Sep 17 2023 to Sep 25 2023 11 a.m.

EVENT HAS ENDED

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

September 17 – 25 | Sunday – Monday | 11am to 8pm | Exhibition on show September 19 | Tuesday | 6:30 to 8 pm 

An exhibition of architectural drawings and sketches curated by Shubhra Raje and the Anant Raje Foundation.

The architecture of Anant Raje (1929-2009) has been described as exhibiting integrity between purpose and expression, building and landscape, part and whole, and the ultimate quality of all good architecture through time – a sense of repose. If the disciplines of the mind, and a humanistic concern, are the underpinnings of all his work, it is his understanding of the elements of building, and the laws of construct, that give it a sense of ordered presence.

In a practice spanning more than fifty years of thinking, teaching, drawing and constructing, Raje engrossed himself in an engagement with the spirit of a personal architectural life. Drawings, along with models and photography, were his tools in the sustained self examination that made his a truly critical practice. As Gautam Bhatia notes in the introduction to Raje’s monograph: his pencil rarely fluctuated, his mind never wavered…built or unbuilt, the project was the testing ground, a vigorous, imaginative world he created for himself out of real situations. The drama lay as much in testing those ideas in the studio as on the construction site. The tireless chipping away, testing, redrawing and correcting were part of a temperament that refused to settle with partial resolutions.

The exhibition presents six projects, from an oeuvre of over sixty, focusing on the development of these elements of meeting, of connection. Selections of development sketches, construction drawings and Raje’s contact sheets with his notes together provide clues to the many fundamental problems and situations he constantly wrestled with. A series of relevant sketches, sifted through fifty years of sketchbooks, provide a backdrop and a milieu for the more specific explorations.

The drawings and sketches in this exhibition are defined both by what is being studied and by the relationship between its being a hand drawing and an act of exploration where thinking does not happen for the sketch to be made; the sketch is thinking in process. With regards to the architectural practice, it reminds us that design is what occurs between the mind and drawing – not what merely happens in the mind to be then put in a drawing. This is, then, an exhibition of an architect at work, rather than merely a presentation of his work.