A Vocation in Waiting: Ecology in Practice

“A Vocation in Waiting: Ecology in Practice” explores the obstacles environmental architects encountered when they sought to put their training into practice. It follows Rachana Sansad Institute for Environmental Architecture graduates, and students on the cusp of graduation, as they try to implement what they have learned. The chapter identifies core tensions between the structural forces of urbanization in Mumbai and architects’ aspirations to implement green techniques. It shows how the specific, shared moral ecologies and temporal sensibilities that were forged at the Institute created for its graduates a sociality and politics that made the fullness of environmental architecture practice into a “vocation in waiting.”