Building a language
Gurgaon, IN
domus 22
October 2013
Building a language With clever inversion of making brick seemingly light, and veneer-like sheet metal heavy, massive and forbiddingly impenetrable, the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon is an urban structure with a conscious manifesto Design
M/s. Prabhakar B Bhagwat
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Gurgaon
The facade in Corten Steel, with openings for limited views within the building 54
Text
Suprio Bhattacharjee
There’s this strange burnt red monolith that one will notice through the din of Gurgaon’s mundane cityscape. It has a defensive, almost fortressed nature. Clean seam lines announce this as a distinctly man-made presence. It has a scale-less, enigmatic appearance—seemingly an unfinished, rusting hull of a mythical vessel marked by a random array of miniscule portholes with scalloped hoods. The serrated edges of these not-solarge apertures seem to scrape away at the wind and light, funnelling it deep into the guts of this mysterious object, and cast away any opportunity of gazing in. Like on a well-worn hull of a battleship, the reveals along these openings indicate an apparent solid, almost-impenetrable shell. A cleft on one side allows the outsider a glimpse within, but there is not much that one can decipher. Once in a while one may just catch a glimpse of an inhabitant through the rifts in the hull’s thick carapace. The sense of mystery has just deepened. From the outside, this solid, impenetrable carapace of Corten Steel can appear forbidding, or alternatively, it can heighten one’s curiosity and sense of exploration. This is the new building for the Devi Art Foundation, a not-for-profit space providing for ‘innovation unconstrained by commercial limitations’ (from the Foundation’s website, www.deviartfoundation.org). For their new building, the founders of the organisation, the Delhi-based Poddar family, turned to Ahmedabadbased architect Aniket Bhagwat, of the landscape and ecological design firm, Prabhakar B Bhagwat. The Foundation occupies one half of the building, the other being occupied by the offices of the family-owned paper mill business. The strategy to turn the building away from the surrounding city was a conscious one, as the architect states, ‘We looked at Gurgaon, and decided to turn ourselves from it and hide in a shell. So the building opens into the court and, almost like gills of a fish, draws in light and air selectively from the outer skin.’ The court forms an inner realm that manages to break through this hermetic shell,
Photos
Edmund Sumner, Debojit Mohapatra Aniket Bhagwat, M/s. Lotus
drawing views into this ‘object.’ This courtyard aligns itself with the city grid, roughly along the south-west-to-north-east axis, which is also along the depth of the plot that is its longer dimension. The architect goes on further to state, ‘The courtyard was where the building came together, and has an intricately crafted red stone-plated geometry that few notice, and has water that fills in the depressions and dries as the day wears off.’ This acute focus on surfaces and materiality and a consciousness on temporal conditions can be seen in the manner in which the building deals with its materials and textures. An intriguing aspect is the set of leaning and rippling brick walls along the north-western facade of the courtyard. It stands in opposition to the more formally disposed, strictly ordered facade across, almost in some kind of joyous mockery of the need to conform to any kind of rational order. Held back in dramatic fashion by tie cables anchored to the building, these walls cant out precariously into the courtyard whilst offering protection from the blazing afternoon sun. This strategy confronts the hardcore nature of running a paper business with the more ‘artful’ nature of the other occupant, but also serves to ‘invert’ their natures, by substituting one for the other, as AniketBhagwat sets out to explain, ‘Two brick facades looking at each otherone a more regular formal arrangement and the other a vibrant, almost kinetic facade of swaying and tilted walls, both representing different moods of the people who would occupy the building. As a reversal, and morphing of these energies, the more vibrant facade took its inspiration from the main business—paper—and like sheets of paper sailing and falling on the ground, manifested themselves as the emblem for the design/art end of the business. It was a comment on the genesis, being the source for the other part of the business.’ Programmatically, the building is straight-forward and rational. Two storeys of basement form a raised platform upon which sit four levels split by the aforementioned courtyard. The south-eastern 55