India 94

India

N. 94
October 2020
Volume 9/ Issue 6 / October 2020/ Pages 100/ `200
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 Contents
Contents

94 October 2020

24 Editorial
Being Public: The pulse of courage and hope Kaiwan Mehta

12 Agenda
13 Suspending the city. Silencing the stranger Kaiwan Mehta

17 Life in Anthropocene Bernd Scherer

20 Cities are not landscapes Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani

22 Our horizontal Babel Luis Fernández-Galiano

25 Practice
26 Good practice Substance in smallness Suprio Bhattacharjee

38 Affinities Etymology of design Amin Taha

50 Design and Art

51 Notes on design Thonet No. 14 Jasper Morrison
Francesca Picchi

57 Art Tobias Zielony, Le Vele Tobias Zielony

63 Reflections
64 Layered meanings Building Biographies Gulammohammed Sheikh,
Navjot Altaf,
Ram Rahman & Riyas Komu

74 Seeing architecture On form and fragments Sen Kapadia

78 Thinking culture Objects in a landscape Yashwant Pitkar and

Bhaveshwari Shah
Richa Raut and Neesha Mewada

88 Making architecture On ornament Ambra Fabi, Giovanni Piovene

92 Rassegna Rassegna - outdoor

Cover Design: The cover image is a work from the series How Perfect Perfection Can Be by the artist Navjot Altaf. The work and series talks about
the engineering and architectural perfection that corporate architecture enjoys presenting to the world outside and inside the building. But then
the artist marks this image with a graph line that indicates some aspect of climate change, emission of dangerous gases, and destruction of the
natural environment, drawing our attention to the heavy anthropogenic impact of architectural materials and resources on ecology. The October
2020 issue is special for us - it marks our comeback after a period lockdown due to the Coronavirus pandemic, when we had to suspend the
publication of our magazine, and this period has raised many important debates on the impact of hyper-development and the built environment
on our lives, climate, and the way micro-life can disturb our assumed sense of modern stability; October for India is also the month that marks the
birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi and in the past, we have discussed how architecture can be the site of violence in the context of Gandhi’s
philosophy of Non-Violence, and this work by Altaf reminds us of our lives between violence and the hope for non-violence.

9
Editorial

Being Public: The pulse of courage and hope

Text Kaiwan Mehta

We return with an issue after this period of unfortunate times. The pandemic important than the joy of being a citizen of the world, its languages, myths,
across the globe has not left any life untouched, if there are lives directly stories and culture. What is it to be public? And why have we denied the public
untouched by the virus and its aftermath, there are indirect influences on so easily in the name of soul-searching or distributed communities? So how
the ecology and cycle of life that connects all living beings. The month of should we understand the forces of togetherness, sharing, understanding
March and April this year were beyond comprehension and belief for all differences, living with variety as a way of making our lives in essential
we know; the stability and confidence in our modern life, medical science, conjunction with shaping public life.
divinity, financial seasons, love and relationships, all received a rude jolt. Whether it is Gandhi or the many philosophies of Yoga, the investigation
Life for all of us will never be the same, and we yet do not know what will of the self and the inner-self is always about connecting with the wider
this change be. Yes, superficially we know what has altered in our lives, imagination of civilization, and the human cosmos; the self is investigated
but how deep the impact of this pandemic and the lockdown of cities and to shape a more human self, one that understands other human lives,
social lives following it is going to leave deep impacts for all of us, and the compassion, the self that understands and ‘recognises the pain that other
depth and violence of this impact will only be visible with time. Time… what human selves bear’ to loosely translate one of Gandhi’s most loved bhajans
can one say about Time? It stopped, or… it decided to behave in ways we – a devotional song by Narsinh Mehta. There is substance in small gestures
could not recognize it. Space… it shrank! Space simply shrank to the limits of compassion and broader visions of human connectivity and citizenship.
of our homes, and to our bodies. But there were people who had no home We are all citizens of the world at large, the earth of soil and waters, trees and
to shrink and hide within, and in this part of the world we faced probably mangroves, human beings of varying physiognomies, and journeys in the
one of the worst human calamities – migrant labour from villages and the long processes of evolution and change. One is reminded of Maya Angelou’s
countryside who come to the city for work and life, trying to return home in wonderful poem “On The Pulse of Morning” especially its opening lines:
the wake of the lockdowns were inhumanly stranded between city and home,
like unwanted children that the cities threw out as economies shuttered A Rock, A River, A Tree
down, and their homes were too far out of reach, and the roads inbetween Hosts to species long since departed,
steeped in summer heat and hunger. For urbanists and planners as well as Marked the mastodon,
governments and economists we pray this will be a wakeup call, to question The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
the models through which they understand, govern, and plan cities… and Of their sojourn here
lives. We have been doing something wrong… as planners, designers, policy- On our planet floor,
makers… and human beings! Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
How can any human being be unaffected by the knowledge that crores of Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
human lives struggled and suffered the mistakes of ill-conceived governance
and ill-conceptualised planning and economic models, or the fact that But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
somewhere we have assumed the wrong ideas? The study of cities undertaken Come, you may stand upon my
in areas of the Humanities or Cultural Studies, as well as Literature have Back and face your distant destiny,
often been assumed as intellectual ruminations and discourse for the But seek no haven in my shadow,
mind of a few or academic circles and cultural platforms; however, if these I will give you no hiding place down here.
studies and readings of the city were taken as absolutely important layers
of understanding the city, and learnings here would have been allowed And then its closing words:
entry into planning and governance systems, we would not have faced this
inhuman calamity – the walk home, that was the walk of inhumanity! Our Do not be wedded forever
lifestyles on the other hand came to a standstill, although the privileged To fear, yoked eternally
lives took refuge in precisely these lifestyles as long as their homes and To brutishness.
purses allowed them to do so. The Virus has exposed the human being and The horizon leans forward,
this civilisation – our pushing Nature to its limits, our selfish approach to Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Nature as lifestyle only in the name of vacation homes and organic products, Here, on the pulse of this fine day
our deep running divisions in society marked with prejudice – the rich and You may have the courage
poor, the formal and informal, job and labour, home and street, hygiene and To look up and out upon me, the
lifestyle, me and you. Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.
Many were quick to become the pundits of the future, we could call them No less to Midas than the mendicant.
the pandemic prophets – they all wanted to declare the ‘new normal’ and No less to you now than the mastodon then.
the ‘post-pandemic’ and some thought ‘going digital’ was the new religion Here on the pulse of this new day
we should blindly convert to. Do we even understand the ‘not-so-normal’ You may have the grace to look up and out
situation we all got pushed into, that we want to rush proposing the ‘new And into your sister’s eyes, into
normal’? Was it arrogance or some inferiority complex against the Virus? Your brother’s face, your country
This was also not the time to recede within yourself, to discover some inner And say simply
self when the world outside was in turmoil with rations and jobs for so many Very simply
people becoming uncertain and unavailable. But this forced withdrawal With hope
from public life was indeed the time to reflect on how we as a civilization Good morning.
behave and how we have shaped ourselves as a human global community,
our sets of relationships across scales and geographies, to reflect on what How will design, cities, and architecture contribute to this ‘good morning’
has turned us parochial, why identity of narrow visions appears to us more and ‘very simply, with hope’?

domus October 2020 10

 Sameer Kulavoor
Unrest 03, 2020
Blue Ink on 250 gsm Mini Sketchbook
3.5 x 5.5 inches

We are grateful to Sameer Kulavoor for contributing his artwork as the Editorial image for our special issue, a comeback issue after six months of lockdown following Covid-19
pandemic. As we discuss the pandemic and will continue to do so in the coming few issues, including questions of public life and isolation, nature and developmental impact,
architecture and design of substance and not size, this editorial image is from a collection of sketches by the artist during the lockdown days.

11 domus October 2020

 Agenda
The lockdowns across the world following the global pandemic, where cities and
human habitations denied the outside as unsafe and withdrew into their homes
showed up the many prejudices that shape our cities, human civilisation, as well as
home and family, forgetting migrations, homelessness, as well as social violence that
is not allowed to surface; Kaiwan Mehta talks about the city, the public, and the role of
the stranger-citizen necessary to living together in times when the city is rudely
shutdown. Taking stock of where we stand in relation to nature, Bernd Scherer explains
how the “coronavirus crisis is exposing the Anthropocene structures underpinning our
environment”. It is time, he argues, to develop “a new alphabet of life and society”,
based on the “logic of relations” rather than growth, and to imagine new organically
inspired spatial conditions for living. Reducing our footprint on the natural world
inevitably returns to the issue of density. Luis Fernández-Galiano warns of the
centrifugal forces that our urban centres generate, “colonising the landscape” with
structures that undermine both “civic virtues and pastoral beauty”. While we cannot
change our need for material spaces – even in an increasingly digital world – we must
make our cities more compact and define their boundaries if they are to become
the sustainable ecosystems we need them to be. Reinforcing this hard boundary
is “actually the most honest and effective way of showing respect to nature,”
writes Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani. This also involves acknowledging that even the
informal green spaces within our cities are artificial, “subtracted from nature”, and
that urban design must reassert itself as an “autonomous discipline” painstakingly
constructing the foundations for ever better urban form.

domus October 2020 12


Suspending the city. Silencing the stranger
Text Kaiwan Mehta
One of the biggest calamities of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the city
– the right to the city, the right to livelihood, the right to move, the right to
being public. The city, historically, has not only emerged as the key location
for the exchange of ideas and technologies in a globalizing world, but also
the site to possibly earn a livelihood with some semblance of dignity, if not
more. In the idea of the lockdown, especially in the harsh and strict way in
which it was enforced in India, people were pushed into the insides of their
homes, and ‘stay home, stay safe’ became a mantra and a greeting. But
there were also people who had no ‘inside’ to immediately hide inside in,
hide from that virus hunting you down; they got hunted by the authorities,
and policies which in the insistence on one single formula – hide yourself
– would not imagine any other possibility for health security, nor did it
imagine that our lives are not simply about inside and outside. There
were people that were precisely caught between this inside and outside
– they were in nowhere-land – the migrants that occupied highways and
state borders in inhuman conditions, walking the earth that was neither
home, nor city, neither inside, nor outside, neither livelihood nor an iota of
dignity. Those shoved inside their homes, we still do not know if family and
home are safe completely and forever, if statistics of domestic violence,
mental health, and sexual abuse are anything to go by.
One of the classic ways in which the city has been theorized, especially
since the nineteenth century and industrialization – is the binary of Inside
and Outside – Home and World. The City becomes the World – the wide
world, where strangers live and exist, and the Home is the family, the unit
of social imagination often extended into the collective of the community.
The outside is then the space of struggle for survival, whereas the Home
is easily imagined as the haven of love and familial care, where the all
heteronormative roles and actions are in order of social expectations,
one is made to imagine. In more recent times in more ways than one, we
have been impressed upon that the city is the space of un-safety – women
molested, terrorist attacks, bombs blasting in trains and public places
in toys, acid attacks, dengue, squatters, etc. An advertisement in the
Mumbai local trains, following a set of serial bomb blasts, never leaves
me – posters by the city police, sponsored by a water purifying systems
company, telling you that the person next to you ‘could be a terrorist’ –
in short, do not trust the people you share your life with, your everyday
company of strangers, you saw as fellow-citizens, you associated with
as fellow-public, and sharing the everyday life of struggle – could now
suddenly be dangerous strangers! Your sense of the collective is now
threatened by the virtue of untrustworthiness, expanded in the name of
security and safety. In contrast, family – the heteronormative structure,
with the head of the family, motherly warmth, and all that baggage of
a conservative and patriarchal society is imagined as the automatic,
and default haven for each and every conforming heteronormative
human life. But is the city such a simple binary of Inside and Outside? In
the pandemic, governance structures clearly found this the easy way
to handle a crisis of sustained inadequacies – especially in places like
India, where lockdowns have extended for long without much imagination
of alternatives.
Jane Jacobs in her wonderful book The Death and Life of Great American
Cities points out how one of the key definitions of a city is the notion of
13
Agenda
living amidst strangers, the stranger is the unknown yet familiar entity
identifiable in the estranged life of the city. To be strangers is nature of
urban publics, but being strangers is not being enemies or threats in
any automatic equation – strangers allow for a sense of independence
in the crowded city, strangers are independent beings. The city is large
and big, unrecognizable in many ways, but it organizes itself into smaller
clusters and neighbourhoods – neighbourhoods of living and work, travel
and shared biographies of struggling through the urban everyday. Every
stranger has his or her neighbourhood, and his neighbourhood – we
just do not know of it, and we do not need to know it all the time, like in a
familial expectation. But strangers in their strangerly associations build
urban narratives. As often, these stranger-associations shape bonds of
friendship and familiarity, even a familial sense, free from the burdens of
conservative institutions such as marriage or blood-ties over generations.
The city then becomes the space of negotiating one’s life everyday, and the
possibility to do that on one’s own terms. Two amongst many storytellers
of Bombay and Mumbai have often spoken about the negotiated lives of
city-dwellers between the street and the home; Sadaat Hasan Manto and
the many spaces from the bed in one room tenements to the eateries of
the laboring classes, in which he narrates his characters and talks about
the multiplicity and the multivalence of urban and life’s spaces; the other
Rohinton Mistry, especially in the novel Family Matters talks about the
protagonist shuttling literally, as well as metaphorically between family
and the space of the outside, where a ‘man’ is supposed to make ends
meet, between hopes and reality, between trains and hawkers. Often
our living quarters – be the Chawl or the housing society, the Moholla or
the Colony, the Baug or the Wadi, they are often spaces and structures
that embody the inside and the outside within its own behaviors and
routines. The theorization of the strict inside or interior, and the outside
or the world, never really existed on the ground in any form. Many levels
of thresholds and interstitial spaces, or bridging routines have shaped
the physical and the psychological map of cities like Bombay/Mumbai;
as the sociologist Simmel would title his important essay – “The Mental
Life of the Metropolis” – the city has a mind that often cheats, more than
obeys its physical ordering of walls and gateways, doors and corridors.
As more and more we have realised that the city has a mind of its own,
more and more we have created gated hideouts in the city, in the name
of safety, in the name of protecting dietary preferences, cursing the city
for what a mess it is – we either recede within rings of walled security
gardens, or aspire to rise into the clouds, or even better take a boat to
the fantasyland called Alibaug. And now, we totally lock the city out of
our lives, blaming the virus. Is the city dangerous, or is it that we have
over decades not invested in cleaner and equitable living environments,
organized with primary health facilities and hygiene routines? Is it
the fault of the city that real estate has been allowed to decide on the
natural and human habitat balance? Is it the fault of the city that rather
than investing and strengthening our public transport system we have
pampered development projects that encourage more private travelling?
But the city is chaotic, messy, dirty, squalor-ed, and we good people are
not to be blamed – it is the city, and its population of unsettled populations
– unsettled because their earning will not allow them a home, or a roof,
domus October 2020
 Agenda

Sahej Rahal, Katabasis.

