Di 27 | Suprio B - Toward an Architecture of Introspection | DOMUSIndia 03/2014 by Suprio Bhattacharjee

32 CONFETTI

March 2014

Volume 03 / Issue 05 R200

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CONFETTI 33 CONTENTS 25

Author

Contributors Suprio Bhattacharjee Photographs Antonio Trimani Carlos Chen Francesco Castagna Rajesh Vora Randhir Singh Robert Stephens Tina Nandi Vaclav Sedy Sameer Tawde

Shaheen Merali Art critic

027

Christopher Charles Benninger Architect

LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO

Kaiwan Mehta

Editorial Architecture as resource

Werner Oechslin

Confetti What practice without theory?

Suprio Bhattacharjee

Toward an architecture of introspection

Bill Viola

The raft

Madhuvanti Ghose Shaheen Merali

Francesco Maggiore

Sameer Tawde

Kaiwan Mehta

Seher Shah

Drawing allegories

Christopher Charles Benninger Kaiwan Mehta

Shatotto Architecture for Green Living

Projects Essences and facts

Kaiwan Mehta

RMA Architects

Design as changing sensibilities

Guido Canali

Cathedral Museum, Milan

INDIA

Volume 03 / Issue 05 R200

027

LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO

Alberto Campo Baeza

March 2014

Title

Contemporary museum for architecture in India

Authors Madhuvanti Ghose Art curator

INDIA

Design

027 March 2014

Cover: View of the KMC corporate office building by Mumbai-based RMA Architects, where the facade doubles as a performative skin growing a variety of plant species. KMC employs approximately 20 gardeners who tend to the facade and can access it though a system of catwalks on all five levels of the structure.

Sketch by Rafiq Azam for the project S A Residence,Gulshan, Dhaka

Jitish Kallat

Terms of the debate Movie-house territory Pockets of longing and desire

100

Rassegna Furnishings

107

Feedback Alberto Campo Baeza’s Madrid

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26 CONFETTI EDITORIAL 34

ARCHITECTURE AS RESOURCE On two recent occasions, one, an architecture conference at an architecture college in Mumbai and the other, a jury session for national awards in interior design, one was thrown right in the midst of discussing what role theory and criticism play in the way architecture is practiced and produced. In the former context, one was surprised to realise how journalism and criticism were imagined, or treated, as peripheral or a luxury, with a clear resistance to even an attempt at understanding its processes and role; including a self-claimed architectural journalist refusing to understand research, criticism and journalism as ‘engagements with practice’. The latter was a more pleasant experience where the process of judging design became the occasion for practitioners to ruminate over issues that one otherwise took for granted – such as the role of craft in contemporary design, and in what ways can ‘integration’ happen, and what are the protocols of this ‘integration’ – and realise the short-comings within normative practice to deal with such issues, and the fact that often issues need a discussion outside the everyday processes of design and build. Both these experiences simply reinforced the journey this magazine has adopted for itself – to draw out, reference, indicate, and emphasise, the multi-valence in architecture, and hence the many experiments in trying to grasp aspects of this subject-object called architecture. Architecture is the study of a field as much as it holds at it centre an object called ‘building’ – and this constantly shifts the manners and methods by which we try and engage with architecture, attempting to understand it, as well as its existence and behaviour. Architecture, in many ways, becomes the playground for culture, life and society to play itself out. Its existence is much, and far beyond that of the architect, and so, in many ways, the architect is playing his role within the architecture as a field of living, rather than being the super-creator of that field. The architect is oscillating between the roles of a creator and a sustainer – creating the material shell and context, by actively engaging with the ocean of life as matter as well as context, and hence sustaining it. The architect essentially engages with what he is given by culture and society, but in his practice s/he also holds the key to turn the rules of the game at some time under certain conditions. Often the questions architects ask, or are pressured to answer, need to be thought through outside the direct production of architecture, but yet within the biography of buildings and material landscapes. The life of things and objects are journeys within histories and cultural atmospheres, and hence their existence is embedded in context, often even sustained by that – in which case the study of objects is incomplete without understanding the

