June-July 2015
domus 41 June-July 2015
Volume 04 / Issue 08 R200
Author
Authors Siddharth Menon Architect Pallavi Latkar Architect and environmental planner Shruti Barve Architect and assistant professor
Vinit Waghe Civil engineer Ajay Shah Designer
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Tejaswini Niranjana Cultural theorist
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
Contributors Suprio Bhattacharjee
Kaiwan Mehta
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Editorial The life of design
Ferruccio Izzo
26
Confetti Historical cities and European schools
Siddharth Menon
30
It’s not about the mud
Pallavi Latkar Shruti Barve Nishith Dharaiya Vinit Waghe
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Conserving diversity
Silvana Annicchiarico
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The dystopian epic of household appliances
Ajay Shah Kaiwan Mehta
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Maria Luisa Frisa
58
Tejaswini Niranjana
62
Musicophilia in Mumbai
Suprio Bhattacharjee
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iStudio Architecture
Projects The choice to breathe free, to live with the elements
Kaiwan Mehta
82
Architecture Discipline
New memories, new histories
92
Herzog & de Meuron
Miu Miu Aoyama, Tokyo
Marc Dubois
INDIA
Title
Talking design
Rubberband
Keeping it together The blouse as architecture for the body Contemporary museum for architecture in India
Photographers Nacása & Partners Malavika Jadhav Vihan Shah Andrea Martiradonna Shruti Barve Anuj Rao Piet Ysebie Christian Richters Frederik Vercruysse Filip Dujardin Marc De Blieck Hemangi Kadu
June-July 2015
Design
Talking design
Nishith Dharaiya Department of Life Sciences, HNG University, Patan (Gujarat)
INDIA
CONTENTS 23
100
Rassegna Office
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Feedback Marc Dubois’ Ghent
Volume 04 / Issue 08 R200
041
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO
041 June-July 2015
Cover: The central installation at the India Pavilion at Hannover Messe 2015, an artistic assemblage of info graphics and interactive installations that display information about the core sectors of the Indian economy, was the Trojan Lion. The Lion stands for strength, courage, tenacity and wisdom — values that are as Indian today as they have ever been. By adding a sense of forward movement and using manufacturing elements as graphic texture, this Make in India icon was born.
Sketch of the Brick House by iStudio Architecture which highlights the seamlessly fluid, organic nature of the design.
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24 EDITORIAL
THE LIFE OF DESIGN
Kaiwan Mehta
As the summer heat beats us down, it is maybe worth talking about our relationship as a civilisation with nature. One is surely not intending here to give a sermon on Sustainability or write an ode to it; in fact Sustainability has become the scary word today. It is such a bandied term today that all the meat and value it holds is actually hollowed out by this overuse and misuse; it is literally something that people and projects flaunt on their collars like a badge, a trophy, a ‘value-add’ to put it in management and corporate lingo. Setting up a sustainable relationship with the natural environment, developing cultural conversations with the world around us, are indeed part of all of human history, then why is it today that we suddenly want to celebrate some efforts towards an amicable relationship between (hu)man and nature? What is this inherent relationship, and what are the protocols of its practice are some important questions we need to ask; but we also need to remind ourselves that only a few years ago we largely did things, naturally, that today are seen as ‘wow’ steps towards a ‘sustainable earth’. Human life can easily be international, global as well as located in one’s own context and geography – this again should not be trapped in catchwords such as ‘glocal’. It is more a concern with attitude and practice towards the building and sustaining of a physical and cultural world we live in – a world that extends beyond our imagination, and a reality that understands everyday mooring in contexts and complexities we live in. Knowledge is part of human life and civilisation, in one part of the world or another, it is the experience of various contexts that interact and collide with each other to produce knowledges; variety and differences encourage exchanges and growth. At the same time certain attitudes have forced a denying of knowledges in local or changing contexts – again here one is not going to start arguing for a Regionalism of sorts. At one end we beat our breasts for ‘Sustainability’ and on the other we encourage attitudes and aspirations that ask for ‘internationalisation’ of materials and practices. The world is a series of shifting plates, much like the geological plates the earth’s crust is made up of. How we locate ourselves – ourselves today, and ourselves from the past – within these shifting scenarios is important for us to focus on. In this issue we look at multiple contexts of natural and human design. We look at mud architecture – not to once more celebrate the ‘Indian-ness’ or ‘localness’ of mud and brick, but to understand it
