Life in Architecture: Sameep Padora
To build is a political act and Indian architects must embrace this, says Padora
Sameep Padora is the founder architect of the Mumbai-based design studio sP+a (Sameep Padora and Associates) – a firm that has increasingly become known for its pursuit and encouragement of sustainable, contextual and innovative practices that arise ‘from a site itself’. Named as One of the Top 21 Emerging Practices in the world by WAN 21 for 21 in 2014, sP+a also has an active research arm that fuels its practice on the ground. I got a chance to meet Sameep in sP+a’s very cool Bandra studio where we discussed issues on affordable housing in India, the perpetual malaise surrounding urban planning, and the role of architects. Here are some excerpts:
Site: Jetavan Sakharwadi
How can a practice ‘inform’ itself and deal effectively with diverse Indian contexts?
We have been taught that you, as an architect, get a client whom you design the project for, and a contractor builds it and that’s the end of the association – it’s a typical service industry sort of format. This is what we are taught in college. However, over the past ten years (I did not have this in mind when I started working) we were/are operating in four formats:
What was the moment when this shift in how you wanted to practise architecture came about?
I was increasingly doing hospitality, stores. At some point I really didn’t think we were relevant as a discipline to what was happening in the country. Of course, one can do beautiful projects; that stuff is important, too, but one has to work in the context of our country and be relevant to the challenges that face us as a country or society at large. The projects we do, have to be for more than the 10 per cent of our country that can afford our services.
How can a practice ‘inform’ itself and deal effectively with diverse Indian contexts?
We have been taught that you, as an architect, get a client whom you design the project for, and a contractor builds it and that’s the end of the association – it’s a typical service industry sort of format. This is what we are taught in college. However, over the past ten years (I did not have this in mind when I started working) we were/are operating in four formats:
- One is the traditional practice mode.
- Then there is a collaborative model whereby we collaborate with people who know more about certain aspects of projects, site, processes than we do. Our collaborations, for instance, allow us to work with people who might not necessarily be from our discipline but have knowledge systems that might inform projects better. It, of course, implies a deviation from sole authorship but it enables a better engagement with the diverse contexts throughout the country.
- The third is a collective (like the Bandra Collective that is a group of six architects) that works towards the design of public space in Bandra with the BMC, resident associations, and so on…
- The fourth is research as a form of practice. There is a perception of a disjunct between what we are taught in schools and the realities of ‘building’ on ground. We have encouraged this disjunct and not addressed it. i believe there is a big role for pedagogy to play within a practice.
What was the moment when this shift in how you wanted to practise architecture came about?
I was increasingly doing hospitality, stores. At some point I really didn’t think we were relevant as a discipline to what was happening in the country. Of course, one can do beautiful projects; that stuff is important, too, but one has to work in the context of our country and be relevant to the challenges that face us as a country or society at large. The projects we do, have to be for more than the 10 per cent of our country that can afford our services.
You are working/researching extensively on issues pertaining to affordable housing. What have been the learnings so far?
Peter Zumthor talked about architecture as a political profession as opposed to being an aesthetic one, and taking on more responsibility as an architect. What do you think?
I think to build anything is a political act. If you choose to build in Mumbai, you are feeding into certain notions of labour, land and the role of state, and you are talking about material consumption, which is a direct commentary on resources and on sustainability. So, if you build in today’s time, you can’t avoid the politics associated with the act of building.
Then how does one explain the confined/non-existent role of architects and planners in India’s urban planning?
I agree on the negligible role of the architect. If you look at the trajectory of the architectural practice in India, it has gone from the time of independence where it was a part of the nation-building impetus to post-liberalisation where the rate of change was so fast that we, as professionals, weren’t trained or equipped to understand or address it. I think it was this shift in the nature of our profession that was the pivotal moment where we lost agency.
Why?
Because we were not able to correctly understand what we were dealing with. What happened was this – we suddenly had Infosys saying that they wanted to have a 300-acre campus. So what did we do? We looked at Silicon Valley. And the default move was to subscribe to that image and see how to incorporate that because we also wanted to build this very quickly. We tried to service that requirement without time to reflect.
But since then, it has been 35 years. Today, all of us in this profession are aware of how this mode of production works. So now if we don’t take this opportunity to wrest back mandate or responsibility for what is being built we will further get relegated to talking about only wall treatments.
Why is the government not engaging with architects and urban planners?
This is something we have to remedy. They don’t call us to comment on policy because they don’t think we have anything relevant to add. They don’t think that we are equipped to understand the political economy of the way a city operates. It is largely believed that the aesthetic is just the aesthetic, it has nothing to do with the way things work.
It is believed that we, in the design community, don’t understand the complexities of urban demands. We are willing to do elevational treatments for buildings, and maybe sometimes it’s good enough. Unless some of us are willing to advocate for a change of our roles and capacities, nothing will change. Our professional bodies, the COA and the IIA, need to be revalued and then valorised to becoming truly representational of where the profession is, and where it needs to be.
Read more:
Houzz Forum: What’s Missing in Indian Design & Architecture Education?
- All affordable housing needs to fit within networks. For example, you can’t say the land in a certain area can be a site for affordable housing, because unless it is fed into a network of transportation or economy, it won’t work.
