Di 37 | Suprio B - Tradition and Revolution | 02/2015 by Suprio Bhattacharjee

INDIA

Volume 04 / Issue 04 R200

037

domus 37 February 2015

037

February 2015

Authors Ruchita Madhok Communications designer Imran Ali Khan Researcher Gautam Bhatia Architect Prem Chandavarkar Architect

Contributors Suprio Bhattacharjee Photographers Aditya Palsule Antony Crolla David Aebi Federico Patellani Femke Reijerman Frédérique Dumoulin Janhavi Sanap Leo Torri Lisa Klappe Margherita Spiluttini Robert D Stephens Takeshi Miyamoto Yasuaki Yoshinaga

LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO

February 2015

Author Kaiwan Mehta

Pietro Montani

Confetti What can a master teach?

Lina Bo

In Europe man’s home has collapsed

Gautam Bhatia

Prem Chandavarkar

‘And I, infinitesimal being...’

Thomas Widdershoven

Design Academy Eindhoven

Issey Miyake

Textile origami

Ruchita Madhok

Imran Ali Khan

In shades of black and white

Robert D Stephens

Inconvenient nests

Suprio Bhattacharjee

Ashok B Lall Architects

Projects Tradition and revolution

Gerhard Mack

Herzog & de Meuron and Ricola

Issey Miyake Tokujin Yoshioka

Tokujin Yoshioka Inc.

Issey Miyake flagship store, London

Umberto Riva

Architecture details

Monticello Contemporary museum for architecture in India

Talking Design

Making a mark Talking Design

100

Rassegna Kitchens

107

Feedback Luciano Semerani’s Trieste

Volume 04 / Issue 04 R200

037

Title Editorial Embracing homes, making worlds

Luciano Semerani INDIA

Design

Contemporary museum for architecture in India

Robert D Stephens Architect and photographer

LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO

CONTENTS 29

LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO

037 February 2015

Cover: An aerial photograph of New Delhi that features in Robert D Stephen’s Delhi Birds — an urban portrait collection which spans from 2011 to 2014, featuring colour photographs taken 15,000 ft above sea level.

A concept sketch for the Development Aletrnatives Headquarters building in New Delhi by Ashok B Lall Architects

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30 EDITORIAL

As we were working on this issue, on the one hand we were preparing for the Kala Ghoda Festival in Mumbai, where, for the third year, Ranjit Hoskote and myself co-curate the Literature section at the festival; and I have also been preparing to chair and coordinate the selection of candidates for the international fellowship across 11 disciplines with more than 3000 applications from 127 countries at hand, and jurors across three continents, deciding artistic activity at the Akademie over the next two years. And then I start writing the editorial as I fly over Munich for the India-edition of an international magazine. A sense emerges where one is floating above locations, and beyond locations, across locations – the home is everywhere; there is a home and locatedness, but not the home stuck to soil. Temples in India have taught us this most beautifully, and we today, so sadly misunderstand these beautiful monuments to time and space. Temples carry time and space with them; they are bodies of story and space, time and narrative. Wherever a temple goes, it makes its own axis-mundi; no temple is dependent on location, but every temple makes its own cosmic location – marking a new, and one of the many, cosmiccentres! The temple is not bound to soil or earth, but it is a milestone in cosmic space and ritual-time; not even reliant on history. Architecture is the visual abyss of narrative space, where the self searches for itself; architecture is the wandering dreamer, the loitering worker, the thinking traveller, that crafts life through its own materiality. The confident traveller discovers the world anew at every step of the journey, the scared soul looks for roots that never grow but make a cocoon of self-doubt, and call it history or tradition. Tradition is that which blooms out of roots, never to return; you cut a part of it, take it elsewhere and it will grow a new tree there; you graft it with another stem, another plant and a new life with newer colours and shapes emerges. Architecture travels with its baggage of elements and ornaments, often sadly fixed to those... architecture is the base for ideas and materials to play over; architecture should not get lost within its elements – characters that play their part here and there, but they are not defining architecture. The meaning of architecture is in its life as experience, memory, and struggles. Different cultures, and different locations have produced different designs and mandates for architecture – it is not the staple of a place or time to make that design, but rather it is the tenacity of architecture to let different scenarios mould it variably. But we forget to explore the idea of variations and variable combinations as scenarios move or change with time. Gautam Bhatia’s Punjabi Baroque and Other Memories of Architecture precisely points to a condition where the rigidity of thoughts we subscribe to get fixated on the sets of images; and then