as a knowledge base – practices of making as well as a cultural institution such as building-making, (built-) environment-shaping. Language, which is such an intricate cultural landscape and institution, is also integral to building practices. Social relationships are also part of organisation systems that produce a built object – a (hu)man-made object. At the same time, to discuss this within the pages of this magazine is not to celebrate some ‘local’ or ‘regional’ knowledge or turning towards the ‘roots’ denying a ‘hollow globalisation’; but it is to precisely understand the production of ‘making’ knowledges, the engagements of different kinds that designing objects in the (hu)man world entail. To talk of the variations and differences in mud architecture in different regions of India is precisely to see Design as the arena of variety and sensitivity both together. Whether it is a discussion on a building practice or designing metropolitan work-environments and stationery to devise very amicable urban work-conditions – it is all about the relationships of human life and designed (humanly made and imagined) objects; houses to notebooks, home appliances, clothing, or stationery – a wide range of objects and ideas we bring into the fold of design practices and cultures. Design structures human engagement with environment, nature, as well as life. But simultaneously we also look at the intricacies of design in natural networks and structures of existence. We understand in detail the ecosystem of wetlands, with the case of Keshopur in Punjab in northern India. Engaging with these design structures of creation and sustenance is where human civilisation comes in the picture – but there are times when balance shifts – which in many ways one can propose is a problem of misunderstanding knowledge as a form of civilisation, and knowledge as an active and operative system within human imagination and design. But there is another form of culture and design of human life and built environment that we explore the history of Hindustani Sangeet (music) and the development of a public sphere in a growing metropolis like Mumbai through 19th and 20th centuries. A cultural theorist (Tejaswini Niranjana), a practitioner of visual culture such as film – a film-maker (Surabhi Sharma), and an architect and urban researcher (Kaiwan Mehta) discuss this across forms of knowledge-practices. The essay and project at large indicates how cultural practices and knowledge production around them emerge from locations but also travel to different locations under certain conditions of economics
and politics; after which the form may undergo a change or influence the shape of locations it travels to; indeed a constant situation of flux or osmotic exchanges. Cities are never, and cannot be showpieces, but they are always places of change and exchange and they only exist within networks and webs that extend beyond regional, national or even geographical boundaries at times. Cultural form and the design of objects and cities are corresponding and enmeshed journeys. Design and cultural productions are integrated aspects of human civilisation and this is something that constantly emerges in this issue of Domus India. One of the projects we discuss indeed stands at these crossroads – the India Pavilion at the Hannover Messe in Germany, that internationally launches Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Make in India’ initiatives as well as the idea of ‘Smart Cities’. India was the Official Partner Country at the world’s biggest industrial fair, and the pavilion was jointly inaugurated by the Prime Minister of India and the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel. Such pavilions are always markers of change and built on aspiration for a newer environment, and newer forms of culture and industry. These pavilions need to be bold and correspond to challenges of the times, rather than shape older ideas into newer avatars. How does design correspond to these ideas and challenges? Design has the capacity to shift cultural and political notions, and it has to bear that burden – its cross to bear! For a country that is today poised on the aspiration of a completely new tomorrow – what has design to offer in terms of collaborative but also critical development of an idea as well as design being an argumentative platform/atmosphere/structure. In a very humble way, discussing a house built for parents in the countryside, brings back the discourse on spaces, design, and values of memory and place – completing a sort of full circle on some of the ideas we have been battling with here. This is a twin-issue, since Domus is always 11 issues a year, we close this twin issue with many question, and possible connections between ideas, to hopefully pick-up and detail or revisit, or rework some of them in our future issues to come. As we occupy an often shifting ground, ideas are always shaping and reshaping themselves, they are often tentative than cast in stone, but it is their critical journey through tentative lives that allows for much brooding and thought, argument and discourse! km
