domus 34 November 2014
November 2014
Volume 04 / Issue 01 R200
Author
Contributors Apurva Bose Suprio Bhattacharjee
Kaiwan Mehta
Photographers Hemant Patil Pallon Daruwala Gonzalo Puga Smiljan Radic Tomoyuki Sakaguchi
INDIA
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CONTENTS 35
INDIA
034
Editorial A cabinet of ideas and arguments
36
Contemporary museum for architecture in India
Kaiwan Mehta
38
Kaleidoscope-lexicon
Manolo De Giorgi
57
Measurements
Italo Lupi
60
Graphic autobiography
Suprio Bhattacharjee
66
Navkar Architects
Projects Memory and invention
Suprio Bhattacharjee
78
Edifice Consultants
So what is the shape of a knowledge society?
Apurva Bose
90
ABRD Architects
Integrating simplicity
96
Smiljan Radic
Serpentine Pavilion 2014
Ruggero Tropeano
Volume 04 / Issue 01 R200
Title
Confetti
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
November 2014
Design
102
Rassegna Office
107
Feedback Ruggero Tropeano’s Zurich
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
034 November 2014
Cover: Clad in brick, the zigguratlike profile of the Brick School of Architecture in Pune designed by Navkar Architects forges an immediate connection with the landscape. The building is intended to age and weather as quickly as the materials allow, such that the students and users of the school begin to appreciate the beauty of a surface’s materiality, and the mark of time upon surfaces.
Whiteboard notes from a lecture on the purpose and criticism of art objects by Kaiwan Mehta. A series of ideas and arguments flow across spaces such as the classroom or the magazine, where a subject-field and its practice gets evaluated, reflected upon, and hence rejuvenated.
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36 EDITORIAL
A CABINET OF IDEAS AND ARGUMENTS
This issue begins the fourth annual cycle for Domus India, and in this issue we review the nature and role of a magazine within its field of operation; in our case, that being architecture and design, which draws from, as well as extends into art, visual culture and city studies. Primarily, it is most important for Domus India to have established that it will understand architecture only within a broad cloud of subjects and practices, which may stretch beyond the tools and forms of architecture, but it is also necessary we understand the body of architecture today, which is much different from its 16th and 19th century understandings. So what one has realised in the past few years, as one shapes and designs a magazine, or any other form of public discourse on the subject, is that, one is, at all points, trying to understand through these deliberations and conversations – what is ‘architecture’? What shapes ‘architecture’? How do we understand ‘architecture’? And this, in many ways, is a constant, ongoing story of trying to figure out what ‘architecture’ and its extended field is all about. There were words we used to talk about architecture, and phrases that helped us discuss buildings, and their designing and making... but we realise those same words and phrases stand on a different plane of meaning today! There are new words that have also entered the discourse... and we are still figuring out what is to be done with them; but we know that they are important to the operating of the field. So what does a magazine do? Its primary task is to contribute to the operating field, to reflect its means and modes of operation, and hold up a mirror to the way the subject and field are shaping up – itself and the world. It should build the ground for productive criticism and evaluation, through means of ‘thick description’ and creative drawing of the field-network, referencesreminiscence, and understanding of resources that build up the practice and its intellectual measure; at the same time, it should have the courage to pull the ground below its feet! Understanding that Domus India was, in a way, a Library of Time for the field of architecture in India, as well as a Homing Cabinet, every issue is a ‘cabinet of ideas and arguments’ on display, on exhibition... to shape itself into a provisional book – a provisional book rewritten and redrawn, or extended and expanded, every next issue. Every issue records in a hurry the many worlds that architecture occupies, the visual world we shape and inhabit, the world of making and building we live in, and operate within. It accounts in a ledger the tensions and imaginations the world of architecture that shapes and unmakes itself day after day; the landscape of smiths, carpenters, techies, bankers, corporates, politicians, and all those who partake in the making of a physical world we live in. Every issue runs against time, as it tries to bring within its fold the many measures of the time it occupies; the many measures that scale the length and meaning of architecture, day after every changing day! It collects and
Kaiwan Mehta
