To the exhibition Anupama Kundoo at AzW

Architectural gallery AzW, located in the Vienna museum quarter MQ since 2001, has been mapping and analyzing the Austrian scene for more than three decades while also bringing current international topics and showcasing global creators. At the end of this year, AzW prepared an exhibition by Indian architect Anupama Kundoo. The expectation prior to the visit was that a traveling exhibition, similar to that of Balkrishna Doshi (from the German Vitra Design Museum) or Tatiana Bilbao (from the Danish Louisiana Museum), would come to Vienna. It was all the more pleasant and surprising that Angelika Fitz (director of AzW) along with Elke Krasny (professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts) simultaneously published a more than three-hundred-page book with the same title “Abundance Not Capital“ (Hojnost místo kapitálu) through the American publisher MIT Press (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Both curators also personally traveled to the Indian city of Auroville on behalf of Anupama Kundoo, where the architect settled after her studies in the late 1980s and still runs her office, engaging local craftsmen and using local resources sustainably.

India is often associated with overcrowded slums and polluted air. In response to this troubling state, Le Corbusier (together with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and the British couple Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew) designed a new capital city Chandigarh for the Indian state of Punjab in the 1950s, which now has over a million inhabitants and continues to benefit from its well-thought-out urban plan. While the orthogonal scheme of Chandigarh made its way into all urban planning textbooks, the experimental city of Auroville (in French, City of Dawn), located in the southwest of India, until recently only attracted the interest of yogis. Auroville was founded in 1968 by spiritual leader Mirra Alfassa (1878-1973), who commissioned French architect Roger Anger to create a city for 50,000 inhabitants on a spiral plan (today, three thousand residents of sixty different nationalities live here). The city was privately owned until 1980. Today, it is formally managed by a special council of the Auroville Foundation made up of a committee from the Indian government (under the Ministry of Education), an advisory board of significant world figures, and all adult residents of the city. According to the founder “Auroville belongs to no one, but to humanity as a whole”, it is also “a place of endless education, constant progress”, perfectly fitting the life story of architect Anupama Kundoo, which is detailed in the documentary screened as part of the exhibition, allowing you a glimpse into her own house (Wall House, 1997-2000), whose fragments are built in a 1:1 scale in the hall of AzW.

Although Auroville is thousands of kilometers away, located on a different continent and in a different climate, it offers inspiring ideas for Western civilization as well. Students around the world (TU Berlin, AA London, Parsons School New York, IUAV Venice, or ETSAB Barcelona) have become acquainted with Anupama Kundoo’s philosophy through workshops, and the architect first presented to the Czech audience in spring 2018 as part of the lecture series Another Perspective organized by the Kruh association. Kundoo is an example that good architecture can be realized even with a small budget and without a negative impact on human or natural resources. Material-wise, she draws from what her surroundings offer. Local craftsmen participate in the construction. Their concentrated work allows the qualities of the materials used to shine. In some of her works, Kundoo revisits pre-industrial times but does not remain in nostalgic times, applying current technological knowledge. She provides work for local farmers in the off-season, allowing them to earn money by producing bricks and ceramic elements, which help save materials and rationalize construction. In a time when housing has turned into an investment and finances are the main development tool of construction, Kundoo demonstrates a sustainable economic model based on local resources. She also strives to avoid the mistakes that modernism caused in the past century. She does not want to become a slave to standardization and the accelerated pace of construction. On the contrary, she brings craft and recycling back into play.

In addition to her own family home, the exhibition at AzW presents another thirty realizations located mainly in the city of Auroville and the Indian Union Territory of Puducherry. The exhibition Abundance Not Capital will run until mid-February next year, and guided tours are held every odd Tuesday evening.