and providing a solution for the problem that we have because of the context that we are creating in and the climate that we are creating for.
I must admit that as much as I am reluctant to lose control over the project that I’m designing as the master architect, there is definitely ease of work, practice, time-saving, thriftiness, all of which is happening because of new technology.

MG: The truth is that the architect doesn’t want to lose control over their project and that is why they are averse to technology. I mean, a good point is that you have done these things in the past, you have laid the foundation. The master architects of the 60s and the 70s laid the foundation with their intuitive thinking, with whatever experiments they did, to form the basis of technology today. So, if AI is functioning today in a very effective manner it is because of certain foundation principles that were laid down by the masters. Without that, nobody would be able to build those things. It’s the architects of the past who actually wrote the poetry about it, imagined it in their fantasies, and today that is getting executed in reality. That will always be the cycle.

VG: I’m not averse to technology. You know, wherever technology is a problem solver or wherever it becomes a solution provider, is most welcome. I set up my practice 40 years ago. I’m talking about the evolution of the practice, the way it happened for me. We started putting pen to paper without any technology. We used to have a drafting board, just a parallel bar and pens. And it was just the thought process. I think after almost two decades of my practice, computers came into architecture. I remember having bought a PC XT in 1992, and then we bought a Modi Olivetti. And an entire team of marketing from Delhi came to deliver that game. It used to be a fanfare in those days. I acquired technology because I knew the merits of acquiring technology.

MG: What if I tell you that today, with technology, you don’t even have to draw a line? So, when you’re saying intuition is getting lost by the use of technology, with the advent of AI, it’s the poetry. Surprisingly, it has come full circle. The technology understands poetry better than a logical prompt. If you were to give a logical prompt to AI, it’ll give you terrible results. It gives you the most beautiful results if you are able to word it in the most poetic language. AI is nothing but thought process of millions and millions of poets and artists and architects who have put in and created this world in the past.

VG: I personally feel that there is a certain amount of emotional quotient. Because architecture is an experience. It is not just a building. Architecture is experiential, which comes with the intuitiveness or the emotion that an architect pours into a project, right?

MG: Without a doubt. Nobody’s saying that you can drive technology without an architect. But with the way things are moving ahead, with the way the world is moving, your client wants your solution immediately. We had time. The master architects had time. They could control the entire design process. And I’m all for the democratisation of the design process where it’s not one person’s mind, it’s a collaborative process of not just one person in a team, not two people in a team, but probably your client, the person who’s building, everybody gets involved in this whole process. Technology enables communication. It’s logic versus intuition. But you need both. You can’t base your project completely on intuition, and you can’t rely entirely on technology. Either way, things might go wrong. You need a good balance of both.

Is Architecture Getting Reduced to Imagery?

VG: I fear that architecture is getting reduced to imagery. And also, just imagine builders. You know, they will not need architects because they sell a space, right?

MG: Trust me, there are builders who have made buildings without architects in the past. They will continue to do that. And there will be builders who have always used good architects to make good buildings and good architecture. They’ll always need architects. You reminded me of one of the expressionist painters who had the same reaction when the camera was invented. He said everything will be reduced to a visual imagery because nobody would want to paint. I think we have moved far, far ahead from there. Photography is an accepted art form now.

VG: As long as architectural practices are using it not just as an extension of their practice, it’s fine. But when it gets used blindly, technology and especially AI, that’s where the issue arises. I think it’s at a very nascent stage. The creator of AI resigned saying that I fear what can happen to AI. What if AI acquires emotion? Suddenly the world will get taken over by machines.

MG: We need people like you who can control, who can put that sort of discipline, that rigor. Your practice is all about rigor
and discipline.

VG: Great, so we resolve that I will continue to remain a disruptor who would want to disrupt this kind of rampant use of technology and Manish would remain at the forefront of technology.