stores with a discerning eye, but also with the sensibility of a library where every stretch of account should be docked, and housed for reference at a time later, when meanings may change and new meanings may need to revisit and read some old books from the hidden shelves of a library. In a contemporary world as ours, where ideas and meanings float, finding stories to rest in, believe in... homing of ideas to evaluate their own purpose and reflect on their lives (however short-lived) is necessary, and the magazine is precisely that box, that container which also showcases, which will allow things of various means and shapes to rest next to each other, however different or odd from its neighbour, but sit within proximity of variations, and strange objects – giving home, however transient, to an idea or a meaning. This cabinet is a showcase of ideas that are being juggled around – at times with certainty, at times with tentative lives – but they all need a resting place, a home for some brewing, some growing-up or selfreflection and evaluation; the magazine is the ‘cabinet for ideas’. Often strange, or apparently unconnected ideas come and sit next to each other, without any obvious logic... but that often is also a reflection of the times we occupy and think and work in... where stories connect the apparently unconnected, or narratives expose the hidden relationships of things when they are brought in the presence of each other through a methodology such as the editorial structure of a magazine. The cabinet has a finite form, but its glass panels always allow a constant visual conversation; and every month you can rearrange the objects, bring in new ones, or get rid of some. The cabinet and the library have a visual logic of arrangement, like that of an exhibition, where the logic of a narrative builds up a content-form, image-meaning, conversation, dialectic. Every issue is a book, and necessarily should be so, but it is a book with many sequels, and that immediately does not let the magazine be a book as we know it. It is a book with an internal narrative logic, an argumentative format, a plot with characters; but that plot can be redrawn again in the next issue, characters may change and subsequent arguments can revisit and challenge previous ones. We begin our fourth year with this revisiting of the library, opening wide the doors of the cabinet, and pulling out parts of objects that are still there, leftovers, and new growths on older objects... trying to understand what has been the body and life of architecture in the past of present time. Making a list of ideas and stories from which keywords emerge – rather than pick up word and establish or search for their meanings, to pick up experiences and stories and identify the key words they express or throw forth; the meaning is the journey to the word, and hence then, establishing a lexicon of words that occupy insistently and persistently, intensely and possessively the worlds of architecture, design, visual culture,
and city studies. The lexicon is a map, for time-now, and its ingredients, and stories, could be juggled to shape out a new map – a landscape of floating meanings and words that shape our time and geography – but through substantiated methodologies and processes; like in a kaleidoscope, where random broken pieces of glass constantly form new constellations, but only within strict geometry and measure, which comes from the logic of a mirrors architected in a particular structural logic. It is not ‘arbitrary disorder’ but a disorder of things that produces the measure of our landscape of work and thought, and ‘correspond(s) to our state of mind’. The lexicon is a kaleidoscope which holds its logic in a provisional state of being – definite but transient, substantiated but open to new thoughts – and hence, capable of measuring our time and geography, every new moment, but within an ethical tectonic of belief, knowledge and political honesty. In this issue we bring the first part of this Lexicon-Kaleidoscope. In a magazine there follows a logic of the visual, especially in a magazine such as Domus where the intellectual narrative is very important; and architecture and design that so occupy the world of visual culture are based on the skeleton and flesh of visual journeys, narratives and reminiscences. These visual residues shape also a lexicon... bits of ‘memory’ building into the ever-producing larger dream of the world, and the physical manifestation of that which we occupy. In the Projects section we delve into one more typology this issue onwards in a focussed way – the campus. Homes and vacation homes, corporate buildings within a landscape of business districts or suburbs, etc. have been some of the typologies we have consistently explored... and so have we focussed on campuses earlier, but here three of them come up together – two are corporate campuses, and one, a school for architecture and design. These three projects, as they sit next to each other, raise very critical questions on architectural language, its intentions, and behaviour. It is evident how at times architecture takes for granted certain things, like wearing its skin like a school- or factory-uniform – automatic, and not through choice – while at other times, architecture seeks a pleasure in postponing its completion, in which there is a reflection on architecture and its templates, motifs and patterns. In these examples, we also witness hints of possible fetishising of architectural ideas and tactics; and these then precisely exhibit the state of affairs within the practice of architecture. In all, this issue is one more milestone in the journey of architectural criticism in India; it is a milestone more in the sense of being a lap in a journey, a stretch of journey that slows down to pause and think, ruminate and mull over things, before moving ahead with things that one did before, maybe differently now on, or maybe in the same tone again... but to continue doing and journeying, with belief, ethics and a substantial methodology and process, as always. km
