August 2014
domus 31 August 2014
Volume 03 / Issue 09 R200
Author
Contributors Suprio Bhattacharjee Ekta Idnany Photographs Ariel Huber ARTUR IMAGES Carlos Chen Charles Garcia Matteo Bergamini Milan Rohrer Photographix Rahul Mehrotra Rajesh Vora Sebastian Zachariah Sergio Oriani Tina Nandi Tomas Riehl Authors Sebastian Cortés Photographer
INDIA
031
CONTENTS 23
Design
Title
Kaiwan Mehta
24
Editorial Invitations and journeys
Michele De Lucchi
26
Confetti Thought as the basis for design
Christian Kerez
30
On the concept of structure of architecture
Vittorio Prina
34
Aleksandr Sokurov’s atmospheric Distortions
Joseph Rykwert
36
Kamini Sawhney
39
Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation
The exactitude of seeing
Sebastian Cortés
45
TASVEER Vacheron Constantin
Empty rooms and surface information
Sharmila Chakravorty
52
SAVE Forum
New-age Chipko Movement
Kaiwan Mehta
58
RMA Architects
Projects Humility in architecture
Does architecture criticism matter?
Contemporary museum for architecture in India
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
INDIA
Architecture BRIO
Architecture multiplies life
Architecture BRIO
Artifice and nature
Angela Maria Piga
84
Karl-Heinrich Müller
The Rocket Station project
96
Konstantin Grcic
Anatomy of a lamp
Pierluigi Cerri
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Rassegna Kitchen
107
Feedback Pierluigi Cerri’s Milan
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
August 2014
Ekta Idnany Suprio Bhattacharjee
031 August 2014
031 August 2014
Cover: The pavilion for underprivileged children designed by Architecture BRIO initiates a reflection on the capacity of architecture to ‘multiply life’.
Site plan for Hathigaon in Jaipur, by RMA Architects
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24 EDITORIAL
INVITATIONS AND JOURNEYS It’s that time of the year when someone working with and within education encounters either a new burst of energy, or feels compelled to be reflective and critical; since one has just finished planning teaching ideas and formats for the coming academic year, and teaching new batches of students has started. Education and teaching are closely related, not to producing newer and newer entrants into the field of a certain practice, as is often thought, but education in many ways is about the redefining of fields and practices therein, or it is about the challenges one feels or observes as a practitioner. The areas of practice and knowledge production one is working within are set in turmoil, once one is closely observing them as an educator and/or a critic. It becomes often difficult to function within one’s set roles, as one is questioning one’s own role and contribution, from within the tools of one’s own practice as an educator or critic and theorist. Being involved in crucial and critical ways with architecture, art, as well as design, there are multiple cross-references one is dealing with between these related fields, which are yet very different in the way they understand their own selves. One is also looking at primary education in the special areas (such as undergraduate education) as well as engaging with more senior and post-graduate conversations and programmes as well, and this opens up the field to enquiry and review from very different scales of observation and thinking. But in many ways these fields of work and practice are personally all about engaging with everyday life, their politics and cultural processes, at times much more than knowing and addressing their tools of trade and mechanisms within. Architecture or design as artifice occupy most discussions and conversations, and so terms like best-practices and innovation, or aesthetic value and apt technology occupy discussions. These discussions result in being self-referential and struggle to connect with everyday life through catch-phrases like ‘context’ or ‘sustainability’, or indicate extensions in the world of social and cultural responsibility as an obligation of duty! The question of humility in design or architecture, or the aspect of life and its multiple existences with and within designed objects and sheds, are crucial as much as the nature of art/design as an argumentative and reflective proposition. With Rahul Mehrotra’s project Hathigaon in Jaipur, one encounters the questions on what roles does and can architecture play in shaping common lives, and its relevance in the way people live and work; to that one could ask, does architecture have the capacity to imagine human life, nature and diverse needs? Architecture and design’s mega aspirations to be part of national histories, and shaping a ‘new India’ (whatever that means for the many different people) are always occupying history and classroom debates, or studio and public imaginations, but we forget the fragility of design or architecture and the possibility that its aspirations and monumentality is so big that it may hamper human development and crush its own patron/builder rather than enhance life and its multiple moorings. Aspirations lead to creative and rich moments and encounters no doubt, but misplaced
Kaiwan Mehta
