Every other week a new design store opens in a major metropolis in the country. In every direction, buildings are coming up, hotels are being refurbished, and homes are being renovated. In the mad rush of design and architecture over the past few years, taste, beauty and urban planning have often fallen by the wayside. Here are the seven worst mistakes we’re making as we rebuild India.
SLOTH: COPYCAT DESIGN
Walk into any recently reopened design store on Delhi’s Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road or stroll through the shops in Mumbai’s Raghuvanshi Mills, and you’ll feel as if you’re trapped in a maze of mirrors: Every display looks the same. Didn’t you just see that gold pillow, decorated with sequins, sitting on a beige couch? Wasn’t that mahogany coffee table, inlaid with mother-of-pearl in a dragonfly design, in the last shop?
Designers say the customers take photos of products they like on their cellphones, and then take them to other stores asking for the same design. But even this does not account for the near-identical furniture displayed in different stores.
Most furniture stores have failed to establish any personality — they all meld into a blur of high-priced, straight-lined, contemporary looks that fail to stand apart, or surprise.
The worst instance of this lazy design behaviour is in evidence when actual innovative design is stolen. Many Indian stores, claiming the look as their own, have shamelessly ripped off Delhi-based designer Alex Davis’ highly lauded line of steel home accessories ‘My Lazy Garden’, and teardrop-shaped glass light fixtures from Klove, another Delhi-based design store. This occurs often with imported furniture, as there is little threat of retribution, thanks to lax government controls. The iconic Barcelona chair and Le Corbusier’s chaise lounge pop up countless times in stores. Store managers will say its their design — even though the looks have been around for decades.
WRATH: NO REGARD FOR URBAN PLANNING
Nothing causes more anger in designers and architects than the two words:
Mall madness: Gurgaon malls, with their billboard clusters, went from strange to downright ugly.Photograph: Harikrishna Katragadda / Mint.
Gurgaon malls. In the absence of central urban planning, developers took over farmland to meet the demands of a newly buying public. And instead of just one or two malls, Gurgaon is now a sea of billboards, flashing lights and odd-shaped, futuristic-looking malls. How many malls does a city really need?
But Gurgaon is by no means the only sinner. Every Indian city seems to be in a mad competition to build as many malls as possible, without a thought to proper planning or design — they end up as eyesores.
GLUTTONY: THE GREAT COLONIAL/GREEK/TUSCAN/BAROQUE RIP-OFF