PROJECTS
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Edifice Consultants SO WHAT IS THE SHAPE OF A KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY? A software development centre for a client known for its architectural patronage, on a site with buildings completed by the architect of New Delhi’s famed Belgian Embassy, becomes a proposition to house a new community for tech workers on a large campus spreading over more than 60 acres. On a former forested city fringe now witnessing rapid urban expansion – the place offering a potent metaphor perhaps – one begins to ask, ‘what can the shape of a future knowledge society be?’ Text Suprio Bhattacharjee Photos Edifice Consultants
This spread: the lush greenery interspersed throughout the TCS campus harks back to the richness of the erstwhile biodiversity of the site
Gachibowli used to be a place that residents of Hyderabad would not find very difficult to loathe, with the University of Hyderabad being the only real presence of humanity in this distant suburb; although the presence of lush greenery used to be a welcome respite from Hyderabad’s dense city centre. Over the past decade, the lush greens have retreated and been replaced by the relentless spread of the placeless global tech city, as Gachibowli becomes to Hyderabad what Hinjewadi is now to Pune – one of the many ‘IT Suburbs’ across the country that (with ample Government incentives) provides the burgeoning knowledge industry the endless acres of square footage it voraciously consumes.
This rapid onslaught of urbanisation has brought the now ubiquitous glass-andaluminium-clad corporate architecture into this setting, along with the associated need of highrise, ‘high-end’ living – for a noveau riche driven by the explosion of IT and Finance professionals. Gachibowli has also acquired a number of stadia; one such stadium complex lies at the southern fringe of the campus under scrutiny here – a large site belonging to formerly state-owned CMC Ltd., now a part of Tata Consultancy Services (referred to further as TCS). The north of the site is bordered by a designated Botanical Garden, a reserve of green that harks back to the richness of the erstwhile biodiversity.
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In the late 1980s and early 1990s, CMC engaged a number of architects who were to design buildings that set a typological benchmark for a yet nascent industry – the CMC Building in Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla Complex became well-known as the country’s pioneering ‘intelligent’ building (designed by Delhi-based architect Vinod Gupta) where sensors hooked to computers controlled the HVAC and lighting systems, besides its remarkable ‘Bürolandschaft’ layout wherein offices formed a continuous spiral between the central 7-storey void and a glazed perimeter, held aloft on centrally supported waffle slabs that cantilevered out dramatically to offer fully glazed corners with ample natural daylight – a light-filled, truly ‘walk-up’ office building. The technical wizardry of construction and operation of this building found a suitable counterfoil in Satish Gujral’s languid, almost fantasy-castle-like spread within CMC’s Gachibowli campus. Here, set amidst what was then an outpost between city and nature, a pair of buildings evoking the thickness of mudplastered adobe construction and domed chinamosaic tiled-roofs became an ironical Hassan Fathy-esque container for the technology-centred institution it was meant to house. These Satish Gujral-designed buildings occupy the centre of the vast expanse of the site, posing a challenge for any attempt to build a cohesive campus around them. The vestiges of the former forest, with large, full-grown trees needed to be preserved as much as possible, as well as a depression on the south-east corner that formed a natural drainage basin. It is these factors that confronted Mumbai-based practice Edifice when they first set foot on this campus. The first step involved designating the areas for the planned three phases of construction to house a rapidly expanding workforce, that by the time the site had attained an SEZ (Special Economic Zone) status well into the design process, it needed to house a total of 12,000 in addition to the 1000 already on roll within the