2010. Performance.
Photography: Niyati
Upadhya.
Courtesy: Artist and
Chatterjee & Lal.

domus October 2020 14


or their lives are organized between cycles of agricultural seasons and
construction industry or other industrial and labour markets – organized
between cycles of migrations, rather than settled in protected homes.
The architect Kamu Iyer, in his book Boombay speaks of how a city
must be judged by the way it treats its poor and underprivileged, and as a
nation we have failed miserably on this count. A rare but critical occasion
such as this pandemic is actually telling us today how maybe an excessive
emphasis on planning static spatialities has not helped us, and rather
a focus on understanding the cultures and life-patterns of cities could
have given us better capabilities to manage the city under emergency
and crisis. Many theses study the city for its cultural and psychological
structures, for the sense of urban experience more than urban planning,
who do not believe that the city is a physical entity any more than it is a
psychic and ephemeral entity of networks and life-patterns not visible
to the naked eye trained only to read the obvious physicalities. These
theses actually emphasize that we have not understood the city beyond
development, real estate, planning, and such physical modes of reading
and language of discourse – at levels of policy and governance but also
our impressions. If governing agencies and prime decision makers would
not have imagined that the lockdown is a simple decision between being
safe behind your home door or being outside it – naïve, but true we would
not have made countless people suffer indignity – inside and outside!
We lack at all levels – daily experience, as well as at the states of policy-
making and governance decisions – a basic understanding of the city, as
an entity that is Kinetic and Open as against a closed-system or a static
body – bringing in here two seminal theses, Kinetic City by Rahul Mehrotra
and Open City by Richard Sennett. The Kinetic or Open city does not play
much on the inside-outside binary, but they open the conversation on
the dynamic nature of the city. And then the book Alice in Bhuleshwar:
Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood indicates, the city is a labyrinth of
negotiations across time and geography, layers of inside and outside and
all in-between. The city exists as a deep structure of networks and lives in
motion, and it exists beyond its municipal or any other governing limits;
these insatiable insides, and its deep interiors can be horrific for those
suffering different kinds of overt or subtle forms of bullying or loneliness
within the family home. While anonymity in the city, stranger-type existence
in the crowd, allowed a solace from pressures of normativity such as
gender, class, or caste behavior patterns; compliance to hierarchical
pressures within a patriarchal or emotional family structure, cutting
out the individual human being’s options of organising one’s life outside
of ‘home’. The city’s public places – whether to strolling and loitering
singles, or couples sneaking away a spot, or friends and colleagues
sharing moments of relationship negotiation – has been the crucible of
negotiating privacy as well as shared lives outside home. What we are
losing at will here is the potential of public life and public spaces to shape
the individual as an independent thinking and behaving body within the
frameworks of humanity and citizenship; the independent body walking
the city and having the possibility to shape one’s own space outside of
family and outside of work.
The city is the essential space where the citizen and resident shapes
herself/himself as well as the political sphere. It is important to remember
in this lockdown that since mid-December, up until the lockdown is enforced
and curfews are spread out for a medical emergency, the cities in India
had emerged as the most vibrant spaces of public discourse and public
debate, shaping voices and arguments on the fundamentals of what it
means to be a citizen in India, and calling for a democracy of spaces in the
name of India’s Constitution and the idea of India as its founding voices
gave us. Public spaces, places with a voice, and people with physical
15
Agenda
There were people that
were precisely caught
between this inside
and outside – they were
in nowhere-land – the
migrants that occupied
highways and state
borders in inhuman
conditions, walking the
earth that was neither
home, nor city, neither
inside, nor outside,
neither livelihood nor an
iota of dignity
presence, emerged in the contemporary Indian city making the city
a vibrant space for politics and the debate on human rights, human
dignity, and the imagination of citizenship within a multicultural India, a
parliamentary democracy, demanding that voices be heard, and reminding
that voices will speak between elections, and for that the city provided
the space, place, and stage. What began with student protests within
campuses, took form in the city with multiple voices joining in, city after
city in India followed, and cities across the world spoke in support and
unison. The world and the argumentative Indian connected via cities and
their networks. Today, the spaces of the city stand silenced and quieted.
As much as the digital space has provided many avenues of shaping new
kinds of public discourse spaces and arenas, the physical space of the
city brings forth the citizen into a particular kind of centre-stage. The
physical and the digital in fact have joined hands in producing logics
of the public in more new ways than one, and this potential needs to be
understood as fast as it is producing itself.
The city is an idea we need to invest in actively; not as the binary of Home
and not as the binary of Rural, but the City as the site of human civilization:
for the exchange of struggles, negotiations between imaginations, and
the power to connect beyond parochial logics of limiting conservatism
or bordered geographies. We also need to invest in the idea of the city
as the site of human endeavors, the site of a struggle that is local but
voicing ideas and arguments across cultures, boundaries, and borders
which is the shaping of publics. The public exists in layers of insides
and outsides, and to understand how these layers have been damaged,
and where they probably also reinforced themselves will be important
to our immediate futures – as histories, as projects of recovering the
collective, the voices and bodies of people in various geographies
of spaces.
domus October 2020
Sahej Rahal, Contingent
Farewell. 2016.
Performance.
Photography: Christie
Yuri Noh.
Courtesy: The Artist and
Chatterjee & Lal

References
Mehrotra, Rahul. 2019. “Kinetic City.” Domus India, February 01, 2019
Sennett, Richard. 2006. “The Open City.” Urban Age, November 01, 2006
Sennett, Richard. 2006. “The Open City.” (November 2006), accessed 17th
July 2020 https://LSECiti.es/u3d3d134f.
Jacobs, Jane. 1992. The Death and Life Of Great American Cities. New
York: Vintage Books.
Mehta, Kaiwan. 2009. Alice in Bhuleshwar: Navigating a Mumbai
Neighbourhood. New Delhi: Yoda Press.
Iyer, Kamu. 2014. Boombay: From Precincts to Sprawl. Mumbai: Popular
Prakashan.
Mehta, Kaiwan. 2011. “The Terrain of Home, and Within Urban
Neighbourhoods (A Case of the Bombay Chawls).” In The Chawls of Mumbai:
Galleries of Life, edited by Neera Adarkar, 83. Gurgaon: ImprintOne
“Suspending the City, Silencing the Stranger” was first published in the
August 2020 issue of Sambhashan which is a Free Open Access Peer-
Reviewed Bilingual Interdisciplinary Journal of the University of Mumbai. This
essay was published in Volume 01 Issue 04 August 2020 which focussed on
the Covid-19 Pandemic as a special thematic issue. The essay is published
here with express permission from the editor and board of the journal. On the
occasion of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s 129th birth anniversary on 14th April
2020, the Office of the Dean, Faculty of Humanities, University of Mumbai
has launched a free open access online journal, Sambhāṣaṇ / संभाषण .
Available at: https://mu.ac.in/sambhashan#1598711971064-3163d4b2-9bb0
The author is grateful to the artist Sahej Rahal for generously contributing
images from/of his artworks to go along with this essay as published in
DOMUS India.

domus October 2020 16

 Agenda

Life in the Anthropocene

Text Bernd Scherer

SARS-CoV-2 has penetrated our world. Here in Central Europe, it has the planet as a whole and unbalanced the existing equilibrium. The ef-
drastically changed our everyday lives and society. We have never ex- fects can be seen in how key environmental indicators are rising expo-
perienced such a situation before and we have yet to develop a language nentially: carbon dioxide levels, ocean acidification, water usage and
to discuss it. People are even talking about a war against the virus. But plastic manufacture. Scientists refer to this phenomenon as the “Great
against which enemy is this war actually being waged? Acceleration”. Climate change has increasingly affected us in recent
Researchers debate whether viruses even constitute living beings. years and is a consequence of this development.
Although they are capable of reproduction, this is only possible with a Anthropocene ways of life have spread the virus and the resulting
host that provides the environment where they reproduce and some- pandemic at an unprecedented speed, one that our knowledge models
times also mutate. The virus merely contains the code that controls the and technological structures were unprepared for. Local medical infra-
process of replication and replication, but lacks an independent met- structures have collapsed, which is why we are now spending billions to
abolic process. In this sense, viruses cannot be classed as organisms buy ourselves time to develop suitable solutions for this existential threat.
acting independently or as living beings – which implies warfare cannot The amounts of money that would be required to ameliorate these dis-
kill off viruses, but merely interrupt their replication. asters of our own making are too huge to be fathomed. This goes hand
In the case of the current pandemic, human cells become hosts for the in hand with the logic underpinning the Great Acceleration, in which
coronavirus. The virus begins to replicate in these cells; the human be- knowledge processes in recent decades have been evaluated chiefly
comes the virus’s host. Here, human ways of life, processes of economic on the basis of their technological applications and profitability, but not
exchange and political structures are the real media transmitting the with regard to their societal use and value.
virus. The significance of the virus itself as a biological entity is mini-
mal. Its meaning derives from its carriers, without whom it cannot exist.
The cultural and social role of the coronavirus becomes clear when
viewed against the background of its biological existence. It embeds itself
into a host – in this case humans, who are transforming the planet during
the current epoch, known as the Anthropocene. Now, the coronavirus
Anthropocene ways
has disrupted the governing principles of the Anthropocene world. Or of life have spread the virus
to put it more precisely, humans – with the help of their guest, the virus
– are subjecting the Anthropocene world they have created to a stress and the resulting pandemic
at an unprecedented speed,
test. It is not a process humans intended. In this process, humans are
first and foremost a species in nature, both carriers and spreaders of
viruses that attack the man-made world.
The rapid replication and spread of this virus have put this world’s one that are our models
structures and deficiencies in the spotlight. Humans experience them-
selves at once as subjects and objects of the unfolding process, as cul-
were unprepared for
tural and natural entities.
The Anthropocene epoch is defined by the technologies and infra-
structures that humankind has invented and built. People have inter-
vened so profoundly in the Earth’s systems that they have transformed

17 domus October 2020

 In the past, we created structures that will destroy our future. The
Anthropocene world consists of gigantic technological infrastructures
extending across the whole planet, from dams, refineries, airports and
road and rail networks, to oil pipelines, supply chains between produc-
tion sites and digital infrastructures with their global networks of cables
and servers. Increasingly, these infrastructures are being networked
together digitally, giving rise to a new sphere that has been termed the
“technosphere”. The technosphere is highly capital-intensive and en-
courages the accumulation of economic power.
The coronavirus crisis has exposed two consequences of this devel-
opment. These infrastructures are responsible for the Anthropocene’s
sense of acceleration; constructing these infrastructures has meant tak-
ing money from other areas that were not productive, in a narrow sense,
in terms of this development. This is particularly true of the healthcare
system, which in almost all countries was ill-prepared to deal with this
type of pandemic.
Moreover, the pandemic was initially spread by people crossing bor-
ders and continents for tourism or economic reasons as members of
our global society. But the pandemic is affecting large numbers of peo-
ple in the Global South, who do not profit from such processes but are
vulnerable to their effects.
They have almost no means of defending themselves against the
spread of the virus. Many people are losing their jobs due to the econom-
ic crisis, and day labourers who can no longer move around freely have
lost their daily wages. Even those who remain healthy despite the lack of
essential goods are subjected to an existential threat as a consequence
of the collapsing economies.
The coronavirus crisis is exposing the Anthropocene structures
underpinning our environment; the challenge it presents is how to de-
velop new ways of life. It is vital to formulate new practices and ways of
thinking, indeed a new alphabet of life and society. New spatial policies
are essential for developing such practices, ones that allow small, de-
centralised, local and regional units providing a joint experiential space
for all those involved.
The key thing is to devise microeconomies and micropolicies on this
basis. These experiential spaces could be globally connected using
digital communication structures. However, such networks should be
formed of structures that bring users together in direct contact in order
to maintain a decentralised mode of communication, rather than using
centralised platforms.
These economic and political0 structures would thus be based on
a logic of relations rather than a logic of scalability focused solely on
maximising units and increasing profits – with associated consequenc-
es for the planet. In a logic of relations, equal units, each pursuing local
strategies, enter into exchange with one another, thus returning human
activities to contexts on a small scale that can be easily grasped.
To conclude, I would like to present an example of how developing new
spatial relationships and constellations could look in practice. In the
context of a project tackling housing issues, presented in the autumn of
2015 by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the architectural practice Atelier
Bow-Wow was invited to develop student housing. They worked in close
collaboration with a student collective. The project was inspired by Italo
Calvino’s 1957 novel The Baron in the Trees. The protagonist is a young
man who escapes a lavish dinner with his wealthy family to live in the
trees. The novel contrasts the landowner’s ownership rights with an
image of the freedom that may be experienced up in the treetops, high
above the ground, with a sweeping view over the country.
Atelier Bow-Wow took this story and translated it into our present day:
domus October 2020
“His free spirit appropriates the forest and transforms it into an urban
environment. The urban forest is the place for today’s barone rampante
in a city like Berlin.” (Kooperative Labor Studierender + Atelier Bow-Wow,
Urban forest, Spector Books, Berlin 2015, p. 17).
The image of the baron in the trees becomes a construction with very
particular characteristics: the space is designed for six people, but the
area is only 80 square metres, yielding just over 13 square metres per
person. This is not much floor space per person – yet one’s experience
of the space is more expansive.
This is due to two things: the building is eight metres high and the space
is spread organically across different levels. The individual elements
of the space appear to float across three levels. Similar to the baron at
home in the trees, the upper level offers the opportunity to retreat and
find privacy in small hut-like constructions. The middle level is a place
where people can work together, while the lower level allows for social
interactions with the city.
This building originally designed by Atelier Bow-Wow for students
can therefore also represent a model for urban life after the coronavi-
rus crisis. It unites the various areas of a city by offering a logic of rela-
tions. Here, individual and social habitats – often achieved with housing
estates – are not separated from the working world’s office towers. All
areas are woven together to form an organic spatial structure that can
be individually designed, offering as it does only basic fixed character-
istics. The same spatial structure offers places for individuals to find
The coronavirus
crisis is exposing
the Anthropocene
structures
underpinning our
environment:
the challenge is how
to develop new
ways of life
It is vital to formulate
new practices
and ways of thinking,
indeed a new
alphabet of life
and society
18
 Agenda
Kooperatives Labor Studierender + Atelier Bow-Wow | Photo © Laura Fiorio | Urban Forest

privacy, for groups to work together, and for people to encounter others Above: view of the Urban
from different spheres of life and work. Forest installation by
Kooperatives Labor
Atelier Bow-Wow’s building upends the usual logic of a consumerist Studierender + Atelier
society. While the latter puts all its energy into transforming actions, per- Bow-Wow. The project
was part of the
ceptions, dreams and fantasies into goods (and thus into a fixed array
“Wohnungsfrage”
of monolithic building structures vis-à-vis architecture), Bow-Wow has exhibition curated by
created a poetic space that excites our imagination and encourages us to Jesko Fezer, Nikolaus
Hirsch, Wilfried Kuehn
think beyond the basic parameters of housing: property, customisations, and Hila Peleg at the
communal and societal needs and interactions, and the organisation of Haus der Kulturen der
space in horizontal and vertical terms. Welt in Berlin (23.10.–
14.12.2015)
It is a poetic space because it concerns a material construction and
not an idea. Rather than limiting the imagination, its concreteness sets
the imagination free. The goal is to explore the various qualities of spac-
es and their relationships to one another with an eye to dynamic needs
of habitats and functions.
In the era of the coronavirus crisis, the Urban Forest is a material
object that allows us to form anew our ideas about work and life, social
relationships and economic conditions, by giving us a space in which to
explore social relations.

Bernd Scherer is director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and au-
thor of several publications focusing on aesthetics and international cultural
exchange. He has taught as honorary professor at the Institute for European
Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 2011.

19 domus October 2020

Cities are not landscapes
Text Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani
The destruction of the landscape by the ferocious invasion of cities,
settlements and infrastructures mostly designed for traffic, but also
by the excessive proliferation of stand-alone buildings, has assumed
devastating proportions in recent decades. Italy is currently consuming
roughly ten square metres of land per second for construction purposes.
The natural landscape we love, value and need for our nourishment
and recreation is at risk of being annihilated.
I have used the term natural landscape but have been imprecise.
Nearly all of Europe’s landscape has been shaped by mankind in one
way or another: from the countrysides composed of fields, roads and
irrigation canals to woods, often artificially planted such as the Black
Forest. Even the high-mountain pastures have been moulded over time
by farmers, herdsmen and their cows. Those landscapes have been
designed in the course of centuries but are still portions of nature.
Our architecture and our cities contrast them sharply: as artificial
environments that provide people with shelter, community life and
identity. These environments go against nature, where humans, if
unprotected, would not survive. The conflict is unbridgeable and cannot
be eluded – but it can be made productive.
If we want to respect and preserve nature, we must not confuse it
or mix it up with the city. The city must remain a compact artefact,
a geometrical device for human and social life that cultivates and
maintains a clear contrast with the landscape. The city must withdraw
into its own space, develop distinct boundaries and concentrate on
itself, becoming dense, solid and as hard as stone. This seemingly
hostile attitude to nature is actually the most honest and effective way
of showing respect to it.
Clearly, the city cannot and must not be a block of stone or concrete.
Nature should not be totally banned from it; nonetheless, nature in
the city ceases to be true nature and becomes a surrogate instead.
Gardens and parks are not portions of landscape carved out in the
urban fabric – as such, they would not even manage to survive. Rather,
they are artificial imitations and poetic metaphors of the landscape
that they themselves, along with the buildings, have contributed to
eliminate. New York’s Central Park may look like a surviving patch of
the nature of the Manhattan area before it was developed; in reality it is
the product of a long, complex and costly transformation process that
turned a partially swampy and rocky strip of land into a sophisticated
recreation machine, skilfully camouflaging it as wild nature. The 18th-
domus October 2020 20
century squares that appeared in London and then won over European
cities with their picturesque and seemingly wild gardens were actually
expertly designed and lovingly maintained. The trees lining our city
streets are not segments of woods but architectural features that
create the spatial effect of columns and require artificial irrigation
and targeted fertilisation, just like the flowerpots on our terraces
and windowsills. Parks and flowerbeds are mainly images evoking
meadows and gardens that no longer exist. Even the most informal
expressions of urban nature are artificial: from the vacant lots used
to grow vegetables to the more aggressive form of guerrilla gardening
and the quieter urban gardening. The green facades and the trees on
urban buildings, as symbolically appealing as they may be, are tours
de force on the verge of the stretch.
Every part of the city, whether it is stone or green space, is subtracted
from nature and must be contained as far as possible. Indeed, if today we
are to build a city that is as non-invasive as possible, while retaining the
best possible quality of life, we must rethink the discipline of urban design.
The corner into which urbanism backed itself when it abandoned three
dimensional and spatial design in favour of bidimensional abstraction
and redefined itself as urban planning led to its being marginalised no
later than the 1970s. The void opened by this ill-considered demobilisation
was initially filled by architecture but subsequently, and far more
forcefully, by landscape architecture. Suddenly, landscape architects
were designing not only parks and gardens but also streets, squares,
embankments and courtyards. The modern revival of the post-war urban
landscape recently promoted with populist overtones by landscape
urbanism is threatening that quintessentially urban density to which
everyone seems to aspire far and wide.
The new urban designers will have to work alongside architects and
landscape architects (as well as engineers, traffic planners, sociologists
and economists) but as independent representatives of an autonomous
discipline. They will have to act as designers and inventors, but before
that as researchers and scholars. Urban design is less a stroke of
genius than a painstaking construction on foundations that partly
already exist but partly still need to be created; the foundations of
urban design as it has evolved in the history of the city.
Because, when all is said and done, as before and more than ever this
is what the new urban designers will have to do: to design cities, parts
of cities, elements of cities, fragments of cities. They are the only ones
 Agenda

Left: aerial view of

Central Park in the heart
of Manhattan, carved
out of the dense urban
fabric. The park is
spread over
approximately 340
hectares. Built to a
design by Frederick Law
Olmsted and Calvert
Vaux, it was opened in
1857 after a long site
reclamation process
© Aerial Archives / Alamy Stock Photo

who can do it. They alone possess the expertise to bring together the
myriads of information, needs, desires and aspirations linked to the
If we want to respect and
city in a tangible physical configuration. This physical configuration,
that is the form of the city, must reflect and steer human life, making it
conserve nature, we must
safe, productive, social, creative and joyful. Regarding the surrounding
nature, it must not integrate or even incorporate it. It must simply leave
not confuse it or mix
it as much as possible in peace. it up with the city
Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani (Rome, 1951) taught History of Urban Design
at ETH in Zurich from 1994 to 2017. His design practice is based in Milan and
Zurich. His most recent publications include Bedeutsame Belanglosigkeiten,
Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2019.

