Download BETWEEN THE SUN AND THE MOON – STUDIO MUMBAI Frankfurt

INFORMATION of April 14, 2016
Frankfurt am Main
BETWEEN THE SUN AND THE MOON – STUDIO MUMBAI
The Rediscovery of Indian Handcraft
April 16 — August 21, 2016
at Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM)
Schaumainkai 43, 60596 Frankfurt/Main
Groundfloor
EXHIBITION OPENING:
Fri, April 15, 2015, 7 p.m.
PRESS CONFERENCE:
Thu, April 14, 2015, 11 a.m.
GUIDED TOURS:
On Saturdays and Sundays, 3 p.m.
OPEN:
Tue, Thu — Sun 11.00 — 18.00 \ Wed 11.00 —
20.00 \ Mon closed
New Studio Saath Rasta, Mumbai, India. Photo: © Srijaya Anumolu
ON THE EXHIBITION
2
INTERVIEW WITH BIJOY JAIN
3
PROJECTS IN THE EXHIBITION
6
IMPRINT
8
COMING SOON / CONTACT
9
PRESS INFORMATION
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BETWEEN THE SUN AND THE MOON – STUDIO MUMBAI
Frankfurt/ Main, 18.06.17
MODERN DESIGN, PRIME MATERIALS AND TRADITIONAL ARTISANSHIP ENTER INTO
A NATURAL DIALOG WITH THE SURRAUNDINGS IN STUDIO MUMBAI´S PROJECTS,
WHICH HAVE A STRIKING SENSUAL PRESENCE.
“Bamboo must be cut when there is no moon – why? Because on those nights there are no
insects and the Bamboo will last twenty years.” Bijoy Jain
At his practice, founded in 2005 and established in the megalopolis of Mumbai, Bijoy Jain, an
Indian architect who studied in the USA, develops projects inspired by both Indian and Western
culture. What sets Bijoy Jain’s approach apart is a brilliant combination of tradition and
modernity, in which local resources and traditional Indian craft skills form the basis for strongly
contemporary buildings, nourished by reality and distinct from increasingly widespread
international architectural output. Thoughtful and uncompromising to the last detail, this is
architecture that cares deeply about the relationship between Man and Nature. The layout has
been designed to highlight the items on display by echoing the look and feel of the Alibag studio,
the “construction laboratory” where the projects take shape. Models, prototypes, materials,
objects, books, videos and tools help the visitor to understand the world of Studio Mumbai and
show on-going or completed design projects.
The exhibition initiated and curated by arc en rêve centre d´architecture focuses on the work
processes at Studio Mumbai.
References, resources, prototypes and projects are all here: projects in the making, designed to
be implemented by hand with great economy of means and resources, always involving a
negotiation with climate and slow pace.
“Between the sun and the moon” invites visitors to explore an architectural corpus that is a
paean to patience: a body of work that is imbued with great sensitivity and unfailingly open to
the world at large.
The title of the exhibition refers to the differences in planning cultures: Between the Sun and the
Moon is a metaphor for the different approaches in the planning processes. First of all there is
the European-American notion of efficiency, which as it were delineates wanted and unwanted
elements in planning with the clear knife of exclusivity. Project generation on the Indian
subcontinent, by contrast, corresponds more with the opaqueness of lunar light. Combining
these otherwise mutually exclusive poles fruitfully is a true trait of the work of Studio Mumbai.
“By surrounding ourselves with everything we might need to produce quality buildings and
objects, we’ve made the Alibaug studio into a place where we’re able to develop ideas and
begin to understand the world around us. Carpenters, masons, electricians, plumbers,
architects and engineers work together, cohabiting in the same space; they are committed to
designing and producing a form of architecture that goes beyond its own limits. Objects are
born and multiply in this workplace, but there are also prototypes in the open air, large
drawings on the walls, and tests covering the tables... This iterative and constantly changing
environment is where our ideas are explored, drafted and constructed.”
Bijoy Jain
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INTERVIEW WITH BIJOY JAIN
Bijoy Jain interviewed by Félix Mulle, architect, Friday 21 November 2014 for arc en rêve centre
d’architecture.