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iStudio Architecture THE CHOICE TO BREATHE FREE, TO LIVE WITH THE ELEMENTS A modestly scaled house built in peri-urban Konkan Maharashtra for an architect’s parents becomes a study in the evolution of a radical spatial environment attuned to a way of life that emphatically reaffirms one’s connections with the earth and the elements Text Suprio Bhattacharjee Photos iStudio Architecture
The Wada-Shahapur Road north of Thane city that leads off the Thane-Bhiwandi-Wada MH SH 35 can be a bumpy ride. Trailers hauling shipping containers wobble precariously as they amble through this busy, but unmade road, as their skilled drivers negotiate the rugged terrain that the metalled road has become. Off this thoroughfare, one finds many hamlets – ‘villages’ so to speak – where the beautifully textured walls of the mud-and-straw house of your relative sits next to the brick-and-stone house (of your other relative) with plasterwork decorations adorning the walls,
which is fronted by the woodframed house (of another relative) painted in vibrant hues, next to which one will find the latest SUV and Compact Sedan under a hastily assembled steel-andcorrugated-sheet-roof extension. One such hamlet is Duparepada, as the name indicates, made up of members of the Dupare clan, that leads to another hamlet belonging to the Vallte clan. The rhythmic cluster of pyramid-roofed houses of varying heights (a typology typical of the region) of this hamlet is an unmistakable presence along the aforementioned arterial road, a cohesive ensemble now rudely
interrupted by a garish fourstorey anomaly of a reinforced concrete residence of one of the Dupare clan, with the claytiled roof substituted by a symbolic pyramidal crown of converging beams topped by a cherry-red pendant. Very close to Duparepada, one will find another anomaly – this time, a welcome one though. Sitting to the north of the road, much like a citadel on its commanding little outcrop, is a curvaceous entity with swooping roofs and a carapace that immediately strikes one as opaque-yet-porous, proud in its raw unbridled self,
Above: 3D rendering of the house. Below: a private garden guarded from the outside by a metallic abstraction of the thorn bushes that have traditionally been used as fencing and barriers. Opposite page: a courtyard-like space with trunks of dead trees found near the site that perform the structural function of columns binding the arching and beams
patterned brickwork adorning its heaving shell, with numerous openings that indicate this as a living-breathing creature. Walls slide past each other, each one like an operculum of a fish concealing its gill-like arrangement of screens that bring light and air into the organism, yet wards off prying eyes along with the untamed sunshine and dry winds of summer. This is a house that iStudio Architecture, an up and coming practice based out of Thane, built for the parents of one of its partners after an arduous construction process that lasted almost five years. Along the way, many hurdles were
overcome, including the lack of skill and workmanship amongst local builders. The practice (consisting of partners Amit Patil, Prashant Dupare and Shriya Parasrampuria) has been winning accolades and widespread attention over the past year since the house was completed, and this increasing interest in the work has resulted in a surge in enquiries, and the hope for further commissions that will allow the practice to explore its more experimental side. I had the opportunity of meeting up with one third of the practice very recently, for whose parents the house was built. Prashant is someone I have known as a
student, as I have known his partners Shriya and Amit. In the blazing May sunshine, we make our way across a summerdried landscape on the hour-long drive from Kalyan to Wada. The landscape has been altered by man’s presence, and agricultural holdings alternate with small towns and their adjoining industrial areas, and ubiquitous brick kilns. The homogenisation of man’s presence is obvious here – with the built fabric consisting of the conventional means of construction in steel and concrete, finished in plaster and paint that conceals the often unsightly workmanship. “One of our primary efforts was to source