Technology and Sustainability

VG: When we were building in Ladakh, the temperature would drop to -40 degrees and escalate to 35 degrees in summer! How do we build in such extreme weather? We learned the indigenous way of building. When we started way back in the 1990s, we built our first building, the assembly building for Leh and Ladakh, the Secretariat Degree College, Governance House, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, we did the Navoday Vidyalaya… all those projects were in extreme climates. We harnessed the solar energy and that is what made us sustainable because we were using what we learned from the local building techniques. Now we realize that material innovation played a very, very important role. We still go with the fact that yes, we will always base our building facing the south where we are harnessing the maximum solar energy. We are using technology like the Trombe wall. We are trying to minimize the aperture on the north side so that we can retain the heat and everything. So any building, any successful architecture that has to happen is always going to be with material innovation. There is one thing that I always say when we go to conferences that vendors are actually our tools. We are space planners. But if we don’t have skin to it, if we don’t have material that will sustain the building and make it functional, I think we’ll be nowhere. So it is extremely important that the material innovation is married to good architecture and we keep making more efficient and resolute buildings. And I see that in your projects all the time, Manish. All the projects that you are doing, whether you are making your building in Goa or Kangra, two extreme climates, two extreme zones, they are sustainable.

MG: It is interesting how you pick up the point of sustainability. Rapid urbanization has become inversely proportional to sustainability. What you did in Ladakh, your experiments with temperature, you did real time experiments in terms of knowing how to create a sustainable building. Sustainability is not an independent aspect from innovation. Nothing can be sustainable if it’s not financially sustainable. In order to do that, material innovation is definitely one thing. We all, in the industry, look at how to recycle materials. When I was doing the Goa building, the L1 contract in the government did not allow me to use any expensive materials at all. I was expected to use laterite because it’s a local stone. They say that by using a local stone it becomes sustainable. Unfortunately, there’s no laterite left in Maharashtra. The hills have been wiped out because of rapid urbanisation. So at that point, do I use an industrial material, let’s say a metal sheet or a colour-coded sheet that is cheaper and highly sustainable because it lasts very well in Goa weather? Or, do I go and wipe out another hill for laterite? So that’s a big question that we all architects have to keep asking all the time. Sustainability is not just about using local materials.

VG: I agree. It’s also about the life cycle of a project. It depends on the context. If it’s a government building, we realize today that they are being demolished like what’s happening in Central Vista. I don’t fully agree that sometimes the buildings outlast their usage, outlast the technology, outlast their life cycle. So they need to go, or they need to be reused. Or they need to, if they are very, very important, to come into adaptive reuse. Many buildings can be put to adaptive reuse without becoming redundant or without becoming a monument. If the expectation is for that building to outlast you and last for 150 years, then you need to use appropriate materials and technology.

MG: Absolutely. You can’t maintain environmental sustainability if your building cannot pay for it. There are projects being done where you spend three times the amount in making and then you spend twice the amount in maintaining that technology. But that building just dies because there is no money to sustain it.
If given a choice, I would want my buildings to last more than a thousand years. We all want that; we are all narcissists as architects. I remember meeting this very senior architect in Ladakh. He told me a story about a project he was doing for a monastery in Ladakh, where they asked him how long his building will last? He replied about 70-80 years, or 100 years if it’s concrete. They said that they want the building to last a thousand years because that’s how old the monasteries are and they’re built of the mud found there. It is important to understand context, principles and then apply them keeping in mind the urbanization or the pressure that you are going to put on this earth. Given a choice, I would not want to build. I would instead devise a plan to reuse all the defunct buildings. But that would be quite a challenge.

VG: I am talking about adaptive use of spaces, not just spaces that shut. For instance, I remember back in the day when the Fort area in Bombay used to shut after 5 pm and not a soul would be present there. And today, how it has got converted slowly, retail and other activities have come in and enlivened the whole area. That is how you can adaptively reuse the same space that is there—up to 5 o’clock it can function as an office, post 5 o’clock it could work as a street for food stalls or something like that. It would work very well. Yeah, so I think that’s another way of not building new but using the same spaces for different activities.

What is Parametric Architecture?

VG: I think one of the most misunderstood or abused words in today’s jargon is ‘parametric’. Manish explained it well; it’s all about parameters. I love the definition. But you can’t build something that is not sustainable and put a parametric skin around it to make it look pretty. Unfortunately, everything in this world is parametric. Everything. That’s the new definition for me.

