Space.

You will always find it:

Space.

Meandering
Like veins under the skin;
Joining the various limbs
In a system of interconnected pathways-
Binding.

Sustaining Life.

This is how Atom and Coco make paths for themselves, ensuring that they are in the centre of all activity.

While the probability of you walking into our office and seeing at least a handful of people surrounding Sai’s desk is high, the probability of you seeing little incisions and elongated corridors stretching between the seats chosen by the people that form this organisation, irrespective of whether or not we’re in a meeting are even higher.

They sprawl on the floor: snoozing, nibbling, yawning or even walking around, sometimes constantly fishing for attention. And that’s one of the things that binds us as an office- this shared love for these sweet creatures and the energy that we draw from them, the quick breaks we take to laugh at their sleep poses and of course, the annoyance we feign when they’re being too needy.

The space they’ve barged into and hollowed out for themselves seems pretty permanent- evident in the literal and figurative sense; in the space we spend our entire day in and in the crevices of each of our minds.

Gushing about them to whoever I meet is almost a predictable part of my routine and so obviously, you, my reader, will not be spared.

Hoping you don’t mind it,
Namitha.

Gradual Destruction and Constant Upliftment.

It has been about 3 days since our little experiments pertaining to the systemization of the office structure have begun and the mood in the office has shifted. The past few days have seemed like high tension, high stakes days for most people. There is no denying that by the end of the day we are so mentally obsolete that I, for one, don’t know whether to feel exhilarated or just exhausted.

This shift in atmosphere is not something anyone can ignore or even leave unnoticed. We did what we, as an office, always do- had a conversation that involved everyone that was in the office at that moment. The end result of this was the decision to start splitting roles and delegating work to establish the next step in this organisational process.

The good thing about this, if we are able to achieve it, is that eventually all the pending work would be done once and for all and from that point onward, there will only be a sustainable amount of work each person has to do. The flip side in my head, however, is that this isn’t an easy exercise to do as the outcomes are far too varied and probably even extreme:

One outcome could be that each of us, being unsure of how much the other person will be able to complete, will end up delegating the bare minimum. The other way would be that we just pass on everything that we can’t do leading to an extreme testing of the patience and work capacity of the last person on the hierarchical ladder.
Either of these methods would set us up for spectacular failure.

The only positive solution to this activity would be to follow a balanced approach that relies on gradual change of systems rather than a sudden upheaval of habits that have been inculcated over a long period of time. 

How we reach this balance is a whole ‘nother story altogether- One that I will share with you, as and when we progress forward.

Stick around, it seems like it is going to be a bumpy but crazy ride!
Namitha.

Baby Steps.

The office is alive.

That’s the only way to describe the past few days. After discussions upon discussion and talks upon talks, it finally feels like we’re going somewhere with our work.

Don’t get me wrong. We never stopped working, but we’ve only started working, very recently, with gusto. Almost all the deliberations we have nowadays are based on one word: consequence.

You’d think that there is only so much you can talk about consequences but you’d be sadly mistaken. Spend one day in our office and you’ll see various reasons to identify and link activities with corresponding consequences- not just in terms of immediate good or bad but also in terms of the manifold systems that revolve around that one word.

Another thing we’ve been touching upon is the fact that our organisation doesn’t end at the rung of interns or at the rung of people who supervise the site. Rather, our office and all that it stands for and believes in needs to reach the level of workers who ensure that all the office work is translated into something tangible.

These are, obviously, not ideas, ideals or concepts that can be introduced and implemented in one day and slowly, but surely, there is a shift in the way we view our work and as of now, the shift is one that moves us towards a better version of what we currently are.

As always,
I’ll keep you updated about the implications of these baby steps.

So long,
Namitha.

Non-Christmas Christmas Hullabaloo

After a month of celebrations, January is usually considered to be a downer of a month; what with the entire year ahead of you (am I the only one who feels better towards the end of the year?) and almost no grand festivals in the near future.  However, today was a day everyone in office was excited about. Turns out that between the public holidays and breaks taken by people in the office, we’d ended up never having the pre-christmas gift exchange last year and obviously, playing Christmas santa is an activity that cannot be ignored.

