Venugopal Maddipati’s book opens with a charming anecdote of Charles Correa toppling over a model of a high-rise block strategically placed by his side during a lecture to architecture students at School of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi. Correa’s performance was meant to demonstrate that low-rise, medium density housing could easily create more humane and economical solutions for living (than in a high-rise), and therefore possibly more suitable to India’s climate and cultural context. While Correa has written about this idea in his articles, hearing it from someone who witnessed a live demonstration changes the tone and experience of the underlying message.
Likewise, this book—Gandhi and Architecture—adopts an engaging approach when speaking about the dignity in low-cost housing, and its narrative is carried by the author’s first-hand research and astute observations on historical attempts and those of the ‘enduring present’. The book makes known his extensive fieldwork, archival research, and neatly re-drawn sketches of low-cost housing, especially those extracted from less accessible but evidently important publications.