Kaiwan Mehta

we keep expecting the limited set of such images to appear and reappear, and produce a set of aspirations, only imaginable in a narrow-way through a limited pool of elements and objects; a vicious pool of limitations and undernourished thinking we decide to live in, under the garb of aspirations or traditions. Architecture is often very important in discussions on history, historiography, or culture, for its two inherent aspects – firstly, at least until the last few decades, architecture was made to last (for ever), and it indeed does survive much of the ravages of time; secondly, it is there right in your face, in the public space... no one can hide or veil architecture, even when wrapped up like Christo does, it makes for a huge presence and statement! These two precisely become the reasons for the struggle between change in, experimentation with, and repetition of, architectural models. And we reduce design to the idea of style and models of element organisation; and further, we fix architecture into these slots. The designer has to think in many directions, and float in the arena of culture and politics, its abstractions and details. How would designs integrate the worlds within them, and become part of the world as well? Not one place, not one region, not one climate but belonging to humanity, the cosmos of human life and experience – that speaks about life and not red soil or black! This is the question that leads Prem Chandavarkar into many ruminations on design and the designer, as he addresses an audience of graduating students. But it is also what one senses as we read through the series of texts that flow into our trigger-subject-line – what we talk about, when we talk about design. On the question of humanities and design, it is not about how design serves the poor or the needy – as that basic sensitivity and role of design has to be inbuilt in the everyday work of a designer – but what is more difficult is to understand the question of how design belongs to the larger world of our everyday culture and politics; what is our pursuit of consciousness in our everyday acts of design-making. The newly bandied term design-thinking is all fluff – well, making is thinking, and no thinking can ever be possible without making, just as no thinking exists beyond or outside speech or writing. To separate making and thinking is falling in the classic caste hierarchy where some are seen to be thinkers and others (the lesser) as makers. Design-making is about understanding the world with all its moments of beauty, and all its troubling inequalities. In these questions, what is regional or local or global about design? Nothing... here, design is about every human life that occupies the surface of this round and uneven earth. In this case, then, what is ‘tradition’ all about? Is tradition responsible towards a section of humanity, or rather every good tradition should have, as its goal and responsibility, the general

critical outlook and development of the human world? Traditions may emerge from specific conditions, and their specificities are about the details they grow from – but then, what dictates that tradition should be limited to that specificity and detail from which it gets its nativity? Good traditions would, and should, expand to the world at large, the condition of how we live and how we see the world we occupy. Can tradition be the revolution? Should we have not long before left back the question of ‘tradition and individual talent’? But moved on to ‘tradition as dialectics’? Some buildings we have discussed and reviewed in the journeys of this magazine have lead towards these questions, including the design for the Development Alternatives Headquarters by Ashok B Lall Architects featured in here. As we move through the world, keeping our life and experiences back home as handy tools for survival, we encounter strangers, and some of these strangers we make familiar by superimposing our past experiences over them. But some strangers remain so, yet become friends, and new familiarities grow and enter our tool box – making new traditions, and new homes. New traditions, new homes sit often to challenge my older traditions and native-home – but that only makes me know my nativehome better, newer understandings, however uncomfortable, make new paths, and critical richness emerges in the process. My old home becomes more dearer to me – not because I am a frog in the well, and think all outside it are either heathens, corrupt or traitors – but because I know my home is a reflection of the world, and it also belongs to the wider world of ideas, people, and many imaginations, thoughts, dictionaries, cabinets, journeys, sounds, and so on. The home and land as aerial view is clear and sharp geometry, it is the play of form and diagrams, but as you descend down into the everyday street and rooms, leaving the privilege of the aerial view, you are within nests and lanes that are uncomfortable, and inconvenient – ‘inconvenient nests’. The eagle’s view combined with the crawling ants storytelling is what makes for design process, and design to home itself in the world at large, using the world as its reference while warmly understanding the specifics of its immediate contexts. The home I belong to is big enough to let me fly the world, and come back to inconvenient nests – thinking, wondering, doing, living... Twenty-four hours ago I closed the issue sitting inside Mathuradas Mills compound in Mumbai, and now, I sign-off this editorial from Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart; sitting within two histories, two geographies, and the many ideas and biographies they home, and nest. Think of the place where you are sitting right now and reading this... a new home I am happy to embrace, and make part of our shared world! km

CONFETTI

Archivio Carlo Pagani

EMBRACING HOMES, MAKING WORLDS

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70 PROJECTS

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Ashok B Lall Architects TRADITION AND REVOLUTION With a humaneness that stems from its tactility and intimacy, the Development Alternatives Headquarters building in New Delhi stands as a ‘voice of sanity’ amidst the mindless carnage of our aspirational urban environments Text Suprio Bhattacharjee Photos Ashok B Lall Architects

