Judgments in stone

Old digs, new polish
Kalbadevi in south Mumbai is a perfect picture of chaos with a bevy of vehicles trying to make their way through a narrow strip of road. Along that busy stretch, at an intersection stands a beautiful nine-storeyed structure called the Cotton Exchange Building. Its façade is getting a facelift while the first three floors have been completely refurbished to house a jewellery mall. A fine example of the Art Deco movement, “it was the tallest building to come up during the 1930s construction boom,” says historian Sharada Dwivedi. The murals on the façade depict the journey of cotton from the fields to the centre of exchange.

The credit for turning it around — in what can be called ‘adaptive reusage’ — can be attributed to Arris Architects, a Thane-based firm. Cotton Exchange was a centre for auctioning various types of cotton and it housed the offices of various companies dealing in cotton. “Conservation had never been our core subject of practice; we just followed our instinct to bring back to life to this forgotten building. We took enormous efforts to clean the facade, hardly changing any of its earlier colours, murals and detailing. In some badly deformed areas we made use of glass-reinforced concrete to get back the original flavour,”  says the 33-year-old director of Arris Architects, Shubhashish Modi.

Even though it was listed as a Grade II-A heritage structure, nothing much had been done to restore the building before the jewellery mall came up. “On our first visit alongwith the clients we saw a lobby with a very high ceiling made of Italian stone. It was in a big mess,” confides Modi. The floor and the walls of the lobby are now made of Italian marble. The ground, first and second floors are made of imported white marble.

But the floors above still wear a dilapidated look. The walls along the staircase are stained with betelnut juice, electric wires hang dangerously from the ceiling. 
The jewellery mall will be open to the public around the end of this month. 

History, unprotected
Every working day is a busy day in the Watson’s Hotel building, also known today as Mahendra Mansion, in Kala Ghoda. Lawyers in black-and-white uniforms can be seen making hasty exits from the building on their way to the court building behind Watson’s. Students, labourers, tenants and travellers crowd around the photocopier shops. Watson’s Hotel has experienced a transformation from a posh 19th century English hotel to an overused commercial building.

Watson’s stands out like a sore thumb  next to the appealing neo-classical Army Navy building and the gothic Bombay University, because of its stark look. Its once impressive iron beams look mouldy due to lack of maintenance.

It is hard to believe that this was once a grand hotel (where Jamshetjee Tata was denied entry, goes the tale, leading him to build the Taj) erected between 1867-69 by John Watson, a wealthy city draper. The result of a 19th century architectural experiment when pre-fabricated buildings made an appearance in England, Watson’s is Mumbai’s sole example of this experiment.

On the ground floor, the photocopier shops, the dingy eatery and an unused office belonging to Air India have replaced the once-bustling wine cellars, a commodious bar and a ballroom of a bygone era. The atrium or the ballroom with a transparent glass ceiling is in a shambles. And the public hall in Watson’s, where the Lumiere brothers premiered their films in July 7, 1896 has been long been forgotten.

Signs of decay are everywhere.  The building was included in the 100 Most Endangered Sites by the New York-based World Monuments Fund (WMF) in 2005. Since then two of the balconies in the western wing have collapsed due to pressures of overcrowding, says conservation architect Vikas Dilawari who has restored the contemporary Army Navy building in Kala Ghoda.

Several temporary wooden poles are holding up the roof on the first two floors. Seeing the decaying building and being unable to help conserve it is frustrating for the conservationist architects in Mumbai. MHADA has taken measures to restore the building by plastering some of the weak walls. “But that has been of no use,” says Dilawari, “the plaster keeps peeling due to humidity.”

“If you want the building to have a future, you must conserve it today,” says Harshad Bhatia, urban designer and a member of the Indian Institute of Architecture. “The structural integrity of the building should be maintained as close to the original with only the damaged portions replaced by material similar in colour and texture to the original construction material.”

Architects are often in a fix while restoring near-destroyed buildings if they should conserve the authentic style or improvise on the form to accommodate the need of the building in its present context. At present the Watson building houses over 150 tenants (according to a tenant who does not want to be identified). Most of them live in one-roomed tenements. For Bhatia, “It is important for the restored building to have a function similar to the original intended use or adaptive to the restored space.”

Although it is believed that all man-made structures are not irreplaceable and new creations mark the beginning of a new era, yet, letting go of a unique architectural creation is painful for any society. According to BV Doshi, a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and the founder of Ahmedabad-based Vastu Shilpa Foundation, “Every building  should be preserved because once a creation is lost, you cannot get it back.”