In this webinar event, held on the occasion of World Art Deco Day on 28 April, architect Robert Stephens, author of ‘Bombay Imagined: An Illustrated History of the Unbuilt City’ surveys ideas that never saw the light of day. What if South Mumbai’s urban form, so distinctly characterised by the modern Art Deco style, had adopted a different design language? What might have the stretch along Oval Maidan and Marine Drive looked like in the absence of its iconic Deco buildings? Get transported to an alternate reality as we explore the unrealised (and at times Utopian) plans preceding some of Mumbai’s most iconic Art Deco buildings that came up on the earliest land reclamations. From Claude Batley’s Collective Living Superstructure overlooking Oval Maidan, to the Indian Academy’s Hygiene Museum at Churchgate, tune in for a richly illustrated talk about the long-lost futures from the city’s never-before-seen past, with archival drawings, contemporary speculations and artistic overlays from this book.
About the speaker:
Stephens, a B.Arch, moved to Mumbai, India from South Carolina, USA, in 2007. He is a principal architect at RMA Architects and is part of the core team, responsible for recent additions to Mumbai’s built environment, including the CSMVS Visitors’ Centre (2011) and Children’s Museum (2019) at Kala Ghoda, and the under-construction Mata Ramabai Ambedkar Crematorium at Worli. In 2016 he founded Urbs Indis, a studio that narrates lesser-known civic histories through the juxtaposition of archival material with contemporary aerial photographs of urban India.