aspirations can flood social spaces to the point of excess that kills; and often architecture and design are too pushed into the space of aspirations built out of social and cultural pressures, rather than processes. In the Hathigaon project architecture is the cue, it is the medium, but neither the primary focus nor the final product. In many ways the pavilion for underprivileged children designed by Architecture BRIO initiates a reflection on the capacity of architecture to ‘multiply life’, to encourage and produce an energy of encounter and collaboration, play and creativity. Architecture in this project is minimal but sharp and precise, it involves effort, thought, and technique to construct spaces that defy generic definitions yet accommodate everyday programmes, and let possibilities for programmes beyond expectations shape up, and create the possibility for chance to shape things. It is between possibilities, chance and the shape of life and action that this building – non-building operates. Whereas the other architectural example by Architecture BRIO plays with architecture as an artifice, an object of defined form and shape that sits within a landscape, within a geography. Deft use of spatial fluidity in planning combined with materials and details that lead to a visual interweaving of context and design (objects, details) produces the classical object of architecture – the house, within the classical encounter for architecture, a brush with nature. In previous issues, we have focussed on the idea of a leisure home as a specific kind of urban and contemporary building typology, not a generic produce of architecture, and in this feature we again analyse this. Two other landscapes of architectural practice occupy this issue of the magazine – history and environment. At on level two issue that are done to death, yet it is never enough how much ever we discuss them; the problem remains in the methodology and genuineness of approach to these subjects. Do we talk of History or Environment (Sustainability) as topics with current currency, as ‘to be done’ things or is there a genuine, even personal investment in the subject and its broader understanding and consequences? Often and in most cases, one can safely say, it is the former. We cannot visit either subject in a patronising way! An everyday engagement is probably the only genuine engagement in the environment we live in today, where jumping on the bandwagon of popular subjects, politically correct issues has become the order of the day. In two features we look at an everyday engagement with subjects, concerns and lives. One of them is the subject of mangroves in the Versova area in Mumbai, where citizens and professionals have worked consistently to stop their erosion and destruction, and help rejuvenate them. A rich documentation of this project through photographs, action plans, newspaper stories indicates the everyday engagement of those involved in this initiative, and it is a great example to either take forward or to learn from and work in other such sites. The other project, prima facie that appears to be historical, maybe nostalgic, maybe making a plea for conservation, but actually much
more intellectual than any of the above is a photographic documentation of house in Sidhpur. A town that has eroded in importance over time still continues to hold within it palatial buildings, large houses, heavily invested with detail and ornamentation in its architecture. The photographer Sebastian Cortés is not only exploring the idea of home and home-ness, taking off from his own biography, but is also exploring the visual structuring of architecture which is apparent in a very different tonality and light in its days of decay. The surface in architecture, which has been a personal area of research and investigation for me over sometime now seems to also be the focus in this imagedocumentation process. This project takes me back personally to three research sites – Bombay/Mumbai, Budapest, and Shekhawati – in my urban investigations in each of these three cities it was the surface, the architectural ornamentation, the flourish of detail and craftsmanship, that occupied my arguments, not as issues architectural but as matters urban. The ornament as an urban motif engages architecture with everyday life in a way that nothing else does, and this I have detailed in a couple of published essays and public lectures now, including the most detailed one on Havelis in Shekhawati which was recently published in a book on the subject by Marg Publications, and another version of the essay has appeared in one of the earlier issues of Domus India. In this magazine we have often reflected on the surface, the skin and the ornamentation in architecture and this feature adds on further to this subject. Talking of surfaces and depths, tonalities and landscapes, the feature on drawings by some of India’s most important and critical modern and contemporary artists, is a peek into an exhibition of many such works from the collection of the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation. Just as the Rykwert essay draws attention to issues of architectural criticism and documentation, the role of models, cast copies, and museums, the essay on Drawings takes us to one of architecture and design’s primary form of engagement – ‘Drawing is direct. Like scratching with your finger nail, or pressing with your finger tip,’ as artist Sudhir Patwardhan phrases it. Architecture and design operate through many layers of intervention and operation – from the scratch on paper, ground or material to the reflections on what we produce as extensions, collages, and interventions in the landscape and environment we live and work in. And in between one is constantly looking for the process of making meaning in culture and life, bring creative thinking and critical imagination into everyday life, rather than producing artefacts that struggle to be beautiful or innovative, or waste time living up to misplaced aspirations that are often monumental, and rarely invitations to reflective and thoughtinducing journeys towards a beautiful everyday life! km