materials and workforce locally,” I am informed. I ask him what initiated the ideas behind the house. “My father believes in a sustainable lifestyle, that one should only use and consume what we can produce ourselves.” I am informed that the retired Government officer now spends his time tending to his farm, very close to the house where he now lives with his wife. I am invited to visit the farm later that day. Along the way, we pass hamlets that have been dissected by the planners’ lines, and at a particular instance, when we marvel at the rare sighting of a house left in exposed brickwork with painstakingly crafted serrated corners, Prashant wryly remarks, “We are still asked by many people when we shall plaster the house.” Our conversation turns to the contentious issue of how broad consensus within an aspirational society such as ours views finishes – “Anything left unfinished in the village means that you are poor and cannot afford plaster and paint.” I speak to him of experiences with urban clients that do not feel any differently. We concur. “We couldn’t get carpenters to do the traditional louvred timber windows and other woodwork,” I am informed. Those were the only personnel that had to be ‘imported’ from the city. Surprisingly, there was no difficulty in finding a steel fabricator. The reason is obvious when he drives me through his ancestral hamlet, the aforementioned Duparepada, the main axial street of which terminates in the aforementioned garish four-storey concrete
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This page below: the ‘door’ is a fan-like arrangement of timber planks held together by studs. Below right: sketches and drawings of the seamlessly fluid, organic nature of the design
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Opposite page far below and this page: a wall swerves to enclose a sinuous body of water and a solitary White Plumeria that grows off an inner ‘rock-garden’ under the apertured roof – an eye-like opening towards the sky that serves as the fulcrum of this large space – the public face of the house
outcrop – one that cannot be missed. “That uncle of mine is a contractor; he built the our house as well.” This explains everything. The Gram Panchayat is building a new metal road, that we ascend to the house. Large slabs of Cudappah fronting the house in a random fashion outlining a driveway and access path have now been damaged by the contractors who dumped their material on it one fine day. “The Panchayat wants to bring the tar road upto everyone’s doorstep – of course it’s not going to cost us anything. We have refused though.” The fact that homogenisation is posing a serious threat hits home squarely, and quite literally, as well. From the approach path, the walls of the house seem to surge upwards and outwards. The roof swerves down gently (children from the village clamber up this inviting roof slope and play on the roof I am informed, when the family is away), its support
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LIVING ROOM WALL FLAT ELEVATION LIVING ROOM WALL FLAT ELEVATION
Project Brick House Location Village Duparepada, Taluka Wada, District Palghar, Maharashtra Client Vitthal Dupare Architect iStudio Architecture Design Team Prashant Dupare, Amit Patil, Shriya Parasrampuria
Above: conceptual sketch of the house. There was no structural or services consultant appointed for the project. iStudio team visited places like Auroville and Costford (Kerala) to understand various technical details required like filler slab, ferrocement, rat-trap bond etc., and experimented with same on-site with help of local masons
Site Area 3 Acres (39624 m2) Project Area 762 m2 Civil Contractors Local Masons Site Supervision iStudio Architecture Model Maker iStudio Architecture Initiation of Project May 2010 Completion of Project May 2014
SCHEMATIC SECTION THROUGH COURTYARD (SECTION A-A') SCHEMATIC SECTION THROUGH COURTYARD (SECTION A-A)
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RAT TRAP BOND BRICKWORK
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LEGEND
UP
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LIVING ROOM
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KITCHEN
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DINING AREA
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MASTER BEDROOM
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TOILET
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STUDY / GUEST BEDROOM
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COURT
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STORE
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150 MM THK R.C.C. SLAB 10 MM REINFORCEMENT BAR FILLER MATERIAL (CLAY POTS)
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ROOF MEMBERS PROFILE AND FILLER SLAB FILLER SLAB SECTION B-B
4M
1 Living Room 2 Kitchen 3 Dining Area 4 Master Bedroom 5 Toilet 6 Study / Guest Bedroom 7 Court 8 Store
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ROOF MEMBERS PROFILE AND FILLER SLAB
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FILLER SLAB SECTION DETAILS
GROUND FLOOR PLAN
GROUND FLOOR PLAN 0
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wall defining the entrance to the house, with another Basalt wall that turns away to enclose a little private garden guarded from the outside by a metallic abstraction of the thorn bushes that have traditionally been used as fencing and barriers. Most houses stand on their land holdings freely. There are no ‘boundary’ or ‘compound walls’ in the hamlets still – and thankfully so – although increasing afluence may soon bring about alienation in subsequent generations. As newer houses built in the ubiquitous ‘modern’ materials substitute the traditional verandah with a wall and aluminium windows, and the rammed earth forecourt is replaced by a tar field adorned with the latest internalcombustion-engine-acquisitions, the close-knit social and built fabric of these traditional settlements is at increasing risk. Through the pair of entrance walls, one comes up the ‘door’ – a fan-like arrangement of timber planks held together by studs that negotiates the geometry of its intersection lines to accommodate the position it will most likely be in during most of the – open (as all doors to village houses traditionally are). In its open state, it can be mistaken for