The Indian sub-continent boasts some truly impressive statistics: a population of 1.2 billion,
gigantic cities, and unprecedented economic growth. Although its ancient culture is shrouded in
a mystical aura, thanks to Le Corbusier it also features some masterpieces of modernist
architecture dating from the second half of the twentieth century.
On the phone with the founder of Studio Mumbai, we explore some of the contrasting realities
of modern India where architecture may have a role to play.
Félix Mulle: The population of Mumbai is estimated at 22 million, twice that of the largest
European cities. Can you say something about the specifics of this context?
Bijoy Jain: We’re experiencing a very radical change. Large cities such as Mumbai are growing
at an incredible rate, and the same phenomenon can be observed in the smallest out-of-the-way
towns: it’s becoming more dense, larger, more “urban” in a way. But although mindsets are
becoming more urban, migrants continue to function in the same way as in their native regions
and bring rural practices and atmospheres into the heart of the metropolis. A sort of crosspollination is taking place, and the frontier between the rural and the urban remains very
indistinct. If you add up the populations of the country’s five largest cities, you get a total of
maybe 100 million people. But we’re still talking about a society of 1.2 billion individuals!
Overall, we can’t talk about a predominantly urban environment, but profound changes are
afoot.
F. M.: The way society is organised leaves a lot of room for informal initiatives. A recent film,
“The Lunchbox” (The Lunchbox, Ritesh Batra, 2013), shows the meal delivery system in
Mumbai. Immense and completely informal, it actually turns out to be very effective...
B. J.: There’s a special way of working here that integrates chaos. As a country, I have the
impression that we need this kind of indeterminacy and fuzziness, and that these are not
destructive or limiting things, they’re also what makes us what we are. A lot of tourists
experience this feeling of uncertainty when they arrive in India: they ask a question in the street
and they get a kind of ambiguous nodding by way of an answer. They don’t know if it means yes
or no, and communication has to take place via an interpretation of gestures. As an architect
trained in the West, I had to learn to work “between yes and no”, hovering between two
conceptions of time and efficiency. On one side there was what I call “Greenwich time”,
globalised, highly codified, based on the course of the Sun, and which India has integrated via
its colonial history; and on the other side there’s the time of the Moon, based on the fluctuations
of water, tides and monsoons, which remains very influential
in our pagan society. There’s a huge potential to be explored in the way these two ways of
operating come together. That’s the meaning of my work, and it explains the title of the
exhibition, Between the sun and the moon…
F. M.:Was it your awareness of this potential that prompted you to create Studio Mumbai when
you came back from London in 1995?
B. J.: Actually nothing was planned in advance: things just developed as time went on. In the
beginning, I worked in a pretty conventional way and my initial projects weren’t all that
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successful. I would compile
a series of plans and technical descriptions and hand them to the workers. They were really
gifted craftsmen
coming from long lines of artisans, but they had absolutely no idea of how to read a blueprint.
So we needed intermediaries on the building site, and I had to spend a long time explaining
what I wanted mainly using gestures. I also realised that my reflex was to try to get across the
modernist idiom I’d learned at college. The result was details that were complicated to execute,
whereas the artisans had a much simpler and much more optimal way of responding to the
questions I was asking myself. I learned a great deal from them. After observing this for a while,
I came up with the idea of setting up a studio where designers and builders would work in
tandem so that the learning process would work in both directions, so that I would understand
them and they would make the effort to understand me. In a sense I had to abandon the culture
of architecture in favour of a very practical culture of construction. It was only after a while that
all this resolved once again into architecture.
F. M.:Your early buildings were mainly beautiful houses in superb natural settings. Today
there’s a sense that you’re starting to work on a new scale. Can you tell us about your latest
projects?
B. J.: For example we’re currently working on a small high-rise in Mumbai, 34 storeys and 70
metres tall. The
idea is to make use of the most influential weather feature in this country, the monsoon, and to
make a building that is responsive to the rain and that knows how to interact with it. Most of the
time, buildings in
the city seek to protect themselves from the monsoon. But on the contrary we should negotiate
with the monsoon, because climatic conditions are very favourable in this period in terms of
temperature and air quality. Our building will act as a rain filter; it will slow down the wind but
allow it to enter. Also the patina will be active, bearing the marks of the passage of time. In
Mumbai, all the buildings are very grey: you could repaint the entire city and one monsoon later
it would all be grey again. So instead of resisting this climatic phenomenon, we turn it to our
advantage so that the appearance of the building can change with the rain and the seasons. It’s
also a way of saying that, even in the very heart of a city of 22 million people, we can forge a link
with nature.
