Di 43 | Suprio B - Bipolar Order | DOMUSIndia 09/2015 by Suprio Bhattacharjee

September 2015

domus 43 September 2015

Volume 04 / Issue 10 R200

CONTENTS 27

Author

Authors Rahul Mehrotra Architect and urban researcher

Kaiwan Mehta

Filipe Vera Architect and urban researcher Gautam Bhatia Architect and writer

Photographers Gabriele Basilico Sami Sert Sengul Murat Emily Hughes Cem Berik Mehmet Cetin Arpad Benedek Edmund Sumner Giovanni Chiaramonte Roland Halbe Mahendra Sinh Rahul Mehrotra Siddharth Menon Dr Deepak John Mathew Filipe Vera

LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO

INDIA

Confetti

Rahul Mehrotra Filipe Vera

Gautam Bhatia

Contemporary museum for architecture in India

Lessons from the pop-up megacity Thinking Correa

Siddharth Menon

It’s not about mud — The role of a 21st century architect in rural India

Peter Cook Kaiwan Mehta

The poetics of architectural vocabulary

Ilaria Valente

Saul Steinberg in Milan

Suprio Bhattacharjee

Faruk Malhan

September 2015

Editorial Landscape of the familiar-unfamiliar

Talking design

Contributors Suprio Bhattacharjee

043

Title

Contemporary museum for architecture in India

Siddharth Menon Architect

INDIA

Design

Jean Nouvel

Projects Jane’s carousel, New York

Vincenzo Melluso

A box of light, a play of views

sP+a

Bipolar order

Rassegna Furniture

106

Feedback Faruk Malhan’s Istanbul

Volume 04 / Issue 10 R200

043

LA CITTÀ DELL’ UOMO

043 September 2015

SIR PETER COOK IN INDIA

Cover: The drawing on the cover is a part of Peter Cook’s drawings and sketches that are being showcased in Delhi at the exhibition titled Sir Peter Cook - Drawings from 1960s-2000s. The exhibition looks predominantly at drawings that seem almost-unbuildable or nearly-buildable, but their components come together to build a vocabulary of working parts.

SIR PETER COOK IN INDIA

An axonometric drawing of the Fort House in Hyderabad designed by sP+a. It has a series of parallel walls, gradually increasing in height, that enclose spaces of varying scale and varying degrees of privacy and luminance.

domus 43 September 2015

28 EDITORIAL

LANDSCAPE OF THE FAMILIAR-UNFAMILIAR

Architecture is the landscape of culture, ideas, and the material world we inhabit. Architecture speaks through buildings but cannot be defined by them alone. The building exists within a landscape of culture, ideas, and the material world, and it is architecture that contextualises the roles and relationships of built form and culture, ideas and material realities. Crystal Palace in London of 1851 was not just a building with new technologies and new materials – it was a landscape that marked the advent of a whole new way of looking at the world and civilisation, it marked a changed imagination with which human beings perceived reality thereon. The many forms of Brahmanical and Jain temples in India are confluences of ideas and philosophical moorings where human and divine established terrains of dialogue – different imaginations of the cosmos and human world collide to animate the shikharas and the columns. The body in performing its circumambulatory journey builds up a dialogue with the material terrain of walls and spaces animating the building into hyper-real geography of visual forms and ideas. The Crystal Palace in its transparency expanded visual possibilities allowing the eye to run far up to a horizon from within material surfaces, through a maze of designed objects and products from the different industrial worlds and human- and machine-made products. The eye travelled in search of a limit for ever-expanding space – that travel was space, not defined any longer by material walls but by the encounters of the eye. The encounters of the body, the encounters of the eye are architecture’s primary concerns. But what the body and the eye encounter are the realities of a world-scape built on ideas and philosophies, within economic strategies and political dynamics. The body and the eye stand tested through challenges that the architectural landscape at all points throw up, and at you. Architecture is the dynamic landscape, and the building is its arena and vocabulary. The landscape of architecture is ephemeral not the solid mass that buildings have us believe. The landscape of architecture is potent and charged, not finished and constructed as buildings again have us believe. Two features in this magazine expose the larger, unsettled, and complex imagination and world of architecture for us – the discussions on the making and unpacking of the Kumbh Mela and the collection of paintings and drawings by Sir Peter Cook. In an interview with Domus