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This spread above: up the flight of stairs supported on a basalt stone arch along the water body one can access the ‘den’. Left: Beds and furniture are fashioned out of ferro-cement, while shelving (top right and right) is in Cudappah stone. Right and below right: the house, with its unabashed spatial openness, is an invitation to the elements yet protected sufficiently from it
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This spread: the house during its construction phase. Clay dishes for the filler slab were sourced from a nearby village. The filler slab has a rough granular finish on the underside, and the rat-trap bond brick walls lead to a noticeable thermal difference within the house
timber fan-column supporting the roofline that springs along its top edge an over a grand brick arch along a curving perimeter forms a backdrop to the benchlike seating area – the ‘seats’ themselves a swooping line of ferro-cement that emerges from the floor and arcs upwards to join the corner of the eye-like grand ‘window’ that frames a view across the north, the height of the opening obscuring views into the house, but ensuring a glimpse towards the landscape in the distance. Lines on the floor emphasise this flowing movement – as much visual, as it also serves a the vital function of creating casting sections for the in-situ cement floor, its pigmented surface trowel finished and sealed with a lacquer that will ensure the floor increases in shine
through use. Meanwhile, one of the entrance walls transforms in character from solid to gilllike and porous, while the other wall swerves away to enclose a sinuous body of water and a solitary White Plumeria that grows off an inner ‘rock-garden’ under a generous aperture in the roof – an eye-like opening towards the sky that serves as the fulcrum of this large space – the public face of the house. This becomes a courtyard-like space without necessary delineating the edges, bound by trunks of dead trees found near the site that perform the structural function of columns binding the arching and alternating timber and steel beams, and as such reinforces the character of the house as neither ‘outside’ nor ‘inside’ – but a continuous and emphatic ‘in-
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between’. This ambiguous nature is immediately perceived – “There are no glass windows in the house,” I recall Prashant mention on the drive earlier in the day; and I can see how this transforms one’s perception of spatial boundaries, as well as the nature of the building-as-object. I am reminded of traditional houses all over the country that historically had wooden shutters over their openings where privacy and enclosure was needed, articulated such that one could still cut out heat and light, gain privacy, and ensure constant ventilation in humid conditions through timber louvers and slatlike arrangements. Some of the openings have metal doors or grilles – again a bow to the traditional means of enclosure – along orientations where
harsh sunlight and hot winds are absent, and where one would welcome the gentle early morning sun – towards the north-east, east and the south-east. One such door, a large fin-like (or operculumlike) metal filigree arrangement towards the east opens outwards along a stepped terrace that continues the arc made by the risers inside the living area to the raised kitchen and dining area. Using simple metal bearings on steel flats and hinged on its side, this mini-amphitheatre adds a communal knot to the house with a view over the fields towards the east of the house, before the arc of the kitchen that reinstates the warm hearth of the house as a central and significant spatial entity. Gill-walls in brick enclose the living area and kitchen, allowing light from the early
eastern sun and wind through the house, whilst the dining area becomes an extension of the ferro-cement kitchen platform – so designed to accommodate four people sitting cross-legged on the floor on mats. A ‘backdoor’ leads out to the south-east past the kitchen to the vegetable garden off the south-east of the house, enclosed by another fin-like metal metal door that interestingly continues the width of the adjacent brick wall and tapers it to a point. Some of the delicate metal members are bent out of shape. “When we’re away kids climb up to the roof and enter the house and play.” Prashant’s father doesn’t seem to mind it. They lead a simple lifestyle – and the bedroom doors are locked and cannot be accessed from outside. Two bedrooms on the lower level
