Will Mumbai beat Miami in art deco buildings?

A boxer’s wrinkled face framed by an Art Deco grille gets tagged #DoggieInDeco. The cream-coloured crown of Eros Building, adorned with red Agra sandstone, draws a comparison to a Bharatanatyam dancer wearing ‘alta’ (a bright red dye) on her hands and legs. And two adjacent Matunga buildings,

Jitendra

and Jagdish, are said to share an “inner soul” because of their identical Art Deco staircases with “Tetris style” jigsaw designs.

These lyrical descriptions of Art Deco elements on social media are just one of the many ways in which the Art Deco Mumbai Trust hopes to raise awareness about this architectural style and make it more accessible to Mumbaikars. Started in May 2016, the Trust also conducts neighbourhood walking tours for school children and university students, records oral histories and photo documents Mumbai’s Deco heritage through extensive fieldwork.

But the latest feather in their cap is being admitted into the International Coalition of Art Deco Societies (ICADS), a prestigious global organization, with members in 13 countries and 29 cities, whose mission is the “promotion, appreciation and preservation of the Art Deco style”. Art Deco Mumbai Trust is one of only three societies to be admitted from Asia. The others are Historic Shanghai in China and Bauhaus Centre in Tel Aviv.

“We wanted to put Mumbai on the global map,” explained founder Atul

Kumar

, who was shocked to find that an online search for Art Deco didn’t bring up any results for Mumbai. “After

Miami

, we have the most number of Art Deco buildings in the world, but we didn’t feature anywhere as an Art Deco city; and cities with 30 Art Deco buildings were tom-tomming themselves to death.” Today, Mumbai features prominently on any online search.

Art Deco Mumbai Trust has identified 316 Art Deco buildings across Colaba, Matunga and

Dadar Parsi Colony

and they will soon start exploring Mohammed Ali Road, Shivaji Park, Chembur and Bandra before looping back to

South Mumbai

. Each building that is identified as Art Deco is then photo documented along with descriptions of its architectural elements like nautical grilles, frozen fountains, eyebrows and tropical imagery.

Their website also features interviews with old-time residents of Art Deco buildings like Mehernosh Sidhwa, whose family built Soona Mahal, which houses Pizza by the Bay, on Marine Drive. The building was built by his grandfather late

Kawasji Fakirji Sidhwa

, who ran a flourishing country liquor business, and named after Mehernosh’s grandmother, Soonabai Kawasji Sidhwa, at a time when most Art Deco buildings along Oval Maidan bore British names like Belvedere Court and Windsor House.

For Kumar, one of the many perks of putting Mumbai on the global map was an introduction to Alfredo Rivera, an assistant professor of art history at Grinnell College, who teaches classes on modern and contemporary architecture. Rivera, who will be coming to Mumbai with his students in May to explore the city’s Art Deco heritage, told Kumar an interesting anecdote. He said that when he worked as a tour guide many years ago, he was instructed to say, “Miami has the largest number of Art Deco buildings after Mumbai” – the exact inverse of what most Mumbai architects and historians believe.

Until Art Deco Mumbai Trust finishes its documentation, there’s no way to know whether Mumbai exceeds Miami’s count of around 800 buildings but Rivera believes that Mumbai’s Art Deco heritage is significant irrespective of the final tally.

“The buildings in Mumbai are much larger than the ones built throughout Miami Beach – buildings in South Beach rarely go above three stories,” he explains. “Mumbai challenges Miami in the presence of Deco, given the larger scale of its buildings and its implementation throughout the city.”


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