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The Wall Street Journal, 28 July 2010
By Tripti Lahiri
On Wednesday, international flights are supposed to start operating from Indira Gandhi International Airport’s brand-new Terminal 3. In the run-up to the switch, one image has dominated coverage of the addition to the GMR-run New Delhi airport: The installation of a series of giant hands jutting from a wall of what look like copper discs along T3’s main concourse.
Indian industrial design firm Incubis Consultants, and U.S.-based branding company Landor Associates shaped the artistic choices for the terminal and settled upon the idea of the hands, which were made and installed by Jaipur-based designer Ayush Kasliwal. Here are edited excerpts from a conversation with Incubis head Amit Gulati.:
IRT: How did you come up with the design?
Gulati: It was a bit of a team effort. There was a lot of brainstorming done on it. This artwork is part of a larger process of creating design installations and graphics within the terminal. It’s the largest, so it’s hogged all the limelight.
GMR has built a pretty world-class infrastructure over here. All airports have very similar design vocabulary. They are actually machines. They tend to evolve in a similar glass and metallic fashion. Very early on they were keen to give the terminal an Indian context and infuse it with Indian values. The basic positioning we created for the terminal was “Expressive India.” All classical Indian dance forms use mudras [hand gestures]. It’s a common vocabulary.
IRT: So it’s not a Hindu-themed piece? It looked a little religious to us.
Gulati: That was an important consideration. We have deliberately avoided any religious motif [in the hand gestures chosen]. They represent an open-ended symbology rather than a religious philosophy. I would say the mudras are not really Hindu in themselves. They represent them in Buddhist art, Southeast Asian art uses the same kind of mudras.It also ties in with the whole idea of yoga, which is again very global. Yoga also has religious undertones but it’s perceived as a secular thing.
In India it’s very difficult to find something that’s very secular. Even the Ashoka Pillar you can construe as a religious symbol, but it’s the symbol of the government. So it’s really about the meanings of the mudras, it’s about how a person from abroad would see these as Indian rather than Hindu or Muslim.
IRT: What is it made of?
Gulati: First we had a sculptor make them in clay — we used a lot of traditional craftsmen.
There was a master model of the hand made in clay. The inspiration was a female hand but also using the inspiration of classical Chola sculptures. The clay model was converted into a plaster mold and then the hand poses were cast using resin. It had to be resin otherwise it would have been too heavy but we used a metallic finish. The discs you see flanking the mudra are spun aluminum with copper coating.
IRT: How much does it weigh?
Gulati: There are 675 discs mounted on a cast aluminum structure [called a spider]. One spider holds three discs – it’s basically an aluminum structure shaped like the Mercedes-Benz symbol, a three-pointed star [A spider with three discs weighs about 50 kilos, Mr. Gulati said via e-mail later]. Each hand weighs approximately 150 kilograms because of the metal frame inside the resin.
IRT: What’s your favorite gesture of the nine depicted?
Gulati: There is a mudra called the abhaya mudra [the fearless gesture], which is actually one of the simplest mudras: An open hand and the fingers are bent slightly almost like someone is trying to reach out. That’s a very nice gesture. It’s not a flat hand, it’s not a fully formed gesture, it’s in the middle somewhere — it’s almost like it’s touching you.
Here is an explanation of each of the nine hand gestures depicted in the sculpture, courtesy DIAL and Incubis Consultants.
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