21 domus October 2020

Our horizontal Babel
Text Luis Fernández-Galiano
Already more than half of humanity lives in cities, and the urbanisation
process advances at so vertiginous a rate that we will soon be able to
describe the planet as a built globe, with its population agglomerated
in metropolises and the surrounding environment transformed into
an artificial landscape. From the city’s mesh of relationships comes its
potential and lure, manifested in the territory like a magnetic field that
is irresistible to rural populations, a multitude of iron filings dragged
beyond remedy towards the metropolitan magnet.
These centripetal forces responsible for the migrations from
countryside to city are expressed in the exponential growth of both the
urban dimension and the pathologies associated with scale, provoking
the contradictory emergence of other centrifugal forces that push large
sectors of the population to remote suburban peripheries, where the
qualities of civic life are denatured or weakened. At the same time, the
dispersal of constructions degrades the natural environment, altering
its morphology by modifying its uses, and colonising the landscape by
filling it with irreversible works of engineering and architecture. What
elsewhere I have called horizontal Babel, formed by sprawl, is thus
neither real city nor countryside, and yet the contemporary exuberance
of energy has allowed it to spread through the five continents, driven by
metropolitan malaise and the nostalgia for nature while undermining civic
virtues and pastoral beauty. The tension between the urban gravitation
that brings us together and the centrifugal urge that pulls us towards
the peripheries produces a vibration of the essential fibre of the debate
on territory and landscape, which has its ominous protagonist in that
boundless and characterless city, and the most visible cause of our
environmental crisis in its planetary metastasis.
In ecological terms, the conventional interpretation of the city is as an
organism that feeds on its surroundings. Inscribed in a long tradition of
biological metaphors, but equipped in this case with a solid analytical and
quantitative base, the description of urban organisms that crystallises
in the studies of Howard and Eugene Odum presents these as receivers
of a continuous flow of energy and materials that enables them to feed
their populations, heat and cool their buildings, and transport people and
goods – besides building and repairing their physical fabrics – and also
as emitters of waste and heat; in thermodynamic terms, as receivers of
domus October 2020
negative entropy or negentropy that gives them the capacity to maintain
their form or, in Spinoza’s formula, “persevere in being”. This organic
view of the city, which in likening it to a living being holds that it must
have nourishment – or in physical terms export entropy – requires an
exact definition of its limits, something unfortunately less precise in the
urban than in the biological sphere, where the skin of an animal or the
membrane of a protozoan forms a relatively clear-cut boundary between
the individual and the environment that sustains it.
Naturally, it could be argued that living organisms should not be
understood exclusively as individuals either, because they are an
inextricable part of populations and these in turn subsist in dynamic
equilibrium with others of different species in symbiotic or trophic
relationships. All told, contemporary sprawl, along with the colonisation
of interurban space by huge transport, production and consumption
infrastructures – from airport cities, container ports or logistical centres
to industrial complexes, commercial centres or theme parks – have turned
cities into organisms with blurry edges, not even nodes of communication
networks, and can only be described as higher-density zones in a built
continuum. The first conurbations have given rise to vast territories that
are compactly occupied, fogging the boundaries of cities and making
urban ecology give way to territorial ecology in the search for a larger-
scale field that allows a better understanding of the material and energy
bases of the sustainability of human settlements: a scientific, economic
and social endeavour that turns our attention from urban fabrics to the
infrastructures that organise the territory.
When we consider the city under the ecological prism, in the current
context of energy scarcity and climate change, no parameter is more
decisive than density. The compact city, which is not so much the metropolis
of skyscrapers as it is the classical Mediterranean town, is the territorial
occupation model most readily described as sustainable: that which incurs
fewer material and energy expenditures in raising urban infrastructures,
which, because they are shared by many, are less costly; that whose
buildings consume less non-renewable energy and resources, both
in construction and in maintenance during their useful lives, thanks
to the advantageous shape coefficient that compactness gives when
the relation between the area it encloses and the volume enclosed is
22
 Agenda

Below: Egon Schiele,

Krumau on the Molde,
The Small City, circa
1912. Oil on canvas.
Private collection
Photo © Mick Gold / Bridgeman Images

23 domus October 2020

In this historic crossroads,
the digital revolution
will not save the furniture
of the physical city
reduced; and also that whose density reduces the time and the cost of
vehicular commuting by providing the direct contact that is the sign of
urban life and the engine of the intellectual, artistic and interpersonal
communication that makes cities drivers of social change. The sprawling
city, in contrast, which historically arose from the garden city, associated
with a return to nature, paradoxically turns out to be less green than the
compact one, precisely owing to the greater material and energy costs
needed for its vast infrastructures, inefficient constructions and long
commuting times.
All this is not to say, of course, that the compact city can do without taking
non-renewable resources and energy from the environment, whatever way
we set the limits between them, or without dumping residues and emitting
carbon dioxide into it. The dream of self-sufficiency, which once nourished
so many anti-urban utopias, now comes true in projects for new cities like
the well-known Masdar, which the team of Norman Foster is building with
the aim of making a town that produces its own energy, recycles all its
waste and emits no carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – thus avoiding
consumption of non-renewable resources and global warming – but it will
take some time before all the objectives are met. While we wait for that
day to come, cities will have to continue exporting entropy (or importing
negentropy), and the familiar compact town will continue to be our best
option for communal life: a solution that is perhaps still suboptimal in
the ecological sphere, but probably unsurpassable in the social and
cultural, providing spaces for intense and spontaneous interpersonal
relations of the kind that make ideas circulate and stimulate innovation,
attracting financial capital with its dynamism and human capital with
its opportunities and quality of life, all of these being characteristics
intimately linked to density.
Beyond its enormous economic and energy cost, as well as its negative
impact on the ecology of the planet, sprawl has had the side effect of
reducing the public sphere, cutting down on the collective spaces that
characterise the compact city. These are the places where shared values
are expressed chorally, but also those where individual paths meet
and fuse, and this double function enriches cities with a social capital
of connections and confidence that is hard to replace with a judicial
architecture of laws and contracts. Both the growing privatisation of
domus October 2020
residual natural spaces and the commercial administration of urban
and suburban places dedicated to leisure transform the public domain.
This process, which affects the entire territory by fragmenting it and
extracting its pieces from the collective sphere, has an even greater
impact on the city, whose civic nature requires vertebration through
shared spaces. In traditional urbanism, these spaces have always been
of a physical nature, and contemporary sprawl has sought to replace
them, so far unsuccessfully, with virtual spaces, whether those of the
media or those of the emerging social networks, whose penetration in
current society brings with it both promises and fears.
Although it seems to have become routine to say that the new generations
simultaneously inhabit the immaterial labyrinths of the web and the
physical precincts of their biological existence, the truth is that all
movements engendered in the digital womb have ended up manifesting
themselves, gaining visibility and acquiring legitimacy in the worn public
space of the traditional city, whether the fashion trends that scouts
look for on the streets of Tokyo and New York, or the political mutations
that young Arabs have brought on with their presence in the squares
of Tunis or Cairo. No doubt we are faced with a landscape of technical
and social changes, but it cannot be ascertained that these mutations
will be expressed only, or preferentially, in virtual realms. We inhabit
material spaces, consume irreplaceable resources and degrade energy
to maintain our social organisation and our own organisms.
In this historic crossroads, the digital revolution will not save the
furniture of the physical city, which must progressively abandon the
model of the horizontal Babel lest it endanger the future of our species
on the planet, and embrace the alternative – density – as something that,
freed of its negative associations with pollution and traffic, can effectively
offer a more responsible and sustainable way of inhabiting the world:
a way of living close together that is more economically efficient, more
culturally stimulating, and more gratifying in terms of interpersonal
relationships.
Luis Fernández-Galiano is an architect, chair professor at Madrid’s school of
Architecture (ETSAM) and editor of the journals AV/Arquitectura Viva.
24
 Architecture / Good practice

Practice

This issue we bring a discussion form our archives on projects that are small in size but
have a strong impact on the places and people they are connected with; Suprio
Bhattacharjee curates a set of projects that challenge the notions of ‘big is better’ and
help us build hope in small interventions that inject hope into the lives of many. This
story was first proposed in an issue dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi, as we said we
compiled stories with ‘Gandhi on our minds...’ and we focussed on the architecture of
humility, architecture that promises relationships with humanity and place more than
size and flourish. We revisit this idea as we come back after six months of lockdown
and in the wake of a pandemic and microorganism attack that has made us amply think
about how we shape the built environments we occupy, and the need to rethink our
ways of being. This month, the ‘Affinities’ column is edited by Amin Taha, founder of the
Groupwork cooperative studio in London. The projects it presents – by Aires Mateus
and Ensamble Studio – trace an experimental and innovative approach, in formal and
material terms, to the expressive dimension of the structure above all.

25 domus October 2020

Substance in smallness
In a country fixated on the notion of ‘big is better’, architects are perhaps in a position now to evolve
and effect — more than ever before — antidotal efforts that negate the adverse effects of our
obsession with magnitude
Text Suprio Bhattacharjee

Size matters. And even more when that size is

1. 2. XS or S. In a world where ‘bigger is better’ has
taken on unprecedented proportions — and
Tsunami Rehousing, Lakdi Ki Kathi (LKK), seldom in favour of local communities, small
businesses and most importantly the
Tamil Nadu Nainital environment within which we build — one can
sense that a reversal of our current affliction
with size is a welcome proposition. At the same
by architectureRED and by Compartment s4
time, for a country that is still largely rural, and
Program VACA where dense inner-city urbanism demands
alternative strategies of intervention other than
the convenience of the tabula rasa ‘raze-and-
build’ strategy that is rampant, architects are

3. 4.
perhaps in a position now to evolve and effect,
more than ever before, antidotal efforts that
negate the adverse effects of our obsession with
Toilet In A Courtyard, Sub-Post Office & bigness.
Thus it is welcome when architecture practices,
Mumbai Ration Shop, whether big or small, attempt to engage with a
scale that is otherwise not easily encountered
by RC A rchitects Tamil Nadu — scales where often the need of an architect is
overlooked. It is precisely this reason why the
presence of architects are most needed, as a
by imago
critical mass of small projects can effect
transformative development within
neighbourhoods and communities beyond the
alienation of grand overarching gestures. Vasanth
and Revathi Kamath’s designs for Mobile Creches
5. 6. within the informal urban settlements of
1980s-Delhi come to mind — specific inserts that

KSV Learning Centre, Jai Jagat Theatre, drew as much from local building traditions and
techniques as they did to reinforce a sense of

Dharwad Ahmedabad community and place.

The parameters for putting together these
projects were simple — they would have to be
by Kumar La Noce by SEAlab small, preferably below 10,000 square feet, sited
in communities or contexts within which one
seeks a certain cultural cohesiveness and
continuity. The projects here are arranged more
or less in terms of ascending physical scale, and

7. 8. the attempt would be to delineate certain ideas

or values within each that make these projects

Private Homestay, Community School, powerful markers of a certain attitude that seems
to be slowly creeping in within architectural

Manali Hyderabad practice.

An exemplar of this can be the efforts to
rehabilitate coastal communities affected by
by PYHT by Designaware the tsunami that hit Tamil Nadu in 2004. Many

domus October 2020 26

 Practice

Tsunami Rehousing,
This spread: In 2015,
Chennai-based practice
architectureRED teamed

Tamil Nadu up with an international

team of volunteers under
the moniker of Program
VACA to rehabilitate
by architectureRED and Program VACA coastal communities
afflicted by the tsunami
that hit Tamil Nadu in
2004
Photographs courtesy architectureRED

27 domus October 2020

 Lakdi Ki Kathi (LKK),
Nainital
by Compartment s4

communities still reel in the after-effects, and

four years ago an international team of volunteers
under the moniker of Program VACA teamed up
with local practice architectureRED to design
and build a set of houses for one such coastal
community, with a budget of $600 per unit, upon
their own ancestral land. Mining traditional or
indigenous ways of building and following a
process of community-participation, volunteers
and members of the community participated in
the fortnight-long rebuilding effort. The result
is a building type that draws from the vernacular
— using materials that can be easily and cheaply
sourced — natural and replenishable, and thus
forms a strident critique of the government-
funded mass-rehabilitation efforts that have
seen a shuddering array of hideous barrack-like
Photographs courtesy Compartment S4

domus October 2020 28

 Practice

This spread:
Ahmedabad-based
practice Compartment
S4 built a small multi-
functional extension —
the ‘Lakdi ki Kathi’ — to
the local school in
collaboration with local
artisans and supported
by the local panchayat of
Ghuggukham village in
Nainital, Uttarakhand

RCC Band

Stone Slate Roof

8’’ Wooden Rafters

Gutter

Wooden Reclaimed Windows

Local Stone Masonry

Wooden Band for
Earthquake Resistance
10’’ Wooden Column

Strip Foundation made using

random rubble masonry

29 domus October 2019 domus October 2020

 Toilet In A Courtyard,
Mumbai
by RC A rchitects

This page: Adjacent to to

Platform No. 1 in
Mumbai’s Bandra railway
station, local architect
Rohan Chavan re-
imagines this found
place as an open-to-sky
courtyard around which
a set of public toilet
facilities are arranged.
Here, the material
palette and structural
components are
governed by the existing
Concourse building

units multiplied endlessly across the ravaged

landscape, thus avoiding the creation of yet
another wasteland of devastating homogeneity
and dislocation.
Close on the heels of this community-
participation, we travel north, to Ghuggukham
in Uttarakhand, where last year, a young
Ahmedabad-based practice that goes by the name
of Compartment S4 (travelling by three-tier
sleeper-class train to these remote destinations
must have been a trigger) decided to build a small
multi-functional extension — the ‘Lakdi ki Kathi’
as they affectionately call it — to the local school
Photographs courtesy RC Architects

in collaboration with local artisans and supported

by the local panchayat. Following a strategy
similar to that described earlier in the
architectureRED+Program VACA project, local
materials, techniques and labour became the
starting points for devising a spatial enclosure
that could become many things: a local community

domus October 2020 30

 Practice

Sub-Post Office & Ration Shop,

Tamil Nadu
by imago

hall, a stage for performances, a guesthouse or This page: Auroville-

an additional classroom. High thermal-mass based Imago Architects
devised a renewed
stone construction tied at the top and bottom vernacular language for
with timber to withstand seismic activity, and a Sub-Post Office in
a hybrid timber roof covered in the traditional Moratandi, Tamil Nadu
method of slate shingles make a decided where a modest-scaled
building that includes a
comeback, with bright blue doors and glass ration-shop becomes a
thrown in. This is a rather intimate construction space for community
that belies the fact that architects were involved. exchange too
Rainwater from the roof is collected and filtered
to be reused. Thus the success of the project is
in the making of a truly vernacular building where
the architect becomes a master-builder —
orchestrating a built work through a participatory
workshop involving volunteers within a span of
three weeks using resources at hand, and as such
ensuring that the local community is the sole
effector and benefactor of the project. The fact
that transactions outside of the community are
kept to a minimum in this manner of building
makes this an exemplary case of architects being
the necessary stimuli for communities to
reinforce themselves with their own resources.
Architects as stimuli are essential not only in
the hinterland, but perhaps now more than ever
Photographs courtesy imago Architects

before, within the failing infrastructure and

mechanisms of the hyper-capitalist mega-city
as well, where the administration no longer seems
interested in providing for the public good, a
task it has willingly left to the forces of commerce
and corporations. Within an existing interstitial
spatial condition adjacent to Platform No. 1 in
Mumbai’s heritage-designated Bandra railway

