With a career spanning over five decades, architect Raj Rewal, 80, is the one behind these resilient concrete structures. And now, NGMA hosts its first architectural exhibition with Rewal’s retrospective, titled “Raj Rewal: Memory, Metaphor and Meaning in his Constructed Landscape”.

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“His architecture is the product of self-reflexive considerations of both his foreign and indigenous roots that foreign critics have valourised as ‘critical regionalism’: that is, the critical adaptation of the principles of European Modernism to local traditions,” say architects and curators AG Krishna Menon and Rahoul B Singh’s note.

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Perhaps a refreshing element in the exhibition is Rewal’s cartoons in miniature style — sardonic portrayals of men, women, and Nehru topi-donning rotund figures in various scenes of life. One has a bearded lean baba with a caption “Caste marks can’t be hidden under cap”. Rewal talks of his mother’s wish for him to learn art, and his consequent stint as a cartoonist for Shankar’s Weekly.

Talking about Rewal’s cartoons, Singh says, “He started doing them around the ’60s-’70s, and a lot of them were published in magazines overseas. These were intended not as political cartoons, but as a means of reflection. They were always playful and had a certain lyrical quality to them.”