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Substantial Architecture What is the substance of architecture and how does it extend across programmes and sites while continuing a consistent dialogue? Two reviewers explore this in the case of two projects by SPASM Design
Design
SPASM Design
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Kaiwan Mehta Suprio Bhattacharjee
Photos
Sebastian Zachariah (House in Munavali) Roque Fernandes, Tjeerd Koudenberg, Andy Lamb, Sanjeev Panjabi (Exim Tower)
Sebastian Zachariah 14.01.2012 Alibaug, IN 26
Nikon Coolpix P500 14 mm 4.8 1/60 s
The urban landscape that provides the scope for architectural interventions is often not too conducive to architectural experiments and a value-based practice. On the other hand, an economic boom creates a niche space for the design in the countryside. The countryside that is less pressured by bye-laws or constraints of space or budget often becomes the occasion for exploring architectural ideas. On the other hand, the metropolitan space is the occasion for architecture to intervene in a large public context. We decided to discuss two projects of Mumbai-based SPASM Design, headed by Sanjeev Panjabi and Sangeeta Merchant, that cross this spectrum of the urban and the countryside, but show a carry forward of values and ideas in whichever context they are building. Many affluent families from Mumbai often choose to build a dream country home in one of those favourite locations such as Alibaug. Located in a small village in Munavali, close to Alibaug, this particular house designed by SPASM is in a three-acre plot, which is partly a grove of tamarind and mango trees. The cue for the design of this house was the brick kiln that you find scattered around many areas in Maharashtra, and you often notice them as you drive around this landscape. At one level, the architect is trained to notice the aesthetics of geometry and material
Alibaug Dar es Salaam
in such objects/assemblage in the landscape, and SPASM very delicately builds up the aesthetics of a brick kiln into their design. However, what becomes of interest in this cue is that the kiln is the production site of a crucial building material. Often missed, unacknowledged, the brick kiln is a manufacturing unit of sorts involving labour, material and the networks of demand in the building industry. This heavy-duty and active complex now becomes the cue for a weekend home, a retreat from the hectic city life. This was a design-and-build assignment, the first such project for the office. Panjabi and Merchant describe their experiences with the team quite enthusiastically, “We had a brick mason — eccentric! Six carpenters with their radios blaring! An old stonecutter whose hands as hard as stone gave evidence of his life’s work, and our engineer all of 28 years who questioned the necessity, sense and strength of everything from design decision to construction joint, to frustrating levels! We enjoyed building this house…” For SPASM Design the act of building is a procedure of engaging with the tool box of architecture, its materials and its values. The bricks in this house are more like pieces collected from the vast environment of kilns and architectural history that celebrated 27
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Alibaug, IN
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I The natural texture of the brick, and the language of a brick kiln structure make up the essential substance of this architecture II Like any farm building you have to step out of the building to go from one room to another III The strong tectonic roof, breaks away from the experience of the house, making a strong formal gesture above the grove IV The lines of geometry along with the texture of the materials such as wood and brick constitute the spatial experience in this country house
fact box THE BRICK KILN HOUSE Munavali, Alibaug, India Design Architects spasm design Principal Architects Sangeeta Merchant Sanjeev Panjabi Design Team Mangesh Jadhav, Mansoor Kudalkar, Thomas Kariath, Nafeez Ansari, Parag Satardekar Structural Engineering Gireesh Rajyadhaksha Building Contractor R. K. construct Site Area 9,800 m2 Building Area 830 m2 Design phase 01/2009–06/2009 Construction phase 05/2009–12/2011
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Alibaug, IN
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the brick. The brick is not burdened to be a weave of jaalis, or form patterns that we may identify with regional interpretations of the material and lifestyle within architectural paradigms. The brick is material, the brick is landscape, it holds within it blemishes that came from its making process, and these now become part of the romantic countryside home. The brick layer has signed his name in the brick wall, a patterned letter, and even this becomes part of the architecture. As the architects put it, “as with all architecture, what endears is never what is planned but the subtle occurrences and accidents which creep in unnoticed, they are the ultimate fruits of architecture...” The house is a series of lines and textures amidst the groves on site. The calibrated composing of brick and timber, ground and earth shapes the nature of this building, which is also a farm-building/ house-like composition of rooms where you have to move outside the house to go from one room to another. The sense of movement, that is punctuated with the details and