Designed to replace the much-admired original headquarters building for the NGO Development Alternatives dating from the 1980s, this landmark work of environmentally conscious urban architecture sets new benchmarks in design, actualisation and long-term building performance. This is not the flashy high-technology-centred ‘hautecouture’ green favoured by industrialised production, but the real deal – a ‘deepseated’ green with its inseparable focus on social concerns, scalable low-tech, and firm experiential engagement. Looking back to take that grand leap forward, this is an extraordinary achievement. It is the last leg of our ten-day-long trip to Delhi. The early November weather has been good, a welcome change from the city I live in, and for Delhi of course, the perfect time of the year to experience the city. I’m here with the students of the third year from the school of architecture I teach at. As much as I’m looking forward to be back, I am thrilled as well, at the prospect of getting to experience,

for the first time, a building I’ve been waiting to visit for long. It will be a nice way to close this particularly exhausting and rewarding trip to this city. I also have this sense of trepidation, on whether the younger generation I am accompanying will enjoy this work that isn’t exactly the typical Bollywood blockbuster; more Dhobi Ghat than Dhoom. I had first come across the Development Alternatives Headquarters building in Delhi a few years ago whilst browsing through the Holcim Awards for Sustainable Architecture, where the building was a Regional winner, in the running for the global-level awards. The building had an intriguing presence in the photographs, and sited next to the forest reserve on the west that it sits next to, it seemed to stretch its many arms out in an attempt to capture the vastness of the expanse visible until the horizon – the Qutub Minar being the only prominent visible marker over this sea of sempervirens. Back on the street, the building marks the end of one of the lanes of the designated

Qutub Institutional Area. From a distance, it strikes an unmistakably non-conformist poise, with its recessed building volume, its almost solid banded facade, and its distinctive ‘raw’ appearance, in deference to the corporate vernacular that finds its way into the adjacent buildings. A totem-like staircase tower marks the presence from the street, as well as the entrance area, with a light filigree and translucent canopy that shields the access ramp and stairs. This delicate canopy, built out of a timber framework stiffened and tensioned by steel ties offers a contrast to the massiveness of the building volume behind it. In many ways, it sets the tone for the experience of rest of the building’s exterior, with its interplay of mass and frame. Once inside the diminutive entrance lobby, the space expands rather dramatically into a two-story void that overlooks a central courtyard. The ceiling of this space has a shallow brick dome, over walls that proudly exhibit the system of construction. The walls are built out of two kinds of stabilised

This spread: the building’s recessed volume and exposed-brick facade form an unmistakably non-conformist poise. All windows are of hardwood, finely crafted with variable openings for light, ventilation or just views

compressed earth blocks that give the building its raw appearance and also offers the building its defining visual logic and experiential transitions. This double-height space also harks back at the system of construction employed in the building that previously inhabited the site. This reinterpretation of the previous building became an important aspect of the design consultation process, during which it was deemed important to retain the memory of the previous building, as well as capture the essence of what the previous architecture stood for. One such aspect of this can be seen in the Baoli – a distinctive drum shaped volume on the North of the new building, an unprogrammed space open to sky, well-like with steps and an arcaded shell, looking up at the facade of the new building, accessible from the underground, and visible from across the site. The Baoli serves to bring back the memory of the space of exchange within the previous building. Memory also serves to become the starting point of the building’s planning, the angular orientation brings back to mind the layout of the previous building that occupied the site, as well, and such becomes as much an act of remembrance as much as continuity. Every visitor to the building can view a film that shows the building’s design and actualisation. Very clearly, the organisation loves its building, and the users are proud of it.

The building’s structure that swings from the delicate to the brawny, its grand vertical scale within its narrow proportions, and the exposed brick face give the building its distinctive ‘raw’ appearance. A totem-like staircase tower marks the presence from the street (above)

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74 PROJECTS

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PROJECTS 75

C B A

1 Enterance 2 Resource Centre 3 Shop 4 Meeting 5 Creche 6 Cafeteria 7 Tea - Coffee 8 Court 9 Amphitheatre 10 Bouli Below 11 Office 12 Conference

2 8

6 4

SECTION AA

9 10

C B

GROUND FLOOR PLAN SECTION BB

Project Development Alternatives Location B-32, Tara Crescent, Qutab Institutional Area, New Delhi-16 Architect Ashok B Lall Architects Main Structure Subir Roy Choudhury Domes & Ferrocement Units Peu & P K Das Indoor climate control: Research & Innovative Hybrid system Dhaliwal Associates Execution Abid Hussain Electrical Installation Kanwar Krishen & Associates Sanitary Installation Krim Engineering Services Pvt Ltd Building Automation Shankar Rao Civil Works Gurbakhsh Singh B A Builders Pvt Ltd Electrical Installation Shivam Engineers Sanitary Installation Yash Plumbing Engineers Hybrid Units & Evaporative Control Vikram Hitech Ducting & VRF Units Adhunik Vatanukool