31 domus October 2020

 KSV Learning Centre,
Dharwad
by Kumar La Noce

This spread: Bengaluru-

based studio Kumar La
Noce created their
Learning Centre in
Dharwad, Karnataka, as
a set of three objects
strewn across the
topography, each with its
distinctive building form,
performing a specific
programmatic role

station, local architect Rohan Chavan re-imagines

this found place as an open-to-sky courtyard
around which a set of public toilet facilities are
arranged — a welcome convenience and sanitation
facility in stone, perforated metal, polycarbonate
and concrete. This is in a city with a failing mass
transit system and even worse, a mass transit
system that is infamous for its lack of public
conveniences, public sanitation and health
facilities. As a concern that is not only restricted
to the city’s suburban railway system but to an
inherent issue within the larger Indian railway
network, this project perhaps offers a prototype
of how to successfully insert easily accessible
public conveniences, and achieving a sense of
Photographs courtesy Kumar La Noce

public dignity through the use of affordable,

easily available and yet durable materials. Public
sanitation and conveniences need to be at the
centre of public mass transit systems. Most
regular travellers of the railways have now grown
accustomed to the public toilet that is usually
banished to the extreme end of the railway

domus October 2020 32


platform and often inaccessible to women, the
physically disadvantaged and the elderly. This
needs to be addressed architecturally and
humanely, and not merely through the lens of
utility for utility’s sake.
There was a time though, when communities
and habitations were marked by these utilities
or public conveniences — the post office, the health
centre, the guesthouse, the police station, and
so on. Like in Satyajit Ray’s masterpiece
Postmaster (1961) — the presence of public
‘servants’ and their base of operations formed
an essential aspect of a place’s and the respective
community’s psyche — a kind of social and
administrative binder, if you will, and these places
served as much functional needs as they did
communal. They became places for gatherings
and rendezvous — markers within a vast and
incomprehensibly inhabited landscape yet being
tamed for human occupation. In the early 21st
century, that landscape needs to be now healed,
to be regenerated so that primal urges to co-habit
and commune are satisfied. As such, it is pleasing
to see Auroville-based Imago Architects devise
a specific and renewed vernacular language for
a sub-Post Office in Moratandi, Tamil Nadu. Here,
a modest-scaled building that includes a ration-
shop becomes a space for community exchange
as well. Granite posts, an exposed concrete frame
with elegant edge details, compressed and
33
Practice
stabilised earth blocks, ferro-cement panels
and timber offer a dignified yet refined setting
for a new form of ‘small pubic building’ —
diminutive in its size but not in its architectural
or social significance, thus performing its role
as a marker in the landscape.
With similar intentions of creating a set of
markers within the landscape, Bengaluru-based
studio Kumar La Noce devise their Learning
Centre in Dharwad, Karnataka as a set of three
objects strewn across the topography, each with
its own distinctive building form, performing a
specific programmatic role. Along with
ensuring that its built presence is ‘diluted’ or
tempered, the strategy makes sure that these
domus October 2020
 by SEAlab

domus October 2020

Ahmedabad
Jai Jagat Theatre,

Photograph ANAND SONECHA Photograph KARAN VERMA Photograph KARAN VERMA

34
 Practice

community become beneficiaries, thus having

to avoid long trudges to other performance
facilities. A simple circle is inscribed in the
landscape sheltered by old, large neem trees,
defined by a low wall that marks the presence of
this intervention. The amphitheatre itself is
sunk within the ground, thereby lowering its
impact upon the landscape, and offering an
artificial gradient and catchment for harvesting
rainwater collected within a large tank under
the performance area. As such the architecture
here becomes the wall; the delineation of a space
of inhabitation and festivity within an arid
landscape that encompasses within its genius
loci a history of learning and liberation.
Similar in its hilly and remote context of the
Lakdi ki Kathi project mentioned earlier, this
private homestay in Manali designed by young
Mumbai-based practice Put Your Hands Together
(or PYHT) chooses to operate within the material
and typological constraints of its setting.
Consisting of half a dozen rooms for guests as
well as a house for the owners, the complex evolves
This spread: For the Jai
as a set of archetypal volumes set within the
Jagat Theatre project at
the Sabarmati Ashram, landscape. The local material becomes a space
Ahmedabad, the for exploration as the architects, more known
amphitheatre itself is for their rammed earth buildings in the Konkan,
sunk within the ground,
choose to operate within the stone vernacular
thus and offering an
artificial gradient and of the region, and thus with the nature of
catchment for construction and artisanship that is extant
harvesting rainwater within the context. Thick walls built from locally
collected within a large
available boulders chiselled into stone blocks
tank under the
performance area and local timber form the basis of building,
adopting a hybrid version of the local khat-khuni
three new volumes are seen as an extension of courtyard become self-shaded and sheltered method of building where hidden bands of
the built accretions of the school it is a part of zones for outdoor activities and exchange — reinforcement are embedded within periodic
the first set of ‘formal’ buildings for the institution registering as prototypical spatial environments courses. As a project, while modest and primal
and thus of as much significance to the community for the community to emulate as it begins to adopt in its architectural expression, the building
it serves. Colour, formal playfulness and a layered newer building methods. exemplifies what architects can achieve when
tectonic strategy inform the building volumes, Landscape, learning and memory become they consciously choose to operate outside of
starting off as massive, earthbound volumes significant drivers for the Jai Jagat Theatre their comfort zones — using materials
with high thermal mass sheathed in a ventilated project as well — an amphitheatre complex and techniques specific to the sites of
double roof upon a shared raised plinth, offering designed by local practice SEA-lab to celebrate intervention.
comfortable habitable environments within a 100 years of the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad This last project — while not specific in its use
landscape of otherwise extreme weather in 2017. Around 1500 students of the Ashram, of material, and also being the largest of the eight
conditions. The interstitial spaces and focal along with those of other schools within the projects mentioned here — is significant in the
Photograph ANAND SONECHA

Photograph HARSHIL PAREKH

35 domus October 2020

 Private Homestay,
Manali
by PYHT

manner in which it chooses to become self-

effacing as a vehicle of architectural expression.
It instead chooses to insinuate its building body
seamlessly into an existing setting. Sited on the
slopes near the Golconde Fort in Hyderabad, this
renewal project for a school serving the local
community expands and reinforces existing
infrastructure through the use of meagre
resources and an everyday material palette. It
chooses colour to bring in the necessary ‘joie de
vivre’ of a school and community marker.
Facilitating the insertion of a substantial building
volume seamlessly into its compact urban
surrounds, local practice Designaware strategises
the creation of an inner street that traverses up
the hillside to a large clearing or terrace deck,
offering a panoramic view of the cityscape as
well as a large space for congregation, exchange
and performance. As an architectural gesture,
it suggests a stance wherein there is a realisation
that communities need to be reinforced and
reinvigorated not necessarily by grandiose built
statements, but rather by significant spatialities
that offer meaning and purpose to the community
through use, and thus become embedded within
the larger public memory.

This page: A private

homestay in Manali
designed by Mumbai-
based practice Put Your
Hands Together (PYHT)
chooses to operate
within the material and
typological constraints
of its setting. Consisting
of half a dozen rooms for
guests as well as a
house for the owners,
the complex evolves as a
set of archetypal
volumes set within the
landscape
Photographs courtesy PYHT

domus October 2020 36

 Practice

Community School,
Hyderabad
by Designaware

This page: Situated on

the slopes near the
Golconde Fort in
Hyderabad, this renewal
project for a school
serving the community
by local practice
Designaware expands
and reinforces existing
infrastructure through
the use of meagre
resources and an
everyday material
palette

Conclusion
The projects here illustrate a very
diverse group of architects
operating in disparate regions
within the country, both urban and
rural, with an urge to relinquish the
salutary role of the grand project
and instead focus on the specific
and local — interventions that belie
their small scale to become
manifestos for place, context and
technique. Besides their positive
social impact, whether through
building programme or through the
economics of their construction
(local labour and materials, for
instance), these projects also
imagine an alternative mode of
practice. Here, one realises the
important ‘professional’ role that
the architect needs to provide in
‘service’ to society, and this clearly
distinguishes the purpose of a
profession from that of a mere
service provider. In our hyper-
capitalist present, where social
good, social values and social
benefits are being commoditised
to benefit a few, these projects stand
out as welcome renegades, offering
us a preview of a burgeoning counter-
current within an otherwise generic
architectural practice culture.
Photographs courtesy DESIGNAWARE

37 domus October 2020

 Affinities
Selected
by Amin Taha
Photo Sven Arnstein
Amin Taha was born in East Berlin
where his Sudanese father and
Iraqi mother met while studying
medicine. Following revolutions in
their respective home countries,
they moved to London where Taha
is now a principal with Groupwork,
an employee ownership trust and
multidisciplinary studio of architects
and designers. He established it after
gaining experience in the studios
of Zaha Hadid, WilkinsonEyre and
Lifschutz Davidson, where he worked
on social housing for London’s South
Bank Coin Street Community Builders
on infrastructure and museums.
Groupwork’s cooperative structure
allows all employees to become
equal partners with independence
domus October 2020
expected from each project
architect as well as an openness
for collaborative review and design
development. Its 16 members have
undertaken work varying from master
plans for new towns in Malaysia,
urban regeneration plans in Spain
and the UK, transport interchanges,
arts centres and residential and
office buildings. Recent works, all in
London, include the extension of the
Barretts Grove housing complex,
the Clerkenwell Close apartment
building and the Upper Street mixed-
use building with a design company’s
showroom on the ground floor and
homes on the upper floors.
www.groupwork.uk.com
38
An etymology of design
During the mid-16th century, Giorgio Vasari published The Lives of the
Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, in effect the first
book on art history. Half remembered now, it was the pre-eminent text
on art history in libraries across Europe for 200 years, until Johann
Joachim Winckelmann published Remarks on the Architecture of the
Ancients in 1764. The latter is unarguably the first scholarly chronology
on the subject of art and architecture from the Egyptian period through
to the Greek and Roman times. It gave rise to archaeology as a discipline,
making Vasari’s work seem anecdotal by today’s standards. Yet while
Winckelmann focused on the observed product — which he taxonomised
without explanation of the artist’s hand — Vasari, through his accounts
of individual artists’ lives, promoted process and, in so doing, life.
To me, the projects featured here are by architects not unlike Vasari’s
world of innovators, explorers leaving choices of material and structure
to gradually reset and align with conditions and ambitions. Each project
strikes a course in innovation through experimentation whether with
traditional forms or materials or the yet to be defined. In Lyon, Christian
Kerez raises the question of how to bring stature to an urban block within
a new master plan where each plot potentially vies for attention. He gives
visual expression of load-path requirements of rising floor plates carried
by a peristyle colonnade to a speculative office building. Classical, robust
and noble in its simplicity and composition within the street, it is ultimately
a balance of material, structure and compositional needs. The prosaic
criteria of internal floor-plate span, beams between columns and desk
height are normally ignored or left to engineers to infill the architect’s
pencil lines. Here they generate the final architectural form.
The span of the perimeter beams have been set to a depth, cognisant
of desk height while helping to space the colonnade. Columns and beams
have been thermally separated as an exoskeleton to which the floors are
linked. With gradually lighter loads, the column diameters inevitably
diminish upward and the columns each express the separate pours.
The most expedient material thus becomes horizontally stratified,

For a generation unwilling
to adopt a prepared
identity, questions of
authenticity are culturally
widespread and acute
simultaneously speaking of compressive forces and the origins of cut
and stacked stone columns. Jagged lines of grout loss in the concrete
allude to the “wolf’s tooth” in Lyon’s local limestone, evident in the
columns of its Roman amphitheatre. Yet the proportions of the office
block do not reference the classical or play with entasis. But in the
lightness of touch and material expression, are they Vitruvian?
The second featured work is by Ensamble, whose architecture is driven
in part by making, by the yet untested permutations available in
construction technology. The process of building and working with
materials is intimately understood, giving their designs what Walter
Benjamin described as the “aura of authenticity”. From their stacking
of colossal sections of infrastructure at Hemeroscopium House in
Las Rozas de Madrid to the balancing of equally imposing boulders of
granite at the SGAE Central Office in Santiago de Compostela, Ensamble
Studio have pursued two parallel if coterminous themes: the
aesthetics possible in mass production and, by contrast, those drawn
from natural materials as found. Their work inhabits two kinds of objet
trouvé, with structural engineering effortlessly integrated.
The factory is itself assembled from the very elements it is to
export. It inevitably projects its rationality of verticals and diagonals
set out to a rhythm of elements able to be transported on flatbed
vehicles, assembled with smaller lifting equipment. As a consequence,
it has the same proportions and textural qualities of an early
industrial and rural barn, albeit one rendered by Jeff Koons. Internally,
the bowels of making are as modern and clean as a 21st-century
robotic factory, with whole sections of prefabricated houses and
apartments undergoing tests. Together, house and factory display
their constituent elemental sections, their fabrication and assembly.
The driver to the work of Aires Mateus is more spatial with a structural
dimension in the tension between secondary, primary and interstitial
spaces. These tensions are gradually developed through apposite
decisions on material lightness and mass. At the villa at Alqueva Lake,
39
Practice / Affinities
a gentle drop in terrain is accentuated: an axial access vanishes from
seemingly ground level and slices into the underworld. On entry we are
not presented with the final drama of the picture window immediately
but a level of reflected light from two opposing directions. Which
to choose, is it a labyrinth? Look back and the light could tempt us back
or we can continue and make a choice.
At the end of the entry stairs, one choice of direction takes us to where
we prepare food and gather to eat; the other takes us to where we
recline and repose. Hidden from visitors are three bedrooms enveloped
by mother earth, their outlook onto small circular courtyards. Driven
into the ground like wells, their sustaining light source comes from
above and changes in level with the passing seasons. Left crudely
jointed and unfinished, the board-marked concrete defines the villa’s
perimeter. The scalloped cast implies huge invisible spheres, defining
their adjacent space. Unpolished it appears, both born and cut from the
ground. Despite its scale, through the studio’s long investigations of
spatial definition and accompanying material and structural choices, a
strength of narrative becomes apparent.
While questions of “style” have begun to melt into the air for a
generation unwilling to adopt a prepared identity, conversely questions
of authenticity are culturally more widespread and acute. It is a
perennial quest, articulated by Gottfried Semper and in Vienna by Otto
Wagner, then by his pupil Jože Plečnik, the latter determined to also
integrate narrative. In succession they developed an approach that
defined what we might call material interface, requiring the architect
to understand the nature of materials, their structural, visual and
tactile properties and the resultant potential for narrative they
create. Like Semper et al., the work of the architects we show has, as
Vasari might put it, become their biographies. Why shouldn’t it?
They have devoted skill and energy with a clarity in material and
structural choices to their work. Their narratives are architectonic, day-
to-day and poetic.
domus October 2020
 1. House in Monsaraz
Aires Mateus

Photo © João Guimarães

Photos by
João Guimarães, Rui Cardoso

The Alentejo region of Portugal is unique in its

weather compared to the rest of Europe. The
lack of water, rivers and humidity means that
vegetation is low on the ground and human
occupation sparse. Since the completion of the
Alqueva Dam in 2002, the area has changed
completely. The structure has created an artificial
lake that now conveys a different, contemplative
value. The plot of this house is located exactly
at the frontier between the sun-hardened land
and the mirrored surface of the reservoir. The
design uses the sloping landscape to cast a dome
that covers these social areas and becomes the
centre of life for the residents. The external space
is oriented to look at the water. Further into the
house, an inverted dome intersects the landscape
and creates an opening that allows light into the
interior space, shaping its precise geometry
and limits. Access to the house is provided by a
hidden stair through the roof. All social areas are
open to the main domed external space. All the
bedrooms open onto small circular patios. Amid
a wide natural landscape, the scale of the house
is read by the patios and the larger dome. They
Photo © João Guimarães

are the sole visible elements, coloured in radiant

white. The aim was to completely integrate the
house into the landscape to minimise its impact.
(from the architects' project description)

This page, top-right: footprint emerging

Access to the house is from the ground.
provided via a The roof is marked by the
continuous stairway diagonal access, the two
set obliquely to the patios overlooked by
layout of the plan the bedrooms, and the
Above: an aerial view larger dome with the
showing the building’s social areas facing it

domus October 2020 40

 Practice / Affinities

The house is at the frontier

between the sun-hardened
land and the mirrored

Photo © Rui Cardoso

surface of the reservoir
Photo © João Guimarães

41 domus October 2020

 Photo © João Guimarães

Above: the view reveals These passages lead

the access to the house, from the access
which is partly sunk into to the social areas
the ground to reduce Bottom: view of the
its visual impact larger dome. The
Opposite page, top: two concrete slab stretches
interior views showing out towards the
one of the two corridors landscape and the lake
running tangent to the in the background
external covered space.

Planimetric diagrams

domus October 2020 42

 Practice / Affinities
Photo © João Guimarães

43 domus October 2020

 House
in Monsaraz,
Alentejo,
Portugal
Project
Aires Mateus
Project architects
Inês Cordovil,
Helga Constantino
Design team
Humberto Silva, André
Passos, Susana Rodrigues,
Joana Simões
Structural engineering
AFAconsult
Contractor
JDS, Manuel Mateus Frazão
Client
Private
Photo © Rui Cardoso

Site area
21, 100 m2
Total floor area
174 m2
Design phase
2007-2009
Construction phase
2010-2018
www.airesmateus.com
Photo © Rui Cardoso

All project materials

© Aires Mateus
section detail
0 0.5 1 2

Top: one of the social Right: the wooden

areas seen from the panelling that
larger dome, where the characterises the indoor
oculus set in the circulation spaces.
inverted dome on the Opposite page: one
roof allows a beam of of the house’s façade
light to shine through

Section 0m 2m

domus October 2020 44

 Practice / Affinities
Photo © João Guimarães

45 domus October 2020

2. Fabrica, Madrid
Ensamble Studio

Ensamble Fabrica is the new prototyping facility
and fabrication laboratory of Ensamble Studio
in Madrid. Besides serving its purpose as a
workplace, it is a proof of concept that tests the
hybrid steel-concrete construction technology
our firm has developed over the past years
to innovate the way high-rise and long-span
structures are built using prefabrication.
The building is composed of 12 bays, has a
volume of 58 x 18 x 12 metres and includes an
open, four-storeyed-high hangar as well as
office and other support spaces. The galvanised
steel formwork that makes trusses and columns
is light and easy to fabricate and assemble in
its final position, where it is filled with concrete
and becomes a monolithic structure.
This building in its making and future activity
is meant to transform the way buildings are
typically designed, engineered and built. Today’s
construction industry is one of the most obsolete
and reticent towards innovation. Buildings are
constructed as they were decades ago.

