This inaugural webinar session introduces Mindful Modernism(s) with a pack of cards called Play Architecture introduced by Roger Connah and a pre-Modernist Modernity presented by Vibhuti Sachdev emerging from the court of Jaipur since 1727. This situates and then discussed both the mindful use of Modernism and what has often been seen as a mindless, imitative or derivative modernism. Connah in Mindfully Playing Architecture uses 20 statements selected from India: Modern Architectures in History (Scriver/Srivastava 2015); these are  phrases used as a critical probe into the moves made in (Indian) Modernism. These act as point/counterpoint dialogue with Vibhuti Sachdev who then identifies a key word from these 20 statements to explore the forward-looking thinking and modernity embedded in the Jaipur court starting in 1727. Every reign adopted new mindsets and modern technologies putting  the culture of Jaipur at the forefront of innovations in India.  The IGNCA International Competition (New Delhi 1986) is run in counterpoint with the shapes of (a pre-modernist) modernity emerging in the court of Jaipur since 1727. Whilst Jaipur negotiated age old traditions, the IGNCA agenda in the 1980s was perhaps unwittingly (mindlessly?) doing the same. Do both challenges wish to appear ‘radically’ different but seamlessly aligned with the past? 

Together, Connah and Sachdev – in a blind juxtaposition with each other’s presentation - consider the uses and abuses, the merits and demerits of Modernism and their relevance to this discussion. Referring to language, architectural form, cultural memory and critical assumptions, they attempt to reveal how these challenges were represented and explained within a fragmenting 20th Century ‘modernist culture’ still possibly leaning heavily on western imitation,  and juxtaposed across a developing but orthodox Hindu Court in Jaipur since 1727. 

Connah and Sachdev then discuss flipping the perception of ‘modernism’ as forward looking. It is quite possible there is a current guilt within modernism which now pulls ‘modernity’  backwards, whereas the confidence in the modernising impulse in the  orthodox Hindu court of Jaipur was forward-looking and futuristic. “The diagnosis of a thought as ‘purely Western’ or ‘purely Indian’ can be very illusory," Amartya Sen writes in The Argumentative India. “The origin of ideas is not the kind of thing to which ‘purity’ happen easily.  The decision to break away from tradition initially made modernism In India progressive and usefully derivative from western models, only now perhaps to find itself intensely worrying about how to situate its own past and what in general terms has passed on.

The open home plan has become a major modernist contribution from its beginning in the 1920 and 1930s. How has this rupture contributed to or subtracted from the art of living? What is interiority today, in relation to privacy, identity and an inner silence?  How have Modernist typologies steered us away from other space types, the byzantine routes of intrigue, magic, and shadows? The pattern of spaces and materiality instilled by Modernist thinking has percolated deep into pedagogy, design, and practice for good or for bad. How do we understand this in relation to the ‘home’ and how can we be ‘at home’ and more generous in our world today?  How does the dialectic between human connection which requires communication, and human self-determination and self-expression which require privacy and control play off each other?Is the sacredness embedded or not in our understanding of Modernism? Does an Aural architecture lend itself to sacred spaces, that foster a feeling at home with self and others? How does it lead to humanistic and generous spaces?

Here we suggest an ‘opening up’ of architecture to a new vocabulary; for example, what are the operative words (like silence, darkness, unformed, unending, magic, myth) which were left out of the original Modernist design repertoire and vocabulary? How does this link with the multidisciplinary investigations derived from neuroscience, social psychiatry or theological contemplative studies that can, should, and are affecting architectural thought and practice? Putting a ‘mindful’ modern architect like Løkken and Haggärde together with Hannes Stiefel, helps open the contemplation of built space today, that magical and mysterious space that architecture can still achieve.

The silence that Louis Komjathy emphasizes is a contemplative silence that explores traditional practices that redefine the meaning of silence, an inclusive method that probes states of consciousness nourished within possibilities of being. Komjathy and Andrew King deliberate on how we think, experience, conceptualize silence and its relation to sound/noise. What traditional contemplative practices support such an act? How can certain spiritual and sacred themes like silence and darkness be defined differently by recourse to new cognitive and theological thinking? Are these omitted or highlighted as undesirable in modernist ways of teaching and thinking? Is there a new mindful Modern to be considered?

The descent of Modernism into aestheticism parallels mindfulness’ collapse into the self-soothing marketplace: both have fallen from their original intentions into parody and commodity. How have the concepts of mindfulness and Modernism come to be used and abused? Are there aspects of Modernism and mindfulness worthy of redemption and resurrection? Moving beyond McMindfulness and McModernism, Ron Purser and Gregory Burgess reframe the agenda of a Mindful Modernism and a Modern Mindfulness by revisiting the self’s relationship with space. By building a dialectic centered on consciousness, collectiveness, community, and culture, the discussion “walks backward into the future,” seeking either the liberation of the modern mind or liberation from the Modern mind.

Architecture and Interior Design Education stresses the primacy of visual and accurate representation. What can we be mindful of in representation so that it liberates and does not limit ways of thinking and dreaming, without preconditions? This invites an obvious question: how do academics and practitioners balance the role and nature of representation, not only to address the focus on ocular-centric approaches but to reassess the role of representation? The latter could lead to new ways to explore alternative methods of thinking about design, more contemplative and even ‘traditional,’ some of which may embed new stories of cultural and contextual elements. Are there alternate ways of representation from different, unexplored traditions, cultures, and disciplines that are not considered, or deliberately excluded, by a still predominant Modernist conditioning? 

Can we shape unusual new built environments—which may or may not even be called architecture or referred to as ‘Modernism’ as we know it; but an evolving practice that respects both the individual and the collective, the designer and non-designer, the architect and non-architect, always in that liminal space of potential?