oving through Delhi, with all its layers of history and migrations, constantly reminds you that you are in the most national city; you are in the capital where roads are named for world leaders and Mughal rulers, and legendary kings and freedom fighters, and you see names of the most obscure and prestigious research centers and administrative institutions. The city is a labyrinth of grand, tree-lined roads and miles of compound walls as much as it is a tangle of inner streets with small, odd neighborhood markets and parks. When such a city gets represented by the monumentality of its architecture and the intricacies of tectonic built forms, one wonders what formal architecture means to a city as well as the other way around. Moving through another Indian city, Ahmedabad, also identified with the county’s modernity and its role in nation building in the years following India’s independence from colonial rule, one has a similar feeling, in certain parts, as if in Delhi, especially when seeing the compound walls of, for instance, the Indian Institute of Management