After 2 date changes and a lot of hullabaloo, we finally celebrated Christmas in office today and when I say celebrate, I mean the entire shindig with a make-do Christmas tree, borrowed lights, Christmas songs on the speaker and a bucket of gifts.

Now I expected us to start playing the game towards the end of the day because I really didn’t have much faith in the probability of anyone getting back into the groove of working afterwards. However, I was perfectly pleasantly surprised when (surprise!) it took everyone about 15 minutes to switch gears and go back to whatever was on the agenda  for the day and all this…wait for it..without any cribbing or whining!

I don’t want to believe it but it turns out that all of us, actually enjoy working! That, I feel, is quite a revelation (at least for me) and a happy one, at that.

Hoping to maintaining this positivity throughout the year!

Namitha.

Never Ending Questions.

Somewhere in the third week of working here, I started typing questions that I needed to figure out the answers to. These could be anything- from ‘what on earth is masala in the context of site work?’ and ‘what should I write in the blog today?’ to ‘does this drawing have to be completed first or that one?’ or even ‘where do I add this in the grand scheme of pending work?’

Initially, I thought that this would just end up becoming one of those random documents scattered in my drive that contain bits and pieces of text that I will accidentally stumble across a few weeks from then. How wrong I was.

Every time one question gets answered, it seems like two more pop up- making it impossible for me to stay on top of it, let alone forget about it. And this is why soon enough, this note got the title- "never ending questions".

You'd think that this random snippet from my life has not a lot to do with office but that's not true. It is testimony to the fact that if you just look around this chaos that is slowly (very slowly) starting to get sorted out, you'll always find something new to do or figure out. It is also an indication of the way we work, the hands on experience of being thrown into the deep end and the type of environment we work in where questions are encouraged and answers don't always need to be found on Google.

I think it'd be quite interesting to see how each of the new people react to this space. Maybe, soon enough, I'll write about their experiences.

Hope you stick around!

Namitha.

5 Minutes.

‘Atom is the reason I can’t work.’

Someone said this is the garage the other day and all of us automatically had a smirk on our faces. Almost everyone who has worked here has probably thought this at least one time.

If you’ve met Atom, you know what I’m talking about.

It can be the sad droopy eyes he looks at you with every time he wants your attention (which is all the time, by the way), the way he makes these noises when he’s trying to communicate with you or even the fact that he is the friendliest great dane you will ever meet; something about this gentle giant will draw you to him.

Of course, all isn’t always good. He can be over enthusiastic while running around, can knock you ever if you’re in his way and worst of all can stamp your feet or semi-crush your shoulders with his paws. But all in all, if atom wants attention, chances are that he’ll get it- if not from you, then someone else.

While this might occasionally disrupt your focus or even annoy you once in a blue moon; the fact that such an energetic and quirky creature is around you automatically makes you feel more at ease, usually irrespective of how stressed you are.

Sharing an office with Atom and Coco has shown me the reason dogs are often chosen as therapy animals- they don't need to try very hard to help you calm down; you just spend 5 minutes with them and that's almost all you need.

Thank you, boys.

See you soon,
Namitha.

Pushing the Envelope

It has been a month!

Wait.
It has only been a month?!

This first month at Sandarbh has been quite something. But it also feels like a blur. We’ve had good days and bad days and days that are so mentally exhausting that you don’t know whether it’s good or bad.

We’ve had sites that have flourished and sites where we couldn’t go the extra mile; work that got completed and files and lists that kept piling up; times where everyone was in sync and times where you didn’t even know what the person next to you was doing. But most importantly, we had people who kept pushing forward, with Sai at the helm of this movement.

As I said earlier, this month has been a month of momentum building- towards achieving even higher quality in terms of work, an even more conducive work environment and an even more holistic work life than we have. This is an ongoing journey where everyone is starting to make conscious efforts to reach the same the goal. A goal that we will achieve and hopefully even push the envelope on this year. 

In the previous blog Leena spoke about what an incredible ride 2018 has been for Sandarbh and I’m writing in hope that 2019 will be even better.

Have a great year ahead!
Namitha.

Here's to you.

If I started to give you anecdotes about the way technology has handicapped us every single day, I probably would have enough content for the rest of the year.

But alas! That is not how this project works.