F. M.: A project on this scale must also affect the way you build…
B. J.: It does. Of course I have to work with engineers and construction firms. The idea is that
the reinforced concrete superstructure of the tower is symbolically anchored in the formal
organisation of the city, in the “Greenwich time” we talked about earlier. What fills this
structural frame, which is lighter and will be built by the Studio Mumbai craftsmen, is rooted in
the most informal and loosely determined aspect of our culture. It’s the “time of the moon”.
Once again, it’s very interesting to organise a convergence between these two city-building
philosophies.
F. M.: India is also a country marked by deep-seated inequalities and, at the urban level, by the
development of huge slums. Does architecture have any chance of having an impact on the city?
Can architecture solve problems?
B. J.: In my view, architecture is all too often reduced to problem-solving. Today, I don’t try to
tackle these problems head-on; instead I look at the meaning we can give to the way our culture
is evolving, in the twenty-first century, at this crucial moment in time. In Mumbai, I’m not
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surrounded by architects but by creative people in a wide range of fields: music, fashion, and so
on. The issue is very far-reaching and concerns our overall cultural future at a time when the
frontiers between genres and places are very porous. I try to make each of my buildings easy to
reproduce so that it doesn’t remain an isolated experiment, so that it proliferates, but I know
that takes time: enough time for new ideas to spread and be shared more widely. Architecture in
India is most often considered as a mere amenity; a lot of work needs to be done to get people to
accept it as an expression of culture. And all these changes happen so fast... How is it possible to
make meaningful buildings while taking this rapid change into account? For the moment I can’t
answer that question, but I see it as a genuine challenge.
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PARTICULAR PROJECTS IN THE EXHIBITION
Palmyra House
Nandgaon, Maharashtra, India, 2007
Located near Mumbai on the Arabian Sea, Palmyra House is designed as a refuge from the big
city. The house consists of two timber structures set inside of a functioning coconut plantation.
— We had no existing typology for building inside this densely planted coconut grove. The
most interesting feature was the superb canopy that stretches across the entire site like a roof:
half our work was already done! The vegetation solved the problem of shade. The plantations
have been here for centuries; they have a history. We try to treat the landscape in the same
spirit as an old building or town, with the same sensitivity and the same respect. After a
careful observation phase, we start work, taking care to preserve the energy of the locale. We
use constraints in such a way as to amplify the space. It’s a slow process that focuses on the
atmosphere a building can exude – it means going beyond the mere functions of protection
and shelter to create something more magical that lives and breathes. It’s the potential of
architecture to transcend its own physical limits that interests us.
Bijoy Jain
Leti 360 Resort
Leti, Uttaranchal, India, 2007
Leti 360 is a small mountain resort perched on a rocky promontory in the Indian Himalayas. At
an altitude of 2,300 metres and nine kilometres from the nearest metalled road, the site is only
accessible via a narrow footpath. Surrounded by terraced fields, five structures made of stone,
timber and glass look out over the sweeping Himalayan panorama.
— One of the particularities of this building is that it is not designed to remain firmly and
permanently on this site. In ten years, the land will have to be given back to the farmers. This
means that our intervention had to fully respect the spirit of the place. Several elements were
made in the Studio Mumbai workshop and carried to the site on foot, which meant that their
size, shape and assembly method had to be carefully thought out. But many of the building
materials were gathered near the site. This may seem very primitive compared to the type of
building we usually construct. What’s important here is neither sophistication nor
traditionalism, but a particular state of mind that underlies the construction process. I think
this principle can prevail whatever the location and local culture may be.
Bijoy Jain
Copper House II
Chondi, Maharashtra, India, 2011
This project began with digging an artesian well. The excavated earth was used to raise the
house above ground level to protect it from flooding during severe monsoons. The house is in a
clearing, at the heart of a thick mango grove. The loosely arranged rooms define a courtyard,
providing a degree of protection for the occupants while forming a harmonious interface with
the setting. Thin copper sheets protect the structure from the rain. When new, they reflect the
landscape. As time passes, they will develop a grey-green patina and blend in with the
surroundings.
