In a conversation with Sameep Padora, Founder and Principal at sP+a, Mumbai, we discuss the distinctions and contradictions involved in the ‘craft of making’ and the bearings of a skill-centric approach towards the practice of architecture in contemporary India.
INSIDE [IN]: India has a wealth of accessible skill and there is a certain emphasis on ‘making’ things on site. How does the potential of crafting things with available skill-sets inform your work?
Sameep Padora [SP]: Firstly, I would like to discuss this idea of craft. It is usually implied that the ratification of a skill as a craft is contingent on the object(s) that a process produces. For our practice, it is the process more than outcome that is far more fascinating. Many times, I feel that this kind of approach is interesting because of the fact that it allows one to begin looking at things that you would not otherwise even consider as craft. For instance, the Carpet Pavilion is one such project we worked on many years ago. Here we worked with carpet layers who do wall to wall carpeting, stitching seams of carpets- something you would not consider to be a craft, perhaps a mundane urban skill at the most. Informed by strategic design input we were able to push that mundane urban skill to a point where it actually ended up transforming waste carpet into a crafted installation. For me, in a sense it is the classic distinction between the notion of craft as a verb as opposed to a noun, the distinction between relationships of craft as process instead of an object.
[IN]: When you say craft and process, how does the process of ‘making’ something with a certain degree of human skill or technology inform your work?
[SP]: Often in the way we practice, the need for a particular skill arises from the material need of a project, which in my opinion should supersede the design input from the architect. So many times, for us the act of making operates within a framework or a material ecology that warrants us to seek out certain skills or vice versa. Even though we may have an idea of what we would want to work with, we are never really fixated on what the idea should manifest into. It is merely a step towards the search for the next opportunity for resolution, almost like following clues and piecing together the solution to the mystery or having to switch directions if the clues point to a dead end. In Jetavan for instance, we actually started out with the intention to build with rammed earth, bringing in Hunnarshala Foundation for that specific purpose. We ended up having to look for alternate materials from our immediate context. That is when we decided to construct walls out of rammed stone dust, owing to the presence of stone quarries in the vicinity of the site, and with guidance from Hunnarshala. The fact is that nothing is sacrosanct, especially the authorship of the architect. I think for us, that is what allows the process to take over the project and it is no longer authored by the designer. The project becomes a sum of these various forces. So, in some way, the role that we as architects perform in the process of making is more curatorial or editorial.
[IN]: As a designer, you establish a framework of how things would work on site. What kind of qualitative feedback do you seek from the processes on site?
[SP]: At the beginning of any project, we first frame responses to any existing ecological presence that the site may have to offer or be a part of. For instance, in the Concrete Void Factory project we had a seasonal water body on the low-lying part of our site that fluctuated with the monsoons holding flood waters. Having decided to retain this, the entire project was cantilevered above the water body. Other times, even along the course of a design process when we visit a site to ratify our design direction, we realise that our strategy is way off from what our response should ideally be. With Jetavan for instance, we initially started out with a scheme to build around the trees. When we actually started to line-out on site, we realised that although we were working with the trees, they were becoming peripheral to the experience of the architecture within. At that point, we decided to rework the project and proposed an inverted sloping roof that changed the design completely.
While some projects offer such possibilities at an early stage in the project, in others we seek out opportunities for interventions that present themselves as we go along, and bear the potential to make the project richer. This is largely defined by the site, the building process, methodology, the involvement of builders, the community using it, and the kind of changes each of these would permit in the process. The important thing here though is to be cognizant about the fact that there is a possibility of change, and light-handed enough to recognise that moment in a project where you could actually introduce an intervention.
[IN]: One of the observable things about your work is that there is no commitment to a certain material palette. When we talk about ‘making’, what is your process of design like?
[SP]: We are not very inclined to the idea of aesthetics- from the purview of style or from the purview of fitting a project into an ‘image’ of a certain place. One common factor in all projects is the search for efficiencies. So, if a particular material works efficiently in a particular climate or provides an efficient environmental response, we would be keen to take it forward. Our commitment to the outcome of a project at the outset, is minimal. What is actually more interesting is how can we further contaminate a project with inputs that we find along the way that show us something about a certain aspect of the project we did not know of in the beginning. The more we learn through the making of the project the more successful the project is for me. So, it does not always matter what we want at the beginning of a project, as it might change through the design process and become whatever works best in that particular context.