textures of the material fabric builds the spatial and tectonic experience of this house. An architected geography sits and accomodates within the natural geography of the land. The living space has a ‘curious shed-like volume’, and the different materials and the properties they embody shuffles between the measure of a unit-detail and surface texture they produce. Every room is cut on two sides with openings allowing for good ventilation, and as most country homes that hide from the scorching light, this house too modulates the entry and flow of light. As the two main wings sit at right-angles around an awkwardly-leaning tree, the house builds a story with the colour of wood and brick, and the visual feel of hand-made units. The house sits quietly like a stack of bricks in a grove of trees, with a pool settled under the shade of a tree. Its roof with deep overhangs, wooden slats, brick-work walls with openings allow for a smooth but articulated entry of sun, wind and rain. One will slowly see the house grow old. As luminescent moss will grow, this house will retreat into the landscape. The country home will forget its architecture, or architecture will simply become landscape, nature and environment. 32
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The understanding of architecture that is displayed in this Munavali ‘brick-kiln’ house is also noticeable in a very urban project — Exim Tower in Dar es Salaam. The urban tower is compact and iconic, as expected of such a programme and building, but it is also a tower that reaches out to the city rather than enclosing itself within its surface-skin. Its iconic nature emerges out of its architectural interpretation of a corporate programme. The iconicity of this building is not externally pasted on a core structure that hides for lack of architecture while the pasted skin screams out loud. The programme of the office building is developed into the structure and tectonics of the floating and stretching-out terraces. This double-height terrace extends the building to the city, to the environment outside the conditioned working-space. Dar es Salaam is a harbour city in Tanzania, retaining traces and memories of a colonial past, where shaded arcades and colonnades defined a climatically-sensitive interface between architecture and urban public-life. As in most globalising cities today, here too a paranoia for security and the frantically emerging global style of architecture dominates. Architecture today often concentrates on structural and material abstractions availing of the surplus in the building industry market. As the city turns into a financial hub, introvert forms have destroyed the fabric of the city as they mushroom without connecting to their context. Understanding this situation, SPASM Design approached the project for a speculative office tower, which was to be a 15-storey building amidst a low-rise urban sprawl, in such a way that “every architectural requirement was carefully synchronised to craft a building coherent to its siting and function”. The design of the tower is developed in its section, with every alternate floor extending out as a terrace, and the linear proportion so calculated as to allow adequate natural light to enter the workspace. The extended terraces act as step-out and hang-out spaces for those working in the building. Where most office or corporate buildings hold their workers in an inward looking shell, cutting off the outside world, the Exim Tower opens
The house is only a stack of bricks in a grove to a passerby, but once you enter it, it opens up as a farm building with verandahs enclosing a courtyard with a pool The shed-like nature of the living room, and the easy flow of spaces from the courtyard through the verandahs and room makes for the language of a country house The bathroom, which sits in the grove, and is partially open to the sky
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its spaces to acknowledge and engage with the city out there. The tower is also oriented within the city grid so as to allow itself maximum open viewing zones, and making way for ingress and egress points at the ground level. The otherwise white tower is grounded by the use of Hassan-green granite cladding at the ground level, making the building softer and non-reflective at the street level. The principal glazing of the tower is shaded by a stainless steel mesh that filters solar gain and buffers ambient noise. The tower with its special mix of concrete has a particular sheen when lit up. The white building with its stainless steel mesh and cantilevered terraces gives the building an architectural presence but one that is not dominating the landscape like most other vulgar and glaring towers. In fact its form and use of the stainless steel skin and floating terraces with their tapered crosssections allows the building to enjoy the views of the city and the sense of space, making the working space of the building a part of the city’s geography as well as contributing to the architectural fabric of the city. SPASM Design attempts constantly to explore what the strengths and possible expressions of architecture can be. In projects like the country house or the urban tower, SPASM Design attempts to rework these prototypical programmes through their architectural posturings. Architectural values are more important than pursuing iconic imagery, and this is the mainstay of design with Sanjeev Panjabi and Sangeeta Merchant of SPASM Design. They show the tenacity to extend architectural expressions of form and materiality, through questions of architectural ethics across a range of different projects. Architecture is a finite expression here, where process is a gradual development of certain key beliefs and ideas. — KAIWAN MEHTA Architect and critic