existing facilities. The depression towards the south-east portion of the site became a catchment reservoir for harvested rainwater surrounded by user-centric landscape elements – as the architects observe, in Hyderabad, stormwater drainage happens through the collection of rainwater into these such catchment basins. The first phase involved the design of three office blocks along with ancillary facilities such as a service block and staff canteen in a stretch of land south of the existing CMC buildings bordering the approach road. The three office buildings assert a stealthy, low poise as seen from within the site, with the building crowns maintaining the datum line of the tree canopy. The northern building faces lean outward to provide low-angle solar shading, capped by a distinct arced roof profile giving these buildings an unmistakable sense of movement, caught in freeze-frame a moment before their further invasion into the site – an almost metaphorical assertion of an unrelenting urban sprawl. The horizontal facade bands of alternating glazing and spandrel panels with their comb-like corner fins reinforce this sense of movement, abruptly halted though by the rather clunky and solid chunk of service spaces defined as a banded grey gable-end volume. This ‘solid’ end ingloriously terminates the flow of the vaulted volume, and the affinity for solidity continues in the stone cladding that climbs up half the building exterior on the southern aspects. The exterior reflects the arrangement of the internal spaces – the linear vaulted volume clumsily intersects a cuboidal volume of equal height. These two volumes give shape to the parallel bars of programmatic elements that constitute the building, with a stepped void or terraced canyon that expands vertically towards the north-oriented clerestory vitrines in the vaulted roof forming a welcome longitudinal spine for communing and chance encounters, besides giving legibility to the scale and spatial diagram of the building. Bridges span this light-filled gorge between the northern office
This page top left: catchment reservoirs on the site for harvested rainwater enhance the micro-climate of the campus while also adding to the aesthetic value. This page top right and opposite page top and below right: the distinct arced roof profile imparts an unmistakable sense of movement. The linear vaulted volume intersects a cuboidal volume of equal height. The ground levels offer spaces for communing, exchange and connection with the outdoors. Opposite page below left: detail of the facade
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Opposite page: a depression on the southeast corner of the site that formed a natural drainage basin. Below: the office buildings assert a stealthy, low poise as seen from within the site, with the building crowns maintaining the datum line of the tree canopy
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bar and the southern service bar – but it stops short of becoming the exalted ‘Kahn-ian’ model of distinct ‘served’ and ‘servant’ spaces with the northern office bar intersected by opaque, transverse service zones. The more opaque southern service bar offers sufficient thermal mass and hence a climatic buffer, while the three-storey void ensures a thermal separation between the two volumes. Thus energy requirements are sharply reduced, allowing for air-conditioning loads of 400sqft/TR. The vaulted ceilings bounce off light from the clerestories such that office spaces receive illumination of varying degrees from both sides, allowing for deeper yet more luminous and open plans, with minimal artificial lighting requirements. Whilst the bio-climatic principles upon which the buildings are based ensure its superior energy performance, one wishes that these buildings could have achieved greater spatial emphasis – one manner of doing this would have been a whole-hearted adoption of the Kahn-ian principle of distinct ‘served’ and servant’ zones. This would have ensured a clear and legible volumetric organisation and spatial structure
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– with office zones towards the north of greater force and transparency, as well as pure service zones on the south. This spatial structure would have ensured that the dynamism and force of the sweeping volumes towards the north would have retained their distinct fervour, unmitigated by the heavy transversal service elements and gable endings that now nullify its very energy. Through a pure distinction of these zones, the closed ‘box’ of service zones on the south could have thus become a suitable foil to the open northern sweep, tied together by umbilical cord-like bridges. For the moment, there is an uneasy and unresolved merging of the two volumetric elements. The second phase of the project, set in the north-western parcel of the land, uses the site’s ‘bow-tie’ shaped (as the architects describe this) boundary condition to evolve a latticed spatial structure that becomes the project’s underlying organisational principle. A set of bars overlap and stack to form this three-dimensional lattice, with the intersections serving to accommodate the services and vertical circulation elements. This phase is the largest within the expansion programme, meant to house at least 6500 tech professionals, and the change in land use status to SEZ ensured the possibility of higher densities. The lattice takes form as two buildings facing each other across what can be read as a large shared forecourt, and the overlapping bars create opportunities for outdoor terraces as well as interstitial courtyards. The lattice erodes in some corners to form cantilevered volumes – one such single storeyed volume raised aloft on (rather too-large) columns heralds one’s entry into the building. An attempt is made to calibrate the vast regions of the facade by the alternation or grouping and stacking of facade bands. The