I am pretty sure that over the course of over 300 blogs, it would have come up quite a few times that generating a blog every single day is not easy. What ends up happening, more often than not, is that the writer of the blogs goes around asking everyone in office if they have any ideas or suggestions and will most definitely receive variations of the same threat:
"I swear, if you ask me this question one more time..!"

Alas, desperate times call for desperate measures and those are exactly what these incessant questions count as. But some times, these encounters can give rise to some pretty interesting, amusing or even perfectly mundane blogs.

I would've never thought that I'd ever write about Bougainvillea or Cab rides or even, more recently, scrubbing the floors. So here's a shout out to the crazy stories each member of this office comes up with.

And here's to you looking forward to the answers that come because we keep bugging others with the same question,
Always.

Namitha.

Immobile.

The initial plan today was to write about how I found it really amusing that the capacity of a home safe is measured in litres. But then I realised that it was merely because cubic metres are often expressed as litres and it ruined the whole fancy and imaginative explanation I was concocting in my mind.

So then, I was sitting here, out of ideas when it struck me that I should write about the link between mobile technology and the site life merely because of how weird it felt when my phone was dead the entire day.

First things first, nothing happens without a whatsapp group. So, obviously, the multiple office groups need to be checked various times during the day for everything from communication between the site and the office to material procurement or even deliberation on drawings. If your whatsapp is off, chances are that you have no idea what the others are up to.

Next, the probability of you carrying camera equipment when you’re out of office, either on site or in the workshop, are particularly low so, obviously, collection of photographic evidence pertaining to work, site conditions and even selected fittings and fixtures (when you’re shopping with the clients) is out of question.

Thirdly, god forbid you do not get an auto or a bus, there is no way you or anyone else can get you back to office by booking a vehicle.

All these, of course, are apart from the fact that you cannot call or message or even research something if the client or workers ask you for input on something you don’t have a great grip on.

I was thanking my stars that I was with Leena and didn’t really need to use the phone but that isn’t the point. The point is that we are all so dependent on our mobiles that even 8 hours of work without them seems like a long shot.

But, here’s to my phone finally having enough charge for me to use the hotspot to upload this blog.

Adios,
Namitha.

Some Wednesdays, We Scrub the Floors.

I was doing my regular mind mapping, idea hunting exercise to find quality content for the blog and as fate would have it, it came in the form of Rithik and Arjun walking into the garage and telling me about the start of their day. It turns out that they began their lazy morning with an activity that shouldn’t really be surprising, considering that today is the day after Christmas. But of course, it needs to be noted that what led to this said activity had nothing to do with Christmas.

It turns out that some of the previous work that had happened on site had left the beautiful ceramic floor tiles used in the house pretty dirty. On noticing that, along with a lack of workers on site early in the morning, someone decided to take things into their own hands and this is exactly why, when our boys turned up on site, they were met with the image of a man, who on close inspection, turned out to be the owner, scrubbing the bathroom floors with all his might. 

Now, imagine this situation:

You turn up on site because you’re building someone’s house and you see the said someone going full force and cleaning. What do you do?

Let’s be honest, you don’t really have a choice. You discuss what other work needs to be done and start scrubbing the floors with him. And if you’re lucky, as these guys seem to have been, there will soon be pumped up music and a constant banter filling the air as other people slowly join you and start, well, scrubbing the rest of the areas.

I couldn’t help but laugh at the image of all of these guys calling dibs on different spots and cleaning till the tiles shined.

I guess if any of us at office ever need to do some floor cleaning, we now know who the experts are!

See you tomorrow!
Namitha

Monday Blues.

Today didn’t feel like a Monday.

There was no lazing around in the morning; no relaxed tea break to start the week off on the right foot and certainly no positive pep talk that makes you feel like the sun is shining on your entire life.

Instead, today began with the kind of personalized bashing that only comes when you work in an environment as familial as ours. But the good side to a hand stitched pointing out of errors is that it often comes with a side of motivation; and as we all know, motivation is linked with productivity.

However, productivity has been an elusive friend to me because it seems like a lot of effort goes into office everyday but it amounts to nothing much, or even worse, the opposite of what was supposed to be done. And yet, as I mentioned in my very first blog, your day can flip from bad to good in a second and while it certainly took more time than that, it did get better.

