Samir Shukla| DNA | Updated: Feb 18, 2019, 06:10 AM IST
It was my Eureka moment as I realised that the architect is a new age agent of Pangaea. He is travelling across the world, getting educated in great academies of the nations he is not born in. He learns his craft from distant lands with different climate, flora and fauna and then moves around the globe to practice his trade. Often trained in Switzerland, he ends up designing buildings in Ahmedabad, where he transfers architectural features from an alpine ecosystem to a desert ecosystem without sensing any issue.
It is a disaster in making across the globe, but for nations like India or Nepal, it is a calamity. Here the situation gets exponentially worse as there a sense of owing for foreigners and foreign-educated.
Our colonial mindset celebrates architects from nations that are completely unlike us, or worse our own architects who have trained abroad, and hence import design elements from other ecosystems. As these alien solutions are completely unlike local traditional architecture honed over centuries by local climate, they offer visual novelty, and hence are found attractive.
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