A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
\n
But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
\n
The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
\n
In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
\n
In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
\n
At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.