ABSTRACT
By way of conclusion, this chapter revisits the driving motivation of the preceding chapters in particular evaluating the postcolonial Indian national modernist project, as responded to by Le Corbusier, in terms of the imperatives of the present. It asks the question: how does one design today that one’s work best engages with the inherent and inevitable uncertainties of the future? In search of open-ended ways of working and thinking, it proposes a reading of Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha’s concept of “wetness” in conjunction with the Sanskrit term “atman” as a new planetary way of thinking futurity. This leads to an alternative reading of preservation not as a defensive tactic but as open-ended or “vulnerable” positionality, reimagining of the modernist stance as not one given to certainty but a kind of constructive uncertainty.