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Dar es Salaam, TZ
Often when one looks at the work of a practice, one searches for a signature, a parti, a move that is always there — that is identifiable across projects, not necessarily in its superficies but perhaps in something much deeper — the manner in which a building is made perhaps, how the work is put together as a set of spaces and inhabitations, experiential aspects or, say, whether the set of works can begin to represent a specific world-view. In this respect, the work of Mumbai-based architectural practice SPASM (Sanjeev Panjabi And Sangeeta Merchant) represents perhaps any reviewer’s delight — a robust set of projects, each one exquisitely crafted in its materiality as well as spatiality, and a set of moves in each project that starts making sense once one is able to see and grasp their larger work as a whole. The tools are perhaps ancient — whether it is stereotomy (the act of carving out) or accretion (the act of putting together additively), and there is the pervasive presence of a sense of craftsmanship, even in larger projects. This aspect is significant as it can become troublesome for any craft-oriented practice working within a milieu where execution is carried out mostly by unskilled individuals. There is a distinct lean towards a sense of mass. Yes, of course this would be obvious for works by a practice that is conscious of its climatic context. But the ‘mass’ here operates differently: mass that is delicately poised at the edge of a precipice, for instance. Or where mass is consciously liberated of its subservience to gravity. However, the sensation of mass here needs to be clarified from a sense of massiveness. These buildings are not ponderous. On the contrary, their mediated assemblage and masterful articulation relieves them of any sense of being weighed down. An example of this is their project for a high-rise in Dar es Salaam, where the prospective banality of a slab block is deftly handled by a simple yet bold device — the cantilevered terrace garden. 34
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Projecting dramatically beyond the narrow faces of the tower, these incisions into the sky open up vistas as well as marking an unmistakable silhouette in an uncluttered skyline — shading devices in super-scale. One longer side of the tower opens up towards the sea, the other is sheathed in a metal scrim through which emerge two staircases which share the cantilevered sky terraces’ profile, rhythm and structural drama, coming across as younger siblings. In this project, the articulation of the various building masses makes the building seem frayed at the edges — the repetitive rhythm of the cantilevered terraces break the monolithic mass of the tower into an object with a serrated profile. As much as it seems to strike a defensive posture with its entire armoury — as the architects label the building’s gestures (although laden with grace), it also makes the building’s porous spatial nature apparent. This is not a run-of-the-mill insensitive skyscraper. But one wherein the limitations of the type have been overcome and a solution has evolved that makes it almost canonical for similar climatic conditions. In the Exim Tower, the building’s weighted projections have a reverse effect: their sheer mass and scale, with their dramatic yet composed suspension high above the city, mark a sense of inner lightness. The tower reaches out to the surrounding landscape — whereas the gestures also bring the city and the elements in. This is an entity in a harmonious state of balance within and without. As aggressive as it may seem, the building’s poise belies a calm composure shaped by an embrace of forces external as well as from the inside. That is perhaps what the architects try to connect to when they compare their tower to a ‘samurai warrior’. The above description explores a sense of ‘inclusivity’ that is a hallmark of the architects’ work — something that they
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The principal glazing of the tower is shaded by a stainless steel mesh that filters solar gain and buffers ambient noise, giving the body of the tower a sinuous weightlessness
The terraces, extending from every alternate floor, is a way in which the office working space extends into the city, and incorporates the city within its daily life
