Sanjay Mohe, Principal Architect, Mindspace Architects, explores the relationship between architecture and the specific peculiarities of the Indian landscape to try and decipher a unique way of seeing that is at the core of our experience of the built environment in India.
The Uniqueness of a Practice in the Indian Context
Our culture is about absorption, not about elimination. So, when you really start looking at our culture, we like to assimilate a lot of things, you know, we have memories latched on to everything. For example, we design some very sophisticated research labs, but we still have to follow Vastu. Sometimes, the discussion is about logic versus sentiments or technology against faith. And that is where we spend a lot of time in an act of balancing. These aspects of working in India are fairly vibrant and this directly or indirectly affects one’s work all the time.
Philosophy of your Practice, Mindspace
An important aspect of our work at Mindspace is to be able to learn from nature as much as possible – it never goes out of fashion. I believe that one can discover all the principles of life just through studying nature.
Significance of Light in India
Light in Rajasthan is vibrant and we can observe how it interacts with rough mud walls with great prominence. The fine carvings of Jaisalmer work as reliefs casting their own shadows, keeping the walls cool.”Whereas in Kerala, the roofs go all the way down very close to the ground and you take the reflected light into space. Each culture has a different response to light. We also keep working with light as the architecture becomes very static without changing light. Our work considers these soft transitions and subtle modulations from outside to inside.
Architecture and Landscape
We do not want to think of architecture and landscape as two different elements. The way one wants to bring light and air into the building, we want to bring nature into the building, making nature an integral part of the built form. You always want landscape and nature to take that kind of active part in the built environment. We look at landscape not as a planned environment but as a natural process of absorbing the built. Water also plays a very important role. Water has the ability to touch all senses.
Visceral Aspects of Architecture
I compare these two works of Rodin: one is ‘The Prodigal Son’ where the person is on his knees with two hands stretching towards the sky and the other is ‘The Thinker’ which is a man sitting. While the first is about ecstasy and looking outward towards the horizon, the other is about looking inward. Between the extremes of deep introspection and expression of ecstasy, there are intermediate stages. One carries these ‘space bubbles’ with one’s body and when inhabiting an architectural space, the better this space bubble responds to the inhabited space, the better the ‘comfort zone’. Whether in a school or in life you are learning all the time. It is important to take a pause and allow that learning to seep in, to get absorbed, to create awareness of that is learnt.
Aesthetics
I think when you discuss aesthetics; you approach it as an outsider, looking at something trying to make sense of it as an observer. Climate has always played an important role in deciding lifestyle, culture, and rituals etc. We remove the shoes outside the house because we sit on the floor and eat as our climate allows us to sit on the floor. This could not be done in Northern Hemisphere, hence the idea of chair originated as insulation from cold floors. So climate controlled the way one dressed, what one ate and the way one lived.
Materiality
When I came to Bangalore in the 80s, grey granite was ubiquitous – kerbstones on the road, granite fences, granite steps and walls. It is such a wonderful material – wherever you dig, you find granite! If you polish it, the same stone looks like a semi-precious material. We started using it because it was the natural thing to do. The material was available and skilled labour was locally available. Grey granite could be used as load-bearing walls as it was as cheap as using bricks. Granite also has this amazing way of ageing gracefully. Slowly, we started experimenting using granite in combination with other materials like introducing concrete bands, stone chips, bricks, kadappah stone etc. Then came this influence of postmodernism as a reaction to modernism and we suddenly had a spurt of using colour. In that phase, we designed many plastered walls with a lot of variation of colours.
Importance of Context
For us, design evolves from the context. The building has to grow out of the soil. In few instances, you can actually go to the site and feel how the built form assimilates with the site observing the way the sun moves on the site, the way the water flows and the way sound works on the site. We do not seek to plant something in it – rather, we try and look at context as something from which design evolves.
Visual Culture in Architecture
I would like to compare this idea of imagery with memory. The eye collaborated with other senses becomes a memory. Image is normally an image of an image seen in a magazine, whereas memories are based on experience and have many feelings overlapped. Images are static and two-dimensional. Memories have many overlays on the image – they are three-dimensional. One can relive a memory in all the senses. I feel that the memory of a place is more potent than the image of the place.
Epilogue
What you liked before joining architecture is very different from what you like now. This makes me wonder if we are getting alienated from the mainstream. Why do we lose that connection? Do we lose a sense of a larger picture as we get into the pursuit of finer details? The mindset is that most of the award-winning work has to make a statement and has to be different. Is it possible to make architecture that operates at these two levels or at multiple levels? This is what we aim for in our practice. It is a difficult proposition but for us, but it is an important thought – an architecture that can be appreciated at a classical level and at a popular level. The achievement of this balance would be, I believe, the real story of creating good architecture ⊗
SANJAY MOHE is the founder and a partner at Mindspace – a Bengaluru-based architecture firm with extensive experience in designing residential, institutional, cultural and of office projects of varying scales. Mindspace was founded in 2004 and is presently led by Sanjay Mohe, Medappa, Suryanarayanan, Amit Swain and Swetha along with 21 architects, engineers and support staff, all of whom work as a team. Projects by Mindspace have been featured in several national and international awards and are consistently featured in architectural journals. Sanjay Mohe also regularly lectures in architectural forums and schools of design across the country.