This page, below:

detail of the girders
of the building
Opposite page: the
front is divided into
12 bays. The
engineered structure
consists of galvanised
steel formwork. Once
assembled, it is filled
with concrete

domus October 2020 46

 Practice / Affinities

Detail of a structural bay

2.91m
2.91m
2.91m
8.73m
2.91m
2.91m

4.88m
0.22 m

1.22m 1.22m 1.22m 1.22m

4.87m

47 domus October 2020

All photos and project materials This spread: In this project it intends
© Ensamble Studio construction and to work on production,
assembly phase of the having incorporated the
building modules. activities of materials
The firm has already research. Fabrica facility
diversified its is the focus of this
operations in the past, experimental and
acting as builders as prototyping initiative
well as architects.

We transport the materials, tools and people to
the place where the building is erected; the work
is done locally, frequently in adverse weather
and working conditions; and the process is
inefficient. The building is subject to the
availability and market of the place where
it stands and is conditioned by it. All this
has limited the incorporation of the most
advanced technologies of digital manufacturing,
automation and robotics into the construction
processes, which are mostly redundant and
mechanical. Something that in other industries
guarantees quality, efficiency, safety and economy
still seems a distant dream in construction.
After years spent working as architects,
builders and, more recently, manufacturers
of our own works, Ensamble Fabrica will
be equipped to support our projects, and
develop the spaces we dream of, delivering
building parts to be quickly, safely and efficiently
assembled in-situ, anywhere in the world.
(from the architects’ project description)

domus October 2020 48

 Practice / Affinities

Ground floor plan 0m 10m

Ensamble Fabrica
Project Site supervision
Ensamble Studio – Antón Javier Cuesta
García-Abril, Débora Mesa (Ensamble Fabrica)
Design team Client
Javier Cuesta, Borja Soriano, WoHo Systems, Inc.
Niccolò Ciaccheri, Federico Site area
Lepre, Massimo Loia, Alvaro 2,520 m2
Catalan, María José Carrillo, Total floor area
Mónica Acosta, Elyse 1150 m2
Khoury, Marco Antrodicchia, Phases
Arianna Sebastiani 2016-2018 (design);
Structural engineering 2018-2019 (construction)
Jesus Huerga www.ensamble.info
(Ensamble Studio)
Electrical and
mechanical engineering
Úrculo Engineering
0 1 2 3 5m

49 domus October 2020

Design e Arte / Cosa è il design?

Design and Art

Jasper Morrison and Francesca Picchi analyse the Thonet No. 14, the most enduring,
profound and intelligent chair ever designed. To the point where, almost two centuries
later, it is still a touchstone. German artist Tobias Zielony told Kimberly Bradley about
his work recording the social and physical environment at La Vele di Scampia outside
Naples in view of the decision to demolish all but one of the towers, a project that
highlights the challenges of large-scale social and architectural visions. Considering
the needs of contemporary society in terms of objects, this month Manolo De Giorgi
questions the meaning of design today. His answer is: “A passe-partout”.

50

Notes on design
Jasper Morrison with Francesca Picchi
Thonet No. 14
The Thonet No.14 is not only the first mass-
produced chair but also, after 160 years of
continual production, the most successful in
terms of volume sold and longevity of design. It
represents the best example of a design which
has been refined to the point where there is no
way to improve it.
Every component plays its part in maximising
performance while minimising material and
manufacturing effort. Though the numbers have
significantly reduced (due to cost and
competition) and despite a change of the seat
shape by the company in the 1970s, a new No. 14
in the right finish can still compete. In its
simplicity and undecorated wholeness, it remains
the benchmark for chair design. While it has
rightly come to be considered a modern archetype,
and in my opinion it is still a reference with which
we subconsciously assess the quality of a new
chair design, the precise history of its
development has not always been clear. Recent
investigations have brought new details to light.
In the early days of its manufacturing the chair
cost three Austrian schillings, an amount which
at the time could buy you three dozen eggs or a
reasonable bottle of table wine. Workers at the
Thonet factory received between 2 and 12
schillings a week, and they could produce, with
the help of a boy, 30 to 35 chairs a day. It was a
high-performance chair that most people could
afford. At its height, the No. 14 chair was averaging
Jasper Morrison
Founder of Jasper Morrison Ltd,
(London, Paris and Tokyo), Morrison
designs an ever-expanding range
of things for Vitra, Cappellini, Flos,
Magis, Marsotto, Emeco, Punkt,
Camper and Muji, among others.
He has published many books and
curated several exhibitions.
sales of 230,000 pieces a year across the world,
a remarkable achievement made possible by the
appeal of the chair itself and by the development
of rail and sea transport brought about by
advances in steam-power efficiency. The design
of the chair was not a flash of inspiration, but
rather the result of 30 years of experimentation
and the development of several other models
that contributed to the eventual perfecting of
the No. 14. Throughout this period, Michael
Thonet combined the roles of designer, engineer,
inventor, manufacturer, logistics expert and
entrepreneur. His earliest experiments were
made with flat strips of veneer glued together
to create bent elements in a more or less single
plain. From this he progressed to gluing bundles
of thin square sections of wood and forming them
into three-dimensional curved elements. But
his ultimate goal was to bend solid wood by
steaming to reduce the time and labour involved
in laminating or bundling. Thonet was not the
first to make chairs with steam-bent solid wood.
A century earlier, English Windsor Chairs had
used bent wood for their backrests and arms.
However, there was very little precision involved
compared with Thonet’s techniques, and in 1842
he was granted a patent for the process that he
had developed.
There followed a stream of models which all
contributed to the development of the No. 14.
The first was the model he was commissioned
Francesca Picchi
Architect, journalist and curator,
lives in Milan. Exhibitions she has
curated include “Enzo Mari. Il lavoro
al centro” (Centre Arts Santa Mònica,
Barcelona, 1999) and “Riccardo
Dalisi: la funzione del pressappoco
nell’universo della precisione”
(Triennale Design Museum, 2017).
51
Design and Art / Notes on design
to make for the Liechtenstein Palace in Vienna,
achieved with the radical technical innovation
of bundling, gluing and forming small, square
sections of wood together into the curved
components of the chair. Due to the enhanced
strength this technique achieved, he was able
to work with far thinner sections than those of
a traditional “carved” wooden chair. There is
speculation that the chair’s design may have
involved the architect of the palace Peter Hubert
Desvignes. If that were the case, he may also have
been involved in the design of some of the bent-
wood models that Thonet developed next,
specifically the No. 1 and No. 3. Both of these
designs share certain characteristics with the
Liechtenstein chair and clearly form part of the
development of the No. 14. On a purely formal
level, the Liechtenstein design already contained
the code that Thonet used for the No. 14, although
with much less of the conceptual rigour. That
was to come from the inventive mind of Thonet
himself, searching for a way to make the chair
practical and affordable.
The Liechtenstein is an exceptionally elegant
chair with a timeless quality brought by its simple
logic and lack of superfluous detail. One can
understand that both Desvignes (who was also
a patron of Thonet) and Thonet himself would
have wanted to profit from the results of their
efforts on the Liechtenstein chair. There was
the added motivation that the commissioned
domus October 2020
chairs were complicated and expensive to make,
and even if the royal commission allowed them
to sell them elsewhere, they would have found
few customers rich enough to buy them. The first
attempt, in 1845, was the No. 3 chair which
deconstructs the Liechtenstein model, separating
the rear leg and backrest and combining them
in one length of laminated wood. The front legs
are also detached, fixed to the seat frame in a
direct way with a vertical dowel and stabilised
by the addition of a capital at the top of the leg,
which widens the contact area while allowing
the leg to remain thin. The shape of the front leg
keeps the waviness of the Liechtenstein but with
a rounder section. There is also an inserted
backrest element within the back leg frame which
could be caned or upholstered. All the changes
represent simplifications for the benefit of
making a cheaper chair while keeping as much
Strong points of the process developed
Thonet No. 14: it was after lengthy trials;
calculated to cost the it dismantles into six
same as 36 eggs or parts; mass production
a bottle of good wine; and big numbers.
it could be completely The sketch is by
dismantled and 36 chairs Jasper Morrison
could be shipped in less
than 1 m³; a bending
domus October 2020
of the elegance as possible. Thonet’s numbering
system relates to the way the models were later
shown in the catalogues rather than their
chronological order. Thus the No. 3 was followed
in 1846 by the No. 2, which swapped the full loop
of the inserted backrest for a more elaborate
curlicue design, left alone to provide support
without cane or upholstery. Then came the No.
4 in 1849, with an even more elaborately curled
backrest insert, representing a step backwards
in the simplification process, perhaps out of fear
that they might be alienating their richer
customers’ taste for more fancy woodwork, but
certainly to achieve a lower cost model. The No.
1 followed with a radically simplified backrest
insert which echoed the Liechtenstein chair.
The design of this model, along with the No. 3, is
occasionally credited to Desvignes, and if it is
true that he was involved in the design of the
Courtesy of Thonet GmbH
52
Liechtenstein chair then one can see why. Most
likely the designs of all three models involved
input from both of them. Desvignes would not
have had the technical awareness that a chair
with a structure as light as the Liechtenstein
one would have been possible, while Thonet’s
earlier designs showed none of the fluid elegance
that this model exhibits. Whoever deserves credit
for design of the Liechtenstein chair, the No. 3
and the No. 1, Thonet’s encounter with Desvignes
appears to have been a crucial factor in the
evolution of the No. 14.
Throughout the development of these chairs,
Thonet continued experimenting with bending
solid wood elements for each of the chairs’
components. In 1856 he received a patent from
the Austrian state for the production of furniture
from wood bent with the aid of steam. Two models
appear just before this official recognition, the
Michael Thonet
Michael Thonet was born in 1796, the same year
that the first factory opened to produce James
Watt’s steam engine. The tantalising prospect of
cheap machine-made goods must have been in the
air as he grew up and apprenticed as a carpenter.
In 1819 he opened his own woodworking business.
Naturally inventive, he made his first experiments
in wood bending in 1830, for which he was granted
a patent in Paris in 1841. The process which led to
the mass-produced model No. 14 combined formal,
functional, material, technical and manufacturing
innovation running over two decades, while driving
towards a low-cost chair that could be distributed in
large numbers, making it the longest and cleverest
chair design ever concluded. How shallow it makes
today’s typical design seem.
 Design and Art / Notes on design

No. 8 and a proto-No. 14 made for the Hanoverian

royal family, which was only recently discovered
at an auction of property from the Royal
Collection. Since the No. 14 is considered an
evolution of the No. 8 (usually dated 1855), this
proto-No. 14 (dated 1856) can be considered the
missing link between the two. The differences
are interesting. The No. 8 is the more refined
and decorative of the two, with the U-shaped
backrest support given the appearance of a
spliced and grafted branch, as if it were growing
out of the main backrest splat. The tops of the
front legs have capitals to strengthen what
appears to be a rather fragile connection, and
the seat is a rounded trapeze shape. The Hanover
chair, on the other hand, is closer to the eventual
No. 14 – almost unrealistically delicate in poise
and proportion. The seat is round (cheaper to
Courtesy of Thillmann Collection

make) and the top of the leg is screwed straight

into the bottom of the seat ring with a wooden
thread turned from the upper part of the leg. The
U-shaped backrest support is butted rather than
grafted (significantly cheaper). The obvious
question is why the Royal House of Hannover
would choose or be proposed a chair which was
less refined in terms of construction than another
recent design. The only answer I can think of
which explains this peculiarity is that the
Hanover Chair, in its startling elimination of all
unnecessary detail, represented nothing less
than a tangible sense of the future, and must
have offered something as yet unseen and
unexperienced, a sense of modernity to come.
Its newness must have been irresistible. For
Thonet it must have represented, except for a
few structural and ergonomic details, pretty
much what he wanted to achieve: a modern,
lightweight, affordable, practical chair which
could be produced in large numbers and make
Thonet the undisputed champion of chair
manufacturing. His aesthetic-minded self must
have struggled with his practical, commercial-
minded self, and reluctantly given way to the
reinforcing ring below the seat, the more
generous, less elegant proportions, and the
Courtesy of Thillmann Collection

splayed back legs for greater stability. But the

design was strong enough to take these
annoyances, especially if they were the way to
achieve the spectacular success that the No. 14
would prove to be. For an idea of the scale of that
success, one has only to look around for other
chairs still in production since 1859.
Opposite page. Top: the Liechtenstein. There is
illustration (ca 1890) a colour difference
compares two back between the beech core
moulds, the older one and the outer layers
being on the left (from in more precious
Wilhelm Franz Exner, rosewood. This page.
Das Biegen des Holzes, Top: 36 dismantled
Leipzig 1922). Bottom chairs. Above: the six
left: detail of the top pieces making up the
end of the front leg with chair. Left: the back-
turned threading that bending process
screws it to the seat; in a 1929 photograph
bundles of thin square by Herman Bramer,
sections of wood “Lisa,” workshop for
for the front leg of the photography, Vienna

53 domus October 2020

 liechtenstein chair THONET No. 3 THONET No. 2

THONET No. 14, ca 1856 THONET No. 14, 1859 THONET No. 14, ca 1865

domus October 2020 54

 Design and Art / Notes on design

THONET No. 4 THONET No. 1 THONET No. 8

liechtenstein chair THONET No. 2 THONET No. 1 THONET No. 14 THONET No. 14
Design Design Design Design Design
Michael Thonet, Peter Hubert Michael Thonet Michael Thonet, Peter Hubert Michael Thonet, ca 1856 Gebrüder Thonet, ca 1865
Desvignes, ca 1843-1849 Production Michael Thonet & Desvignes, ca 1850 Production Production
Production Gebrüder Thonet, Söhne, Werkstatt Production The Royal House of Hanover Gebrüder Thonet, Koritschan
Wien, 1844-1858 Gumpendorf, Wien, ca 1850 Gebrüder Thonet, Wien, Materials Materials
Materials Materials 1858 ca Beech wood, cane Bent beech wood, solid, cane
Bent and carved rosewood, Bent beech wood, partly Materials Collection Collection
rod bundles, laminated and laminated, cane Beech wood, laminated and Die Neue Sammlung – Wolfgang Thillmann
solid, front legs with beech Collection curved, glazed on rosewood, The Design Museum
wood core Die Neue Sammlung – cane (rattan)
Collection The Design Museum Collection THONET No. 14
Wolfgang Thillmann MAK/Photo Georg Mayer Design
THONET No. 4 Gebrüder Thonet, 1859
THONET No. 3 Design THONET No. 8 Production
Design Michael Thonet, Wien, Design Gebrüder Thonet, Koritschan
Michael Thonet, Peter Hubert 1848-1849 Gebrüder Thonet, Wien, Materials
Desvignes, ca 1847 Production Gebrüder Thonet, ca 1855 Steam-bent, solid beech wood
Production 1862-1865 Production Gebrüder Thonet, frame, laminated beech wood,
Gebrüder Thonet, 1862-1865 Materials Wien, ca 1860-1865 cane
Materials Curved beech wood, Materials Collection
Curved beech wood, cane laminated and solid, cane Bent beech Victoria and Albert Museum,
Collection Collection wood, solid, cane London
MAK/Photo Nathan Murrell MAK/Photo Georg Mayer Collection
Giovanni Renzi, Milano

55 domus October 2020

 Courtesy of Thonet GmbH
Opposite page:
a portrait of Michael
Thonet. This page: the
bottom of a Thonet No. 14
seat from the collection
of the V&A Museum in
London. Its round shape
is the outcome of a long
development process
aimed at reducing
production times and
Our sincere thanks go to
Wolfgang Thillmann and
Giovanni Renzi, whose
long-term devotion to and
study of the subject have
provided us with most of the
information for the text on
these pages. In particular,
many references came
from their books on Thonet:
Giovanni Renzi, Thonet 14
(Silvana Editoriale, 2003,
legnocurvatodesign.it) and
Wolfgang Thillmann and
Sebastian Hackenschmidt,
Courtesy of Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum
domus October 2020
costs to a minimum; the
bending process had to
be perfected to achieve
this resolved form
by which the top of the
Photo Jasper Morrison
leg is screwed directly
into the seat ring.
(Furniture, Room 135, the
Dr Susan Weber Gallery)
Bentwood and Beyond.
Thonet and modern furniture
design, catalogue of the
current exhibition at MAK
Vienna until 13.4.2020
(Birkhäuser Basel, 2019).
With thanks also to Joseph
Strasser and Die Neue
Sammlung – Pinakothek der
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Moderne, Munich, for the
information collected in the
catalogue of their recent
exhibition “Thonet & Design”
(Koenig Books, London 2019).
Courtesy of Thillmann Collection
56

