Book Description
Bombay Art Deco presents a treasury of Art Deco buildings comprising residential, commercial and civic architecture created during the glamorous and optimistic era of the mid 1930's and 1940's. The architects, a small list of first generation Indian architects and builders, were mostly educated in English schools and trained in western architectural traditions, if not actually in the West. Impatient with the British reluctance to shed the Gothic and Indo - Saracenic architectural styles that had dominated Imperial Bombay's urban landscape, these visionaries were determined to imbue the city with a new modern style. That style shares its provenance with the Art Deco architecture of Miami Beach, termed Tropical Deco by author Laura Cerwinske in her seminal 1981 book. Built in the same era, the Art Deco architecture of the two cities exhibits similar scale, geometry, tropical vocabulary, and love of romance.
Back Cover copy
Miami beach and Bombay, two subtropical cities built on islands, both with large portions of their land reclaimed from the sea share a unique architectural kinship - ART DECO. - David Dermer, Mayor of Miami Beach, Florida The Art Deco buildings of Bombay are rapidly being transformed by the exigencies of space and neglect. Navin Ramani's book awakens world attention to this treasury of Indian architecture and to the delights of the wonderful Art Deco movement in Bombay's history. - Rahul Mehrotra, Governor of the Heritage Conservation Committee of the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority
About the author
An American originally from India, Navin Ramani grew up in the city then called Bombay. He is a graduate of Sydenham College, University of Bombay and received a Masters of Business Administration from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Ramani's career in the United States has included collaborations with leading architects in India and Miami as a developer's project coordinator. He serves on the board of The Miami Design Preservation League, the organization responsible for listing of the Miami Beach Art Deco District in the National Register of Historic Places, and was co-chairman of the Art Deco Weekend Festival in 2005. He has led guided architectural tours of the Art Deco District since 2002, has lectured in Miami on Bombay's Art Deco style, and has been an honorary tour guide of Bombay's Art Deco architecture for the United Kingdom-based conservation organization, the Cinema Theatre Association and The Twentieth Century Society. A founding member of the Florida Chapter of The Congress for The New Urbanism, Ramani also provided extensive research for the publication of A Guidebook to New Urbanism in Florida 2005.