PROJECTS
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Architecture BRIO ARTIFICE AND NATURE This retreat in Alibaug becomes a languid arrangement of a set of spaces that swerve and position themselves within a verdant landscape to afford its inhabitants a range of views that encompasses aspects in the distance and those in close proxmity Text Suprio Bhattacharjee Photos Sebastian Zachariah, Photographix
The leisure home is always an enticing proposition to behold. As a building typology that, by its very nature, ends up finding itself on ground distant from the density and hustlebustle of the city, the leisure home benefits from the absence of constraints imposed upon it by the city. On open ground, one comes close to realising an idealised vision of living that is in congruence with that of the residents’ or ‘the client’, or as we have seen in the course of the 20th century, the architect’s vision of living that may or may not embrace the residents’ ideals. Nonetheless, this sense of freedom has always offered us engaging views of man’s direct interrelationship with the environment, with the specifics of the ground on which these houses sit, and thus broader world-views of the interaction between artifice and nature, between a settler and the wild. Alibaug is this place off Mumbai’s hustle and bustle where those who can, afford themselves a slice of the idyllic that is lost to the citydweller. This landmass across the city’s harbour has always been that place of retreat, a now-tamed landscape where former groves of trees and open farmlands offer one a chance of escape, as well as therapeutic getaways, which however brief they might be, allow the architect to explore aspects of a site’s condition, to often achieve startling results. One such getaway is this dwelling by Mumbaibased practice Architecture BRIO. One’s vehicle is left behind to find oneself chancing upon a set of stark grey concrete volumes that spread themselves out over the landscape, large and boulder-like, seemingly reaching out to the views beyond, and dissected by the shallow riverbed of a seasonal stream. A bridge affords access to an apparently closed volume that sits on what one begins to realise is a spur where the streambed makes an s-curve through the site. This block consists of, what appears from the outside, a large skewed volume heaving
Above and left: the access bridge connects to an apparently closed volume that sits on what one begins to realise is a spur where the streambed makes an s-curve through the site
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itself up from the streambed, with another volume pivoting off it and cantilevering over the rivulet after it has turned. This houses the master bedroom suite, with the closed volume that greets visitors enclosing a bathroom and dresser, along with an open-to-sky shower space from where one can peek through a miniscule slot cut into the hull of the concrete container. The bridge leads from a trellised pavilion or pergola structure that connects to the aforementioned accessway, as well as to the main body of the house. A narrow body of contained water along this shaded pathway strikes a connection to the seasonal stream beyond, ‘acting as a celebration of it during the monsoons, and a memory of it during the dry season,’ as the architects put it. Despite the monolithic nature of the house’s external appearance, the main body of the dwelling can be read as a set of interconnected volumes that find place around the existing trees of the site, gently swerving and repositioning themselves to occupy the interstices and affording its inhabitants a range of views that encompass aspects in the distance and textures in close proxmity. Thus, the living room heaves off the ground like the hull of a beached vessel
to draw in the view of the hills in the distance, while a window may be positioned to make one gaze at the bark of a tree that begins to define a shaded court. Elsewhere, the bedrooms become nothing less than containers of the landscapes they gaze out onto, with their projecting planes of concrete and metal acting like barn doors of focus lights or like visors, offering their occupants a chance to be at one with the mise en scène as large sliding and folding doors move sideways to dissolve the boundaries of the rooms. As such, these splayed volumes can also be read as viewing devices, that obscure aspects of the surroundings while emphasising others. In that sense they begin to define a specific relationship the occupants share with their surroundings, despite the dissociation of the building’s volumes from the ground at its extremities. This formal strategy is described by the architects as a measure to ‘defy the heaviness of the concrete volumes. By not resting it on the ground, the relationship with the landscape paradoxically is strengthened.’ This interplay of a sense of weightiness and levitation allows one to read this as either a metaphor for a set of large geological entities or a manmade hull.