domus 27 March 2014

Kaiwan Mehta

atmospheres that house them, and through which objects journey. But this also brings us to essentially realise that the study of architecture may not reside within the practice of architecture, nor are the tools of architecture adequate for the knowledge we need to produce about the life of architecture. In which case borrowings from experiences and researches in other fields may be necessary to study and understand, but having said this, the problem is how do we assimilate knowledge produced in different fields and formats into one conversation or a conversation purely on architecture? This issue begins with the question of practice and theory and then journeys through artistic projects that explore questions regarding the mediums of our thinking, cultural forms such as theatre or a public speech and redrawing these formats in different, but specific, spatial and architectural locations. Jitish Kallat spatialises Swami Vivekananda’s speech, draws text not into being an image but being a bodily experience, using the form and sense of a winding stairway through a large space; the stairway and the grand space now not only perform a new role, but also alter our imaginations of reading space typologies through the politics of a speech-content now entering it. The medium of LED lights itself conjures up material histories, and the role colours play in human social templates, now adjusted as image and word, text and landscape, diagram and space, in forms of simultaneous readings, and mappings. As we talk of readings and mappings, the work of Seher Shah redraws architectural drawings, in the way she converts these capsules of message and information into landscapes of spectral conversations. The aerial photograph and the architect’s drawing both assume a power of telling, a sensibility of control – and then Shah, literally flattens them out with a breaking of the scale and geometry of the image, or knitting lines and diagrams through the drawing as if it is a carpet of memories – in this flattening, she literally narrativises the image, taking it beyond the conventions of depth or dimension. Two architects have been touring India, lecturing on their work and thoughts Juhani Pallasmaa from Finland and Rafiq Azam from Bangladesh. As we revisit the way Pallasmaa understands architecture, and urges us to travel this path with him, we, in a detailed way, engage with the scope of Azam’s work. It is not just about the work that Azam produces as an architect, and the very fine and sensual quality it expresses, but it is more about the discourse his work generates in Bangladesh and also the Global South or South Asia. Both these architects produce a discourse on the sensibilities of a material culture like architecture, and literally speak of the ‘eyes of the skin’ but

at no moment is this sensibility only about emotion and sensuousness, it is very cultural and historical. In the emotions that one finds in Azam’s architecture, it is actually possible to ask questions of South Asia’s tryst with multiple modernisms, resistance to universal typographies in architecture, as well as the intellectual life of a city and its inhabitants. Architecture can systematically be explored and expanded to understand the intellectual life of a city and the histories of its inhabitants – but one will have to leave behind the methods that Francis D K Ching’s Form, Space and Order proposes, and work towards other methodologies and tool-boxes of understanding and exploring. On one hand we look at the conservation of old and dying-out cinema houses, while on the other we look at informal ‘slum cinemas’ which produce an architecture of urban tongues, and they are spatial typologies for which the normative structures of study are incapable of producing much knowledge, and hence the demand for newer ways of approaching spatial and material studies in cultural contexts such as Mumbai in this case. And talking of typologies in changing cultural formations, as well as bringing the discussion on South Asian contexts, we review, through an interview, the KMC building in Hyderabad designed by Mumbai-based RMA Architects. We discussed the apartment typology in the context of a Delhi neighbourhood with Mehrotra earlier, and now it’s the corporate office building we look into. Mehrotra, having only recently completed a survey of architecture in India over the last 20 years, is interestingly placed as an architect as well as a researcher to comment on the broader issues of architectural development while negotiating the details of design in one of his own contributions to the contemporary architectural landscape. In his design for the KMC building, he negates the curtain-glazing formula otherwise seen as unavoidable for corporate towers, but still explores the facade as the most contemporary architectural device. He converts the facade to a vertical garden of sorts, not only raising questions of surface and sustainability in a more sensible manner, but as a simultaneous effect, also achieves a blurring of social and class boundaries across the different cadres of employees in the building. This building also localises the production of itself, phasing it out over a time period, completely changing the rhetoric on urban constructions. This building indeed creates much ground for thinking and conversation. In this way, this issue, like all others, journeys through projects and thoughts, in an ever-ongoing attempt to deepen and expand the definition of architecture.km

