ReFresh: CEPT

As architects, we do not practice in a mono-lingual/ mono-cultural world. The diversity, and migration of ideas and resources are reflected in our projects, their design and construction processes. The choice and use of building materials, systems and fabrication, then, must reflect ground conditions, rather than a romanticized vocabulary of the regional or local.

In the context of the proposed demolition of the dormitories on the IIM-Ahmedabad campus, Shubhra Raje, Sarosh Anklesaria and Riyaz Tayyibji converse with host Vikram Prakash on the value of collective/cultural memory, and privileging certain memories over others.

A small recording studio for podcasts where the gaze and the spectacle of the site condition is used to co-opt the space of the host; a borrowing across the threshold of what is given, without physically incursing boundaries.

‘Drawing to Find Out’ is an annual curated column on drawing in architecture and the techniques and ideas therein. In its fifth edition, Matter interviewed Shubhra regarding the craftsmanship cultures, their relationship with the design process and the way in which they inform her practice.

Preservation of the ancient mud-brick structure in the spirit of a renovation project – an act of repair – where the work dissolves, or integrates, in the way a transplanted organ must; both parties, the host and the transplant are at play here. In the integration, there is the disappearance of the architectural gesture, revealed in the subsequent gesture of the reconstituted whole.

Shubhra Raje was a member of the ongoing archaeological project at Abydos sponsored jointly by the NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts and Princeton University (field seasons 2011-12).

The gate to the garden, straddling within and without, is scaled to allow inhabitation; a pavilion which receives pople and the cross breezes on behalf of the garden, thereby shifting emphasis of the project from the building to its context.

Formalized through a series of linked courtyards around which small learning communities are organized, the spatial character evokes a familiar archetype. However, this was neither the emphasis, or the genesis. Instead we have looked to the nature of activiities, and the meaning of use, to provide an endurance which is material, tangible and a practice of the everyday.