Architect Sen Kapadia and a tale of 5 cities

Architect Sen Kapadia looks back on over 40 years of his practice in his new book In Pursuance of Meanings

Sen Kapadia, an architect rooted in modernism (while also critical of it), belongs to the generation that left a mark on contemporary Indian architecture. He worked with American architect Louis Kahn in Philadelphia and in India on buildings for the IIM in Ahmedabad before setting up his architectural practice in 1977.

In his long career, he has contributed to the discourse as a practitioner, a theorist, and an academic. His designs include the postgraduate campus of the National Institute of Design, the Computer Management Centre in Hyderabad, and a Buddhist pilgrimage centre in Kushinagar. Kapadia’s architecture departs from the normative through a rigorous process of disassembly. He loves the departure from the tangible — his buildings are brought together as places of activity, creating new narratives out of space, light, and context, that are rooted in the experiential. In doing so, his designs critique both precedent and the present, making them relevant in an increasingly non-linear world.

Early this year, his new book, Sen Kapadia: In Pursuance of Meanings (CEPT University Press), was released on the grounds of the CSMVS in Mumbai. For his colleagues in architecture, his friends and students, so many of whom were present, this is a book that has been a long time coming.

Kapadia collaborated with architect Pinkish Shah (as editor) to create this book, using the former’s specific forms of representation — through drawings, images, conversations, and text.

Edited excerpts from an interview with Shah.

A book was in the works for a considerable period of time, since Sen retired a few years back. Then the pandemic struck and, egged on by his wife, he took it on himself to try and express his search and philosophy in his own words. In June 2021, Sen invited me to work on it. I was delighted but terrified. Delighted, because I have long felt that his work needed to reach out to a larger audience, especially younger generations who are often not aware or exposed to his work. Terrified, because I knew Sen’s exacting standards and high expectations. This is in spite of [or maybe because of] having known Sen for more than 35 years. It was important to bring the work and his ideas to the fore again, to allow us to reassess its relevance then and its meaning for contemporary times. Through the course of several ‘Saturdays with Sen’, the format of the book came to light quite naturally. It was not meant or ever imagined as a monograph but a first-person account of an architect’s search, practice and influences.

We must not mistake it for a ‘diagram’ as we normally understand it [reductive/essential/abstract/organisational]; it is a search for the ‘generative image’ of the building. A poetic drawing that encapsulates the story of what the building is about, or what it can become. It has oscillated from both the compositional and painterly, to the technical. Over the course of his practice, Sen has used various devices like collages of Indian miniatures, serigraphs, flat projections, axonometrics, colour blocking, early wire frame computer models, three dimensional renders, and combinations thereof, in the unwavering search for alternate conceptions of space and form. In his archives, one can find multiple iterations of this search through various explorations of drawings. Sen’s portfolio of these representations is unique across the country.