June-July 2014
domus 30 June-July 2014
Volume 03 / Issue 08 R200
Author
Contributors Suprio Bhattacharjee Jasem Pirani Photographs Rajesh Vora Bharath Ramamrutham Jeetin Sharma Amit Pasricha Olivier Namais Authors Gyan Prakash Researcher Latika Gupta Curator Ruchir Joshi Writer & film-maker Rahaab Allana Curator
INDIA
030
CONTENTS 25
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
Kaiwan Mehta
26
Werner Oechslin
28
Confetti The patient experience
Antonio Forcellino
30
The death of Michelangelo
Kaiwan Mehta Latika Gupta
32
Chemould Prescott Road
Meanings forged
Gyan Prakash
42
Meera Devidayal
Death and dreams
Ruchir Joshi Rahaab Allana
48
PIX: Habitat
Collecting the landscape
Kaiwan Mehta
52
SPA Design
Projects Tower as spatial landscape
INDIA
030
Contemporary museum for architecture in India
Kaiwan Mehta
62
Architecture Discipline
A spatial moment
Jasem Pirani
68
Malik Architecture
Dramatic within the idyllic
Suprio Bhattacharjee
76
SRDA
Glazed cases in a garden
84
Stefano Giovannoni
Rediscovering archetypes
90
Jasper Morrison
Design that’s needed
96
Rassegna Furniture
103
Feedback Mimmo Jodice’s Naples
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
Volume 03 / Issue 08 R200
Title Editorial The life of dreams
Mimmo Jodice
June-July 2014
Design
029 May 2014
030 June - July 2014
Cover: In spatial terms, the Triburg Headquarter in Gurgaon by SPA Design is an “inverted step-well” where the visual axis is horizontal through all the courtyards and diagonal through all the terrace gardens. The building does not adopt the unified urban-block mentality, but plays with its volumes, step-back terraces and most importantly, its sense of transparency.
“And what we call progress is confined to each particular world and vanishes with it” – Walter Benjamin
A page from the art-book Into a rose garden by Meera Devidayal
domus 30 June-July 2014
26 EDITORIAL
THE LIFE OF DREAMS
Kaiwan Mehta
Dreams have a history. Dreams are often more real than the awake-state life we live in. We believe more in dreams often, and share their picture-perfect rosy gardens and promises than think in the life we can touch and know. It’s good to dream, they are also sites of hope, imagination and creativity, but if they are too monumental, scaling larger-than-life fantasies, closing more towards magic within the dreampromises sequence, then they are no longer only dreams but some existence in a fantasy world. The fantasy world promises a forever, a ‘beautiful forever’, and imagines it can exist outside history, beyond time or the realities of place. Utopia is that perfect land, and hence literally translated the word is ‘no land’. Utopias take energy and strength to be built, they are constructed from the raw material of dreams, and detailed with fine craftsmanship, good use of materials and best techniques; but if utopia does not know the ‘floating world’ it stands on, or the day it forgets that it exists within habitats of imperfections and realities, it either collapses scattered and shattered, or it decays with time. Architecture is one of the strongest visions of dreams built to shape veritable forms and images. It stands tall and robust shaping the geography within which life unfolds and plays itself out. Is architecture the shape of reality? Or is architecture shaping a reality? Meticulous construction systems and details of timber and stone fashioned dreams into images that took the shape of palaces and cathedrals. Architecture works towards a utopia often, often it plays image-games with dreams people have. Mumbai-based artist Meera Devidayal’s current exhibition draws attention to the decay of dreams and monumentality and their cheek by jowl existence with promises and dreams. Large buildings that today are either flatly destroyed to make way for newer fantasylands, or rot and decay in large volumes, you can still observe the once-detailed constructions they were, built with care and professional finesse, and one wonders why something that was built with so much vigour, care and professionalism would await a slow rotten death today – where reality and randomness gnaw at it, eating it up every day, and there you see, in front of your eyes, the history of dreams. On the images of these failing and disgraced monuments, Devidayal superimposes manicured gardens of roses and tulips – the everlasting motif of beauty, hope and honeymoon in popular culture productions such as print posters and Bollywood films. The promised landscape is always there, but yet to come, within reach yet just on the other side of the picture frame, the eternal spring of utopia that is real, but for now yet a dream. The vicious cycle of dreampromises and utopia, everyday life and decay produce atmospheres of anxiety that need thought and maybe forced wakefulness. The other exhibition we discuss in this issue focusses on cabinets of