This spread: the horizontal facade bands of alternating glazing and spandrel panels with their comb-like corner fins reinforce a sense of movement, abruptly halted though by the rather clunky and solid chunk of service spaces defined as a banded grey gable-end volume
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ground levels are transparent enclosures offering spaces for communing, exchange and connection with the outdoors, in deference to the blue mirrored glass of the rest of the building. By the time work on the third phase had begun, the demands on density were even higher. With a restricted footprint to engage with, north of the existing CMC buildings bordering the bioreserve, the architects were forced to go higher, conforming to the generic tower and podium model. This also happened to be the building closest to the existing Satish Gujral-designed two-storeyed CMC buildings, and the architects state that their attempt to bridge scales was through the podium, by keeping it as high as that building’s china-mosaic-domed roofline. The hues of the new building’s base evoke that of the Gujral buildings, while the tower block is clad in a generic facade. TCS is a company that has a history of commissioning distinctive architectures for the slew of new campuses that are needed for a rapidly expanding workforce. In recent times, the fabled New York practice of Williams & Tsien was commissioned for the company’s flagship Mumbai campus, while Swiss master Mario Botta designed their Hyderabad and Noida outposts. Just as in those campuses, here there too was an opportunity to create a new campus with a distinctive presence. The context too was challenging and offered powerful metaphors, sited as it is between the city and the forest. In many ways Edifice’s attempts to build a campus in an incremental manner over 9 years has managed to fulfill the immediate demands of a new campus, whilst ensuring a due regard to landscape and the site’s topography. These are proficient buildings, fulfilling their roles as able containers of workplaces. So what’s missing here? For one, the tectonic vocabulary unfortunately strives hard to fit into the international commercial vernacular. While it thankfully avoids the many clichés observed of other IT campuses – such as those for Infosys – the design of the buildings avoids any real engagement with what the nature of a community meant for knowledge workers, needs to be like, and whether the spatial and tectonic models used for a manufacturing economy can be replicated for that of a knowledge-driven economy. This dilemma – of the changing nature
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Below: an attempt is made to calibrate the vast regions of the facade by the alternation or grouping and stacking of facade bands
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Project Software Development Campus Location Synergy Park, Gachibowli, Hyderabad Client Tata Consultancy Services Ltd Architect Edifice Consultants Pvt. Ltd. Design team Sanjay N, Sachin B, Apekshit G, Sabarno De, Manoj CV, Jyoti T, Nashvwiin M, Vidya R, Vignesh N, Siddarth S, Sanjeev U, Purva N, Deepak M Site Area 67 acres Project Area 0.178M m2 Civil Contractors Phase-1 - IJM, Salasar; Phase-2 SPCL, Narsi Asso, Alufit, Voltas; Phase-3 - SPCL, Narsi, Asso, Soundarya, Voltas, Alufit, SGM, Micron Structural Engineers Phase-1 - Potential, Phase-2 J+W, Phase-3 - Sterling Services Phase-1 - Potential, Phase-2&3, Entask Other Consultants Landscape - AMS and RVG, Facade - Fiti and Meinhardt Site Supervision Cushman & Wakefield Project Estimate R 700 Cr Initiation of Project Phase-1 - 2005, Phase-2 - 2008, Phase-3 - 2011 Completion of project Phase-1 - 2008, Phase-2 - 2012, Phase-3 - 2014
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This page: the hues of the new building’s base evoke that of the Gujral buildings, while the overlapping bars create opportunities for outdoor terraces as well as interstitial courtyards
of the workplace – has been confronted almost half a century ago, in mid-century examples such as the campus for Olivetti in Ivrea, as well as Eero Saarinen’s campuses for General Motors and Bell Labs amongst others to name a few. Whilst this is a larger question of spatial engagement models, at the level of the campus itself, the buildings of the first phase lack the immediacy of interstitial outdoor spaces – that the second phase, to its credit, achieves to a greater degree. However, the refinement necessary to make an exceptional statement over the generic is crucial. The lattice buildings begin with a simple, yet powerful idea. That power suffers in design resolution – similar to the limitations discussed earlier for the phase one buildings. Could the clear distinction between the spatially pivotal service fulcrums and open-plan office bars have ensured a legible, coherent architectural message? The power of the diagram is hamstrung by the heavyhandedness of detailing and the generically treated building envelope. The opportunity to make sweeping statements is punctuated by far too many abbreviations, which seriously impede a coherent reading of the building volumes and their relationship to each other as well as the landscape, besides a mitigation of the architecture’s sheer power to communicate a clear vision. In the end, it is this coherence that is a vital, missing bind.