Consciousness and Indian-ness: Making Design “Good”

“Consciousness and Indian-ness: Making Design ‘Good’” follows environmental architecture students through field trips outside of Mumbai, showing the important role they played in synthesizing the idea of a distinctly Indian history, quality, and imperative for what Institute architects called, “good design.” This section considers specific field study sites, their complex histories and symbolics, and the ways that encounters there were structured and limited by environmental pedagogy. This chapter argues that producing green expertise was a history-claiming endeavor which used specific logics of cultural identity and moral ecology to make the globally legible choreography of environmental architecture meaningful at the lived scale of social practice.