Di 21 | Suprio B - The Space of the 'In-Between' | Domus India 09/2013

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21 • Volume 02 • Issue 10 • September 2013 / BDP.Khandekar sense of a place / Mancini Studio the space of the 'in-between' / Flying Elephant Studio cerebral analytical / Architects' Combine architecture is an emergence / Kazys Varnelis technology is our modernity / Gregory google glass / Tan collective power / Hoskote insurgent cosmopolitanism / Vivan Sundaram piecing a landscape / Gobhai, Hoskote, Chatterjee nothing is absolute

September 2013

Contents

21 21 • Volume 02 • Issue 10 • September 2013 / BDP.Khandekar sense of a place / Mancini Studio the space of the 'in-between' / Flying Elephant Studio cerebral analytical / Architects' Combine architecture is an emergence / Kazys Varnelis technology is our modernity / Gregory google glass / Tan collective power / Hoskote insurgent cosmopolitanism / Vivan Sundaram piecing a landscape / Gobhai, Hoskote, Chatterjee nothing is absolute

India

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M Pravat

Layout BDP.Khandekar, Kaiwan Mehta Scan the QR code to access our Facebook page on the go

Cover The image indicates the role planning visions and ideas played in realising a human and productive environment for the Nirlon Knowledge Park in Mumbai. Planning is not seen as a dogmatic approach but an orientation for the development of an urban space, and generating a public place through landscaping and design features The mural on Issue 20 (August 2013) of Domus India cover was created by Orijit Sen

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Joseph Grima

Shipping forecast

21 • Septemb er 2013

India

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BDP.Khandekar / Mancini Studio / Flying Elephant Studio / Architects' Combine / Sundaram / Batliboi

Editorial

Sense of a place

Mancini Studio, Suprio Bhattacharjee

The space of the ‘in-between’ Flying Elephant Studio, Shilpa Ranade

Cerebral analytical Architects’ Combine, Kaiwan Mehta

Architecture is an emergence Kazys Varnelis

Technology is our Modernity SuperNormal Hannah Gregory

Google Glass

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Pelin Tan

Collective power

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Ranjit Hoskote

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Vivan Sundaram, Girish Shahane

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Banoo Batliboi, Hena Kapadia

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Contemporary museum for architecture in India curated by Kaiwan Mehta Mehlli Gobhai, Ranjit Hoskote, Mortimer Chatterjee

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Insurgent cosmopolitanism Piecing a landscape Folding reveals

Nothing is absolute

Design, politics and the new rhetoric Justin McGuirk

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British Design Award

78 82 84 90

94 100

Cold Case Luigi Spinelli

Istituto Italiano di Cultura Rassegna

Furniture

104 108

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Coimbatore, IN

The space of the ‘in-between’

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The space of the ‘in-between’ A structure that builds on the notions of beauty not commonly associated with spaces meant for mourning, and engages the traditional concept of ‘appropriate aesthetic’ for an evolving typology in contemporary architecture

Design

Mancini Studio 44

Text

Suprio Bhattacharjee

Coimbatore

September 2013

Sometimes an act of building comes along that makes us pause.

Not in the usual manner of being awestruck or startled by a blaring visual enticement, but by that which arouses a sense of measured intrigue and heightened alertness. The images may come across as unfamiliar. But they instil in us a degree of restfulness. One senses a deep visceral connection. One can perceive, with a sense of immediacy if not necessarily ‘clarity,’ a deep resonance with one’s being and an engagement with imperceptible phenomena. Perhaps in an unconscious way, an act of building can overcome the limitations of the merely material, imbibed with a sense of being apart from the stimulating or ‘exciting’ physiognomy. But resonant of the place, and its spirit and purpose.

This new Crematorium by Chennai-based Mancini Enterprises in Coimbatore’s dense, low-rise Pappanaickenpalayam is representative of one such act of building. It is not an immediately visible and rousing urban marker. But in due course of time it has the potential to become an important element in the city-dweller’s consciousness. It is a sacred space, but secular, avoiding any direct referencing or image-making. It joins the ranks of a few recent examples of funerary architectures across the world1 where concrete has been used to singular spatial effect to achieve a desired sensory immersion.