Kaiwan Mehta

India, Cook points out to a very important and delicate issue – the idea of architecture that plays in the realms of imagination and utopia versus what one would otherwise refer to as ‘build-able’ or ‘normal’ architecture; he indicates that in differentiating the thoughtprovoking and challenging imaginations in architecture from the normative building-type idea of architecture we keep the world of ideas and dreams in some ephemeral space as if it is to be enjoyed only there and not as a part of the real and meaty world of architecture, while the mainstream in announcing its connection with a ‘reality’ hides “what it often is – lacking in wit and invention”. The world of dreams also emerges from the real world of buildings, inventions, struggles, and circumstances – discourse on architecture is similarly located within realities of everyday life. Dreams and discourse are not peripheral to the making of buildings, or are not meant for special appearances once in a while but are the ‘stuff’ of architecture, and its everyday life. The drawings of Peter Cook featured here are from a phase of his work when, as he puts it he was gathering together component “almost-unbuildable (but nearly buildable)”. This terrain inbetween the ‘buildable’ and ‘unbuildable’ is the potential terrain for discourse, where architecture would and will discover itself again and again. The drawings of Cook as you read them slowly and carefully, and enjoy their visual play reveal to you the many questions you have about architecture hiding within you; the drawings generate a landscape of the familiar-unfamiliar, the recognisable vocabulary merge into unfamiliar terrain where lines and colour, as well as form are in an eternal creative bliss – the lila of Krishna, or the churning of the ocean where colour, line, and form are engaged in the creative battle of balances and challenges. The feature on Kumbh Mela, which is a series of extracts from the research and subsequent book Kumbh Mela – Mapping the Ephemeral MEGACITY (Hatje Cantz, 2015) discusses a Pop-Up urbanity – an architectural landscape of the built and of its ‘unbuilding’. The landscape that emerges for a mega-festival or hyper-event establishes itself as if a city from time immemorial with established roots in memory, cultural moorings, design vocabulary, engineering foundations – but only to vanish and unpack and fold-up one day. Openness and Reversibility are two important concepts that one takes back as lessons from this event-city, this dynamic urban phenomenon – which is

more phenomenon that establishment. The phenomenon is structured within a historical reality – a reality that is myth-bound and geography-bound; a city that always existed and never exists. This phenomenon-city challenges the ground principles on which we think about urbanity and the stuff of architecture. The phenomenon of urban living and the architectural make-ups for it get exposed as Saul Steinberg tears open the façade of a Parisian building in his sketch The Art of Living. A dynamic drawing that unveiled the hidden urbanity of ‘insides’ allows me to understand the urban not as ‘public’ (space) but rather the private (space). The hidden urbanity within the tenements and apartments influencing the mental make-up of the urban condition will deny the classic division of urban living split between the public and the private. On the terrace of this apartment building one will notice a parallel emerging landscape of terrace-urbanity reminding one of Cairo’s Yacoubian Building or Bombay/Mumbai’s Queen’s Mansion – the multiple grounds on which yards of living quarters emerge shaping life and architecture. Dwelling occupies much of this issue as the architectural phenomenon of material realities and notions of urbanity. The materiality of cob, wooden trusses, terracotta components, and stone elements occupy the processes of building in non-urban contexts raising questions on the relationship between building, architecture, and the architect. While in other cases the act of architecture engages with form, memory and light, as with the Box of Light in Italy and Fort House in Hyderabad, in some the dwelling is an urban island within a wider landscape of suburban India as with the Lattice House in Jammu. The dwelling picks on the home as terrain, rather than form. It is the terrain within a phenomenon of urbanity and/or materiality, of conditions that are historical and political, or circumstances that require memory and invention. Architecture is the landscape of culture, ideas, and the material world we inhabit. Architecture speaks through buildings but cannot be defined by them alone. The building exists within a landscape of culture, ideas, and the material world, and it is architecture that contextualises the roles and relationships of built form and culture, ideas and material realities. km

