READING THE WIND AND WEATHER

THE METEORO-LOGICAL

ARCHITECTURE OF STUDIO

MUMBAI

Architectural writer and educator Kazi Ashraf likens the work of Studio Mumbai to that of a tree, in which landscape and architecture converge. As he explains, such a position is realised by a profound commitment to the act of building in which native materials are condensed into temporary structures. This requires due attention to the process of making, refl ected in a workshop practice that incorporates craftsmen and artisans, and by necessity has to stand outside the conventional expectations for construction and economies of time.

Kazi Ashraf

HONOLULU JUNE 2012

Studio Mumbai Architects, Palmyra House, Nandgaon, Maharashtra, India, 2007The fi ligreed, louvred wooden structures are woven through the coconut groves, intertwined with their landscape and environment.

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A building is like a tree. Unfolding into the environment, incarcerated in it and incarnating it too, buildings by Studio Mumbai dwell in the space between architecture and landscape.

In most projects by Studio Mumbai, the first thing one notices is the crafting of the building in a kind of poetic and situational economy. It emerges effortlessly as if it has been there all along, without the conceit of artifice. Kengo Kuma thematises such an act of building as ‘weak architecture’ following Gianni Vattimo’s programme of ‘weak ontology’ as a non-hierarchical, non-dominant condition.1 The Bangalore-based architect Prem Chandavarkar approximates that through the notion of ‘architecture of background’, when the test of a building is not its spectacular presentation, but the accrued experiences and memories of its everyday inhabitation.2

Such a position is driven by a profound act of building: the architect’s perennial art of putting things together as a condensation of the landscape. For the practice’s resort in Leti, up in the Himalayas, Studio Mumbai’s Bijoy Jain describes the act of building as ‘a passive reworking of the landscape through gathering, moving, condensing native materials into cohesive but temporary structures’.3 Jain understands that a built work takes place, how it is inscrutably situated, and how it is environed or enveloped by the world in a manner where, in the language of phenomenology, ‘no cleavage is possible’ between the work and the world.

Taking place invokes two perennial truths: the inevitability of situatedness, and building from a site. The environmental analogy of the tree suggests care and an exact understanding of the science of geology and moisture, and the rhythm of the seasons. When students inquired of the Philadelphia-based wood sculptor Wharton Esherick how they should proceed, the Modernist craftsman is supposed to have replied: ‘Think like a farmer.’ Louis Kahn, who designed one of Esherick’s studios, also understood that an architect can learn from a farmer in not making the landscape pretty, but rather ‘to preserve his crops by the logic of planting’.4 It is in the logic of planting that Studio Mumbai frames its work, as a kind of cultivation. A building – or a tree – emerges in the horizon from the material potentials and possibilities of the world, from their numerous combinations and assemblages, and from the natural laws and systems that dictate their production.

The inevitable situatedness of architecture indicates an ideological and strategic difference between the ‘what’ of architecture and ‘where is architecture’. The question of ‘where’ brings up the obvious nexus of architecture and the world; but one that is increasingly opaque to most architects inordinately beholden to the seduction of ‘what’. Despite our habitual thinking of the autonomy of architecture (which is perhaps the biggest visual deception with which we contend), architecture is always in a kind of ‘reciprocal insertion and intertwining’ with the environment, where the limits of one are lost in the other.5

Such an intertwined identity positions Jain’s work in, as Kuma observes, the relationship between architecture and landscape. Disagreeing with the division of disciplines into architecture and landscape architecture, Kahn proposed the term ‘land architect’ as someone who looks at land from an indivisible point of view, from a condition of oneness.6 The principle of land architecture suggests a complex dialogue between the grounding and arising of a building, as if the building – a fact of constructedness – rises from the ambiguous earth into a precise form even if the earth is still the material and genealogical source of the unfolding. Such a reasoned consideration of the simultaneity of distinctiveness

Together, carpenters, masons, architects and craftsmen create hand-worked details from locally sourced Palmyra wood.

Architect’s hand sketch of the Palmyra House elevation.

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Studio Mumbai Architects, Tara House, Kashid, Maharashtra, India, 2005Above the reservoir, sunlight filters through wooden slatted screens creating sense-stimulating patterns of light, shadow and air.

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The inevitable situatedness of architecture indicates an ideological and strategic difference between the ‘what’ of architecture and ‘where is architecture’.

top: Section drawing through the Tara House, contrasting the subterranean gravitas of the hidden well with the atmospheric lightness of the open structures above.

bottom right: Beneath the courtyard lies a secret room filled with water from a subterranean aquifer: excavated spaces form a lexicon of grounding in Jain’s work.

The stone-lined reservoir cavity was constructed with the local knowledge of a 72-year-old master well-builder and a team of artisans.

and seamlessness – of architecture and landscape – is expressed in the articulation of subterranean gravitas and atmospheric lightness in Jain’s work. A section drawing through the Tara House in Kashid, Maharashtra (2005), with the well as excavation and building as construction, reveals his predisposition towards architecture as a manipulation of the topographic continuum.

The deep, dark well as an emblem of dwelling appears in the Copper House II in Chondi, Maharashtra (2011), Palmyra House in Nandgaon, Maharashtra (2007) and Tara House, conferring on these projects a subterranean sensibility that is both ecological and mythical. Excavated spaces, deep wells and stone walls form a lexicon of grounding in Jain’s work. The Copper House begins with the new excavation of an artesian well forming the organising core of the project. The curb of a dank well covered with moss sits amid the coconut grove of the Palmyra House. In Tara House, a secret room under the courtyard/garden forms a reservoir of water for the house, drawn from an underground aquifer. The courtyard and garden rise above it, and the house spirals out as an ensemble of pavilions.

