If architecture’s defining characteristic is that it is always seen in a state of perpetual distraction then the Kerala Student’s Union Building (KSUB) fits the bill1. Located at PMG Jn. in Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum from here on) the building seems to oscillate between innocuity and intrigue. It stands partly hidden behind trees, slightly below the road level, with its façade a background for the medley of passengers who are often milling around and waiting for the bus (See Figure 1/Frontispiece and Figure 2). All the same, the horizontality of this cuboidal form never quite allows it to merge into the scene. No doubt much of this intrigue rests solely on the texture and chiaroscuro of its façade – a typical mid-century modernist concrete sunscreen wall (See Figure 3 and Figure 4). A porch projects out from one end of this U-shaped building and the lobby this porch extends from, leads into a singly loaded corridor that wraps around the courtyard. Most of the time, even with a fresh coat of paint, it looks worn out like only a minor government building which has weathered forty years of sun and tropical monsoon can. The building is decidedly not formally complex. However, it has its own subtle architectural sophistications which appear only when read in context of the three other Public Works Department (PWD) buildings that stand at PMG Jn. This ‘reading’ is what this piece intends to do along with briefly considering the value of minor modernist artefacts that stand in umpteen small towns like Trivandrum.

Context: PMG Jn.

The KSUB (ca.1969) stands in Post Master General’s (PMG) office junction, a node surrounded by four other historic buildings each of which offers a portal into time. Clockwise, starting from the SUB is the Post Master General’s office (ca 1890’s), Hotel Mascot (ca 1915), G.V. Raja Sports Stadium Pavilion (ca 1963). The SUB itself constructed by 1969, was designed by two young architects of the Kerala Public Works Department, Thomas Panicker and A.K. Jayachandran. The building was a new facility for the Kerala University (whose campus buildings dot this part of the city) Student’s Union that included offices, classrooms and meeting spaces.

It’s oldest neighbor, the Post Master General’s (PMG) Building was constructed in the late 19^thcentury as the headquarters of the British Chief Engineer of the Travancore PWD.2 It later became in the 1930’s, the College of Engineering Trivandrum3 and then the Post Master General’s building. A sparse, symmetrical stone masonry building save for its rusticated quoin detailing its dominating feature is its three towers capped by steep tiled roofs. The building is characterized by its axial positioning to the node with the central clock tower and its circular arched fenestrations lining up to the entrance from the city (See Figure 5). Towards the east is Hotel Mascot, the erstwhile British officers complex built in the early 20^thcentury. PMG Junction in fact lies right next to the parade ground, the heart of the British Town and institutional core. This is an area replete with tree lined boulevards and stands in marked contrast to the older, denser city center of Trivandrum consisting of Chaala market and its surroundings as well as the more traditional city center with the temple and upper caste residences around. The Mascot is built in the British bungalow style replete with its characteristics verandahs and large roofs adapted to the functional needs of a double storied hotel. Towards the south and at the highest point of PMG junction is the Kerala University Stadium Pavilion (See Figure 6). Like most of Prof. J.C. Alexander’s buildings4 it is a mix of ‘modern’ styles from the blocky Art Deco façade on the outside to an RCC cantilevered pavilion facing the ground (See Figure 7). The modernizing role of Kerala University founded in the 1930’s is certainly evident in its main buildings that are in the vicinity. The senate hall by S.L. Chittale pointed out as an example of the ‘regionalist’ and ‘revivalist’ tendencies is the better known example5 while the Kerala University Library by Prof. Alexander from the 1950’s tends towards a blockier art deco (See both in Figure 8). The university stadium reflects the expansion of the University of Kerala as it initiated one of the first physical education departments in Southern India.

The pavilion (ca.1963) was named after G.V. Raja, a member of the Travancore royal family (who were the initial patrons of the university) and a promoter of sports and many things ‘modern’ in the Travancore administration. The pavilion’s zig zag art deco façade fits the curve of the stadium and faces and lines up to the primary artery (NH 47) that brings people from the suburbs and into the city. For a Trivandrum resident, the PMG junction is the first experience of the city with these four buildings, the four institutions of the city, located here. The Stadium facade terminates the view when one arrives at PMG Jn. with the building’s serrated roof profile matching its zig zag façade visible from afar. Thus in order to get a sense of the node as it might have been in 1969, we have to imagine the Chief Engineer’s Office/College of Engineering/PMG building and the Kerala University stadium facing each other across 200 meters flanked on the North East by the Mascot Hotel without the property walls and the wide roads that divide it today. It is with the addition of KSUB that this node becomes a portal of local modernity, completing the circuit of Trivandrum’s institutional modernity – Travancore PWD > Kerala University > College of Engineering Trivandrum > Kerala PWD.