curiosities and Wunderkammers, where precisely these cabinets, these miniaturised worlds of collections, is in one way, largely in its original use, a utopia of coming together, a closing down of differences, and revelling in fantasies, and nurturing fetish, but these wonderful contraptions, in the work of all artists presented in the show become collections, critical and thoughtful of the dream-promises we occupy in many ways, the utopias we believe in so much that we begin to consider them as realities a doorstep away. The cabinets in this exhibition wake you up, as they collect life in pieces, in its talismans, in its fantasy objects, in its doll-house avatars, and collect them in rooms, vitrines, peep-show boxes and crypts, and line them up as reality checks – reality checks
within the grammar of fantasy worlds. Floating World, which is the subject of the last of the five-episode exhibition curated by art critic and theorist Geeta Kapur, celebrating 50-years of Chemould Gallery, one of the oldest and primary galleries in India, is also featured here; in many landscapes and images that this exhibition ‘offers material fragility, subtle rendering, and hovering between the sacred and the profane’. As we talk of dream-promises, utopias, and solid grounds, fragility and subtleness, are crucial in the discussion on how we know, imagine, and perceive the world, or are allowed to do so. One more project that helps us collate the broader theme of living within worlds on this earth is the photographic exhibition under the theme ‘habitat’, along with an accompanying issue of the quarterly photography journal PIX. In the conversation on dreams and their histories, we see image after image from a range of photographers that bring to us the brute nature of civilisational promises, and the environments that contain them. Habitation is the complexity of traversing the world through shared and private spaces, hopeful promises and experiences that are within troubled terrains. Habitation deals with the central concern of architecture – shelter and home – neither in the sense of essentially space, but their conceptual framework in abstractions – warmth, family, protection, need, desire, sanity, culture, and love. But habitats are beyond our cosy understandings of inside and outside or private and public; no interior space is complete haven, no interior space is always where dreams come true, and often interior spaces cheat you with utopias built against the outside world. The ‘home’ is a siting for human habitation. The ‘home’ is often seen as the safe inside, inside in a landscape that is public, urban, and in many ways unprotected; however the tropes by which we reproduce the imagination, at times the illusion of home, even if imaginary and incoherent to the normative definition within the landscape of habitation, is the very locus for charting lives in the terrain of an incomprehensible civilisation. The home is not private space as always imagined, but a site where the human habitation shapes up to living and breathing, generating a constellation of sorts, one that is not yet measured, or classified in all its depths and details. Habitation is a geography of ‘insides’; a labyrinth of interiors where we enter sparingly and only on few occasions, but we often imagine that the few interiors we know and see and experience are what all interiors in civilisation and human lives are about. Simultaneously, we continue to look at idyllic landscapes and homes within, where architecture enjoys itself, celebrates life and materiality, enjoys nature and light, is happy in crafting a tectonic interpretations of hope and desire. The formation of architecture has its own history, as a history of tectonic discourse, as a history of spatial imaginations, and a journey in detailing meticulously the physical landscapes of our time. We visit a house designed by Malik Architecture, within a very different idiom than what we saw earlier right within the pages of this magazine, but still detailed and designed with the same finesse and precision, sharpness of thought and tactility as before. The other house we look at is by Samira Rathod Design Associates, in our journey at looking briefly at some of the work from this vibrant studio – from a research project with deep urban engagement, to an art gallery converted out of a metal workshop in an industrial neighbourhood, to a house in Ahmedababd. Yes there is delight in encountering this work, but it also opens up ways in which various scales