Word processors are my friends and so are excel sheets. Combine those two with visits to showrooms and I’m like a kid with candy.

The rest of the day went in jotting down which of the shiny fittings would go into which bathroom and drawing up lists of work that need to be done these coming few days. So in a way, today was a perfect blend of indoor and outdoor time and that in itself is enough to balance everything else out.

Add to all this, the fact that tomorrow is Christmas, and quite frankly, you can’t be in a dismal mood. Even if you don’t celebrate it, no one can stay sad about a mid-week holiday.

Don’t you worry though,
I’ll write to you tomorrow, in the midst of an assumingly scrumptious cake.

So long,
Namitha.

Elitism and Eclecticism

The two words written in the title mean things that are far from each other. The former talks about exclusivity bordering on snobbery and the latter talks about diversity and heterogeneity. But the funny thing about architecture is that it can be expressed through either of the extremes- sometimes even both.

As designers, it isn’t uncommon for people to become a little haughty and believe that their aesthetic is the best and it is equally common to experiment so much that the building looks like a mash up of too many things that you, as an individual, wouldn’t probably put together. But that is the beauty of a creative field, isn’t it? Each person seems to have a different perception of what works and what doesn’t; this idea can vary by a few degrees or by miles and this also makes it the most frustrating part of this creative field: There is no pleasing everyone. And sometimes, there is no pleasing anyone (including yourself).

This is one thing I’ve realised we all struggle with. The discussions in office regarding everything starting from the placement on one tiny half wall to the grey lines on a white marble can get incredibly interesting and sometimes, even exhausting. But that is what makes brainstorming among a group of ‘creative’ people so interesting, especially if you’re someone like me who is inclined towards conversations, especially ones that have some heat to it.

This, for me, is one of the reasons the 3 weeks in office seem to have gone so fast.

Hope to see you tomorrow,
Namitha.

Guess-Break-Validate.

It has been a heavy few days at Sandarbh. There have been lengthy discussions about everything from human resource management to project management systems that can make your head go for a toss. 

Dead in the middle of this chaos of information is each of us is trying to wrap our heads around the volume of content that has been handed to us on a platter formed by years of experience.

Like everything else in life, this too has two sides: One being the cliché that you can learn from other peoples’ mistakes and the other being the fact that there is no way to guarantee that you won’t make the same mistake, unless you’ve made it once. But the funny part isn’t the possibility of making a mistake while knowing that it is one; it is that you won’t even realize that it is the same error someone else made, just in a different context.

But that isn’t what this blog is about.

This is about the things that struck me most in the entire (almost) 2 day long conversation: My favourite one being concept of breaking things down. The idea of taking something and deconstructing it is so simple in theory that we often forget how detailed everything in life can be.

Next in line is guessing and validating. Much like academic research where you start with a hypothesis and do various experiments to either affirm or negate your theory; research and small, harmless experiments on humans can be quite eye opening, especially if you are your own test subject.

And the third most interesting thing to me, was what was happening in front of my eyes- a scene where 10-15 people were huddled around one desk, listening with rapt attention for hours. The reason this is so interesting to me is because it perfectly combines the aforementioned 2 ideas in two very different ways:

1.      The first perspective is one where Sai guessed that we would benefit from such an all-encompassing talk, broke things down to make it easier for us to digest, watched us gobble up all this information and that, in turn, validated his assumption.

2.      The second perspective is one where we guessed that what Sai had to say would help us, broke the information down in our head to digest it, and today, when we tried to work using the principles discussed, found that our initial guess was validated.

Of course, realizing that there is probably a more efficient way to work might look like a win-win situation; but it rarely is. What it means, then, is that there is a lot of unlearning to do, before you reach your optimal efficiency. But that is a conversation for another day.

So long,
Namitha.

Rendezvous with the Bougainvillea

Lunch is a relatively grand affair at Sandarbh. Most of us usually go together to eat at one of the two places that are at a walking distance from office. But was it the workload, the boredom of eating from the same old places or just plain laziness that prompted us to order food a couple of times consecutively last week, I don’t know. Whatever it was, it is safe to say that when a couple of us walked to our old hangout today, we couldn’t help but feel sluggishly full and contemplative about the choice of walking on the way back.