Reading in Context

In 1969, it is quite likely the SUB might have defamiliarized the onlooker. However, neither was its materiality distinct nor were concrete sunscreen blocks6 unfamiliar in Trivandrum. Other buildings also had it, notably the stair towers of the Trivandrum Corporation building (1963) nearby designed by Prof. Alexander. However, as an entire face of a building it did look distinct from the Corporation Building and the Sports Pavilion not to mention the PMG Building and the Mascot Hotel. Two moves are distinct: the open façade and the entry. In these two moves it negates the architectural convention set up between the PMG Building and the Sports Pavilion of how a public building signified importance: symmetry, hierarchy and sequence of movement/entry. At first glance the façade makes a modest attempt to disassociate itself with the ground, projecting out at the level of the road in front, offering a clean rectangular frame that emphasizes the buildings horizontality and scale in marked contrast with its neighbors. In the repetitive pattern of its concrete screen we find no hierarchy that the surrounding buildings offer – not of different types or sizes of fenestration or any gesture of an entry or framing. It in fact avoids the blocky modernity of the University stadium that relies on traditional tropes of solidity and grandeur. What the concrete screen wall (jali, if you must) does is dematerialize solidity, the primary element by which public buildings produce grandeur. The façade offers no clue to an entry and one walks to the porch that rests on a singular column (a signature of Jayachandran). A turn to the left and three steps offer an entry into the lobby space that houses the single stringer dog leg stair going up along the open jali wall (See Figure 9). Diagonally across the space, we catch a glimpse of the courtyard and the corridors lined with circular columns (See Figure 10). There is one more critical detail. The concrete screen wall façade has a second skin. Not of glass, since in 1969 Kerala that would be unthinkable, but regular casement windows on timber frames (See Figure 11). Both architects went on to collaborate to produce a series of interesting variations of this language all done in concrete sunscreen blocks which were all cast on site separately and then assembled. This includes the Co-operative auditorium in Quilon and a series of Co-operative Banks across Kerala (Figure 12).

Working within a PWD resistant to change and demanding adherence to a standardized process, the precast concrete was an example of a single custom detail that could be cast on site and combined to make an ‘original’. Within a decade of KSUB being built both its architects would move on to other responsibilities and projects. Thomas Panicker to the housing board and Jayachandran as the chief architect of the Kerala State Film Development Corporation. Jayachandran’s hand is fairly evident in this building and the series of concrete sunscreen block buildings done for the KPWD. In most of his independent designs, like the KSFDC film theatres in Trivandrum and across the state, he eschews brise soleil extensions from the building envelope, employs larger spans and restrained profiles. (Figure 13)

The KSUB in dialogue with its context, i.e. as a set piece with the other three other buildings, offers a way to understand state modernity as it manifested in Kerala from the British era Travancore PWD to the socialist 1970’s. The relevance and influence of state modernism reached its final phase in the 1970’s and the state led modernization that drove it transformed into questions of decentralization and ‘identity’. However, Kerala’s social modernity remains entangled in the infrastructure that was produced by the PWD at the time. It has been appearing often on television far too often these days, the Sri Chithira Tirunal Hospital Block, the Kottayam Medical College Hospital, the Kozhikode civil station and municipal offices across the state. All of this also operated as the foil against which both Laurie Baker’s critique of modernism as well as the ‘regionalism‘ and originality of his work were framed in public and architectural discourse within counter modernist cultural milieu of the late 1970’s.

Copies and Originals

The KSUB was probably modelled after a whole host of influences from Marcel Breur’s Hunter College to Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew’s buildings popularized by their 1964 Tropical Architecture in the hot and humid climates.7 Jayachandran keenly followed Breur through architectural magazines like Progressive Architecture from the USIS Library. Panicker, trained at IIT Kharagpur was interested in climatology and kept a copy of Fry & Drew’s book (See Figure 14a/Footer, Figure 14b,Figure 15). The architects second skin of casement windows, which are neither Breur’s glass panels or Fry and Drew’s suggestion of ‘movable screens of glass and mosquito nets’,8 show a concern on this issue of human control over space. This would later be the source of a difference with Laurie Baker on the question of open jali walls and the larger question of ‘finishing’ and making a space ‘livable’9. As mentioned before, Prof J.C. Alexander’s buildings like the nearby Trivandrum Corporation building (ca 1966) incorporated sunscreen blocks, albeit less sculptural and muted, for service spaces like the stair tower (See Figure 16). In fact the corporation building had a revivalist flavored, domed, council chamber with thin art deco fins as well as bolder brise soleil! Panicker and Jayachandran in KSUB, one of their initial independent interventions within the KPWD, strips away Alexander’s hybrid architectural language to one that is more abstract relying on fewer and simpler formal moves.

