As I first came to India to work on my architecture thesis, attracted by the development of the Asian metropolis and the big questions that comes along with it, I happened to be driven to the other side of the scale, toward the local and the experience of the place... and toward the crafted material from which it was made. I found myself, as a student, looking for a simple way of expressing what architecture might be, as the built forms that I knew or did draw at the time seemed to be so much more complex than a crafted object. And yet I recall seeing in a simple dish a lot of what architecture meant; the work of a man, a material, a form, a use, a meaning maybe, sometimes a symbol. Space was another dimension.
Taken by my brother in law to Santiniketan, in the winter of what happened to be my last few weeks in India, I came across the houses of Bidyut and met this very idea, expressed in a very obvious way.
The places we went to visit seemed deeply connected to the land in which they were standing, made out of the earth lying around, of the trees surrounding it. But it also looked very personal, as they were all quite different, radiating with the spirit behind it, a free-going imagination that gave it an unpredictable character.
One of the house, standing alone in the fields of the Bengali countryside, reminded me for a second of Hayao Miyasaki‘s drawings, one with its too many clay roof, holding somehow a touch of heedlessness. A tribal man from the nearby village was walking through the work site, holding his girl‘s hand and smiling. The place was meant as a second home for a couple from Calcutta, yet it obviously looked very familiar to him; he could recognise the same mud-plastered walls like the ones he uses to live in, the same wood holding the roofs, nothing fancier than he could expect to see in the village ... although a lot was new : the clay tiles covering the roof, the sun-screens in mud-plastered wood, the stone used for the floors, and of course space itself, fitting the needs of the contemporary urban man during his retreat in the countryside.
Common sens, observation, sensitivity seemed to drive the work on site, the result of which was highly dependent on the craftsman; the hands wrapping the rope around the wooden beam, spreading the yellow mud, driving the nails in, were taken care of by Bidyut, giving out cigarettes as he came across them, getting some news of their family. He saw their happiness as the key to the happiness inhabiting the place itself, until the point where a mistake may become a good surprise, an opportunity for the project to keep writing itself at any moment, taking a new turn away from its original plans, which in fact came down to a simple model made of folded paper, lying somewhere on the site. The place, filled with a free and poetic spirit yet so obviously considering to its environment, came to be my personal example of what a good architecture ought to be in essence, a reference I keep coming back to in an everyday practice.
Charles Detilleux - graduated ESA architecture school in Paris, after completing a thesis in Indian on Delhi after a year spent there in 2006, he worked one year afterwards at Romi Khosla’s arch. studio in Delhi before going back to Paris where he lives and works today.
Photo Credits © Charles Detilleux
Text published in "Of human nests", by Bidyut Kumar Roy
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