One and half year back in March 2020, we were almost ready with the manuscript of thefifth issue of ‘artEAST’ magazine for designing but could not proceed further as all of a sudden a Covid – 19 pandemic induced lockdown was declared all over the country. We decided to close our office at “Charubasona”, to safeguard our people who were busy at the desk. Lakhs of people died in India due to infection from the Corona virus. Social life and normal activities were totally disrupted. However by the end of December 2020, the situation became somewhat normalised. With much hope we restarted our activities from January 2021. Alas, the second wave of pandemic came suddenly soon after, more infectious and severe, causing deaths of innumerable people all over India, once again. Before we could hardly make any progress of our publication, we had to again close our office in May 2021, for an indefinite period, until the situation improved. Now from the 2nd week of August, we have partially opened our office for three days a week and we are almost ready to go to press.
The present issue of the magazine is dedicated to Architecture. Architecture serves a dual purpose in our lives. It serves our need to design proper habitation and at the same time it helps us to create visually beautiful structures. But as we know, we have not yet been able to appreciate a building – an architecture, as a form of beauty, a form of art. Infact when we build structures in an open space that interferes with our natural environment, we need to be extremely cautious so that it does not disturb the existing beauty of the location. Rather, it is expected that the built structure with its form and matching colours scheme will enhance the visual beauty of the place. Primarily, the problem is that public taste in our society has not developed enough. Having said that, I must also mention that there are good architects and bad architects. Infact most of our city planners and architects are most mediocre. Even our students do not get any chance to be educated at the school level about architecture, design or town planning like their counterparts in Japan or other developed countries of the world.
Let us talk about our architectural institutions in India. The only well known architectural institution is the School of Architecture at Ahmedabad. IITs of different states in India also teach architecture and town planning. In West Bengal we have an architectural course in Jadavpur University and Shibpur Engineering College. But these courses emphasise upon engineering aspects of buildings and constructions rather than on the aesthetics of Architecture.
There is a great tradition of architecture throughout the world, whether in Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Europe, India, Japan or South America. Now modern architecture has come up in every part of the world and has excelled in their aesthetic beauty of form and structure. For this issue we have received large number of articles dealing with traditional as well as contemporary architecture of India and other countries, and they provide information about how architecture played a crucial role in our socio-cultural lives. In this fifth issue we also have our regular feature called “Gol Table”, a round table discussion on architecture with the participation of eminent architects like Abin Chowdhury and other renowned artists and designer of Kolkata. An interview of B.V. Doshi, the famous architect who received the prestigious international prize called ‘Pritzker’, along with an interview of Harshavardhan Neotia, renowned art lover of our city and creator of few land mark architectures of Kolkata, are being published in this issue besides other regular features.
It is regrettable that we could not publish all the articles we received for this issue due to shortage of space as we have already exceeded more than two hundred and eighty pages. We hope to be excused for the same.
At the end, I thank all our editorial staff for their sincere co-operation and hard work during this difficult time and wish everyone a corona pandemic free world.
With regards
Jogen Chowdhury
Editor, artEAST