ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter briefly chronicles the emergence, in a religious sense, of a Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude in 1936 and how it is different from forms of housing that conform to “minimum standards.” The chapter also foregrounds a presentist framework. It explores how the event of the making of a Gandhian low-cost architecture of finitude in late-colonial India repeatedly emerged in the post-colonial period as a self-evidently given fulfilling intuition for wholly different, emergent, signifying intentions among architects, planners, philosophers and village-workers. The chapter argues against a retrospectively projected historicity of the present time of the making of a Gandhian low-cost architecture of finitude. Instead, it explores, in a phenomenological sense, the prospects for writing about the time of making a Gandhian low-cost architecture as a continuing, enduring present that never entirely became a part of the past. The chapter suggests that staying within the limits and boundaries of a continuing, secular present time, and not crossing those limits into a future time of scientifically chronicling the past, may be better suited to narrating the event of the creation of a Gandhian low-cost architecture of finitude. The introduction ends with a chapter outline.