But alas! Something good did come out of it. We realized that we all shared an almost comedic connection to the words ‘Bougainvillea’ and ‘Rendezvous’. Now that you’ve  heard the  words, I’m pretty sure you’ve guessed what I’m talking about. But in case you were a prodigy who dealt with complicated spellings right from a young age and have no idea; I’m talking about this middle school phenomenon called ‘Spelling Bee’ where everyone received, memorized and then showcased their ability to spell out a never ending list of words that you honestly couldn’t expect a 10 year old to have even heard- let alone phoneticize.

Be it stuttering on stage, stumbling with the pronunciation or even acing the contest, the possibility of finding two words that people from different parts of the country share a connection to; among the million that make up our vocabulary seems pretty astounding to me.

Here’s to finding more and more nostalgic things in common with people I barely even knew 2 weeks ago,
Namitha.

Tucked into the Warmth of this World.

If you saw a building being torn down on your way to office, you probably wouldn’t turn around for a second glance; but even the thought of your home being damaged a little would definitely wrench your gut.

Deny it as we might, the architecture around us seems to have 

the power to evoke emotions we often don’t even know exist within us. One could say the same thing about travel and the proof of this lies in the fact that we tend to bring back pieces of memorabilia from each holiday we take.

The feeling of your eye randomly being held captive by something that reminds you of a distant memory is quite indescribable. But the joy of moulding your home around everything that you have seen, loved and collected over the years would feel like snuggling into the warmth of a comfortable blanket.

One tiny part of this nostalgia is what I experienced when I walked into one of our sites.

The house that has been designed capitalising on the beauty of patterned tiles and upscaled wooden frames that have been strategically placed on walls and floors to offset grey and white backdrops. These plain colours come with the opportunity to add a trace of brighter shades that heighten the brilliance of the tessellations used. And let me not forget the strikingly blue doors with a hint of stained glass that frame the greenery around the house beautifully.

While I was there for barely an hour, I couldn’t help but smile at the coloured glass lights that reminded me of Turkey, the blue tiles that seem to take you to Morocco, the light switches that I vaguely remember from a time my grandmother described in her stories and the grey, textured walls that speak of a time so contemporary yet timeless that it acts as a perfect adhesive to hold all these elements of striking individual beauty together.

I may be biased towards things that help me travel without moving but why would anyone count that as a bad thing.
Right?

Looking forward to write about many such brilliant projects,
Namitha.

Iron Trails

Space planning in an ordered sense is core to the world of architecture.

As much as architecture attempts to orchestrate our perceptions of scale and proportion and expose our senses to tangible experiences, a film of safety from various external agencies that resides within the realm connecting functionality and necessity cannot be ignored.

One would think that elements such as grills would be easy to design but even the most seemingly mundane components can be a result of complex processes. In function, grills form the layer that screens the outdoor clutter from getting inside. So isn’t it obvious that our grill designs will vary as their locations do. Safe to say, these small but essential parts of the building are formed at the confluence of a rational sense of design and visual quality.

Our journey of piecing the puzzle together starts at the workshop with the assembly of various iron sections to birth frames that then host a series of thinner rods placed into holes that are punched or drilled in accordance to the design.

Once the frame is welded, punctures of the required diameter are created to allow thinner rods to easily slide in and be welded. This forms the inner core of the grill which is then transported to the site. Here, a recreation of the process of punching holes into the external frame and welding rods to hold the core is done to hold the design in place.

At the end of it all, these oft-times ignored lines of ferrous find their quiet home perched upon the mantle sill; and if one spares the time to look closely, each of these will sing of the intricate and precise skill that has gone into their creation.

Here’s to our first site story,
Utsav and Namitha.

Altering Our Course.

In these memoirs of daily life that we put up on our blog, we often forget to mention half of our story: the half of the story that depicts the realization of the work that is done within the four walls of our office. What I’m talking about, is the substantial chunk of behind the scenes action that unfurls on our various sites- slowly, but steadily.