of reality are negotiated by the profession of architecture. In what ways does the role of the architect manifest itself — the creative thinker, the precise craftsman, the delightful artist, the sharp critic, the critical philosopher? In everyday practice how does the architect’s studio operate, and in everyday life what and how does the architect observe as a critical thinker? We look at two other buildings, and one clearly plays within our conversation on dreams and promises. A site office is designed to showcase and exhibit a large township project that is being planned – townships and planning itself work on notions of utopia and the ideal, the dream of a beautiful civic life! But the site office is pretty grand and monumental, and imagines itself as a town hall, a kind of pre-town Town Hall, which itself is an interesting juxtaposition of ideas and functions, but then there is more – the building is designed to exist only for six years, after which it could be dismantled and shifted to another location. At one point we see here monumentality of a town hall but the question of fragility and mobility as a virtue, and these would have never come together in the classic world but it is interesting to note, something that one has pointed even earlier, the temporariness as a virtue in architecture. This is a small and interesting project, but its existence raises many questions about the directions architecture is shaping itself in. And no doubt, in its raison d’être the building brings in the entire story of dream-promises to life again, the detail thoughts on habitations and homes! The other project is also a step in a journey looking at the work of Delhi-based Stephane Paumier. We looked at a university campus, and office-cum-workshop building on a large monumental scale, and now a corporate office building in Gurgaon. While looking at his architectural engagements at different scales and on different sites and programmes, we also had him interview India’s master-engineer Mahendra Raj in the last issue, where he engages with the profession as a thinker and someone who has observed the workings of this field closely. This is the third time we closely look at a corporate building in Gurgaon, the neighbourhood and hub for corporate office and buildings, which leads it to become the centre for architectural fantasies to roll out, exhibiting from the quaint to the fancy, the dramatic to the crazy! In all three buildings we reviewed there were constant questions of a responsible and critical entry and existence in this landscape of architectural madness. Romi Khosla, Aniket Bhagwat and now Paumier, all challenge the corporate tower block typology, redefine it and raise questions in their very own personal ways. All of them critical thinkers and sharp practitioners understand the world of this production well, and then deftly insert architecture there which is thoughtful, rich and critical, and in all three cases a beautiful engagement with materiality and architectural language. Paumier in this case is able to release a transperency in a typology that is always enveloped within a skin, and he is able to let the building tell a story rather than cage it within an image the architect and client so strongly fix otherwise. Well all these ideas and buildings will journey through dreams and promises, their creative and critical biographies will hopefully build up spaces for thoughts and discourse; they will all have histories, just as all dreams have histories, and if we fail to recognise that, and imagine dream-promises to be timeless gems in a ‘floating world’ of crystals and tulips, God or someone needs to save us! km
PROJECTS
domus 30 June-July 2014
76 PROJECTS
domus 30 June-July 2014
PROJECTS 77
Samira Rathod Design Associates GLAZED CASES IN A GARDEN This house in Ahmedabad by Mumbai-based SRDA (Samira Rathod Design Associates) becomes a languid, collagist expression of a journey through the confines of its site’s boundary, traced through one’s motion within newfound spaces of exquisitely crafted material and tectonic detail, resulting in a set of ‘vitrine’-like building volumes that begin to weave themselves freely between what begins to be reinstated as a secluded inner courtyard, and a peripheral urban spatial interstice Text Suprio Bhattacharjee Photos Rajesh Vora, SRDA
It is always a delight to chance upon a project by Samira Rathod. Her work is highly crafted, plays on the sheer joy of experiencing the unexpected; works that are as much about the tactility of each surface, as they are about the articulation of the tectonic of their – the surfaces’– interaction. But that does not mean that the architecture is devoid of conscious experientiality and kinaesthetic immersion. On the contrary, her work exudes a certain delight in the complete experience of the moment, and the spatial choreography of a collage of materials, surfaces and textures embedded in a (seemingly) loosely organised compositional strategy resulting in an almost nonchalant formal articulation that belies the intense process of conception it is preceded by. There is also a persistent attitude towards playfulness and the perception of analogous experience – on the one hand, the incredulity of chancing upon a ‘misplaced’ object or an element, within a curiosity-arousing assembly; while on the other, a deep evocation of
