In 2026, the last working textile mill in Byculla closed. With it, Mumbai lost the final trace of the industry that once shaped the city. Ends in Architecture, a video work by architect and researcher Himil H. Ramani, was filmed inside this same facility. It is now projected onto the mill’s abandoned walls, next to Nine Fish Art Gallery, so the building’s decaying surfaces become both the subject and the screen. The work sets an ageing human body against a building that has witnessed its own ending.
In this conversation with Abir Pothi, Ramani traces the moral history of modernism’s whitewash, and describes plants and other species as co-authors of the built environment. He also considers how to read these ruins without reducing the 1982 Great Bombay Textile Strike, and the lives it upended, to a backdrop.
Q: The title ‘Ends in Architecture’ suggests that an ending might not be a singular or final event. What does it mean to think of “ends” in the plural, and how does this understanding challenge the conventional ideas of architectural completion, obsolescence, and permanence?
Himil H. Ramani: Ends in Architecture attempts to reimagine the idea of ‘ending’ through the lens of abandoned architecture– a space constructed on human scale, for preserving specific human purposes, opens up a possibility of provoking questions of the anthropocentric obsession with static environments through cosmetics, maintenance, and everything that goes behind preserving the image of skin of a body. If you think about it, a body of architecture or human that is present in a field is never static, it is always changing, aging, and adapting to the environment it interacts with. This work frames the process to push the standards of visual image making in architecture. By thinking about ending as a continuing process, instead of a singular event in history of the object, it implies that we look at materials no longer as inert conduits of meaning, but their qualities as histories that invite us to follow and retrieve agential collaborations between humans and more-than-human agencies interacting with the site.
Q: Buildings are conventionally designed around anticipated lifespans, cycles of use, and strategies of preservation. Your work instead draws attention to time as something that continuously alters architecture from within and without. How might architects begin to design with time, rather than attempt to protect buildings from it?
Himil H. Ramani: I am interested in understanding time not as something that happens to architecture, but as something that actively produces it. Materials age, surfaces change, and ecological systems establish new relationships with built environments. These processes are often treated as deterioration, inconvenience, or a failure in the life of objects, but it means that they also produce new spatial conditions. Architectural objects, or buildings, often outlive the singular moment of perfection that the architectural drawings aspire, or communicate. You see the process of making architecture through time means that we contest the representations of buildings, or architectural thinking beyond static canvases. The video-work that was shot during changing surfaces as witnessed on abandoned facilities, was also used as the surface of projection, interplaying change as integral part of the work and installation. Designing with time might therefore mean accepting that architecture cannot be fully determined at the moment of its completion, but is open to embrace both ecological and socio-political change between different species.
Q: You describe the work as exploration of architecture in the absence of humans. What becomes visible when architecture is no longer understood primarily through human occupation?
Himil H. Ramani: Architecture, that is an extension of the human body, has the agency to control, monitor and shape the behavioral pattern of bodies that inhabit it. The built environment involves not only human bodies, but other species such as plants, bacteria, animals, birds, insects, and other species that are inherent knowing or unknowingly to our socio-ecosystems. And if you look back in history, architect’s scale often imposes this violence of human scale on both human and more-than-human species as a corrective tool of our social behaviours. Only things that are to this corrective scale become present to us, other things are out of our range. We are always inside of them, trying to measure the world from it. However, in the absence of humans, the ecological occupation of architecture and its corrective structure exposes these corrective structures when plants grow beyond the empty hallways into rooms through its cracked walls and window openings, allowing the environment to become one with the site. It questions the isolation of human bodies from the natural world, could merely be a fabrication of perception. Therefore, it was important for me to understand architecture through the occupancy of other species, unmonitored by humans, to unveil the existence of architecture’s spectrum outside the fixated fabrics of our society, a form of liberation, a form of new knowledge.
Q: The abandoned textile mills of Mumbai have become sites where plants and other ecological processes transform the built environment. Do you see this transformation as nature reclaiming architecture, or as the emergence of a different kind of architectural life?
Himil H. Ramani: Historically the white coat of paint and hygiene that is portrayed in the video-work, one that neutralizes the architectural surfaces was strongly imposed on the mass population as a western morality by modernist architects post first world war. By using colors such as white, the perception of diversity was reformed into clinical hygiene. In 1925, modernist architect Le Corbusier wrote in the French magazine L’Art décoratif d’aujourd’hui, translated to ‘The Decorative Art of Today’, claiming that “Whitewash is extremely moral.” Further, he continues to involve other societal agencies primarily used for controlling and monitoring social behaviours citing– “Suppose there was a decree requiring all rooms in Paris to be given a coat of whitewash. I maintain that it would be a police task of a real stature and a manifestation of high morality, the sign of great people.” This idea not only shapes cultural thinking to a larger audience, but also undermines the ecological presence in architecture, such as bacteria and more than human life that faced scrutiny under this idea. In ‘Ends in Architecture’ therefore, by framing decay as a dynamic process rather than a failure of maintenance, the project challenges the traditions of modern architectural obsession with permanence and perfection. It treats the peeling paint, the cracking concrete, bodies beyond the membrane of white paints, and the invading plant life as a living, moving design canvas for architectural thinking and knowledge production.
