homogeneity of programme that you find in a mall, the repeat of it across the city and what its impact is. I would also like to understand your role as an architect in deciding this programme. or questioning this programme.

VS: There was a programme that was given to us but we did attempt to question this programme despite the constraints of maximising the floor plate. We understood those equations and we tried to look at possibilities where we could see more of the mall experience not just as a brand experi- ence but also as an architectural experience.

NG: What about the public experience? VS: The mall was not large enough to accommodate a public experience. There was a con- strained space that I would term as a public experience, it was the atrium space which gradually diminished because we wanted to achieve better FSI for the shops on the floors. The typical cen- tral atrium became linear. The public experience was not really a public experience. The mall is experienced completely by consuming products. There is a harsh inside outside condition where when you come out you are on the street.

TN: I might be wrong, but you are talking about this project (pointing to a panel on the wall) I saw an image from your office, I think that it was the first scenario that you designed for this mall, and I saw a complex form trying to integrate the roof into the design of the spaces.

VS: That was where it started. That was the ambition and the desire. It was very well received. Fl- nally when it comes to allocating budgets for cladding, structure, steel consumption per square feet… These are rather brutal and limiting. NG: How important do you think public experience is in a mall and how would you initiate it? Oth- er than the atrium? Can a mall have public experience in a true sense? Is that feasible in private developments?

VS: It is feasible but at the end of the day, in a capitalist regime you have to buy something for the public experience.

RK: The Jon Jerde experiment in Roppongi, where the whole mall becomes a huge negative space. The architect has been successful because he has a method to do all these malls, but he has not given up on the consistency of styling but at the same time, he has created a huge void space. The void is the public space, that is a huge amphitheater that is running for eight floors, it is a scoop out of a cube, and he has striated a spine through the building that makes the space haptic. You will buy but buying becomes incidental. It is a public space. Especially if you are look- ing at the present context of what is happening in our cities, it is an instant gratification of some sort of joy, I do not know how to define that. People have stopped going to parks. They have stopped being on strips like Mahatma Gandhi Road, regardless of what has happened to it. Bri- gade Road has become extensively an oversees sort of experience, because it is on the list of places to go on Lonely Planet and that is why you are there.

People from the zone, someone from Banashankari does not want to go to Whitefield, you may have a beautiful mall.