SECTION CC 10M

WEST ELEVATION

DETAIL OF WALL SECTION AAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

SOUTH ELEVATION

10M

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PROJECTS 77

78 PROJECTS

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Our guides, who were recent additions to the organisation’s growing workforce (the earlier building had to be demolished as staff strength had quadrupled in two decades) were visibly excited to show us around. It is rare to come across a building, more so in the case of the office building typology, whose occupants are at ease. Of course, this has come at a considerable readjustment in terms of conditions of thermal comfort that the future occupants were willing to compromise with. This ensures that the building’s HVAC system works at a far greater efficiency, and there is a renewed focus on natural ventilation, passive cooling and the provision of thermal mass to stabilise internal temperatures against thermal fluctuations. But all this would be sheer numbers if it were not for the building’s experiential qualities. It may be a relatively modestly scaled building, but by no means is it hamstrung by spatial variations and diversity. The building offers intimate spaces for retreat and contemplation, as well as large spaces for gathering. Impromptu or chance encounters will be the order of the day. The sense of intimacy continues in the courtyard as well, with its grand vertical scale within its narrow proportions, and the up-close appreciation of the building’s myriad details – ornamentation at a minute scale, an unabashed expression of the building’s structure that swings from the delicate to the brawny, and of course, the chiaroscuro of the mirror work that adorns the patterned facades. Windows become larger as they reach lower into the courtyard, to compensate for the reducing reach of natural light. At night, this has a reverse effect, with the office windows becoming welcoming lanterns, thus making the heart of the building glow, quite literally. At twilight this is an extraordinary space to experience. This is a lovingly crafted handloom saree made into a building, or an exquisite work of carpentry at mega-scale. Speaking of which, all windows are of hardwood, finely crafted with variable openings for light, ventilation or just views. No aluminium. This shunning of materials with high embodied energy continues in the adoption of thinner glass (less than 6mm) instead of the ubiquitous industrialised standardised system.

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Previous spread, left: the ceiling of the entrance lobby is a shallow brick dome, over walls that exhibit the system of construction. Previous spread, right: the modulation of natural light within the interior spaces. This spread, top left: windows become larger as they reach lower into the courtyard. Left: verandahs look out into the forest reserve adjacent to the site. Above: hardwood windows wash the interiors with natural light. Top right and right: the vaulted ceiling, made of ferro cement shells offer a visual vibration and tactility, besides reducing the embodied energy of the building in terms of the amount of steel used

PROJECTS 79

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80 PROJECTS

There are times when one forgets one is in an office building. The narrow verandahs on the ground level with their slender paired concrete columns have an almost domestic scale, while narrow balconies, just enough for an individual or two continue this sense of domesticity. The vaulted ceiling, made of ferro cement shells (there is no conventional reinforced concrete slab in the superstructure) offer a visual vibration and tactility, besides of course reducing the embodied energy of the building in terms of the amount of steel used. Their detailing ensures that they provide recessed routes for the electrical works , while the vaulted ceiling also works in tandem with the hybrid HVAC system. The walls are left rough and unfinished, for time to leave their mark, and the walls of the circulation spaces are evocatively ornamented in inset tiles and relief work in plaster – something that one remembers from ancestral homes of yore. But the building’s humaneness does not merely stem from its tactility and intimacy. The entire ground plane is public. The canteen at the far end is an open invitation to the public to participate in the building’s workings, and thus the occupant’s routines are laid out clearly for public scrutiny and participation. Not often,

in these paranoid times, does a building offer one this sense of accessibility and openness. The ground floor becomes this open field, for the casual visitor who’s come in for a ‘dhokla’ to gape in envy at what is probably one of the finest works in urban Architecture within the country in recent memory. Just makes sure you’re wearing natural materials – that light cotton shirt has been designed to be worn in here, with the breeze streaming in intermittently, and natural light that can be modulated at an arm’s length (narrow floor plates are a rarity in our speculationdriven office building ‘market’ - although mandatory in many parts of the world from an environmental perspective). I’m glad the kids love this building as well, and as we sip the ‘chai’ in the canteen that, yes, has a domed ceiling in brick beautifully adorned in mirror work , that, yes, is cooled by a planted roof, it is comforting to know that amidst the mindless carnage of what our aspirational urban environments have become, there is this voice of sanity. If one was looking for an answer to questions regarding the creation of balanced building stock in 21st century India, we need to look no further.

This page: the intimate scale of the central court and presence of water create a favourable microclimate; the walls in brick are left rough and unfinished. The photos on this page by a student, Janhavi Sanap, were taken on a study trip conducted by the author. Opposite page: earthen pots are inserted randomly into the brick wall – to nest birds and squirrels

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This page, far left: the facade imparts a defining visual logic as well as the experiential transitions. Left: a water-cascade feature with mirror work in stone and terracota jaali screen. Below left: mirror work on dung plaster within the interior of the shallow dome. Below right: paving details in the courtyard and sit-out area. Opposite page: the exposed-brick exterior of the building stands in contrast with the lush green foliage beyond