The stolid mass of the earth is contrasted by another language defining the arisen building: diaphanous membranes, floating planes, skeletal frames and delicate slats form a tectonic configuration for most of the houses. Palmyra records the architect’s earliest articulation of an architecture of porosity formed simply by slatted envelopes as an analogue of the filigree of coconut-tree leaves. Formed over and along low basalt walls rising from the ground, the tectonic assemblage of the Utsav House in Satirje, Maharashtra (2008), utilises the porous property to complete the intertwined relationship.

‘I am alert to the weather,’ claims Jain.7 Learning from the nature of being exposed in the moisture-laden landscape, especially the monsoons, largely in the region of Mumbai, he has developed a typological vocabulary (the pavilion-like disposition) and a refined language of materials and details. House pavilions are woven through coconut groves (Palmyra) or mango trees (Belavali House, 2008, and Copper Houses). In a kind of apostolic succession to Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa, Jain has invigorated the promise of tropical architecture, taking its ecological ethos towards a new poetic prospect.

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In maintaining a consistent sense of situational particularity and tectonic poetics, Jain’s architecture approximates the act of resistance that Kenneth Frampton put up as a provocation in an environment of devastating sameness.

Communication is through gesture and scale model, rather than conventional drawings: a collaborative, nonlinear narrative that describes atmosphere, not instruction.

Studio Mumbai Architects, Tara House, Kashid, Maharashtra, India, 2005 The house spirals out as an ensemble of pavilions above the secret reservoir.

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Text © 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 78-9, 81(t&b), 82 © Studio Mumbai Architects; pp 80, 81(c), 83 © Studio Mumbai Architects, photos Hélène Binet

Few architects in India seem to have patience for either the phenomenology of situatedness or the care of crafting. The former requires a listening to the wind, so to speak, and the latter a tactic of delay best relayed by that wonderful Latin phrase festina lente, ‘make haste slowly’. Jain emphasises an attention to the process of making and the patient evolution of things. He speaks of riyaz, the practice or discipline of doing architecture every day with both attentiveness and repetition. These are best represented in his workshop practice, placing craftsmen and artisans in the middle of the process, doing life-size mockups and prototypes, and material innovations, and eventually weaving a tapestry of sensorial experiences out of the constructed materiality.

Jain’s close collaboration with artisans and craftsmen recalls what noted Egyptian architect Hasan Fathy developed with the master mason Aladdin Mustafa, or what Bawa and British-born Indian architect Laurie Baker practised with their builders. In the highly disciplined practice of Studio Mumbai, there is also room for instinctiveness. Jain lets the building ‘respond to the instincts of the craftsmen and the evolving challenges of construction, with predictably surprising results’.8 It is this combination of the tactical and instinctual that will produce an empathy for the language of unauthorised architecture from the niches and interstices of Mumbai’s official fabric and their plastered reincarnations at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

In maintaining a consistent sense of situational particularity and tectonic poetics, Jain’s architecture approximates the act of resistance that Kenneth Frampton put up as a provocation in an environment of devastating sameness. Delicately poised between the contemporary and the traditional, and Zen minimalism and delightful elegance, Jain’s work cannot be described as regionalist either. Not avowedly staged as a resistance, Jain’s work nonetheless represents an alternative to India’s double trouble: the raucous architectural phantasmagoria serving the neoliberal economy and the hyper-aestheticised extravaganza surrogating for tradition. Jain tiptoes towards a more precious and patient position. Like a farmer, he scans the sky for a meteorological intuition, treads the earth for secret semaphores, and then gathers with carpenters, masons, architects and artisans for cultivating the building-tree together. 2

Notes1. Kengo Kuma, GA Architect 19: Kengo Kuma, GA Edita (Tokyo), 2005. The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo has written about ‘weak thought’ on a number of occasions, especially in the collection of essays, with PA Rovatti, Il pensiero debole (1983), translated as Weak Thought, SUNY Press (Albany, NY), 2010. Juhani Pallasmaa writes on fragile architecture in ‘Hapticity and Time’, in The Architectural Review, May 2000.2. Prem Chandavarkar, ‘The “Background” in Bangalore: Architecture and Critical Resistance in a New Modernity’, in Kazi K Ashraf, 3 Made in India, Vol 77, No 6, November/December 2007, pp 78–83.3. Studio Mumbai Architects, in Kazi K Ashraf, 3 Made in India, Vol 77, No 6, November/December 2007, pp 36–41.4. Louis Kahn at the First International Congress of Architects, Isfahan, Iran, in Richard Saul Wurman (ed), What Will Be Has Always Been: The Words of Louis I Kahn, Access Press and Rizzoli (New York), 1986, p 99.5. Here I draw the idea from the notion of the ‘lived body’ developed by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, For an analysis, see S Gallagher, ‘Lived Body and Environment’, in Research in Phenomenology XVI, 1986, and the exploration of a correspondence between lived-body and built architecture in my essay ‘Taking Place: Landscape in the Architecture of Louis Kahn’, Journal of Architectural Education, November 2007. 6. Kahn at a lecture at Drexel University, Philadelphia, 1968, from Wurman, op cit, p 31. 7. Bijoy Jain, interview with Kavita Rayirath, in ‘Indian by Design’ (2009); see http://indianbydesign.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/archifeature-bijoy-jain-studio-mumbai/. The title phrase ‘reading of the wind and weather’ is taken from the same interview.8. David Neustein, in Monument, June/July 2009, pp 38–45.

Studio Mumbai Architects, Utsav House, Satirje, Maharashtra, India, 2008 left and top: Close collaboration with craftsmen and artisans allows handcrafted, environmentally responsive details designed for tactility.

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