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36 CONFETTI

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CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM FOR ARCHITECTURE IN INDIA

TOWARD AN ARCHITECTURE OF INTROSPECTION Juhani Pallasmaa, the eminent Finnish architect, academic, writer and theoretician1 recently lectured in India. It was a rare opportunity to ‘encounter’2 the individual who has influenced contemporary architectural thinking profoundly over the past three decades Suprio Bhattacharjee

Right: images from the essay titled An architecture of the seven senses by Juhani Pallasmaa (page28 and 29). Below: cover of the book Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture, with essays by Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Pérez-Gómez, published by William Stout Publishers, San Francisco, 2006

This page: images of the pages from the essay titled An architecture of the seven senses by Juhani Pallasmaa from the book Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture (page 32 and 33)

I first came across Juhani Pallasmaa in my second year of architecture school. He was one of the two jurors for the Alvar Aalto Centennial Student Design Competition, in which I participated as part of a team. (The jurors had set the bar high the winning competition project, a library building, would be built, right next to Aalto’s hallowed collection of revered civic architecture in Seinajoki. Needless to say, no project won the competition.) This was in 1998. Looking back, I can today see how this has had a long-term impact on my thinking. Can a project be solely concentrated on creating an enticing visual image, or are there deeper resonances that one would need to seek? As he states in his essay Toward an Architecture of Humility (1998), “The longing for singular, memorable imagery subordinates other aspects of buildings, isolating architecture in a disembodied vision (...) We become voyeurs obsessed with visuality, blind not only to architecture’s social reality, but also to its functional, economic, and technological realities, those which inevitably determine the design of buildings and cities.” Pallasmaa’s attitude towards architecture and practice has been shaped distinctly by his difficult pastoral childhood during the years between the two World Wars. As he elucidates in his essay titled My Way to Architecture (2006), ”I cannot recall anyone ever having been asked: Can you do this? Mastering everything necessary in daily life

was considered self-evident in farm life. The skills of the farmer were not theoretical knowledge learned through reading, but embodied and tacit wisdom learned and remembered by the muscles and body through observation, imitation and practice. The cycle of the year and weather timed all daily activities and revealed details of hidden wisdom. The instruction of what to do were directly given by the settings, situations and weather, not by verbal instruction. Presumably as a consequence of my farm experiences, I am even today unable to acknowledge boundaries between architecture and design, fine arts and philosophical investigation, or the spheres of life and work. I learned that everything should be done with care and attention, and the way one works reflects one’s attitude to life. Work is an essential part of the art of life and one’s self-identity and self-esteem.” Perhaps this explains Pallasmaa’s prolific output not only as a widely read author (his seminal work The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses is now in its third reprint), his wide engagement as an academic in various teaching posts across the world, but also as an architect engaged in critical ‘practice’ (in the manner often assumed to be understood as somebody who ‘builds’) with a portfolio of works that traverses design domains and scales — currency, door handles, funerary urns and gravestones, graphic design, sculpture, furniture, pavilions, art installations, private

dwellings, landscape commissions, experimental architectures, cultural buildings as well as the largest project built in Helsinki to date - a vast mixed-use complex. His talk here, titled Twelve Themes in My Work: Interplay of Thought and Form sought to encompass this broad oeuvre as well as distil the essential aspects that characterise his thinking. Perhaps what sets Pallasmaa apart from most architects engaged in works across design disciplines is the manner in which it seeks to highlight and perhaps, in a very personal way, attempts to address the vast dichotomies that are inherent within the discipline of architecture. Seeing his work, as an observer, one can sense a deliberate cerebral engagement with the discipline that he describes as being ‘logistically complex and philosophically controversia... As architecture is simultaneously an end and a means, it cannot be prescribed, and it is bound to emerge through a creative process of compromise and synthesis.’ As such he does not seem to avoid a critical self-analysis of his own work and the influences inherent therein, and is often quite candid about their conceptual and formal reasoning. This open-ness can be disarming, but perhaps it is an insight into overcoming the ‘insecurity’ and ‘uncertainty’ that accompanies most creative work, their inception and the way in which they are perceived by onlookers and experiencers3. In this manner, he