Art
Tobias Zielony, Le Vele
Text Tobias Zielony
Left: Tobias Zielony,
Sail 1, Sail 2, Sail 3, Sail 4,
2010; C-print; In an
edition of six
Opposite page:
Tobias Zielony,
Vela azzurra, 2009-2010;
C-Print; In an edition
of six
Le Vele are an icon and
a symbol of the crime
problem in Naples, but
also a symbol of failed
modernism
57
Design and Art / Art
For almost a year I worked on the photographs
of Le Vele di Scampia in Naples with a tripod
and a medium-format camera. My Italian
gallery wanted me to do a project; we researched
the whole city, but in the back of my mind, I
always said I wanted to shoot Le Vele. At the
time (around 2006), you could not really go in;
and if you did, it was scary. We found a person
who lives there — a man maybe 65 years old,
who sells cheap clothing from his car. He
knew everybody there. Then I saw the buildings
at night. That was the moment I got hooked.
At night, you don’t see the buildings at first.
Most are vacant, so they’re just black. But in
some you have the neon lights in the corridors
and staircases; a kind of system of bluish
lights. When your eyes adjust, it’s magic.
I’m a night photographer anyway, but of course
that made the whole operation even more
difficult. We got access to the buildings. At
first we were circling around them and I took a
lot of pictures from outside with a tripod. In
Italian, vele means “sails” but in my mind, it
meant sailing ships. The buildings look like a
line of ships from the side, because they all
have different shapes — one after the other. When
you walk around them, they’re constantly
changing their appearance like a moving ship.
I took pictures of the buildings until we
managed to go inside and I started to meet people
there. I thought it would be boring just to have
architecture. On my first trip to Naples to shoot,
I read Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah (2006) on
the plane. It had just come out in a German
translation; it was kind of an introduction to
what I was going to do. Of course Scampia (the
suburb in the far north of Naples in which Le
Vele is found) plays a major role in the book,
so that was the background I had in mind:
how much the city is controlled by and suffering
from the control of organised crime on levels of
corruption, and so on. I felt a tension. What I
didn’t know then is that they would shoot
Gomorrah, the film, in Le Vele. Someone from
my photos became one of the main characters.
I was amazed that this architecture exists.
It’s a miracle, even if it’s a dystopian one, that
you have this structure and it’s somehow still in
use. It felt like a ruin from a different time,
perhaps the future. So, it’s this kind of excitement
of what it was and what it meant. Now it’s an
icon, but even at the time, people identified
the crime problem in Naples with that feeling.
Le Vele is a symbol of this.
domus October 2020
domus October 2020 58
 Design and Art / Art

Above: Tobias Zielony Opposite page:

Structure, 2010; Tobias Zielony, Corridor,
C-print; In an edition 2009-2010; C-Print;
of six In an edition of six

It might also be a symbol of failed modernism.

Think of something like Alterlaa in Vienna, which
my friend Zara Pfeifer has photographed. Like
The buildings were
Le Vele it’s a very ambitious housing project. But
while people want to live in one (Alterlaa), the like a ruin from
other (Le Vele) is a total failure. My theory is,
and maybe architects don’t want to hear it, that a different time,
success or failure is not because one building is
better than the other. You cannot change social perhaps the future
structures and conditions by just constructing
a building. The guy who helped me in Le Vele is
an architect and he was always saying, “Yeah, I
think they made a mistake here, this should have
been five metres more.” I said, “Look around
you. Do you think five metres would have made
a difference?” It’s a mental game that you can
actually go up against social issues with a

59 domus October 2020

domus October 2020 60

The Le Vele project liberated me. It was one
of the hardest projects I’ve ever done. It was
my sheer force of persistence
building. Under communism it was easier to
force people to use buildings a certain way, but
I don’t know if this is desirable.
By accident I read about a Nikon camera where
you could take still photos up to 25,000 ASA. For
ten years I’d been dealing with 800 ASA and
tripods in darkness. With the new camera it felt
like you could see deeper into darkness. I bought
it and for some reason I had the idea of doing a
slideshow or animation of single images, because
it didn’t have a video feature. A week before
another trip to Naples, I was testing the camera
in Essen, where I was teaching at the time. I
walked the streets at night and shot quickly,
“clack clack clack”, because for the Le Vele film
I wanted to walk around with a camera. It worked!
In the end it looked beautiful. I didn’t invent
this technique, but I hadn’t seen it much at the
time. The flickering makes it look a bit like a silent
movie. Every second, you’re confronted with the
idea of a constructed movement in still
photographs, and the side effect is a nervousness.
This constant feeling of stopping, checking, being
uncertain. It doesn’t want to flow and when it
flows, it stops and goes again. The technique was
similar to how I produced the stills. I basically
walked around, went in and got closer, discovered
some people. It’s very personal but also almost
subjective. You can feel the camera entering the
building and the reluctance, the apprehension.
I had a nickname for the building. Il Monstro
– the monster. I don’t even know if that’s proper
Italian. For me, it was an entity or creature. It’s
the only work of mine in which the building is
the main character. When I started my career,
my series were more about one defined place,
Design and Art / Art
but I wasn’t interested in a description of place
beyond an overview on which the subjects
oriented themselves: sometimes the places were
small, like a car park. Later, the notion of
space opened up. In a newer series of photographs
taken in Kiev (Maskirovka, 2017), the space is
the whole city, even the whole country of Ukraine.
The different pictures of architecture are more
like signifiers of where you are. They define a
space but it’s not a 100 per cent equivalent to the
geographical space. A constructed neighbourhood
for the working class isn’t new to me. Before Le
Vele I worked in Marzahn in Berlin, in
Halle-Neustadt, Quartiers Nord in Marseille, or
early on in Bristol, England. As a student, one of
my first projects was about this kind of council
estate. I dealt with issues like the exclusion
and marginalisation of the working class,
also geographical marginalisation. Which is still
happening all over the world. When you look at
Le Vele it is obviously the periphery of the city;
you build a whole new neighbourhood for
certain kinds of classes, people, and it has been
criticised, but for some reason in my work, but
also in general, this discourse is quietened.
I think the main factor in this discursive shift
is social media, which is distorting the senses
of here and there, outside and inside. The people
in Kiev, for example, are so connected with what’s
going on in the rest of Europe, mostly through
social media, that there’s this fast back and forth
of looking at what people are wearing, how they
photograph themselves, and so on. So the idea
of exclusion and inclusion has changed from
being very physical and locational to something
else. Criticism of identity politics and class get
61 domus October 2020

mixed up; a lot of emancipation or resistance
has become very individualised about who you
are, where you want to be, and how you want to
project these things. Older, leftist theories think
more about larger societal groups, but now
it’s much more fragmented. You could say it’s a
side effect of neoliberalism. The old narratives
just don’t seem to work anymore.
The Le Vele project liberated me. It was one of
the hardest projects I’ve ever done. It was my
sheer force of persistence and wanting to work
in Naples. It was painful and scary. In the
buildings, you go higher and higher and it gets
darker and darker. Once you’re inside, it’s not
easy to run out. Another major failure is the
echoing sound between the buildings; you hear
people from far away, but you can’t locate them.
In a way, Le Vele reminds me of Giovanni Piranesi’s
drawings of prisons in the seventeenth century.
Would I do another project like Le Vele? Yes,
but in a way it’s a pinnacle in terms of how
architecture, place, social environment and
domus October 2020
Le Vele is a pinnacle in terms of how
architecture, place, social environment
and crime all come together
crime, all come together. I did the project with a
kind of innocence back then, when the place
wasn’t as well known. If I went there now, there
are so many more layers of iconography, it
would probably be more difficult to find my way
through. But apparently it’s not getting easier
to visit. I sometimes see the buildings from
an airplane, and they still have this mix of power
and attraction.
Above: Tobias Zielony
Tobias Zielony is a Berlin-based artist known The group, 2010; C-print;
for his photographic depiction of marginalised In an edition of six
groups. He has exhibited widely, notably at the
German Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale with
The text was taken from
his work The Citizen (2015), and has been a guest
a conversation between
professor in art schools in Cologne and Budapest. Tobias Zielony and
Kimberly Bradley
Kimberly Bradley is a Berlin-based American
All art works:
writer, editor and educator whose work has © Tobias Zielony.
appeared in publications including ArtReview, Courtesy of Lia Rumma
Frieze, Monocle, and The New York Times. Gallery, Milan/Naples
62
 Reflections

We reflect on architecture, its many forms of being and what shapes meanings and
memory, through photography. In an exhibition titled Building Biographies, four artists
across generations share their photographs and photographic renderings of
architectural forms and visions - their own journeys have been marked by certain
architectural moments, and in these visual captures, they bring us face to face with the
many ideas and intricacies of architecture, its material manifestations, its spatial
visions, and their histories we all share. Architect Sen Kapadia who envisioned his own
buildings as a sort of visual philosophical ruminations visits the National Museum of
Qatar at Doha and shares his own memories and reflections on forms and fluidity,
image and thought as he moves in and around the built volumes and layers of this
building. Another architect and architectural photographer Y D Pitkar also visits this
same museum and two other museums in the region and brings back his photographic
notes for us to discuss how buildings build and connect with landscapes and histories.
Ambra Fabi and Giovanni Piovene reflect on the chequered fortunes of ornament in
architecture and testify to its conscious and joyful return.
Layered meanings
Building Biographies
Artists Gulammohammed Sheikh, Navjot Altaf, Ram Rahman & Riyas Komu

Building Biographies presents a selection of artworks by artists Gulammohammed Sheikh

Gulammohammed Sheikh, Navjot Altaf, Ram Rahman and Riyas Komu. The
exhibition is an attempt to map the way the architectural sites become citation
grounds for reflecting on visual, spatial, political and environmental concerns
for the artists.
This exhibition looks at ‘biography’ as a set of layered meanings and metaphors
that transform the architectural sites to a level of transcendence. The collection
is an insight into how artists relate to these structures and their biographies. The
photographs of Chandigarh Legislative Assembly shot by Gulammohammed
Sheikh during his trip in 1966 are a statement on visual and aesthetic pleasures
of scale, design and function. Sheikh playfully arrests the horizontal, vertical and
diagonal lines and their interventions in these photographs. Series of drawings
‘How Perfect Perfection Can Be’ Navjot reflects upon the anthropogenic impact of
the material and resource heavy development on ecology. Ram Rahman revisiting
some of the known buildings designed by distinguished architects from various
Indian cities during the first few decades after the Indian independence reflects
on the visions of the architectural legacy of modern India suggesting us to relook
at these buildings under the new light of political conflict. Riyas Komu visits the
ruined burial grounds in Karachi capturing the decay enforced by time, natural
forces and human factors.
Around late 1966 after I returned from a three year stay in England, I saw a vacancy
advertised for the post of lecturer in art history at Chandigarh College of Art.
Bhupen (Khakhar) and I decided to apply because I was unemployed and Bhupen
was fed up of his job as an accountant. Neither of us expected to land the job (and
neither of us did), but we were keen to see Corbusier’s architecture, and also to
relish the visual bonus of Chandigarh Museum’s famed collection of miniature
paintings. So off we went to Chandigarh. I carried my Asahi Pentax K2 (SLR)
with 35mm black and white and colour rolls of films. Having been to Ronchmp
in France to see the amazing modern church Le Corbusier had designed, it was
fascinating to see his vision of the new town with a fresh eye. I went about taking
pictures of the iconic buildings but concentrated on the great monument, the
Legislative Assembly.

Gulammohammed
Sheikh
Legislative Assembly -1,
1966
Printed on Hahnemuhle
archival, Fine Art Inkjet
paper on Epson
Surecolor P7000 printer
9” x 15”
Edition of 6
2020

domus October 2020 64

 Reflections / Layered meanings

This page, left:

Gulammohammed
Sheikh
Assembly (detail 3),1966
Printed on Hahnemuhle
archival, Fine Art Inkjet
paper on Epson
Surecolor P7000 printer
9” x 13.5”
Edition of 6
2020

Below:
Assembly (detail 3),1966
Printed on Hahnemuhle
archival, Fine Art Inkjet
paper on Epson
Surecolor P7000 printer
9” x 13.5”
Edition of 6
2020

65 domus October 2020

 Gulammohammed
Sheikh
Assembly (detail 1), 1966
Printed on Hahnemuhle
archival, Fine Art Inkjet
paper on Epson
Surecolor P7000 printer,
14.5” x 9.5”
Edition

domus October 2020 66

 Reflections / Layered meanings

Gulammohammed
Sheikh
Assembly (detail 2), 1966
Printed on Hahnemuhle
archival, Fine Art Inkjet
paper on Epson
Surecolor P7000 printer
14” x 9.5”
Edition of 6
2020

67 domus October 2020

Navjot Altaf
How Perfect Perfection Can Be: Series of drawings ‘How Perfect Perfection Can
Be’ are broadly inspired by the engineering /architectural perfection / scale and the
visual pleasure artist experiences. And yet Navjot reflects upon the anthropogenic
impact of the material and resource heavy development on ecology. A part of her
larger project that explores the relationship between nature and the asymmetry
introduced by urbanization in the context of complex environmental changes.
The images are created using watercolours and superimposed with markings
in the way of graphs depicting the energy consumption over a period.

This page:
Navjot Altaf
Watercolour drawing on
Wasli paper and PVC on
acrylic,
32” x 22.5”, 2015-2017
From the series How
Perfect Perfection Can
Be, 2015 – 2017
Graph: Annual change in
Chinese coal
consumption, 2001-2014

Opposite page:
Watercolour drawing on
Wasli paper and PVC on
acrylic,
32” x 22.5”, 2015-2017
From the series How
Perfect Perfection Can
Be, 2015 – 2017
Graph: Annual change in
Chinese coal
consumption, 2001-2014

domus October 2020 68

 Reflections / Layered meanings

69 domus October 2020

Ram Rahman
Ram Rahman revisits some of the known buildings designed by distinguished
architects from various Indian cities during the first few decades after the Indian
independence. He reflects on the visions of the architectural legacy of modern
India suggesting us to relook at these buildings under the new light of political
conflict – to bring out changed meanings of the sites over time. Some of these
photographs are part of his research on the modern architecture of Delhi through
the lens of contemporary politics.

Ram Rahman
Triveni Kala Sangam,
New Delhi, Joseph Allen
Stein, 1963
Archival Digital print on
Photo Rag paper
32” x 24”
Edition of 10
2020

domus October 2020 70

 Reflections / Layered meanings

This page, top: below left: below right:

Ram Rahman Stadium, Ahmedabad,, Shiela Cinema Delhi,
India International Charles Correa/ Habib Rahman, 1961
Centre, New Delhi, Mahendra Raj, 1965 Archival Digital print on
Joseph Allen Stein, 1962 Archival Digital print on Photo Rag paper
Archival Digital print on Photo Rag paper 36” x 24”
Photo Rag paper 24” x 24” Edition of 10
36” x 24” Edition of 10 2020
Edition of 10 2020 2020

71 domus October 2020

Riyas Komu
All architecture is a shelter. The shelter for the departed such as cemeteries
becomes a subject of inquiry for Riyas Komu. He revisits the ruined burial grounds
in Karachi capturing the decay enforced by time, natural forces and human factors.
The photographs of these cemeteries with rows of abandoned tombstones speak
about the impermanence nature of memorials. The tombs surrounded by broken
walls and arches resonate how the built environment undergoes a cycle of decay
becoming one with nature. The memories are buried and who knows of whose?

Riyas Komu
Karachi series
20” x 30
Archival print on
brushed silver metal
Edition of 10
2005

domus October 2020 72

 Reflections / Layered meanings

Riyas Komu
Karachi series
20” x 30
Archival print on
brushed silver metal
Edition of 10
2005

Building Biographies was an online exhibition presented by The Guild art

gallery in Mumbai, from 5 August to 20 September 2020. The curatorial and
introduction note was written by Chitra K S (PhD) and the exhibition featured
photographic works by Gulammohammed Sheikh. Navjot Altaf, Ram Rahman,
and Riyaz Komu. Each artist explains in an independent text their approach
towards the photographs they have taken. All photographs and texts
published here with courtesy and with permission of the gallery and artists.