- Affordable housing needs to have a structure that will also allow it to change over time. It needs to be designed to imbibe that flexibility. While researching a project for our book, we found projects where structural grids were repetitive, but within a repetition they still had four sizes of apartments. That kind of variety is important to allow different income groups to live in the same building . Also, it is not necessary to see housing within the default BHK format, because in affordable housing projects very often the same spaces are used to both live and work. So, a living room might also be where there might a small home industry operating, so the BHK imagination for housing is often very limiting…
- We have to also re-examine the binaries of private and public spaces. It’s perhaps more clear-cut in the case of large apartments, but when you are living in an affordable housing schemes in 300-square-foot unit sizes along with five other people, lots of activities are contingent on the outside space immediate to the interior.
- The last is the attention to detail. However much we might talk about the big moves within housing policy, infrastructure, finance, transportation, and so on, it’s imperative to design in detail the immediate environment within and there are numerous details of the ingenuity of people inhabiting small spaces, the flat pack ladder being one of them.
Peter Zumthor talked about architecture as a political profession as opposed to being an aesthetic one, and taking on more responsibility as an architect. What do you think?
I think to build anything is a political act. If you choose to build in Mumbai, you are feeding into certain notions of labour, land and the role of state, and you are talking about material consumption, which is a direct commentary on resources and on sustainability. So, if you build in today’s time, you can’t avoid the politics associated with the act of building.
Then how does one explain the confined/non-existent role of architects and planners in India’s urban planning?
I agree on the negligible role of the architect. If you look at the trajectory of the architectural practice in India, it has gone from the time of independence where it was a part of the nation-building impetus to post-liberalisation where the rate of change was so fast that we, as professionals, weren’t trained or equipped to understand or address it. I think it was this shift in the nature of our profession that was the pivotal moment where we lost agency.
Why?
Because we were not able to correctly understand what we were dealing with. What happened was this – we suddenly had Infosys saying that they wanted to have a 300-acre campus. So what did we do? We looked at Silicon Valley. And the default move was to subscribe to that image and see how to incorporate that because we also wanted to build this very quickly. We tried to service that requirement without time to reflect.
But since then, it has been 35 years. Today, all of us in this profession are aware of how this mode of production works. So now if we don’t take this opportunity to wrest back mandate or responsibility for what is being built we will further get relegated to talking about only wall treatments.
Why is the government not engaging with architects and urban planners?
This is something we have to remedy. They don’t call us to comment on policy because they don’t think we have anything relevant to add. They don’t think that we are equipped to understand the political economy of the way a city operates. It is largely believed that the aesthetic is just the aesthetic, it has nothing to do with the way things work.
It is believed that we, in the design community, don’t understand the complexities of urban demands. We are willing to do elevational treatments for buildings, and maybe sometimes it’s good enough. Unless some of us are willing to advocate for a change of our roles and capacities, nothing will change. Our professional bodies, the COA and the IIA, need to be revalued and then valorised to becoming truly representational of where the profession is, and where it needs to be.
Read more:
Houzz Forum: What’s Missing in Indian Design & Architecture Education?
I like to see how the scope of a project can achieve a larger impact than the project itself.
To give you an example — we designed Jetavan, a Buddhist learning centre. And when we were building that, we were, of course, building within a context. We were preserving the trees, we were building with materials from within that area. But in this project, we also ended up creating a material that did not exist, or rather a technique of building that didn’t exist in traditional practice. We used waste basalt stone dust from nearby stone quarries and waste fly ash to make load-bearing rammed stone-dust walls which, as a construction material or a system, did not exist in that area.
What we were able to do is to look at the resource available in an area and create a technology or a technique that would, in some sense, live beyond the scope of the building itself. It is a technique that can be used in the future by other people in that area, and to build with effectively, economically and in a way that is sustainable.
So, for me, when a building is able to project the potential of systematic change either through material or type and not just service its programme, then that’s an interesting project.
How do you approach a project? What’s your firm’s research process?
We work through a system that is not prescribed by a single person. In the studio, everything that moves forward on a design project is part of a process where there are multiple authors.
Besides looking at historic evolution and precedent, research then extends onto talking to end users/the community involved to understand aspirations, to look at the material ecology of that space, and to see who is best equipped to deal with it. We, of course, know some aspect of it but we obviously don’t know everything about a project and its context.
In the Jetavan project, we invited the Hunnarshala Foundation to initially do rammed earth walls. We assumed that since there was a lot of brick manufacturing going on in the area, rammed earth could be a viable solution. Well, it wasn’t. The amount of cement that was required to stabilise rammed earth was over 12-13 per cent. We then started looking for alternatives, and we found this new material (waste basalt stone dust). This is only possible when a process is open enough to allow for that kind of change within a project.
You also have to be a bit light-handed when you work within contexts like ours. It means to not come with hard, preconceived ideas of how something needs to be done. You can have a clear general framework that fulfils the programme, materials, site sensitivity, but then allows site conditions and site paradigms to ‘contaminate’ the project. The project becomes richer because of that.
So, every time the approach has to change.
Yes, it has to. In the essay Is There an Indian Way of Thinking, A.K. Ramanujan talks about the futility of a singular approach within the diversity that is India. So the model of practice that we are typically trained to operate through as architects is insufficient to deal with all of these contexts.