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— One of our artisans knew exactly where he would find water. I know this might seem weird
and mystical, but it’s true all the same. It was midsummer and the water tables were at their
lowest, but we actually found water. In this clearing, the house is sheltered from the rain,
because during the monsoon the leaf canopy becomes denser, offering extra protection. This
means that glazing and windows are superfluous.
Bijoy Jain
House with 9 rooms
Kankeshwar, Maharashtra, India, 2014
Set around several courtyards, one communal, the others more private, the nine rooms of this
house are carefully arranged to accommodate a family. Connected by a walkway, the apparently
similar rooms actually adapt to a variety of programmatic and geographical situations. They are
embedded in the slope of the plot, creating a series of platforms that make it possible to
harmonise family life with the topography of the site. A single roof unifies these separate
“boxes”, creating a house with inner courtyards, walkways, a pool, and living spaces. Built
entirely of upcycled burnt bricks and lime, the outer walls exposed to the rain are whitewashed,
while the bricks along the walkway have been left exposed.
The interior walls are also whitewashed to soften the visual effect of the domestic areas. The
plywood roof is covered with a bituminous coating that looks like black lacquer, traditionally
used by boatbuilders to seal timber hulls. Endowed with a very discreet material and formal
presence, the house blends in with the site and its broader setting, blurring the distinction
between interior and exterior.
Agronet House
Kankeshwar, Maharashtra, India, In progress
The site, which is planted with a large number of mango trees, made it impossible to assess the
complexity of the building. On site, using a very simple structure covered in Agronet, a type of
cheap tarpaulin used by farmers, the architects directly mapped out the spaces in three
dimensions. To test their hypotheses, they set up a table, ate meals, and did all the things people
do when they live in a real house.
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IMPRINT
BETWEEN THE SUN AND THE MOON – STUDIO MUMBAI
The rediscovery of Indian Handcraft
April 16 — August 21, 2016
An exhibition by arc en rêve centre d’architecture Bordeaux.
Director DAM Peter Cachola Schmal
Curator DAM Yorck Förster
Exhibition design and Graphic Design DESERVE Wiesbaden, www.deserve.de
Panel production inditec, Display & Messegestaltung GmbH, Bad Camberg
Poster and Invitation Cards GARDENERS, Frankfurt am Main
Videos Daniele Marucci, Enrico Cano
Registrar Wolfgang Welker
Press and Public Relations Brita Köhler, Stefanie Lampe
Education Curator Christina Budde
Guided Tours Yorck Förster
Installation of the exhibition Paolo Brunino, Ulrich Diekmann, Enrico Hirsekorn, Achim Müller-Rahn,
Harald Pompl, Simon Speiser, Angela Tonner, Gerhard Winkler under the direction of Christian Walter
Administration Inka Plechaty, Jacqueline Brauer
Director arc en rêve centre d’architecture Bordeaux Francine Fort
Curatorship and exhibition layout design Michel Jacques, Ludovic Gillion, Cyrille Brisou, Emmannuelle
Maura
Texts Félix Mulle
Thanks to
Studio Mumbai
Dank an | Thanks to
Bijoy Jain and Mitul Desai, Nitin Vaghani, Gajanand Paratakar, Prashant Gurav, Imrankhan Jatu
With kind support of:
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Press images for announcements and reports during the exhibition period at www.dam-online.de
14.05. – 18.09.2016
YESTERDAYS FUTURE
Visionary Designs by Future Systems und Archigram
21.05. – 26.06.2016
THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX
An innovative approach to current urban challenges
DEUTSCHES ARCHITEKTURMUSEUM
Press & Public Relations
Schaumainkai 43, 60596 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, www.dam-online.de
Brita Köhler, Dipl.-Ing. (FH)
T +49 (0)69 212 36318 \ F +49 (0)69 212 36386
[email protected]
Stefanie Lampe, M.A.
T +49 (0)69 212 31326 \ F +49 (0)69 212 36386
[email protected]
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