Funerary Architectures have often provided one with mysterious, puzzling spaces. In rare cases (in contemporary architecture) they become extensions of, or a part of, the natural landscape – one cannot forget the much celebrated and riveting Igualada Cemetery

by Miralles-Pinós. This can be seen to hark back to the ancient practice of creating buried and/or troglodytic spaces2 in which light may or may not become the agent of specific intent– whether in Africa (Egypt for instance) or in cultures that existed across the geography of what we now know as Europe. This perhaps rings true for cultures that practised burial or embalmment. But here, in a culture where the dead are cremated, there never really has existed a tradition of ‘building’ for that purpose.

The place of cremation has since time taken on the character of a landscape, or seen to inhabit landscapes – as in the ‘ghat’ along a river bank or the open field. In our modern urban building culture, these crematoria are generally abject buildings or cluster of buildings and ramshackle pavilions (depending on whether these are electric or wood-fired). These spaces reduce the act of cremation to a mere set of ‘tasks’ to be performed in a certain ritualistic order, and offer no relevance to the living accompanying the deceased and bound to the deceased by forces beyond the palpable.

But this humble building becomes a visceral and moving evocation of realisation and composure, an otherworldly pavilion very much part of this landscape that connects the individual to the fundamental elements and makes one aware of one’s own mortality and state of transience. That we are eternally connected to, and part of, the unpredictable forces of nature is an irrevocable truth. Not often does architecture have that power to communicate man’s tenuous existence on this ground. The building becomes a mediator between many things – the earth and the sky, the sense of ground and that of the firmament, the finite and the infinite, the living and the dead, creation and recreation. It is monolithic yet gauze-like, quietly monumental yet intensely humane, singularly atmospheric yet extremely tactile, gravely sombre yet luminous. In many ways it becomes an affirmation that architecture ‘(...) re-creates man and makes him assume his true condition, which is not the dilemma: life or death, but a totality: life and death in a single instance of incandescence.’3 The crematorium is a modestly scaled complex. The existing building was redesigned and almost-symmetrical flanks were added. These are the pavilions within which the precremation rites are performed and are meant for assembly and large gatherings. The one on the east closes itself off to the neighbouring buildings that lie in close proximity, while the one on the west opens up to a newly laid-out landscape containing smaller shelters for other post-cremation rituals. The pavilions are seen as part of a processional route taken by the body that begins soon after the hearse van has entered the site.

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Previous page: the crematorium is not an immediately visible and an obvious urban marker, but in due course of time, it has the potential to become an important element in the city-dweller’s consciousness

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The use of ‘cold’ concrete and the perceived presence of wind, light and other natural phenomena make this building an immersive corporeal experience

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The ambiguous bound/ unbound condition as experienced through one’s movement within and without can be seen as an important spatial response to a dense urban setting wherein the intention to create a secluded atmosphere is balanced by a substantial degree of visual inclusion of the immediate landscape surrounding the buildings, as well as the perception of this space being ‘almost outdoors’

These pavilions anchor the spatial experience of the new crematorium. Despite their nature of construction and obvious visual weight, they come across as ephemeral and transitory in nature. The pavilions make subtle references to the traces of man’s presence and existence upon an erstwhile landscape, seemingly evoking the nature of place-making that has existed since primordial times when human habitation was marked out by a fence or a series of posts. It also makes implicit references to the manner in which, till today, posts of granite are used as a means to define boundaries or create a sense of an enclosure – in a material that is widely and easily available in the region. Here, this simple gesture delineates an intense space for mourning and reconciliation from the residual ground that surrounds it.

Receptive to the elements, the roof is a weighty but liberated plane of concrete supported by a clearly articulated and legible structural ordering principle that comes across as a bow to historic models of constructing the sabha-griha or the public hall within sacred architectures – especially South Indian temples.

One can see this as an abstraction or interpretation of historic structural typologies to an extent where it has the potency to develop into a contemporary structural-iconographic vocabulary.

The sheer singularity of materiality that is encountered in the interior volumes of, say the Hoysalesvara temple in Halebeedu or the Chennakesava temple complex in Belur can also be seen as spatial and contextual references.