73 domus October 2020

Seeing architecture
On form and fragments
Text Sen Kapadia Photos Asha Kapadia
As the enduring symbol of Arabic world, Abu Dhabi and Qatar are engaged in
image enhancing cultural activities, showcasing finest specimens in two new
museums. In an effort to create a fluid space, MOMA at NewYork City had broken
away from skylighted boxes of aligned galleries in mid-twentieth century and the
process has now yielded a continuous swirl of the National Museum of Qatar
at Doha. Taking advantage of new technologies for display, need for an icon for
Qatar, and the high funding from Arabic wealth, architect Jean Nouvel from Paris
has gone beyond his dramatic domed central street bathed in “rain-of-light”,
conceived recently for Abu Dhabi Museum.
domus October 2020 74
In this display of creative burst in Doha, he generates a breathtakingly fluid
form that outwardly seems to appear as a mass of collapsed bunch of flying
saucers. Both outside and inside, he creates fragments of this ideology and
designs a form/space ensemble befitting the twenty-first century aesthetics. Its
structural form camouflaged in swirls of a newly redefined specific architectural
construct. One and half kilometer-long display space and ancillary facilities in a
built-up area over fourty thousand squaremeters.The museum offers variable
spaces for specially created advanced audio-visual displays for dramatically
sloping planes.
 Reflections / Seeing architecture

This spread: Sen

Kapadia sees the
promise of a new
architectural aesthetic
in the way tectonic
elements come together
and start crossing each
other to produce an
assembly of planes and
zones, providing for an
interesting inside-
outside coherence
amidst a geometry of
disjunction

Both outside and

inside, he creates
fragments of this
ideology and designs
a form/space
ensemble befitting
the twenty-first
century aesthetics.
Its structural form
camouflaged in swirls
of a newly redefined
specific architectural
construct

75 domus October 2020

This page: The form and
space relationship is
renewed in this building
as ‘the continuity of
unlighted fluid space/
form offers a new
dialogue in the
architectural language’

A structured formation that

presents itself as flower
like groups of mineral
crystals. The impression of
redundancy in extravagant
centilevers, disolves into
long shadows that protect
the building from heat
gain and at once lends
sculptural virtues

domus October 2020 76

 Reflections / Seeing architecture

Qatar’s National Museum now being completed in Doha, stands apart from its
traditional pedigree of well-lighted and orderly boxes. Instead, the continuity of
unlighted fluid space/form offers a new dialogue in the architecturall language.
One encounters a curious group of collapsed disks interpenetrating randomly.
The central courtyard being approached through several cavernous voids finally
allows the entry to the museum foyer. Here begins a long journey towards the
discovery of a story of Qatar’s cultural and economic chronology. Spellbinding
as is the contemporary form, it has no reference to early decendents.
The architect likens its architectural genesis in the local desert rose. A
structured formation that presents itself as flower like groups of mineral crystals.
The impression of redundancy in extravagant centilevers, disolves into long
shadows that protect the building from heat gain and at once lends sculptural
virtues. The image of this museum is sodistinct that it adds a new chapter in
contemporary cutting edge architectural history. The museum’s complex
butlyrical form has the skin made of high performance glass fibre reinforced
concrete both outside and inside that easily adapts to fragments of disks just
as the deserts and would cover vast geological formation in Arabian peninsula.
The building presents the utopian image of contemporary architecture. Defying
the traditional categorization, it sits royally on the apex of its own domain.

This page: The interior

spaces are not simply a
result of the tectonic
exploration of form, but
in fact like a crystal the
interior structure of
space is an integrated
story of the object-
geometry that the
building is - a desert
rose, mineral crystals
grouping towards an
object-scape

77 domus October 2020

Thinking Culture
Objects in a Landscape
Text Richa Raut and Neesha Mewada Photos Yashwant Pitkar and Bhaveshwari Shah
In the times when visiting museums has changed to the impersonal virtual mode,
a walkthrough into a rich exploration of three thematic museums in Qatar’s Capital
city Doha could bring our personal memories of museum visits pre-pandemic.
This exploration of international Islamic art, architecture, and culture was made
by a group of friends, architects, and enthusiasts to soak in the diverse cultural
experience Doha offers to its tourists. In the past few decades, Doha has gained
attention in global economics after the Qataris discovered one of the world’s
largest natural gas reserves in 1971. That motivated the Qataris for visionary plans
not only on economic growth and development but also on empowering gigantic
infrastructure and technology to stimulate manifold experiences of Islamic art
and culture of the Middle East through museums, cultural centers, and libraries.
domus October 2020
The Museum of Islamic Art
Extending the corniche, on the turquoise coloured sea of the Arabian Gulf floats
an iconic building, the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA), designed by Pritzker Prize
winning architect Ieoh Ming Pei. The cubist expression of the form is inspired
by the 9th-century ablution fountain of the Mosque of Ahmad Ibn Tulun in Cairo,
Egypt. Staying true to the simplicity of this historic fountain, the MIA manifests
into a museum housing a collection ranging from a tiny jewel box to a large carpet
where art is incorporated in day to day objects.
As one enters the MIA through an avenue of palm trees and cascading water
body, the architecture begins to enfold activating sensorial experiences in the
stroll. One carries the striking geometric imprint of the building on the way towards
78
 Reflections / Thinking culture

Opposite page: View of

the Museum of Islamic
Arts from the entrance
This page: The central
atrium (void) of the
Museum of Islamic Art

79 domus October 2020

 This page, left: View from
the central atrium
overlooking the
connecting bridges on
the northern side
Below: Exhibits inside
the Museum of Islamic
Art

the pedestrian bridge connecting to the main entrance. The entrance leads to
the central atrium where one is astounded by the geometric void as against the
solid exterior of the building. The weightless double helical staircase leading to
the first floor draws further attention to the fine geometric arrangement of mini
domes in the waffle ceilings. The gaze continues up until the center of the room
that encapsulates a faceted dome dazzling with the light from the oculus. The
character of the faceted dome is reminiscent of muqarnas commonly found
in Islamic architecture. While the entire atrium is a perfect ensemble of major
Islamic design elements, one could not miss the sight of an ornate metallic
circular chandelier as found in the Ottoman mosques. The 45-meter tall north
glass window axial of the entrance draws a flood of light in the entire atrium,
while also exhibiting the growing Doha skyline.
The five-story building houses various functions where one can spend an
entire day. To begin with the ground floor there is MIA cafe in the atrium and the
seating against the tall north glass window, where one can sit and sip the Arabic
coffee with Arabian dates... An auditorium, special exhibition galleries, and other
ancillary functions define the spaces at the ground level.

domus October 2020 80

 Reflections / Thinking culture

The upper floors that have a square plan with chamfered edges occupy
the galleries on three sides, commonly having the central atrium and a bridge
connecting the veranda spaces on each floor. On the first and the second floor,
the collection of Islamic art is displayed and categorized through various galleries.
Each object is sparsely placed in the glass boxes with succinct information that
gives enough space and time to appreciate the art. The collections of Islamic
artifacts of everyday objects are strategically placed in galleries narrating a
story about the dynamic culture through figures in art, calligraphy, patterns, and
science. On the northern end lies the staircase with minimalistic details leading
up to the second level where the artifacts are classified in historic chronology
from the 7th-19th century and are geographically aligned from Spain, Egypt, Iran,
Iraq, Turkey, India, and Central Asia with few double-height spaces. These spaces
enhance the museum experience and accurately justify the foreground and
volume required for huge objects like carpets and furniture. The top floor has a
mini auditorium at the staircase end, a temporary exhibition gallery overlooking
the permanent display and a study gallery. The decreasing layout on each floor
ends with IDAM restaurant with a magnificent view of the Doha skyline.
An arcade with a central courtyard on the east side directs to the education
center which accommodates few administrative offices and a humble library
space containing 21,000 books solely dedicated to the subjects of Islamic art
and culture. The museum complex has a vast landscaped area that expands
along the crescent form promenade with MIA Park and cafes ending with a pier
which hosts Richard Serra’s enigmatic installation “7”. At the pier, the sight is
once again struck by the magnificent cubic form of the museum floating in the
turquoise coloured sea of the Arabian Gulf.

This page right: The

central atrium
(void) of the
Museum of Islamic
Art
Below: View of the
Museum of Islamic
Art from the
Arabian Gulf

81 domus October 2020

This page, top: View from
the courtyard of the
Desert Rose Museum
Below: Facade detail of
interconnecting
concrete disks

National Museum of Qatar

The National Museum of Qatar is symbolic of the complex natural formation of
desert sand rose from where it also derives its name ‘The Desert Rose Museum’.
This marvelous sculpture-like building is designed by Pritzker prize winning French
architect Jean Nouvel.
The Desert Rose Museum gracefully spreads approximately 30,000 square
meters on a strategic site facing the Arabian Gulf. Architecturally, the building
can be deciphered as circular concrete (GRC) disks of varying sizes intersecting
with each other transforming the natural desert rose into an overwhelming size.
This daring composition in the face of modernity evokes the poetics of the desert
in every part of the museum complex. While paying the utmost attention to the
building experience, the design details are meticulously worked. For instance,
obstruction-free vistas are achieved by embedding all the major signages in the
flooring that is readable in the day and are illuminated in the evening. Another

domus October 2020 82


detail is that the windows are placed in the deep setbacks of the concrete
disks that generate deep shadows and eventually cut down on building energy
consumption.
To define the interior spaces, it houses 11 galleries sprawled over a 1.3 Kilometer
loop along with an auditorium, gift shop, and cafes. The gift shop designed by
Australian based Koichi Takada Architects offers a unique spatial experience
inspired by nature. The gift shop is the first space that immerses the visitors in the
cave-like spatial exploration through undulating wooden surfaces representing
stalagmites. Their artistic design suits them to function as columns, display
shelves, and skylights.
As one walks towards the main gallery, the dynamic variety of volumes created
due to the arrangement of the intersecting disks is one of a kind experience.
Truly architecture inside out! One doesn’t know what to expect architecturally
This page: The Desert
Rose Museum shop
83
Reflections / Thinking culture
as these interior spaces constantly strike elements of surprise characterized by
the impression of a natural scheme of things. The unique museography together
brings at one point the sensorial and spatial experience of the interior form and
the scale.
The Desert Rose Museum is dedicated to curating the history of Qatar into
three categories: the evolution of the desert peninsula, life of the Qataris before
and with the invention of the pearling industry and lastly building the nation on
the discovery of natural oil and gas from the 1960s. This unique museography
is experienced through short documentaries projected on the curved disk
walls, islands created with models, suspended artifacts, interactive panels,
and accidental pause points to soak in the information and the architectural
spaces. The directed organic movement through varied galleries and dramatic
representation wholesomely encapsulates the history, culture, architecture,
domus October 2020
 This page: Inside the
Desert Rose Museum

domus October 2020 84


struggles of the long tradition, conflicts of desires, and visions of a powerful future.
The museum galleries end in the Royal Palace of Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim
Al Thani of the early 20th century, which is restored and has become a part of the
history and the overall experience of the Desert Rose Museum. Traversing through
the historic architecture and courtyard spaces which has its prime importance at
the location yet slightly edged with the circular disks of contemporary architecture,
it amalgamates the diversity Qatar offers today in every sector of development.
Through the doors of the past, one re-enters the same space from where one
began, completing the loop. This loop of gallery walk is architectured around
a convivial central open courtyard. This area is activated through temporary
and seasonal Souq Waqif (markets) which makes it an interactive public space.
For an enriched experience, one can spend their day at the Desert Rose
Museum captivated in history and culture surrounded by an impressive piece
of architecture and ending with a stroll by the sea...
This page: Qatar
National Library
85
Reflections / Thinking culture
Qatar National Library
Amidst the education district in Doha lies a classic masterpiece designed by Rem
Koolhaas (OMA Architects), a public library: The Qatar National Library. This library
has a labyrinth of 1 million books. The entire Library is one gigantic voluminous
space set in an ideal panorama where multifunctions harmoniously coexist.
These multifunctions are an auditorium, a space for temporary exhibitions, an
open cafe, back office for staff and maintenance, reading pods, and a submerged
museum of Arab History and Manuscripts. One surely gets startled to find this
beautiful outburst of a vast space at one sight in a flood of natural light.
Ideally, a library is expected to be a quiet space where one immerses in
the books as opposed to the museum/exhibition space. Nevertheless, these
functions independently coexist keeping the integrity of each function intact
and yet emerges as interesting architecture.
The unique submerged museum of Arab History and Manuscripts is located
domus October 2020
domus October 2020 86
 Reflections / Thinking culture

Opposite page: The

submerged Museum of
Arab History and
Manuscripts inside
Qatar National Library
This page: Inside the
Qatar National Library

in the center and can be accessed from the main floor of the library itself. It is
also called the Heritage Library. The choice of building material, being a uniform
luxurious Italian marble having gold inlays and woodwork, makes this submerged
museum visually stand out that certainly generates curiosity in the visitor’s
experience. One can overlook the museum/the heritage library and its activities
from the main floor and the terraces of the Qatar National Library. Until one has
entered, the museum indeed looks like a planned excavation site having a play
of solids and voids where the solids act as display units and the voids are the
movement areas. This remarkable museum houses a collection of the finest
and rich historic manuscripts, maps, books in European languages, historical
photographs, and few travel tools and artifacts that explain the Arab History
from the beginning of Islam across the Middle Eastern region.
The Qatar National Library is a definite visit to see a unique piece of architecture
along with a treasury of knowledge.

87 domus October 2020

 Making architecture
On ornament
Text Ambra Fabi, Giovanni Piovene
More than a century after Adolf Loos wrote Ornament and Crime (1913), the
discussion on ornament is still far from settled. The debate – is ornament una-
voidable or is it vain decoration? – has driven key changes of direction through-
out the history of architecture. Ornament is also the barometer of prevailing
theoretical positions. By looking at the way ornament coincides, or coexists,
with architecture we can decipher historical changes, sudden accelerations or
nostalgic reprises. Most importantly, we can arrive at an understanding of how
ornament might be used today.
Contrary to what for a long time has been common opinion, the evolution of the
ornament-structure binary is the story of progressive separation. This process
occurs as a steady distillation rather than basic removal. Looking at Roman ar-
chitecture, we can find occasions in which ornament is not perceived as a pure
embellishment but rather is conceived as armour or the correct vestments re-
quired to officiate at a ceremony. That is the case of the Tomb of the Baker near
the Porta Maggiore in Rome which, for example, can be considered a unique whole.
It was only in the 15th century that the first semantic dissociation happened.
Leon Battista Alberti was the first to recognise ornament as an entity, separa-
ble from structure. In questioning its existence he thus opened a crack which
was bound to expand. Alberti lived in mercantile, proto-capitalist Florence, which
seems the natural context in which to start separating what is useful (or profita-
ble) from what is not. Even if he did not take full advantage of the consequences
of his discovery, Alberti unwittingly crossed a line of no return which would only
acquire meaning in the following centuries.
Ornament is also the
barometer of prevailing
theoretical positions
in architectural history
Photo Byus71/wikicommons
domus October 2020 88
In every evolution in thinking about ornament comes a rethinking of the past.
In the second half of the 19th century, Gottfried Semper asserted that the ori-
gin of architecture was concurrent with textiles. ‘‘The beginning of building,” he
declared, “coincides with the beginning of textiles.” His theory marks another
huge step in the narration of separation. As stated by Semper, structure be-
longs to tectonics while cladding originates from the very structure of fabric, the
alternation of warp and weft. Like a dress, cladding has the right to express its
texture. Like cloth, it can change according to the needs of specific occasions.
Cladding, according to Semper’s theory, possesses an expressive nature which
empowers the social role of the building.
Even though architects and theoreticians fought to preserve the integrity
of ornament and architecture, reality has followed another course. New build-
ing technologies have historically forced a renewed and stronger separation
between structure and skin. The entirety of Louis Sullivan’s oeuvre in Chicago
is perhaps the clearest example of this running schism. The impressive photo-
graphs of the developing city in the late 19th and early t20th centuries depict
skyscrapers under construction before they are dressed in ceramic curtain walls,
like scaffolding covered by a soft cloth. If a ceramic facade must be deployed
to protect steel structures from fire, the dissociation between structure and
ornament is inevitable.
Gottfried Semper’s position was that both the wall and the tent are architec-
tural skins and thus walls can be considered the descendant of tents. As thick
and structural as stone, bricks or mass concrete, or as thin as a cladding layer,
a textile dress or a coat of paint, the skin of a building is what separates interior
spaces from the outer world. Walls have often been the expression of the tec-
tonics of a building. The way tents are sewn, the way bricks or stone blocks are
assembled and the way concrete is moulded make it possible for us to under-
stand the architectural and structural intentions under the surface.
Indeed, what is currently occurring in contemporary architecture – some ex-
amples of which illustrate this essay – is a deepened understanding of the sig-
nificance of ornamen, and not just at the obvious level where it intersects with
structure. Consider patterns, which are generally dismissed as decoration. De-
spite their apparent innocence, patterns hide organisational structures reflect-
ing the time and society that generated them.
Take Owen Jones’s masterpiece The Grammar of Ornament (1856), which can
be read in many ways. On one hand, the book represents the attempt of a Brit-
ish intellectual to document the use of ornament. Jones’s broad selection could
rely on the vast network of the British Empire and contains a global collection
of patterns and rules for their application. Yet there is another conflict taking
place. Jones condemned the role of industrialisation while implicitly encouraging
the development of the mechanical reproduction of ornamented patterns. The
ambiguity of his position was brought to its extreme by the active role he had in
designing the interior decor of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition in 1851.
Adolf Loos’s take is apparently much clearer as he firmly opposed the repro-
duction of classical ornament in an era when industrial production progressively
substituted craft. His condemnation resonates in the title of his most famous
essay. Yet in his built work, Loos made use of classical ornament – as with the
Tuscan columns for the bank building on Michaelerplatz in Vienna – which ap-
pears to contradict his position. But it actually reinforces it. Loos, ultimately, was
 Reflections / Making architecture

Opposite page: the

Tomb of the Baker in
Rome (circa 30 BCE),
also called the Tomb of
Eurysaces, is a funerary
monument built out
of travertine.
This page: the extension
of the Kunstmuseum
in Basel by Christ &
Gantenbein (2016),
with facades featuring
a delicate glimmering
chiaroscuro effect. This
is created by the texture
and arrangement of the
bricks, elongated and in
different shades of grey,
alternately projecting
and recessed from
the line of the facade.
The horizontality
of the elevations is
emphasised by a frieze
of voids forming a text
sign in the upper section