lead off a circulation knot past the dining area. Beds and furniture are fashioned out of ferro-cement, while shelving is in Cudappah stone. Woodwork is used where needed in the openings, and when the gill walls are not in brick, they are in Cudappah – each of the bathrooms has an internal court past a sinuous ‘bathtub’ fashioned in-situ out of cement concrete that breathes through a louvered wall made of stacked Cudappah slabs – seemingly light and delicate, but tough and resistant to changes in weather and the onslaught of the elements. Washbasins are formed out of ferro-cement, and a filler slab becomes the floor of the upper level of the house. Clay dishes were sourced from a nearby native or ‘tribal’ village (where settlers still use these in their daily lives). The filler slab
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has a rough granular finish on the underside – a lime plaster coating is in the offing. The modest Guest Bedroom on the south-west opens into an internal court edged in by the Basalt entrance wall mentioned previously, and the metal thorn wall. Up a flight of stairs supported on a basalt stone arch along the water body one comes to the ‘den’ – a quasi-indoor space (only the bathroom can be locked) that opens up on the northern edge to the swooping and cascading ferro-cement roof, whilst protected from the south by walls of brick and timber. The sinuous spatial language continues, with built-in furniture becoming extension of the enclosing surfaces themselves. The Plumeria grown through the roof, and when it shall grow to its fullest, it shall form the fulcrum for the roof landscape, providing shade as well. The roof ‘is’ meant to be used – Prashant mentions (with a sense of joy) something to the effect that “when kids are here they’re excited and active, exploring the geography of the house, while parents are apprehensive and anxious.” The house has become this adventure-laden terrain, and I do not hesitate at savouring the opportunity of hopping over a (really low) railing to walk on the roof. Roofs are meant to be used, I strongly agree, and in this case, the sinuous geometry of the ferro-cement surface ensures that rainwater run-off cascades into the water body below and to planters along the edge walls. Formed on lost shuttering of bamboo mats spanning between alternating timber and steel
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purlins (lined by a woven plastic textile to form the base for casting the roof) and supported by whirling main beams and dancing steel columns ( when not over the rat-trap bond walls that lead to a noticeable thermal difference ‘within’ the house), the roof, as much as the rest of the building, affirms of the necessity of costeffectiveness in building and material research in association with local craftsmen. Later in the day, I visit the family farm, a stronghold of green atop a hill in a landscape being consumed by human greed (an adjacent hillock is being flattened by another relative, much to the chagrin of Prashant’s father). I enjoy the cool breeze on an otherwise hot May afternoon, as we pick vegetables and fruits for the family kitchen and more, while I am offered a treat of juicy sweet kajoo (cashew) fruits and almost-ripe mangoes. I am struck by a nagging feeling – that there cannot be a true ‘sustainable architecture’ or any ‘sustainable artifice’ unless the human condition resolves a most fundamental challenge – that of ‘sustainable living’. This is perhaps where the house is at its most radical. In its unabashed spatial open-ness, an invitation to the elements yet protected sufficiently from it (all openings are never hermetically sealable – and no it doesn’t ‘rain’ into the spaces) and in its permissiveness to human access (both welcome and otherwise); in its emphatic use of as much of the local as is possible, and in an effort to train a local workforce in the choice of materials and their articulation, the house achieves
the same thrust of ‘living with the minimum” as was desired by the client. ‘Sustainability’ becomes a question of lifestyle – that then determines one’s way of living, and thus one’s habitat – in this case – the house. It becomes a firm ‘choice’ and not a casual ‘adornment’ in the form of an apologetic sheen of ‘green’ that mocks at one’s inability to do much more with much less. This is not merely an attempt at ‘sustainable architecture’ – but much more. That, is this architecture’s unchallenged victory. So in case you’re driving past and do a double take at discovering this citadel of brick, and upon approaching it with that sense of curiosity and enthusiasm you find the door locked, fret not. You can clamber up the roof (not advised though), or you can well, just borrow the keys from the relative who runs the roadside convenience store you just passed.
Opposite page: from the approach path, the walls of the house seem to surge upwards and outwards, while the roof swerves down gently. This page avove: builtin furniture becomes an extension of the enclosing surfaces. All images featured here are by bmdpix.com and anclicks.com