PROJECTS

domus 43 September 2015

88 PROJECTS

domus 43 September 2015

PROJECTS 89

sP+a BIPOLAR ORDER The two houses discussed in this feature, one in Hyderabad and the other in Jammu, showcase the pronounced manifestation of two opposing streams latent thus far in the studio’s work – that of a responsiveness informed by the sense of agile flexing and supple weightiness, and that of a sense of calm drift and restrained buoyancy Text Suprio Bhattacharjee Photos Edmund Sumner

It’s compelling to think of an office working on two concurrent dwellings of similar scale sited at two locations as distinct as Hyderabad and Jammu. One in the semi-arid heart of the country’s weather-beaten Deccan on the banks of the Musi river, the other on the sub-tropical foothills along the Tawi river. While one occupies a cave-like set of volumes partly embedded in the ground, enabling its inhabitants to retreat from their surroundings, the other builds itself a filigree nest, creating a gauze-like veil that, despite its hulking presence, obscures the outside world from its inhabitants. The house in Hyderabad responds to its urban setting by a series of walls placed in a parallel configuration, gradually increasing in height, that between them enclose spaces of varying scale and varying degrees of privacy and luminance. Seen from the outside, the visual order of overlapping walls reduces the overall scale of the building while assuring inhabitants complete privacy through their sectional interplay. The walls seem to be as impenetrable as they are fluid - zipping along three of the site’s boundaries in a game of

‘follow-me-till-the-end’. They enclose the heart of the building in the form of an elevated courtyard over an underground parking space, the fourth side of which is formed by a taller building on the adjacent plot. This is the social epicentre of the house, that guests can access independently as well from the South-East entrance forecourt through a stepped ramp that climbs up along the tall and slender chasm-like entry sequence that leads its occupants into the guts of the house. The house as such does not seem to subscribe to the notion of creating a distinctive ‘urban form’ - choosing instead to retreat behind the visual coherence of its overlapping walls to offer an inner world of choreographed experiences far removed from the extremities of climate and a satisfaction of the clients’ request for a ‘fortress from the cacophony of the world outside’. As such, the house can be seen to be derivative of the nature of topographical ascent and laminar flow seen in the Golconda Fort that lies in close proximity to the city. Furthering its critique of the city’s fabric, one can begin to see this house as a ‘landscape event’ instead of an urban figure, a move in which the act of artifice tends

This spread: the house in Hyderabad has a series of parallel walls, gradually increasing in height, that enclose spaces of varying scale and varying degrees of privacy and luminance

SITE PLAN

domus 43 September 2015

90 PROJECTS

domus 43 September 2015

PROJECTS 91

SECTION PHOTO MONTAGE

The house draws inspiration from topographical ascent and laminar flow of the Boondi fort and the Golconda Fort that lie in close proximity to the city of Hyderabad

1 Enterance 2 Home Office 3 Living Room 4 Kitchen 5 Show Kitchen 6 Dining 7 Bedroom 8 Guest Bedroom 9 Entertainment Room 10 Pool

SECTION BB

0.5

FIRST LEVEL MEZZANINE LEVEL GROUND LEVEL

Project Private Home Location Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India MEP Consultant R.N. Joshi Structural Consultant Facet Size 1300 m2 Year of Completion March 2014 Architects Sameep Padora & Associates Design Team Viresh Mhatre, Harsha Nalwaya, Aanoshka Choksi, Mythili Shetty Photographs Edmund Sumner

99 66

UP UP

5 5

AA FIRST LEVEL MEZZANINE LEVEL

GROUND FLOOR PLAN

1- ENTRANCE 2-HOME OFFICE 3-LIVING ROOM 4-KITCHEN 5-SHOW KITCHEN

6-DINING 7-BEDROOM 8-GUEST BEDROOM 9-ENTERTAINMENT ROOM 10-POOL 0

0.5

GROUND LEVEL

PUBLIC SEMI PUBLIC LEVEL AXONOMETRIC

PRIVATE

SECTION AA

0 0

0.5

5M 3

92 PROJECTS

This spread: as per the clients’ request for a ‘fortress from the cacophony of the world outside’, there is a fortlike spatial intricacy even in the way the interiors are designed

domus 43 September 2015

PROJECTS 93

The house in Jammu is set within its chaotic suburban context, rather than an object that sits by itself in an idyllic landscape