The risk of
the current
banalisation of
ornament is
a drastic loss of
complexity and the
transformation
of it into mere
decoration
Photo Julian Salinas

not against ornament. It was just that for him, inventing a new ornament was im-
possible as the present had overcome the need for decoration.
Loos opened up an argument which was fully embraced by the Modernists.
In the most simplistic interpretation, modernists are totally against ornament
in architectural production. Once more, this statement needs deeper analysis.
Certainly, while apparently avoiding it, the modernists actually gave ornament
a new form. Le Corbusier’s persistent use of colour was an exercise in provid-
ing the thinnest possible layer of cladding. Buildings like the Palace of Assembly
in Chandigarh (1962) as well as the Unité d’Habitation (1952) in Marseille show
how coloured surfaces can in unison construct particular kinds of space or
give space particular qualities. The other crucial aspect characterising Le Cor-
busier’s work is the way in which materials are granted the capacity to be orna-
ments themselves. Following Auguste Perret’s lesson, Le Corbusier enhanced
the sculptural properties of in-situ poured concrete to determine the quality of
large bare surfaces at the Unité d’Habitation.
Nor was he alone in doing this. Mies van der Rohe used very specific materi-
als because of their implicit expressive nature. In the Barcelona Pavilion (1929),
Roman travertine, green Alpine marble, green marble from Greece and golden
onyx from the Atlas Mountains were displayed bare, like textile curtains defin-
ing spaces. In the 1970s, while attacking modernism, Venturi and Scott Brown,
in their own way, defined the postmodern ornamental agenda: “When modern
architects righteously abandoned ornament on buildings, they unconsciously

89 domus October 2020

 Left: plate from Owen
Jones’s book, The
Grammar of Ornament
(1856), which catalogued
ornaments from
around the world.
Opposite page: view
Getty Research Institute/ wikicommons

of the drawing room

with the fireplace
in Villa Müller, Prague
(1928-1930), designed
by Adolf Loos.
Photo Martin Gerlach
Junior, 1930. Negative
on glass, 18 x 24 cm

domus October 2020 90


Courtesy of Franco Raggi Archive, Florence
Right: The Red Tent
of Architecture (1975),
by Franco Raggi.
The hand-painted
installation reproduces
the iconography of the
Doric temple in canvas.
Opposite page: entrance
to Petralona House
(2016), built in Athens
by Point Supreme
Architects –
Konstantinos Pantazis
and Marianna Rentzou
Loos, ultimately, did not stand against ornament
Photo Yannis Drakoulidis
91
Reflections / Making architecture
designed buildings that were ornament.” This happens because the negation of
ornament is, according to Venturi and Scott Brown, still a communication tool. In
the decorated sheds, the ornamental apparatus is a superimposed layer – the
main architectural means of communication.
The contemporary debate about ornament is as revealing as it ever was. If
ornament has become associated with parametric architecture and, generally,
with the figurative treatment of evenly decorated building envelopes, then there
is another group of architects pushing against this. Firstly, they say, this interpre-
tation hides the assumption that architects nowadays should be busy designing
perfume boxes with undefined interiors. Secondly, it presumes that contempo-
rary ornament is a single overarching gesture which is supposed to determine
the entire building envelope. Yet architecture in the past was always character-
ised by a certain economy of ornament. Its presence, even if massive in scale,
has always been concentrated in a few key elements in a building: the profile of
the mouldings, for example. The risk of the current banalisation of ornament is
a drastic loss of complexity and the transformation of it into mere decoration.
When we were asked to contribute to an exhibition on the subject at the Trie-
nal de Lisboa, we wanted to bear witness to the fresh, self-confident and joyful
return of ornament since the early 2000s. Today, it seems natural to carefully
consider the junctions among elements; to question the nature of cladding as a
project rather than as a consequence; to design expressive facades with images
and typography; and to dress surfaces with patterns, motifs, textures, materials
and colours. As architects, we sometimes need to concentrate our efforts on
the ornamental apparatus in order to maximise results. Whether this process
is conscious or unconscious, or simply a reaction to a lack of means, it seems
necessary to redefine the current threshold between ornament and decoration;
to rethink what we can allow ourselves in our daily practice.
Ambra Fabi and Giovanni Piovene are co-founders of Studio Piovenefabi
based in Milan and Brussels. In 2019 the studio curated the exhibition
What Is Ornament? as part of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale.
Opposite page: plan
of St. Peter’s Square
in Rome and Bernini’s
colonnade with the third
arm. The engraving
is from Templum
Vaticanum by Carlo
Fontana, 1694.
This page: Adolphe
Appia, drawing of the
stage set
domus October 2020
 Rassegna
Outdoor
This month we present a series of solutions for outdoor environments that highlights
the need for closer contact with nature that is increasingly evident in contemporary
living. This trend translates into the definition of fluid transitions between inside and
outside giving rise to multi-functional spaces where furniture acquires different
possibilities for use and creates hybrid environments with a free approach to
aesthetics. So chairs and tables define complete dining areas and move the
fundamental ritual of conviviality outdoors. The heightened comfort of modular
systems of soft furnishings moves beyond the walls of the home to transform
metropolitan terraces into real open-air lounges, where pergolas, awnings and
shading systems acquire a new central role.

domus October 2020 92

 Rassegna / Outdoor

Cassina goes outdoor Cassina

www.cassina.it
Moai Fast
www.fastspa.com

Inspired by the particular forms of either porcelain stoneware (in a

the Roman pine tree, Moai tables
designed by Lievore Altherr for Fast
have been designed to be highly
versatile. The structure in painted alu-
minium, that looks slender and light,
in reality sits on legs that are solid and
sturdy like roots. Elegant and
functional, the tops are available in
rectangular format 150 x 90 cm; 220
x 100 cm and 300 x 100 cm), natural
stone (in a cir-cular format with ø 140
cm) and in aluminium (in rectangular
formats 160 x 90 cm; 220 x 100 cm and
290 x 100 cm, circular with ø 146 cm
and square 140 x 140 cm).

From left, clockwise: Trampoline by

Urquiola, Fenc-e Nature by Starck
and the Doron Hotel Outdoor
armchair by Perriand

The notion that life is shifting more
and more towards outdoor spaces
is also confirmed by Cassina with
the launch of their first outdoor
collection last month at Cologne.
“Today outdoor space is considered
an important place in our everyday
life”, maintains Luca Fuso, Cassina’s
CEO, explaining the reason for this
choice, “a genuine extension of the
home that not only has to be
beautiful but also functional,
comfortable and of the highest
quality”. Cassina, who last year
presented, ‘The Cassina Perspective’
– living and dining environments
that bring together products with
an innovative spirit with icons of
Modern Movement to create
complete and comfortable spaces
– has shifted this concept with
coherency to other areas of the
home, presenting an outdoor
collection where icons by Le
Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and
Charlotte Perriand form a dialogue
with three contemporary designers:
Rodolfo Dordoni, Philippe Starck
and Patricia Urquiola.

Plato Magis
www.magisdesign.com

The Plato chair (referring to one of the

Greek philosophers’ pillars) betrays
in its perfect balance between form
and function, the rigorous and
minimalist design hand of Jasper
Morrison. Made from diecast
aluminium, Plato is a pared-down object
that is able to enhance all kinds of living
contexts, whether they be indoors or
outdoors.

93 domus October 2020

DNA Teak Gandiablasco
www.gandiablasco.com
Pranzo allungabile Scab Design
www.scabdesign.com

The latest addition to the series of

outdoor furniture designed by José A.
Gandia-Blasco Canales, DNA Teak is
the most recent version that offers the
warmth and naturalness of teak wood
in contrast with the coolness of
aluminium that frames the furniture,
the distinctive material of the
Spanish firm.

Ola S Out Midj

www.midj.com

The soul and founder of Midj, Paolo Tables and chairs can carry out their table, that consists of a painted metal
Vernier is also behind the design of Ola, domestic function directly beneath structure on which sits a rectangular
a range of outdoor furniture that con- the sky and in so doing transform top, is available in a length of 160 cm
sists of chairs, both with or without spaces in gardens and terraces into and can be extended to a maximum of
arms, stool, bench, low tables and tables open-air stage settings. In particular, 210 cm, with room for up to ten people
with three or four legs. In the photo: the extendable dining table designed to sit round it. The top, made from 12
the Ola S Out chair, made with structure by Centro stile Scab can be used to mm thick HPL, extends by sliding on
and seat in painted steel, stackable up create a real outdoor dining room. The ball-bearings.
to eight units.

Tribeca Pedrali
www.pedrali.it
Carousel Emu
www.emu.it

Designed by the CMP Design, Tribeca This collection of outdoor chairs

offers a modern reinterpretation of designed by Sebastian Herkner
the classic outdoor chairs from the consists of a trestle structure made
1960s made from steel with string out of aluminium tubing, a seat in sheet
seats. An icon that has been reworked aluminium alloy that is fixed to the
with new materials: a frame in solid aluminium structure by means of
tubular metal combined with the structural welding and an inviting back
flexibility of a profile in plastic that comes in different materials.
material strung vertically.

domus October 2020 94


Open-air life
Shading systems
A shaded inner courtyard that constitutes
the organisational centre of Mediterranean
architecture, the patio has long been the centre
of social life. A reminder of this came from
Alberto Sánchez and Eduardo Vilalón of the
Valencia practice MUT Design with the creation
of an installation for the Das Haus project at
the 2020 edition of imm cologne. It was called
“Salir a la fresca” that translates as “step out into
the fresh air”, a tradition that sees family and
neighbours come together in the backyard at
home, improvising the creation of an open-air
living room. Today the movement outdoors of
rituals and habits reflects a genuine need that is
constantly growing, especially for inhabitants
of cities, to live in direct contact with an
environment that is as close as possible to nature. Lounge Pavilion
ET755+Vertigo Medit
www.medit-italia.com
High-performance sunscreening for
exteriors, ET755+Vertigo consists of
a sturdy core – a double-headed,
galvanised steel roller – combined with
the Vertigo metal screen - patented
Medit® - ideal for situations that have
difficult atmospheric conditions and
for those that are normally critical for
traditional technical fabrics.
Rassegna / Outdoor
Brera Pratic
www.pratic.it
A collection of retractable canopies
that close up, the Brera range has been
conceived to respond in a functional
manner to the desire to dwell outdoors.
Thanks to the sunscreen blades that
slide and close up in a small space,
Brera combines two benefits:
protection and the possibility of
opening up to the sky.
Kettal
www.kettal.com
This series of pavilions for outdoor
use have been conceived to give order
and structure to spaces and are
functionally designed to provide
shelter, controlling light and heat.
Consisting of a structure in aluminium,
the Lounge Pavilion integrates into
the surroundings thanks mainly to
the transparency and lightness of the
structure.
Soltis Touch Serge Ferrari
www.sergeferrari.com
Controlling the natural flow of light
and heat through solar protection and
cladding for facades has a significant
impact on the energy efficiency of a
building. Gruppo Serge Ferrari design,
produce and distribute eco-compatible,
technical fabrics and offer solutions
for solar protection on bioclimatic
facades.
95 domus October 2020
Pergospace R640 BT Group
www.btgroup.it
Q&A
This bioclimatic pergola features a
cover with adjustable aluminium slats
that offer total or partial protection
from the sun, aiding air circulation Q. What is your approach to design?
and protecting from the rain. The A. It is a problem-solving approach.
structure can be fitted with LED
lighting, side blinds or systems of Q. What was the brief for Nodo?
A. To be able to be installed on either
enclosure in transparent PVC. the wall or ceiling and fit in with both
classical architecture and more
modern designs.

Q. How did you respond?

A. An awning has to rotate. We
created a solution that blends in
with the architecture where it is
installed. A single element, with a
part that is always solid on the wall
and another part that can move
freely. To connect these parts, we
inserted a hinge, a circle tangential
to the two rectangular elements
Kedry Prime KE
www.keoutdoordesign.com
that creates a clean form.

Gibus
To create a lounge area alongside the www.gibus.com
swimming pool in a private villa in
Atina in the province of Frosinone, the
Kerry Prime bioclimatic pergola has
been used with adjustable slatted roof.
The structure sits against a section of
wall that is part of the design and for
the most part on an L-shaped
cantilevered steel beam.

Boston 135 Resstende

www.resstende.com
Below: produced by Gibus, the Nodo
The Boston 135 system of facade awning can be adjusted from 0° to
screening has been installed on a 90° and installed on either the wall
or ceiling
traditional farmhouse built in the early
1900s, laid horizontally with the special
Traction kit75. The grey linen colour
of the fabric that has been used is
particularly well-suited to the colours
of the surrounding area, giving the
screening a natural look.
Photo © MdAA Massimo d’Alessandro & Associati

domus October 2020 96


Thea
Born in Transylvania, raised in Isra-
el and a graduate of the Milan Poly-
technic, architect Adam D. Tihany is
a point of reference in luxury design
for hospitality. He has recently come
up with the Thea collection for Roda,
inviting and contemporary outdoor
seating inspired by forms and lines
found in nature.
Frasca
Abstrakt Mona
Jonathan Lawes has worked with
Diable to create the Abstrakt Mona
range. A British designer specialised
in print, Lawes has developed a special
pattern for the Mona one-legged tables.
Based on the characteristic geometric
coloured motifs of his designs, two
patterns are available applied to the
tops of the tables.
Roda
www.rodaonline.com
Nardi
www.nardioutdoor.com
Designed by Raffaello Galiotto, Frasca
is a base for contract tables that has a
central leg with four feet in painted
aluminium, designed for professional
use. With a design inspired by an
upside-down tree, the leg with offset
feet is distinguished by its marked
practicality: ease of fitting tables
together and fast reuse.
Diabla
www.diablaoutdoor.com
97
Oh, it rains!
The result of an iconoclastic
functionality, the Oh it rains! sofa and
chair, born out of the first
collaboration between B&B Italia
and Philippe Starck, consider a
problem that is en-demic when it
comes to outdoor furniture: rain.
How many times on a terrace or a
patio does it happen that we have to
suddenly seek temporary shelter?
Even though outdoor soft furnishings
are made from water-repellent
technical fabrics and feature internal
drainage systems, for the seats to be
ready to sit on after a storm, they need
to dry out in the sun.
Philippe Starck has addressed this
problem and thanks to years of work,
have developed a sofa and an
armchair designed to be used
outdoors, characterised by a generous
Rassegna / Outdoor
B&B Italia
www.bebitalia.com
back that creates in a wholly natural
way an intimate and protected space
but above all endowed with an
original mechanism that en-ables
it to recline on the seat to protect
the fabrics in case of bad weather.
“Oh it rains! is an innovation”
according to Philippe Starck, “this
collection doesn’t follow trends, it
does much more: it protects from
the rain”.
It is a collection in which technology
is placed at the service of intelligence
and comfort. The colours and
materials used propose a palette of
natural tones that go from beige to
warm brown. The fabrics are water-
repellent and make the product
completely water-proof, while the
structure of the chair can be fitted
with a side shelf in Mediterranean
stone.
domus October 2020
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French charm, Italian craftsmanship K-Lite redefines
Text Elena Sommariva LED Landscape

Reinterpreting a classic typology in a contemporary Founded in 1977 in India, K-Lite has grown to be the
way — this is the inspiration for Marco Dessì’s design leading manufacturer of outdoor luminaires and
for La Manufacture, a new French brand that joins decorative poles. K-Lite’s proven performance in
fashion and design, with Luca Nichetto as artistic the landscape segment is because of its ability to
director. A tribute to the Nordic modernism of two stylishly convey the identity of a space with a blend
masters like Hans J. Wegner and Eero Saarinen. Born of efficiency and modularity to maximise the visual
in Alto Adige, he studied in Vienna, where, in 2008, he comfort best suited to specific spaces.
decided to open his studio. Dessì then took advantage The new range of ‘Landscape’ products includes
of the opportunities offered by moulding to obtain a linear wall washer, up-down lighters, LED strips/
compact armchair with fluid forms as well as craft neon flex, promenade lighting, bollards, underwater
details. “Luca came to see me in my studio in Vienna, lighting, post-top luminaires, bulk heads,
where he began talking about projects and Nordic pathfinders, polar lighting and a newly added series
design. Linus was born from this conversation,” of facade lighting.
states the designer. The first collection of the brand
founded by Robert Acouri (formerly the head of Cider, For more details visit klite.in
specialised in office and contract furniture), with

Naoshad Pajnigra 9819373218

the intention of signalling “French charm and Italian
craftsmanship”, is made up of pieces by various
international designers — from Nendo to Patrick
Norguet and Elena Salmistraro — but also of a men’s
and women’s prêt-à-porter collection by the Italian
Photo studioblanco

fashion designer Milena Laquale. Because for the

French brand, design inspires fashion and vice versa.
www.marcodessi.com 1

1. Linus, armrest detail. 2. Backrest mould

3. Complete view of the armchair, designed by
Marco Dessì for La Manufacture

67

naoshad@spentamultimedia.com
Photo courtesy of La Manufacture

domus December 2019

3
Photo Marco Dessì

domus March 2020 10

Full Page 245 x 325 Domus.indd 1 2/25/2020 10:09:34 AM

Bhairavnath Sutar 9892063731

Bhairav@spentamultimedia.com