MG: Terms are always misunderstood. I’ve been, from the very beginning of my practice more than 20 years ago, done manifestations of fluid architecture. People think that it’s fluid buildings or forms, but it’s got nothing to do with forms or fluidity of forms. Usually as human beings, we have a tendency to pick up a term, and imagine it the way we understand them. So parametric is one of the most misused and misunderstood terms in design practice. When students come to me and say, you do parametric facades, I don’t even understand what that word means; there is nothing called parametric facade, because every facade is parametric. But what if I tell you that you code all the factors into a machine, you do an intuitive design, and then there is a machine that checks all these parameters for you. You can parameterize Vastu, you can put down principles of Vastu, because it is all about climate, nature, sun’s direction, wind, water… If you can put all of that into a series of algorithms, which can vet and check your design, in terms of saying that this is optimized design, this building will lead you to this much of energy wastage, then you are not dealing with things on the surface. You are actually using parameters, and getting into the DNA of a building. That is how you define a good building versus a bad building; a good or bad building is not defined by surface looks, but how it functions, how well it serves humanity, how well it takes care of the climate, what is the carbon footprint of that building, etc.

VG: To put things into perspective, parametric doesn’t mean anything that is geometrically distorted.

MG: Interestingly, when you bring this point up of geometrically distorted buildings, I think the term came into being when Zaha started building. We all know Zaha was a mathematician, her sense of mathematics and equation was far more complex than anyone could imagine. We think in simple mathematics, whereas she thought in complex mathematics; she was a mathematician before she became an architect, so she could apply the mathematical principles that were far more complex in terms of distorting those geometries. And while those geometries could be distorted, they were structurally stable. She knew that Gaudi’s catenary principles are parametric catenary principles, more complex to an average human eye but they are pretty much part of the mathematics parameters as such. So, it totally depends on the level of complexity that each of us can go up to, but we are all thinking of a parametric bottom line.

VG: We’re conscious about the work that goes into it, because we know that architecture is something that will outlast the architects. That’s a huge responsibility. Buildings will outlive you. Buildings are leaving a very indelible footprint on earth. So I ensure that I create for the client, the context, and the climate. These become the three main pillars on which we are constructing; I add the client because without the client there wouldn’t be any project, and the client sometimes is the most important aspect. The financial aspect can’t be discounted. In all our projects, what we try to do is marry technology with our intuition and new innovations in material.

MG: I want to share this experience about designing the National Institute of Water Sports in Goa. It was a long project, and we went through a series of emotions, experiences throughout that project. But with the project, the brief from the government and the competition was that they wanted to create a building that would be a statement for the city of Goa, which would put the project and the city on the world map. It would put something like a water sports institute, which is the first of its kind in Asia, to be recognized worldwide. So the architecture must say something like that. That was the competition brief. We of course created something that was inspired from the waves and the sea and other elements out there. But more than that, we also understood that in a government institution, it is important that your movement and the functions, the way they flow into each other, are fairly fluid. You cannot box certain functions in an institute like this. A sea surfer who is an adventure sports player wants to go to the sea. He’s not going to sit in a classroom and study adventure sports, but you still have to teach the theory. So the architecture in a way has to be so fluid that the transition between the corridors and the classrooms to the hostels and the admin block have no boxes or walls. So, the plan is fluid. Number two, we were building it on the sea beach. Sea levels are rising every day. We wanted to build it on stilts, so that even if flooding happens, you don’t get affected by it. There’s a rainwater collection pond right at the entrance of it. So, the whole idea of putting a building like this starts with the planning itself, then going on to translating that expression of poetry, of the waves and everything into real-time materials. It is fairly complex, and then you have to keep the budgets in mind. When you said the client is averse to materials, we
were planning to use a lot of local materials that would not have been possible to use at that scale, so we had to innovate and look at newer materials. That time, WPC was not widely used in the government sector. And we’re talking about ten years ago when the tender document was formed. To convince the government to use WPC, or to use a pressure equalization system in a roof, to do a double roof—two steel roofs parallel to each other that would equalize the sea pressure so that you don’t have leakages inside the building—took us about 14-15 presentations at the ministry to explain to them that this is how it’s going to work scientifically, with simulations and animations of waters and everything.

The Future of Architecture

VG: I don’t think there’s any other profession as fulfilling as architecture. Not even medicine. Each time you pass a building that you built, there is a certain sense of pride. Architecture impacts you, impacts the society, impacts the city like nothing else does. It is also the culture of that city. Today, cities are being marked by the buildings, not by anything else. Not even by flags.

MG: I think you’ve worded it beautifully. And that’s where the wisdom comes in. That’s where you sort of feel that architecture has become a part of you. And you have become part of your architectural practice. They are not two distinct things. And it’s important for the future generation.