humanises the task of the architect to a profound degree, where he states that ‘while we are working on an artistic or architectural project, we are also working on ourselves’4 such that a work can become an assertion of one’s own sense of being, at a particular moment in that person’s evolution. Pallasmaa’s work reinforces our nature as sentient beings with the ability to perceive that which is beyond the realm of the merely physical. And it reinforces our connection with our primordial instincts. These include our affinity for landscape, for touch, for social engagement, for associations drawn from deep memory, for the quest for silence and peace in our everyday lives and the need to overcome anxiety and uncertainty with reassurance and composure. This profoundly human engagement becomes the basis of his phenomenological approach to architecture ‘which encounters architecture in its lived and real material and mental dimensions (...) to make us see the majesty of the mountain, the patience of the tree, and the passing smile on a stranger´s face. In today´s world of alienation and detachment, we need an architecture that can re-mythologise, re-sensualise and re-eroticise our relation with the world and fuse us with our very lived reality. Today’s popular fallacy is to see architecture and art as realms of fantasy, as, in fact, they are always areas of intensified reality’.5

However it would be misplaced to assume that this is an overtly serious and self-indulgent approach to architecture, as can be evidenced in the dry wit embodied within his work (see the inscription on a manhole cover in his project at the Cranbrook Academy) and the manner in which these are communicated in his talks. This combination of a cereberal, intellectual approach to architecture with the appreciation for the need of good humour is an essential characteristic of his work. His oeuvre encapsulates his very sense of being - an individual who has clearly set out the fact that ‘there is nothing which cannot be done’ and uses a deeply humane approach to find a deep sense of purpose within every work, that goes beyond the facile aims of mere artistic creativity. In his own words, ‘the timeless task of architecture is to create embodied existential metaphors that concretise and structure man’s being in the world.’6 Juhani Pallasmaa’s own life-work gives us perhaps the greatest evidence of this (his own) assertion. And it also reinforces the fact that the creation of a deeply humane architecture needs the relinquishing of the externalist ‘artistic ego’ in favour of a deeper search for meaning and purpose, which may come from the realisation that the individual’s inner spiritual experience is central to the creation of architecture.7

I use the word ‘theoretician’ here with a sense of trepidation. As he describes in his essay ‘An Architectural Confession’ (2011), ‘the original meaning of the Greek word theorein is to make observations, not to speculate.’ As such one can see his writings emanate from his own critical practice, and not an independent esoteric activity. 2 I use this deliberately here – Pallasmaa’s essays can be found compiled in two volumes titled Encounters 1 & 2. 3 Pallasmaa talks often about this aspect of ‘insecurity’ and ‘uncertainty’ and how his practice as an architect is, in very personal terms, a means of overcoming these. 4 From his talk “Twelve Themes in My Work: Interplay of Thought and Form.” For those who missed the direct experience of this talk, it is available online on the Vimeo page of NC State University’s College of Design. 5 From ‘An Architectural Confession – My Phenomenology’ (2011). 6 From ‘An Architecture of the Seven Senses’ in ‘Questions of Perception - Phenomenology of Architecture’, A+U Special Edition, 1994. 7 Here I would especially like to draw one’s attention to the affinity his thinking shares with eastern thought - Pallasmaa’s work is indeed influenced substantially by Zen philosophy. 1

Finnish architect, educator and critic Juhani Pallasmaa was recently in India on a public lecture tour.