The sunscreen block façade also raises the question of validity since it is North facing and carries the implication of a ‘copy’ without meaning. Suffice it to say that architecture has always belonged to that class of everyday objects whose being of technical functions are in a state of perpetual flight towards becoming cultural meanings.10 However, this does pose the oft asked question of value of small-town modernist artefacts which could (very reasonably) be argued to be copies (at worst) or as repetitions (at best), devoid in both cases of ‘originality’. In one sense the essential principle of the artwork, even architecture, is that it is essentially empty and achieves meaning only in its ‘sedimented history’, that is in its relations across space and time. The KSUB offers little comparison to the authentic artefacts of modernism located in Chandigarh or Ahmedabad. It offers no spatial curvatures, Breton brut materiality or ingenuous technological innovations. Its architects are not associated with the Modern Masters or their disciples and their interaction with metropolitan centers in the 1960’s and 70’s range from non-existent to tenuous. As a result, the KSUB has offered little interest to visitors or even local architectural auteurs in search of a regionally authentic modern or even an original local variation. Although Its screen wall and windows offer privacy and ventilation to the meeting rooms inside, its architects were not actively re-interpreting history – i.e. traditional Kerala wooden jali screens. Perhaps, one could argue that if the afore mentioned location in space and time of the KSUB is tightly circumscribed to relations between buildings within the PMG – Palayam institutional precinct, within the late 19^th to the 20th century - it accrues a more stable meaning. This has been the way this piece has been written. But contextual meaning thus defined is also inherently unstable. The architects personal interests – Jayachandran’s fascination with Breur’s work and Panicker’s interest in modern climatology, re-expands the space of relations far and brings non-local comparisons back into play.

Caught in this oscillating play of value, it is tempting to argue that it is the circulation of copies that creates the authenticity of the original and/or search for qualities implicit in post colonial theorizations of mimicry. However, in the question of KSUB as a symptom of modernity, even a local modernity, something more important is at play. Two of modernisms primary critiques have never really been congruent. The gap between the originality of modernisms ‘master works’ and the banal repetitiveness of its everyday manifestations and second the failure of modernism to keep the promise of plenty (for e.g. space, housing, infrastructure). This is because modernism relied on a formula of abstraction and repetition to produce the large numbers of modernization and not so much on a formally perceptible difference. Put another way the most original thing about modernism might have been its aesthetic guarantee in the qualities of repetition.

• 1. “Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.”Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 239
• 2. The PMG node is unique also in its additions to these older buildings. For more information on the addition to the PMG office in the early 1990’s and also more photographs of the building see https://otaa.architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-193719
• 3. Jayachandran graduated in civil engineering from College of Engineering Trivandrum and both him and Panicker taught in its newly formed department of architecture ca. 1964
• 4. J.C. Alexander was the first chief architect and town planner of the Kerala PWD and founded the department of architecture at the College of Engineering Trivandrum, University of Kerala.
• 5. See Jon Lang, A concise history of modern architecture in India(New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002)
• 6. The blocks were cast and cured on site and then assembled on the façade.
• 7. Jayachandran admired Breur while Panicker kept a copy of this book and was very interested in questions of sun, ventilation, functional space planning and so on.
• 8. Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Tropical Architecture in the dry and humid zone(Huntington, N.Y.:Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1964)
• 9. See Thomas Oommen, Rethinking Indian Modernity from the Margins: Architectural Politics in Thiruvananthapuram in the 1970’s, Architectural Theory Review22, Issue 3 (2018): 386-409 https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2018.1516684
• 10. “Each of our practical objects is related to one or more structural elements, but at the same time they are all in perpetual flight from technical structure towards their secondary meanings, from the technological system towards a cultural system….” Jean Baudrillard, Introduction in The System of Objects,trans. James Benedict (New Delhi: Navayana, 2008) p. 8-9.