Contemporary Architecture is bound by and sometimes tangled between architectural,

political and cultural contexts spanning across a vast time-line. While many aspects
govern the modern contemporary architecture seen today, some features of the building
process play a more important role than the others. Increasingly placed in contrasting
environments buildings today need to play dual roles of creating space, addressing a welldefined requirement, documenting an architectural ideology while conversing with the
environment. The boundary or the point of distinction of a building from its environs is a
premise that powers relations between the centre and the periphery.
The pursuit of program manifests generalist solutions into individual designs and
buildings. Shelter, or protection from the elements is the primary motive of any building
program. The building boundary or faade serves the need for shelter in a multi-valent
manner, sometimes as a mechanical device, a filtering element, but mostly an aesthetic
device. Almost always, the functional response of the faade is closely tied with
providing a powerful aesthetic statement. Addressing a functional aspect it protects by
manipulating light and heat penetration, or conflicts by cutting out an exotic view of the
outdoors. Active or passive measures such as operable screens, or glass facades,
verandahs are incorporated to encourage the buildings response to the context. It is
usually designed as an instrument engaging the user into an external dialogue with the
surroundings or an internal dialogue within itself.
Apart from serving a functional requirement the building boundary also provides a
cultural, chronological or factual story, exchanging knowledge. The exchange occurs
between metropolitan and peripheral sites or modern and traditional techniques.
Contemporary Indian architects generously borrow techniques from vernacular contexts
fueling climate responsiveness in modern architecture. Evolving global practices
encourage architects to morph traditional architecture into befitting icons embracing the
global trends, hence establishing a contemporary modern idiom. In the post-colonial era
Le Corbusiers development of the brise soleil expanded the European sensitivities of
climate design to new locations. As a keen expression of function and a site of exchange,
the boundary is more than a divide between the inside and the outside, producing through
conjunction new symbolic and enacted meanings operating at both a monumental and
everyday level. The invented contemporary hybrid exterior acts as a mediator between a
prestigious western interior space and a hidden native environment. The ambivalence
gives rise to opportunities for subverting intentions of climatic discourse making the
boundary a place of creative resistance. The material composition of the built boundary in
contemporary Indian architecture is exemplified in the brise-soleil. Hardly exuding the
monolithic quality the woven skins are non-loadbearing solving more contemporary
issues, like sustainability and offering an ornamentally recall. In the Nirlon Building the
faade includes two parallel skins to promote increased shading on the inner glazing and
hence heat dissipation.
In their capacity to be reused, re-imagined, and repossessed, buildings are never
completely in the hands of power. They perform like metaphoric boundaries delineating
the domains of sites and subjects in the context. This boundary, while ideologically
suffused hold great differences, themselves becoming a place for emergent identities.

Critical readings help practicing architects understand heritage as binding and rich in
possibility for reinterpretation. Climate responsiveness remains an important factor
within the architectural practice particularly in the post-colonial world. Current
preoccupation with architectural regionalism and green architecture has recently garnered
renewed interest in the contemporary architecture scene in India. The systematic
knowledge of environmental technologies documents an inclusion of climatic design and
building science into modern Indian architecture of the mid-twentieth century, becoming
the hegemonic norm for architectural development in the subcontinent. Interdisciplinary
scholarships on postcolonial studies, science studies, and environmental history link
socio-historical constructions with modern day development. Although centered on Asia,
these studies relate to the production, circulation and reception of knowledge and
practices of modern architecture across different time-spaces all across the world and in
India.