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consciously ascribe to and state. But there is an obvious duality. Inclusivity here is beyond a normative understanding of ‘transparency’ versus ‘opacity’. It goes beyond this obvious physical quality. Can an opaqueness be still considered inclusive? What highlights this altered understanding of inclusivity? Can a sense of being be ‘open’ even if one outwardly seems to reject external influences, or one’s immediate physical context. This may read as rhetoric, but there is a fundamental search here — what is the relationship between a building’s physiognomy and the attitude it holds towards the elements and a site’s natural geography, not to mention the influence of culture. The ‘Brick Kiln House’ in Alibaug, India, demonstrates this beautifully. The outer perception is of a hermetic container — with minimal contact with the outdoors or the outside world. The mass staggers ever so slightly and there are subtle deviations — and the courses have random ‘missing’ bricks — a direct translation of the brick kilns the architects saw in the vicinity. This has the effect of making the wall seem visually permeable (when it is actually not, except at the corner of a volume where the brickwall becomes a jaali to capture an open-to-sky court for a bathroom). The house also succeeds in making a strong visceral connection between the process of making a material and the final act of putting that material to use. While on the outside, the impenetrable nature of a kiln is made ever so apparent; on the inside the house presents a stark contrast. Open, airy, receiving of the elements — the house has a pavilion-like nature that one would not anticipate at first glance. Verandahs that draw the vegetation in, a tall room where the spatial boundary between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ is defined by where it can rain or not, the use of a lot of glass where needed and large oversailing parasols hint at a light-handed approach to shaping the spaces for living. The site is embraced and the house opens up at one corner, its edges defined by a pool. In this sense, the house unmistakably creates an open inner realm, where the sense of inclusivity is scaled to relate not only to people, but flora and fauna. The spaces are restful. One realises that the house is perhaps a projection of an altered state-of-being — the mind manifested-elements of pre-existing nature taken in and 38
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the geography respected. The building is about its sanctum — an open (and not bounded) core that whilst seemingly drawing away and closing off its surrounding actually manages to do the inverse — to create a set of contemplative spatialities that allows the user to reflect on man’s relationship with nature. The brick here too loses its sense of physicality. The house is so much about the material that after a point of use it is actually no longer about the material. Details will disappear and only be revealed upon closer inspection, the wholeness becomes more important than its constituents. Only regular users will slowly discover the workings of the building’s hidden assets - meticulous attention to detail yet a not-so-fussy joinery that is easy to read and understand, and an overall tectonic quality that tends to subdue the actual detail — the ‘how’ to the ‘what it does’ — the material that constitutes that architectural device and its effect upon its users. The singularity of the material and the subsequent monolithic nature of the construct are other recurring aspects of the architects’ works. These works allow for unitary spatialities (in terms of material) with intensified experiences. Yet, heterogeneous inhabitable environments are created for their users – something to look forward to in a house under construction at Khopoli. Curiously too, many of the lower inner spaces have a troglodytic nature that stands in stark contrast with the aerie-like feel of the belvederes — the large glazed box in the Khadakvasla House, the pavilion atop the Brick Kiln House, or the upper storey of the Aon Headquarters in Dar es Salaam. This duality can be seen in light of the discussion on the nature of the projects’ ‘inclusivity’. This dialogue between the sense of mass and an inherent lightness, in the grounded lower levels and the oversailing parasols, hark back to historic or cultural typologies that stand at extremes — a cave-like nature and the pandal (a temporary pavilion erected during festivities). In an upcoming project — the Zanzibar House — these two distinct opposites seem to merge into a unified whole — where the aerie with its large parasols sailing over the treetops (for adequate protection from the sun and rain) and the cave-like
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I&IV The building sits on the public street with a softer approach and a wide canopy. The green marble softens the base as compared to the glistening white concrete of the rest of the building II The terraces that form the essential architectural language of this building are also the favourite meeting and relaxation spaces for the people working here III The building accommodates itself within the urban fabric, and yet stands as a strong architectural gesture
retreat carved into a hillside (to create living spaces with equitable thermal conditions) are encompassed within a bold zodiac-like profile that stands out almost lighthouse-like along the coastline. This would be one project to look forward to. — Suprio Bhattacharjee Architect
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fact box EXIM TOWER Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Design Architects spasm design Associate Architects Iain Pattie Associates Principal Architects Sangeeta Merchant Sanjeev Panjabi Design Team Sanjay Parab, Maithili Joshi, Andy Lamb, John Kelly Structural Engineering COWI (T) Ltd Building Contractor China Railway Jianchang Engineering Co (T) LtD Site Area 1,541 m2 Building Area 10,058 m2 Height of the building 68 m Design and Construction Phase 2005—2009
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