94 PROJECTS

domus 43 September 2015

PROJECTS 95

5 1

5 B

B 6

A 1 Living Room 2 Dining Office 3 Kitchen 4 Bedroom 5 Bathroom 6 Walk-In Wardrobe

GROUND FLOOR

GROUND FLOOR PLAN

5 3 1

This page: the two-storey reinforced concrete frame of the building is wrapped completely by a filigree handcrafted armature of slender timber battens

B 2

FIRST FIRST FLOORFLOOR

PLAN

LEGEND: 1

LIVING ROOM

DINING ROOM

KITCHEN

BEDROOM BATHROOM WALK-IN WARDROBE 5M

10M

SOUTH ELEVATION

Project Private Home Location Sidhra, Jammu, J & K, India. MEP Consultant R.N. Joshi Structural Consultant Suhas Chande Size 600 m2 Year of Completion January 2015 Architects Sameep Padora & Associates Design Team Sudarshan Venkatraman, Aparna Dhareshwar, Karan Bhatt

SECTION BB

SECTION AA

domus 43 September 2015

96 PROJECTS

This spread: while one can draw connections to the region’s historic building traditions involving fine timber work from the outside, from the interiors one can view a metaphorical forest clearing in the form of the front garden, with the lattice fencing enclosing spaces that are outdoors, but not ‘outside’

towards a ‘configured ground’ instead of the classical ‘figure-ground’. In Jammu, the practice takes an approach that can be considered to be the polar opposite of its strategy in Hyderabad. Within its incoherent suburban realm, here, the house assumes an indomitable urban presence that belies its modest scale to impart a sense of visual order and offer a singular, referential coherence. Becoming an unmistakable urban marker (and thus at the risk of exposing its contents to scrutiny), through the elation of its building mass, the ‘laminar flow’ of the Hyderabad house changes its dimensional orientation to become horizontally layered and planar, a crystalline object whose inner layers are in the act of sliding past each other in geological time. As such, much like the Hyderabad house, this also ensures a deceptive outer appearance, where the true scale of the house is never clear, until the lights turn on at nightfall to reveal the inner structural frame. As such one realises this to be a two-storey reinforced concrete frame, wrapped completely by a filigree handcrafted armature of slender timber battens. The house’s mass and its bulging presence dissolve in the dematerialising perceptual effect of the timber lattice screens, amplified by the horizontality of each strata and their shift from the adjacent lamina. From the outside, the connections drawn to the region’s historic building traditions involving fine timber work is strikingly resonant, with their former massiveness now transposed into an atmospheric haze as one drifts within its perimeter. The allusions to traditional lattice fences and a metaphorical forest clearing are reinforced by the occupant’s view of the front garden, while on its flanks, the timber lattice encloses spaces that are outdoors, but not ‘outside’. The timber lattice is more than a

domus 43 September 2015

PROJECTS 97

2M 1M

STREET ELEVATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

1200 HRS 0 (80.5 )

1200 HRS 0 (80.5 ) 0800 HRS 0 (37 )

0800 HRS 0 (37 )

1200 HRS (80.50) 0800 HRS 0 (37 )

0800 HRS 0 (37 )

JUNE 21st

CROSS SECTION COMPARISION

ELEVATION STUDIES

JUNE 21st

2M 1M

deft tectonic gesture though, its geometry and orientation ensures that the harsh sunlight during the warmer months is kept at bay, while tempering the elements as it filters in through the gauze-like veil. In many ways, this house plays on current topical debates within broader Architectural discourse regarding the role of atmosphere and perception, offering its inhabitants luminous spaces filled with a tempered, dappled light that alleviates a simple plan organisation on a tight lot within a disjointed neighbourhood to offer a calm sanctuary of immersive, uplifting, phenomenal experience. From the outside, it becomes a well-defined and enticing urban figure that offers a stiff, composed resistance to the now-mundane visual disorder of our towns marked by communication towers and infrastructure services. These two houses by the practice mark an important step in the evolution of the office’s work. It would be difficult to pick a favourite. Both projects offer a critique of their immediate urban surroundings through a distinctive handling of building mass and the presence (or absence) of the urban figure. But perhaps for a sheer sense of material singularity, the attempt to offer a coherent architectural vision, and the promise of an enriching and immersive spatial experience, I’d head to Jammu.