the memory of past experiences, resonant with the vestiges of casual erstwhile observations and tactile engagements that come flooding back in an instant, as beguiling as these instances become. This innate capacity of the architecture to build enough of a proximal experiential familiarity to overcome the otherwise alienation of something new, and yet be able to invoke sheer wonderment and the intense curiosity of an eager explorer endeavouring to ‘discover’ something ‘unseen’, is an inescapable attribute of Samira’s craft. This project is no different. Set in Ahmedabad, this house does not have the typological density of the inner city-dwelling, but perhaps the sense of restrained openness of a courtyard dwelling. A rather straightforward, linear programmatic progression becomes, that can begin to be seen as a driving motif in the architect’s work, an opportunity to explore a richly articulated non-linear spatial narrative that weaves around pre-existing building volumes and
This spread: the house is filled with details that beckon one to reach out and trace their contours – like the texture of the concrete wall and the jaalievoking screen, amongst others (opposite page left and middle) – while also striking an inseparable relationship with the landscape beyond. Within the house, the stair descends along a delicately crafted courtyard vitrine with a deep, leaf-blade-like handrail (below), as the courtyard garden becomes an inescapable edge for the ground floor spaces
domus 30 June-July 2014
78 PROJECTS
trees, freely between what begins to be reinstated as a secluded inner courtyard within the fastdisappearing city, and a peripheral urban spatial interstice. One may be reminded of Samira Rathod’s furniture pieces, in their bold exploration of craft and tectonic possibilities. This is not misplaced, as her architecture stems from a consistent and meticulous attention to detail. One enters the house through a jaali-evoking box strewn with a grid of miniature openings that encloses the trunk of a tree within the confines of its exposed concrete roof to chance upon perhaps the project’s tour de force – the staircase volume. Along an arced skylight, dozens of slender timber hangers with expressed metal connectors build a staccato tectonic rhythm that evokes the unseen aspects of a musical instrument, not unlike the construction of the keys and strings within say, a harmonium or a grand piano. Wrapping around a deep red and maroon pigmented concrete wall, the stair descends along a delicately crafted courtyard vitrine with a deep, leaf-blade-like handrail. The stair treads, with their subtly indented nosing, seem to evoke the worn out leading edges of the staircases one has experienced in the cherished old houses of one’s childhood, or in old buildings that have the mark of time and use left upon them. That strikes a deep chord. Past this spatial knot, one accesses the lounge or living area that opens into both the inner courtyard and the peripheral garden. Past a bar beyond, one enters the dining area that opens, again, into the courtyard and onto the peripheral garden on the other side. All this while, the journey takes one around what begins to be seen as the project’s spatial anchor – the secluded courtyard garden, which becomes an inescapable edge for these ground floor spaces. A clever sliding shutter connects the bar and the dining area, while a copper contraption is revealed as a delightful water feature. A lone tree in the cusp of the courtyard finds a complement in a cobalt blue column outside the dining area, supporting the overhang of the children’s rooms. Above, the master bedroom box seemingly levitates above the lounge space below, duly arrested by supports on three locations that hoist it above the lower glazed enclosure, the effect of its suspension marred however by the heavy curtains and the rather cumbersome copper-clad cylinder that encloses the services from the master bathroom above. Elsewhere, the children’s rooms extend beyond the building volume to overhang the garden spaces below. A fingerlike volume protruding beyond the