As students, we are often told that architects are ‘the creative folk’; the people who design but don’t necessarily need to get into the nitty-gritty details of the actual construction. But that is so untrue! I don’t pretend to know how other places work, but that is definitely not how we work. There are an equal number of people on site, as they are in office- scheduling, helping, directing and facilitating the work that needs to be done. When I tell you that I hadn’t seen one or two people from our office till yesterday but knew about them and the projects they were working on, I’m not joking. This can be attributed to the constant stream of messages that pour in on our office chat, day in and day out, from 8am to even 9pm, detailing the progress, and addressing the issues that inadvertently arise on site.

The reason I am writing about this today is because, as an office, we strive towards learning and growing to the best of our abilities and that can only happen, when we learn from our each other and the people around us. And so, starting from now, we will try to split the focus of these blogs between both our office lives- the indoor and outdoor ones.

Hope you’re as excited about this as I am,
So long,
Namitha.

Static Without Static.

What do you do when the electricity fails and you watch your old laptop that has been overworked ever since you laid your architectural hands on it, die a losing battle to its rapidly dying battery?

What do you do, when after a panicked attempt at switching from laptop to phone as your medium of work, you realise that there is no way you can efficiently detail out and finish all the mails you were supposed to send out while typing on the tiny screen in your hand?

What do you do when the electricity hasn’t returned in 2 hours and you are now knee deep in work that hasn’t been done- starting from documentations to presentations; all of which that, of course, need to go out that very day?

I’ll tell you what you’ll do.
You’ll head out for an early lunch.

And while there, you will mentally prepare yourself to beat flash with the pace at which you cover ground the moment the dim light on your laptop flickers; simultaneously bringing your device and you, back to life.

You will prioritize and make a mental note of the order in which you will handle files and, unquestionably, have to multi task.

And finally, you will wrap everything up, look at the clock with surprise and file this in your head as a relaxed day at work; quietly happy that you weren’t the one on site when the electricity went out.

Hoping to see you tomorrow,
Namitha.

Thesis?

I vividly remember the time when our first thesis review was scheduled. After listening to the importance of the Architectural thesis for 5 years, it was big deal for all of us. The first review wasn't very elaborate. All we had to do was to describe the project we were to take and show them the abstract. But hype around the first review was intense. 

Throughout the whole course of Architectural school, the thesis was given utmost importance. Every sketch we made, every line we drafted seemed like it led onto the thesis. Amazing design sheets were called "Thesis level sheets". The thesis sheets of our professors was a bench mark. 

After 6 months busy working, the sheets that I had closed after our Thesis jury was never opened again. I included parts of it for my architectural portfolio, but Sai says he never looked at it when he hired me. I haven't seen my thesis report since and neither do I know about it's whearabouts. And it probably won't matter. 

So what was all of the 6 months of research and hard work for? 

Today's discussion at office was centered around processes. Every activity has a direction and steps within that direction. It's the same with any activity - small or large. Even a simple sketch of a plan would have to be done in various steps. The thesis is probably a part of the process leading to a graduation to a degree to a COA number and legally practicing architecture. 

So hey student Architects! Your thesis is important. But probably not as much as they tell you it is. So have fun, enjoy the process and things will get sorted on their own. 

Happy designing!

What language does your subconscious speak in?

"What language does your subconscious think in?" Sai asked us in general. Drashti had no clue, Leena and Anirudh said English. I thought about the last time I was asked  the same question. I had ended up thinking of this for days and days until I figured out mine was English too. There is probably a lot more to think - the language is just a starting point to understand your subconscious. 

Each of our design instincts are derived by our subconscious. And just like the language the subconscious speaks in, each decision the subconscious takes is evolved over the experiences that happens over our lifetime. It's probably why experienced architects take less effort developing their designs. They have basically taken time to understand and train their subconscious to understand the client's needs. Who would be better than a child to design a room for a child? But thinking about it, I don't really need to be a child to design for a child. All I needed to do was to take the effort to imagine being one. I needed to meet people, and not just meet - consiously take the effort to understand their fears, their aspirations and train myself to understand the emotion behind the words. 

Sai elaborated to Drashti about using the subconscious to step in the client's shoes and imagine like the balcony she was designing was being used by her .  

But out of nowhere, another question rose in my head -

The subconscious has a negative too. My fear of stairs may be projected in my staircase design. I would probably cage my stairs in grills if I had to design one for myself.

 How do you get over that?