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The sense of inner open-ness belies the hermetic nature of the house as may be perceived from the outside, and in many ways strikes a deep connect with traditional typologies wherein a dwelling begins to have a remarkable sense of open-ness from within. Here, a central courtyard is replaced by a voluminous kitchen – in fact the largest spatial entity within the house, and the tallest. This stems from the client’s passionate desire to make cooking a central activity, and as such becomes a strategic typological inversion that can be seen to engender the distinct ‘disembodied’ nature of the house wherein building volumes begin to creep away from this spatial knot. Thus, the generic tendency of the single building figure with a contained spatiality is subverted in favour of a rhizome-like spatial organism that attempts to strike a varied dialogue between figure and ground. In fact, one can begin to read the house as the materialisation of a continuous cavern, a strange and luminous burrow hollowed out from gigantic boulders that pinwheels about the centralised kitchen – a metaphorical core of warmth, cheer and bonhomie – forming a set of interconnected spaces that seeks to offer atmospheres
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of withdrawal as much as that of connect. The abstract, sombre monolithic volumes cast in plank-finished concrete stand in stark grey contrast to the timber and soft white of the interior. Here the light-filled burrow gazes out onto greens on all sides, a space of verdant immersion. A space for pause that facilitates a deep gaze at nature’s changing moods or a space for flitting in between these opportunities for pause. The grey of the concrete will gain a patina over time, becoming at one with the temporal shifts that the landscape will encounter. As such, the burrow or cave finds for once a strange interconnect with the nest or aerie, as the house’s spatial entity emerges over the streambed. These experiential transitions between the self-enclosed spaces meant for the perfunctory daily rituals of living, and the inescapable presence of the landscape and the elements within which these are enacted can be seen as the house’s key phenomenological and kinaesthetic construct.
Opposite page: a trellised pavilion or pergola structure connects to the accessway, as well as to the main body of the house. This page, above: by not resting the concrete structure on the ground, the relationship with the landscape paradoxically is strengthened. Far above: concept sketches
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16 15 14 C
11 13
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PLAN
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1 Living Room 2 Kitchen 3 Pantry 4 Powder Room 5 Court 6 Guest Bedroom 7 Guest Bathroom 8 Dining Room 9 Pool Pavilion 10 Pool 11 Bridge 12 Study 13 Master Bedroom 14 Walk in Wardrobe 15 Master Bedroom 16 Outdoor shower
Project House on a Stream Location Alibag, India Architect Architecture BRIO Design Team Shefali Balwani, Robert Verrijt, Pankaj Chakraborty, Sujata Chitlangia Site Area 4000 m2 Project Area 300 m2 Civil Contractors Aaryan Devcon Structural Engineers Vijay K Patil & Associates Carpentry Ketheram Suthar Initiation of Project July 2009 Completion of Project September 2013
SECTION AA
SECTION BB
SECTION CC 0
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ISOMETRIC DRAWING
10M
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This page: the abstract, sombre monolithic volumes cast in plank-finished concrete stand in stark grey contrast to the timber and soft white of the interior. Below: in the bathroom, one can peek through a miniscule slot cut into the hull of the concrete container
14 17
TOS +4150
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TOS +2800 FCL +2400 LINTEL LEVEL+2125
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19 20
FFL +0.00
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SECTION BB IN DETAIL
Thermal insulation 50mm Adhesive PVC waterproof liner, welded Aluminum flashing element Cement ledge 125x50 mm Marineply, polished, 19 mm Toughened glass, 12 mm Custom G.I. steel window box thk 6 mm Cast in situ concrete form work out of timber planks 150m wide with BASF RHEOMAC 707 waterproofer admixture 10 Aluminum angle 15x15mm for plaster groove 11 Polyethylene 0.2mm sheet laid out below al footings / plinth beams / foundation walls and ground floor slabs
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This page: the narrow body of contained water along this shaded pathway strikes a connection to the seasonal stream beyond
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12 Plywood 19 mm, fixed on timber purlins to form tray 100x50 mm 13 Aluminium perimeter angle welded 14 Ventilation slot 15 Glazing, 8mm in timber window frame 16 Timber window board 17 Gypsum board false ceiling 18 Timber sliding folding window 19 Drainage channel 20 Slope to exterior 21 Timber flooring on staircase 25mm 22 Terrazo finish 60mm 23 Filled with boulders and cement slurry above as per detail
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