Vikram Iyengar on Adda at Ranan with Anubha Fatehpuria

ADDA AT RANAN - July 2015

Vikram Iyengar responds to the Adda at Ranan with architect and actress

Anubha Fatehpuria

How many times have we walked or driven down a road and been brought up short by a building that seems to have no business to be there? It has nothing to do with its location, its surroundings, its neighbours – its incongruous in every way. “Who built that, and why”, we wonder as we move on.

Or worse, still, how many times have we walked or driven down streets in our cities where every house looks like the next, every street looks like the next, and every neighbourhood looks like a generic urban landscape. Nothing to tell us visually which city we are in, what makes it unique, what its culture is, who its people are. Faceless four walls enclosing in, leaving out, without a trace of the personalities individuals who live or work there. Functional buildings, soul-less buildings, buildings without surprises, buildings without delight, buildings of brick, mortar and cement… and precious little else.

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How can the art of architecture work to humanise spaces? This is what drives architect Anubha Fatehpuria’s work and vision. How do you approach a space, listen to it, hear what it has to say, accordingly conceive of a design and choose appropriate building materials and methods to deliver something unique for that spot and that client? Something that cannot be replicated with a different set of variables in a different location. Something that works with the clients specifications and also reflects and responds to the locale, the culture, the surroundings.

Architecture is about siting people, says Anubha. It always has to be approached with the user / client in mind – it is not an installation or a monument. But often convincing the clients to open themselves up to new and unusual ideas can be the most difficult part of the process. There are issues of familiarity, issues of expectation, issues of what constitutes modern living which do not include looking to the past for ideas, issues of social status in terms of building materials and cost – glass and chrome, yes, how glamorous, our AC bill will be through the roof but we can afford it – mud and bamboo, no, how primitive, backward and poor.

As an architect, Anubha’s prime concern is to address how the built space – the envelope itself – can perform for you, the client? How do you place your openings, how do you allow the breeze to travel through, how do you frame the outside from the inside, how do you open up spaces to the surrounding elements even in the act of closing spaces in. Everything else that you put into the space, load it with – amenities, electrical devices, solar panels, air-conditioners – come later. Like the large ceiling skylight of a residence in a cramped neighbourhood in Calcutta – opening upwards in the absence of space around, letting in a different quality of light from above every season of the year.

Each design idea begins with a concept, a narrative of sorts that serves as an inspiration, a point of departure – something that springs from the space itself or the client specifications or a combination of elements, and something which the client often does not know. Like the concept of the sickle which has been put down for a residence in Jorhat. An oddly shaped piece of land with a bamboo tree right in the middle which the owners were willing to cut down. And a refusal to cut is – therefore the laid down sickle – and a sickle-shaped arrangement of the house around the bamboo tree as its centre. With the first rays of the rising sun falling on the front door, passing through the courtyard with the tree, over the swimming pool and into the kitchen. Entrance-tree-water-food – four signifiers of sustenance and welcome forming the axis of the home.

Or the use of sun-dried mud bricks for an eco-resort in Himachal Pradesh, the layout of which followed the contours of the hillside. Re-using and adapting a local age-old technique, combining it with equally local traditions of slate roofs and incorporating boulders in the landscape into the design to support the slanting roof over the café area.

Or a proposed three-bungalow family residence, where each home retains its privacy but where the family is able to come together around a jal kund – flowing with rain water during the monsoon months, and a stepped area over the rest of the year to celebrate festivals together. After all, in a country where traditional music, dance, sculpture, painting makes repeated and metaphoric references to spaces such as the angan, why should architecture not be inspired to think of spaces with a similar sense of poetry?

And can one take things away or re-use, rather than use material and modern building methods just because they exist? What is the point of choice and availability if one is not able to choose intelligently, creatively, economically and appropriately? The two-storied home in Barasat made of mud-bricks is held up by the load bearing walls – it doesn’t need columns and beams, so why insist on using them? In upcoming café space in Calcutta, the false walls and ceilings are ripped off to reveal old architectural work that is almost impossible to recreate today. And the louvered wooden windows from an older house, re-used as sliding window panels in the residential building that comes up in the same spot.

There was so much to hear and learn in this adda, so much to process, so much to connect to and grasp about how people think, make assumptions, make demands often without reflection and without looking around and taking in what already exists. In the discussion later, a sharing about the imposition of specific types of architecture by the British – what came to be called ‘colonial’ – as a political show of might rather than a response to what the climate and culture of India demanded. And a question from a visual artist about artists who are now moving into community based installation works responding to the needs of a specific area or people - how do architects view them? 

And then – perhaps the mark of any good conversations – the slow, almost unwilling dispersal of people, breaking into smaller groups discussing specific points or branching into wholly unrelated conversations… mingling, dallying, mulling … enjoying the lingering aftertaste of an evening well spent in engaging with ways of seeing, ways of listening to and for, ways of imagining spaces that have yet to come into being.