With the Maya Somaiya Library for instance, we were attempting to build a landscape in brick because the material was available to us. We began to look for historical references on how to work with the brick tile, and that is how the idea of the vault came up. Literally following a sequence that would lead us from one step to the next, we were looking for efficiency of structure and a certain programmatic need for the project with minimal intervention, which led to the almost pavilion-like form of the library. So, the pursuit of efficiency in a project, is actually an incumbent to material choices. It might be true that sometimes we see greater value in engineering than ‘architecture’ because what we are trying to do essentially is to get things to come together as simply as possible without the weight of the image of what that context would typically produce.
[IN]: How do manual and digital processes within the studio explore efficiency of a craft, and how is it different from the typical way of doing things- say, imagining a project completely in the studio?
[SP]: Historically, the structure of craft & craftsmen has socio-political and financial implications embedded within. Architecture has ‘fetishized’ this idea of craft to the point where it celebrates and encourages, for example, a stone mason in today’s day and age to continue using tools and work in the same way as his forefathers may have done 200 years ago. It propagates extant social hierarchies and to expect that masons, carpenters should not evolve, and continue to use the construction techniques of their time is regressive to say the least. For me personally Richard Sennett’s book, ‘The Craftsman’, on how craft and its tools are a function of their time is extremely important. As a studio, we constantly move back and forth between digital and analogue means necessary for realising any project. Feedback loops are omnipresent throughout the design process.
This is not to say that we do not make drawings, but a personal handicap is that I find it much easier to work with physical three dimensional objects like models, over two dimensional drawings. Perhaps it has also to with my personal history, growing up around my grandfather who traded in Kashmiri crafts, seeing him work on these beautiful papier-mâché objects. I also remember one of my professors from undergraduate school in Mumbai, Rajeev Sathe, once telling me that 90% of architects are space-blind they only see objects and surfaces. Holding physical models at the level of the eye rather than looking at it top-down, he would often ask us to experience the space within. In this way, the model becomes a way not to imagine the project in a compressed format but rather to imagine oneself within the project. That is something that has always stuck with me as a mode of working.
Our models are not a documentation of the final project. They are almost always process models. They inform us about a certain aspect of the project that we would not be able to fathom otherwise, or at least I would not be able to (Vami, my colleague for instance is much more comfortable with the digital). So, you take that one step further and maybe change something as you scale up to look and find another aspect of the project. This constant feedback loop operates back and forth between sketches, drawings, models and augmented reality tools of today, which I have to confess allows us to see parts of the project that one would only see in the final building. We are constantly oscillating between all of these modes to actually get to the final project. The contractors, or engineers with whom we engage also have kind of gotten a sense of how we typically always have a model to explain a project with, in the beginning of a project. In this way, you also begin making models that actually capture ideas that need to be communicated to various actors in the project.
[IN]: What do you think is a truly collaborative process, and how do you see your role in that?
[SP]: It comes from two things. One is the fact that you do not come with saying that ‘you know’. The moment you start by saying, ‘I know what I have to do’, or ‘I know how this should be’- it is over. There is no scope for collaboration. Once you come together with the attitude that everybody is an equal stakeholder and everybody has certain knowledge which is unique then there is no problem really in any kind of collaboration. Everyone is working collectively to resolve a challenge that you see in the project. It is not just about the engineering or structure, it is also about programme and its adjacencies, and about the way the building may connect with the surroundings. The effort has always been to want to genuinely learn something at the end of the project. It is not about constructing a building that already exists in our minds, but finding out what the building needs to be. So, the emphasis shifts from authorship to problem-solving. When we had six architects working together for the Bandra Collective there could have been many problems. But it is truly incredible the way we were able to work bereft of egos and after all we were all trying to solve simple issues of how a particular public bench would work in the monsoon or how a wall coping material would stay steady, etc. It is as simple as that ⊗
SAMEEP PADORA is a practicing architect and principal of the design studio sP+a based in Mumbai. He received his diploma in architecture from Academy of Architecture went on to study at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, and received his Masters from the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University in 2005. Most recently he has collaborated on a research project for the ‘Uneven Growth’ Tactical Urbanism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The studio has 25 architects and works on projects ranging from small scale urban interventions to large scale developments in India.