The construction of these pavilions marks an interesting dialogue, and perhaps merging, of the ‘tectonic’ and the ‘atectonic.’ The concrete ‘fence’ seems to be light and filigree when seen against the backdrop of the adjacent landscape, but upon close inspection, one realises that each individual post is quite large. These posts cleverly camouflage the set of four that become a composite column holding up a bracket or ‘dowel’ that supports the paired primary beam spanning across the space, which in turn supports the secondary beams under the roof slab that floats free of the bounding concrete fence. The tectonic articulation of this construction system is reminiscent of the nature of spanning using a series of stacked timber or granite beams. This ‘stacking’ is reinforced by joints in the concrete members that, besides 46

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This page: the various pavilions within the crematorium are seen as part of a processional route taken by the body that begins soon after the hearse van has entered the site

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See for instance the Ashwinikumar Crematorium, Surat, by Matharoo Associates; the Baumschulenweg Crematorium, Berlin,

by Schultes-Frank Architects; as well as the Tanatorio, León, Spain by Baas Architects.

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The ‘topos’ space – from the Platonic reference to natural place or the earthwork.

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4 See the discussion on this in the essay The Space of Architecture: Meaning as Presence and Representation by Alberto Pérez-Gómez, originally published in the 1994 A+U special issue Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture.

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3 The philosopher Alberto Pérez-Gómez adapts this extract from Octavio Paz’s The Bow and the Lyre in his essay The Space of Architecture: Meaning as Presence and Representation originally published in the 1994 A+U special issue Questions of Perception.

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5 See Rabindranath Tagore – Philosopfy of Life and Aesthetics by Soumyendranath Tagore, Aparna, Calcutta, 2006; p76-77

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Ibid.

See Kenneth Frampton, Studies on Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, MIT Press, 1995; p10-12 for a discussion on the Corporeal Metaphor in eastern as well as western architectural/theoretical constructs.

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crematorium Design Mancini Enterprises, Chennai Design Team Niels Schoenfelder , J T Arima, Bharath Ram K, Ganesh V, Priyanka Rao, Priyanka Bobal, Sridharan, Rijesh, Divya K N Kiran Chandra

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fact box

1 Pavilion 1 1a Pavilion 2 2 Antespace 3 Perforated metal screen 4 Furnace 5 Firewood storage 6 Tool kit 7 Ladies toilet 8 Gents toilet 9 Existing office building 10 Van parking lot 11 Bike parking lot 12 Genset room 13 Electric panels 14 Ritual pavilion 15 Existing store 16 Verandah 18 Front office 19 Gents room 20 Wash area 21 Ladies room 22 Ladies toilet 23 Counter 24 Gents toilet 25 Lunch area 26 Wash area 27 Toilet 28 Manager’s cabin

drawings

Civil Contractors Ramya Associates , Coimbatore

Site Area 4856 m2

1 Site plan

Client G.K.D. Charity Trust, Coimbatore

Construction Phase August 2012 - August 2013

3 Section CC

Location Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India

2 Section AA

8 Here, I must mention how Mecanoo’s colourful and celebratory funerary chapel in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, resonates in many ways with Tagore’s assertions as mentioned earlier.

The Japanese have for long developed a building tradition that dwells, amongst other conceptions, on the idea of shibui – as something which is in harmony with nature and has a tranquil effect upon the viewer, as well as the wabi-sabi – which evokes, in one way, the need to be at peace with the processes of transformation.

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From Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s description of a space beyond the physicality of objects that offers something more intangible through a ‘complete perception’ of one’s reality.

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Kenneth Frampton, Studies on Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, MIT Press, 1995; p27

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coming across as subtle ornament that induces a human scale, also reinforces a referencing of the archetypal post-and-beam structure. This comes in union with the decidedly ‘atectonic’ nature of the concrete fence, that, at first glimpse, seems to be carrying the roof but is not – its stubby proportions in rhythm with the nature of the bounding envelope but essentially carrying its own weight. In-situ concrete benches integrated into this bounding fence serve to reinforce the locations of these composite columns, besides setting a clear spatial and structural/ ornamental order for the scheme. A grey floor in large stone slabs completes the monolithic nature of the space.

