ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT ROOTS IS ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT MEMORY

For Architect Habeeb Khan, the crisis of Indian architecture does not begin on the construction site. It begins in the classroom. Long before glass towers and interchangeable skylines became the visual shorthand of Indian cities, architecture in the subcontinent was learnt through apprenticeship. Young builders trained under master builder, absorbing knowledge slowly, through observation, repetition, and lived experience. That system, Khan argues, produced buildings of far greater cultural and environmental intelligence than much of what is built today.

“Give me fifty buildings constructed in the last seventy-five years post independence that we would be proud to preserve a hundred years from now,” he says. “You will find very few. A handful, at best.”

For Khan, this scarcity is not accidental. It is the consequence of a deeply outdated model of architectural education, one that has failed to evolve alongside the realities of contemporary India and the rapid advances in profession. Organised architectural education, shaped largely by post-industrial European models such as the Bauhaus, brought structure, syllabi, and degrees into the discipline. But it also introduced rigidity. Decades later, India continues to follow the same pedagogical framework, even as its cities, materials, economies, and social conditions have changed beyond recognition. The opening up of the economy, the forces of globalization, and universal access to materials and information have radically transformed the built environment. Yet architecture schools, Khan notes, still teach processes designed for another era. The result is a widening gap between what the profession demands and what education produces. As a former president of the Council of Architecture, chairman of MNIT Jaipur and SPA Delhi, founder of multiple architecture colleges like PIADS Nagpur and LTIADS Mumbai, and a practicing architect working across the country, Khan occupies a rare vantage point. He sees the system from all sides. What he sees, he says, is structural decay.

“Not more than ten percent of our built mass today would be worth preserving a century from now,” he says. “That tells you something is fundamentally wrong.”

He is careful not to place the blame on practicing architects alone. They, too, are products of the same system. Change, he believes, must come through a comprehensive overhaul of pedagogy. The National Education Policy 2020, along with proposed reforms such as the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhistan Bill, offers a cautious opening. By loosening rigid disciplinary silos, these frameworks could allow architecture to reconnect with fields it has long been estranged from: sociology, economics, culture, history, literature, and the humanities. Architecture, Khan insists, is not merely the synthesis of art and technology. It is a social act. It is built for people, within contexts shaped by memory, climate, habit, and belief. Treating these dimensions as optional electives rather than core knowledge has impoverished the discipline. This estrangement becomes especially visible in the age of globalization. Khan describes a growing global anxiety around identity, visible across political and cultural movements worldwide. In architecture, this anxiety manifests as placelessness. Buildings begin to look the same everywhere, stripped of local meaning.

“Globalisation has no identity,” he says. “Everything becomes uniform.”

Against this homogenization, Khan advocates what he calls contemporary vernacular architecture. The term, he stresses, is often misunderstood. Vernacular does not mean nostalgia or replication of the past. It is not about recreating palaces or mimicking historical styles. Rather, it is about rooting architecture to the land it is built upon. Vernacular, like language or cuisine, changes across regions, cities, even neighbourhoods. What works in Rajasthan cannot work in Kerala.

What suits Srinagar cannot be transplanted to Nagpur. Climate, material availability, social habits, and cultural rhythms demand different architectural responses. To ignore this is to deny architecture its most basic intelligence. At the same time, buildings must belong unmistakably to their own time. A structure built today should be recognizable as contemporary, not a confused imitation of another century. Contemporary vernacular, as Khan defines it, is the synthesis of inherited wisdom and present-day technology, without anxiety or mimicry. This philosophy extends to his understanding of sustainability. Khan frames it not in terms of certifications or metrics, but mortality. Just as the human body returns to the earth, he believes buildings should, too. Materials that can be reabsorbed by nature are, for him, the most ethical choice. Even partial adherence to this principle, he argues, is more meaningful than performative green claims.

When he speaks to young architects, Khan returns repeatedly to patience. Architecture, he reminds them, is a marathon, not a sprint. In an age saturated with images, instant references, and borrowed ideas, the real danger is the erosion of thinking itself. Information, when mistaken for knowledge, and knowledge when mistaken for wisdom, hollow out creativity. Processing, reflection, and commitment, he says, are becoming endangered skills. Yet without them, architecture loses its depth. Institutions, Khan believes, carry a responsibility beyond professional training.

Academia is the conscious keeper of the discipline, tasked not only with producing employable graduates but with shaping public understanding of cities, space, and the built environment. Without this moral and intellectual stewardship, architecture risks becoming merely another service industry. For Khan, architecture is ultimately an inheritance, passed down through generations, shaped by land, memory, and time. To practice it responsibly is to acknowledge both where one comes from and where one stands and where one has to go. Without that awareness, buildings may rise quickly, but they will leave little behind.