master bedroom and bridging the peripheral garden is revealed as a study. The house is filled with details that beckon one to reach out and trace their contours – like the handles for one, or the texture of the concrete wall. Inventiveness and play also finds its voice here – the bicycle wheel and handle on a sliding door, for instance. Colours and materials fill the visual schema – most of the chromatic palette stemming from the nature of the materials themselves – such as copper, exposed concrete, polished wood, burnished metal, stone and cement board. The house strikes an inseparable relationship with the landscape and the boundaries within which it sits. While it opens up towards one aspect to encompass a courtyard, it shuts itself off on a few. Its languid plan schema seems to reach out to ‘grasp’ the site, seemingly expanding to make the notional boundaries of this contained groundscape its own – winding its way between fragments of pre-existing buildings as well as trees on the site. This sense of territoriality – open and receiving of the surroundings, yet introverted enough to be able to define a specific aspect and spatial extent captured at that instant – begins to define one’s journey through the house. The connection struck with the landscape or the outdoors is not generic, but attempts to specifically respond to ‘constructed incidents’ – such as the loose path in the courtyard garden terminating into the lounge, the staircase vitrine that seems to graze a tree (too closely – enough to necessitate the chopping off of its branches), the low windows that capture the low-hanging foliage outside
This page, top: at the entrance, one encounters a tree trunk jutting out into the exposed concrete roof within the jaali-screened area. Middle: A bicycle wheel and handle on a sliding door, add a touch of playful inventiveness. Below: The stair treads, with their subtly indented nosing. Opposite page: the house opens up to encompass the secluded courtyard garden, which asserts itself as the project’s spatial anchor
domus 30 June-July 2014
PROJECTS 79
domus 30 June-July 2014
80 PROJECTS
15
11 12
8 7 9
PROJECTS 81
1 Entry 2 Entrance court 3 Existing Dvd room 4 Lounge area 5 Bar 6 Dining 7 Pantry 8 Store 9 Powder room 10 Staff room 11 Toilet 12 Utility 13 Verandah 14 Garden 15 Garden store 16 Passage 17 Study 18 Master bedroom 19 Master toilet 20 Children bedroom 21 Children toilet
B 10
domus 30 June-July 2014
13 6 2
5
B 20
21
20
17 16 A
A
A
17
A
14
4
18
3
1
19
B B
GROUND FLOOR PLAN
FIRST FLOOR PLAN 0
6M
0
18
19
3
4
SOUTH SIDE ELEVATION
SECTION AA
18
4
0
1
3
16
6M
Project Steely Fins Location Ahmedabad Client Mr Malav Patel Architect Samira Rathod Design team Minal Bhagwat, Bhavesh Patel, Pranav Dakoria Civil Contractors Unicon Engineers, Ahmebabad Structural Engineers Setu Infrastructure, Ahmebabad Services Plumbing Vimarsh , Ahmebabad Electrical Vij Seva, Ahmebabad HVAC Mihhir N Patel, Ahmebabad Other Consultants Landscape M/s Prabhakar P Bhagwat, Ahmebabad Site Area 1.86 m2 Project Area 465 m2 Project Estimate: R 3 crores Initiation of Project: 2010 Completion of project: 2013
6
EAST SIDE ELEVATION
SECTION BB 0
6M
0
6M
82 PROJECTS
the master bedroom, the timber shutters that focus one’s gaze to the interstitial court below rather than the distant urban jumble, the tree trunk captured within the otherwise screened-off entrance area, or the delicate, vine-like, narrow columnar elements that hold up the ‘jagged, massive’ outcrop of the children’s rooms above, to name a few. This episodic nature of the house’s spatial articulation and its construction begins to manifest this search for specificity. The tautness of surfaces contrasts with an apparent looseness of compositional order – the tightly articulated meets a celebratory ad-hoc. But this is not a place for misinterpreting this as a mere collagist scenography, as it begins to prize experience over mere tactile and material information. While it would be incorrect to describe this as fragmentary, one could begin to understand this rather as an attempt to build a disjointed whole – with the gaps and interstices to be filled in by life itself, and the sheer joy of inhabitation and occupation of these voids. The ‘mess’ of living takes centre-stage here, the accumulation and assimilation of experiences, the accretionary nature of our cities and our built landscape. It is an homage to the informal and an evocation of diversity. The specific needs of a sentient being is expressed here through an irrefutable corporeality that immerses one in the joy of touch, the tactile expressiveness of surfaces, and their consequent hapticity. All of which begins to be experienced in this secluded foliated island within a bustling cityscape. If there is any reservation about it being overwhelming in terms of its materials and articulation, this can be suitably argued as its very human-ness. Rather than an idiosyncratic or whimsical ad hocness, one can begin to see this work as a conscious and deeply resonant story-telling, a narrative that is anticipatory and a-perspectival – a reinforcement of being merely human. This becomes the project’s necessary phenomenological lens.
This spread: the house can be interpreted as an attempt to build a disjointed whole; wherein the gaps and interstices will eventually be filled in by the inhabitants of these voids – by life itself
domus 30 June-July 2014
domus 30 June-July 2014
6M
PROJECTS 83