The pavilions, despite the presumably chunky proportions of the individual members, retain a sense of extraordinary open-ness, whilst still ensuring a sense of being ‘bound’. This ambiguous bound/unbound condition as experienced through one’s movement within and without can be seen as an important spatial response to a dense urban setting wherein the intention to create a secluded atmosphere is balanced by a substantial degree of visual inclusion of the immediate landscape surrounding the

buildings, as well as the perception of this space being ‘almost outdoors’ – a filtering device that blocks out the urban din but lets the wind and light in. One cannot escape the ensuing sense of impermanence that these pavilions capture, in the nature of their making, and how, in their positioning within the landscape, they become, for an individual, a metaphorical, womb-like space of transition in a journey encompassed by cyclic time – not very different from the nature of the ‘chora’ – a mysterious space that is both abstract as well as substantial – ‘a space of human creation and participation’ (whose) ‘presence and reality can (only) be grasped with great difficulty.’4 In their project note, the architects ponder whether ‘it (would) be barbaric to expect beauty in a place as weighed down as a crematorium’ – a telling argument that can lead one to engage in a wider debate on misunderstood conceptions of the ‘appropriate aesthetic’ – especially for an evolving typology such as this – and whether notions of ‘beauty’ are relevant within spaces meant for mourning, or for the dead. So is this perception of ‘beauty’ merely that of the physical (architecture in this case), or is there a deeper 49

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acceptance of the processes of change and transformation9.

The austere all-enveloping material presence and tranquil immersive spatiality makes one seem to be drifting within a light-filled, airy, and elevating grey matrix – an ‘in-between reality’10 – that becomes fibrous at the edges to enmesh with the ‘outside’ – offering an ambiguous environment that is neither a space of defiant refuge, nor a space of sympathetic consolation.

Rather it becomes an emphatic reinforcement of man’s intrinsic intertwining with the unpredictability of the forces of nature, and reminds one of man’s one-ness with that which is natural, and the value of the present, the here-now.

This is an important moment in India’s contemporary architectural culture. The building’s sheer simplicity makes this a forceful, moving, and timeless work, intimate and expansive at the same time, exquisitely detailed yet stark, and profound in its meaning and presence. To quote historian Kenneth Frampton, ‘the task of our time is to combine vitality with calm.’11 — Suprio Bhattacharjee Architect and writer

This page: the building’s sheer simplicity makes this a forceful, moving, and timeless work, intimate and expansive at the same time, exquisitely detailed yet stark, and profound in its meaning and presence

September 2013

• The roof is a weighty but liberated plane of concrete supported by a clearly articulated and legible structural ordering principle that comes across as a bow to historic models of constructing the sabha-griha or the public hall within sacred architectures – especially South Indian temples

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resonance? We could engage with Tagore’s assertion that, if one investigates deeply, ‘Aesthetics has nothing to do with beauty.

Aesthetic or aesthetic feeling has for its subject, not beauty, but Ananda, which is the mind’s pure delight in existence.’5 Here, one cannot make the error of equating ‘Ananda’ with ‘joy’ – rather it is seen as a realisation. As he clarifies, ‘even sorrow is Ananda.

Because in sorrow one has the most intense realisation of one’s self . . . sorrow and Ananda are not contradictory forces. In sorrow one has intense realisation of one’s inner being.’6 This crematorium building can be seen as a construct that enables the individual to achieve an intense inner experience in its phenomenological conception. The use of ‘cold’ concrete and the perceived presence of wind, light and other natural phenomena make this building an immersive corporeal experience. It is sharply tactile, and through the perception of ‘the body as being warm and soft’7 – one can sense oneself as being ‘alive’ – a realisation that would reinforce one’s sense of the present and the value and ‘delight’ of existence (we can relate this to Tagore’s conception of ‘Ananda’8), and the need for living in harmony and respect with that which surrounds us, as well as an

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The pavilions make subtle references to the traces of man’s presence and existence upon an erstwhile landscape, seemingly evoking the nature of placemaking that has existed since primordial times when human habitation was marked out by a fence or a series of posts

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