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M+, Hong Kong, © Raj Rewal
Raj Rewal 拉傑．雷瓦爾
Model, Bhikaji Cama Bazaar (1965–2016), New Delhi, India 印度新德里比卡吉卡瑪廣場（1965–2016）模型
1966
In 1964, Raj Rewal won a government competition for Bhikaji Cama Bazaar, a commercial centre in southern New Delhi named for a female leader of the Indian independence movement. The project was one of the first by Rewal’s practice, which he had established after returning to India from France two years earlier. Although the scheme was finalised in the mid-1960s, legal issues related to land acquisition stalled its realisation until two decades later.
Drawn from traditional urban typologies found in northern India, Rewal’s pedestrian-oriented design incorporates multiple levels and access points, coordinating separate foot and vehicle traffic among groups of six-, nine-, and twelve-storey terraced structures. Pedestrians move through the complex on a three-metre-high podium, following street-like pathways that open onto courtyards of varying scales and pass under overhangs extending from the towers. Along with the brise-soleils that unify the buildings’ beige facades, the arrangement was intended to encourage social interactions while responding sensitively to climactic conditions, allowing air circulation and generating shade.
Bhikaji Cama Bazaar recalls both contemporaneous architectural experiments and traditional bazaars in Indian cities like Fatehpur Sikri, a sixteenth-century Mughal capital. With its dense, modular geometry, the complex represents a strain of postcolonial modernism that diverges from the monumental, plastic forms of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh.
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