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.