Q: Ends in Architecture takes the form of a video work rather than a conventional architectural representation. What can the moving image reveal about architecture that plans, drawings, photographs, or other static representations cannot?
Himil H. Ramani: The moving image allows me to approach architecture as a process rather than a fixed object. Unlike architectural drawings, which often imposes the idea of building through a controlled system of static permanence that revolves around the time frozen in the blueprint, which makes it difficult for the architectural representation to capture the change through moving time. Yet a video allows a possibility to attend to these changing relationships between materials and their environments. In Ends in Architecture, video becomes a way to observe architecture beyond its intended function, allowing decay and ecological presence to become forms of architectural thinking.
Q: You suggest that architecture can enact a form of violence upon a site by imposing a static environment that resists change. What do you mean by architectural violence in this context?
Himil H. Ramani: I think architectural violence emerges from the desire to impose a fixed order on bodies and environments that are constantly changing. If you look back in history, humans have used architecture as a form of violence to correct our bodies. For example corsets that were designed for women to be able to sit at the dining table in a specific way, heels that worked spines, or boots that try to impose symmetry on our feet to walk on urban surfaces. But symmetry in the human body is a disaster and could never work, because the state of ‘walking’ itself is not symmetrical. And our left side of bodies aren’t symmetrical to the right. This dream of a perfect body might be dysfunctional, but its always trapped inside the corrective structures of architecture. And this further becomes a larger attempt to neutralize changes in environments through construction, maintenance, and the regulation of how collective bodies occupy space. In Ends in Architecture, I question this desire for control by observing what happens when a building is no longer maintained and controlled according to human standards. The work asks whether architecture can allow change rather than continually resist it.
Q: The plants growing through the ruins appear not merely as elements within the landscape, but as forces actively reshaping the architecture. How do you understand the agency of more than human life in this process?
Himil H. Ramani: I am interested in how more-than-human life participates in co-producing the environment we inhabit. Plants growing through the abandoned structures are not simply decorative additions to architecture, but they alter its surfaces and relationships with the surrounding environment. This challenges the assumption that architecture is exclusively a human achievement. It opens up the possibility of understanding space as something continually produced through interactions between human and more than human forms of life. My upcoming book ‘Interrogating Plants’ takes a step further to understand how plants have been a victim of domestication and control through the means of human psychology.
Q: The abandoned mill structures you document are part of Mumbai’s industrial history, shaped by the 1982 Great Bombay textile strike and the subsequent transformation of the city. How do you approach the relationship between the social and labor histories of these sites and the ecological transformations taking place within them today? How can an artistic reading of ruins acknowledge these histories without reducing them to a backdrop?
Himil H. Ramani: The textile mills of Mumbai are not simply abandoned industrial structures, they are material remnants of a particular social, economic, and political history. The Great Bombay Textile Strike of 1982–83 was a defining moment in the city’s transformation. Involving approximately 250,000 workers, the strike lasted for around eighteen months and ended without achieving the workers’ central demands. The decades that followed saw the gradual decline of textile manufacturing, the displacement of working-class communities, and the conversion of former industrial lands into sites of commercial and real-estate development. The transformation of these mills is therefore inseparable from the transformation of the city itself.
What interests me about these spaces is that their histories do not end with the cessation of industrial production. The buildings remain, but the relationships that once gave them purpose have changed. Their material structures continue to exist beyond the economic systems, forms of labor, and human activities for which they were constructed. In this sense, they occupy an ambiguous condition: they are simultaneously remnants of a past and environments undergoing new forms of transformation. In Ends in Architecture, I’m interested in observing what happens to architecture when its intended function is no longer sustained. Plants grow through cracks, surfaces deteriorate, and materials respond to moisture, weather, and time. These processes do not erase the building’s history, nor do they necessarily resolve the social and political consequences of its abandonment. Instead, they introduce another dimension to the life of these structures—one that is not entirely determined by human intention.
I am interested in holding these histories and processes together without treating ecological transformation as a romantic narrative of nature reclaiming what humans have abandoned. The industrial ruin is not an empty space awaiting a new occupant; it is already charged with histories of labor, extraction, urban development, and loss. At the same time, it is a material environment in which forms of life continue to emerge and establish relationships with the built structure.
This raises a question for me about how we understand architectural value. If we consider a building valuable only while it remains economically productive or fulfills its original function, we overlook the other processes through which it continues to exist. The mills invite us to consider architecture not as a finished object whose life ends when its intended use disappears, but as a changing material condition embedded within larger social and ecological systems. What comes after architecture, then, is not necessarily a clean break from its past, but an ongoing negotiation between what remains, what has been lost, and what is still becoming.
All images courtesy of the artist
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