I was familiar with Can Lis (1971-73), by Utzon. It is considered one of the iconic houses of the 20th century, but its form always seemed to me to be rather humble.
I am reading this incredible book by Piers Taylor, Learning from Local: Designing Responsively for People, Climate and Culture. The first chapter starts with Can Lis as the main case for the book’s central premise—the tension between the universal and the local. I hope to write a longer post about this later, but the book allowed me to look closely at Can Lis, a project I have known for a long time, and this reading allowed to dive into it in a bit more detail. As I read the dedicated chapter on Can Lis—one of the 24 projects in the book—the author had some brilliant obervations that opened up a lot of nuanced readings and resonances. Here are the quotes I noted down – a small resonance, a connection, as one reads the text.
“Can Lis shows how abstract and placeless ideas can be tempered by the local” (2) “Utzon’s confidence in knowing when to surrender or abandon architectural ideas to follow his instinct or those of the local craftspeople” (2) “one foot in architectural theory .. and infused with the vernacular” (3) “low lying and absolute personal” (5) “considered accumulations of separate pavilions” (5) “there is a delicious looseness in how the house has been adopted, developing and softening the original diagram” (7) “softening the purity of the initial idea” “a large volume broken down into small elements that each engage with the site in an engaging way and creates spaces between them” (7) “the arrangement of the house is at once formal and informal, and sits between high and low architecture” (7) “It constantly refuses to read as a mere ‘object’, unlike the most contemporary works of architecture, and certainly unlike the Sydney Opera House” (7) “nuanced and relaxed” (7)
After reading it twice, I did what I normally do—I deep-dived into the internet to search around for more photos and videos.In this blog, in an attempt to hold the resonance a little longer, I have traced a few drawings, trying to explore the text above, overlaid with my own observations. This post is, in a way, that annotated reading of Can Lis—a collection of reading, tracing and looking again.
At the end of the post, I will sharing a list of curated sources from where these reference were collected.
These are few primary sources referred for this blog and which are good sources too for further study on the same project or branch into other Utzon’s projects.
The other day, while speaking with my thesis students, we returned to an earlier post I had written on Mise En Place — on preparation, and on “intentional action.” (It might help to read that piece before reading this post further.) The discussion moved toward thesis topics, the depth of enquiry, and the question of how much time one gives oneself to a thing before it fully appears. They are currently in the thesis preparation stage, where much of the work is still invisible.
I’ve always considered drawings as vessels of care, a quality that can extend to various aspects of life.
As architects, we are always working at a distance from buildings, even though we are deeply involved imagining them. We experience, analyse, and speculate on them through drawings long before they exist physically. Even in practice, there remains a certain separation. We do not make buildings directly; we make drawings, and builders build buildings. In this process, drawings become units through which care is transferred.
The amount of care held within a drawing often depends on how deeply one has prepared before/during making it.
I gave the example of making a dosa. The act of cooking it may take only five minutes, but there are many layers preceding that moment. Each layer reflects a different degree of care.
20 minutes — if one want the easier way out – ready-order dosa.
Buying a good batter on a delivery app. (Honestly, this has made life much easier for people like me.)
Grinding the batter the previous night, allowing it to ferment under the right conditions. Remembering to soak a few hours before grinding, the usually forgettable first step.
Choosing and purchasing the right rice.
Buying rice in season and storing it properly at home.
Growing your own rice.
That last one sounds excessive, but I was reminded of it while watching Chef’s Table featuring Dan Barber. He goes to the extent of growing his own food — thinking not only about the crop, but also the soil, the manure, the fish, the animals, and even the food that the animals themselves consume. Care extends backward into an entire chain of preparation. In The Third Plate, Barber writes about rethinking food systems entirely — where farming and cooking are not separate acts but deeply interconnected ones. The idea stayed with me because it feels close to architectural work as well. What finally appears on the table, or on site, is only the visible tip of a much larger field of preparation.
Perhaps thesis preparation is similar. One can arrive at a topic quickly and still produce something functional. But depth often comes from extending care backward — into reading, observing, drawing, discussing, collecting references, revisiting intuitions, and sitting with questions longer than necessary.
The final drawing may only take a few hours to produce. But the drawing carries within it all the invisible preparation that came before it. The degrees of care contained in it.
(Text Edited lightly with AI for proofreading and a bit of structuring of flow)
Shades of Theory is an umbrella term I have been using for a long time. Theory is often seen as elite and cerebral, which perhaps explains the general distaste around it. But I believe theory exists across a spectrum of shades — from a diagram to a text — each carrying different roles. Through this series, I want to gather fragments that may not intuitively feel like theory at first. As this collection progresses, the meaning of theory might slowly shift into something more palpable and accessible. There are two notions I completely subscribe to. First: “theory is an organizing tool” (link) (Malcolm Gladwell). Second: “There is nothing so practical as a good theory” (Kurt Lewin). These two ideas anchor my premise of what theory can be. Through this sub-series on the blog, I will collect and share multiple fragments to extend and test this proposition. These fragments may fall within a field formed by two perpendicular axes: dense–light, text–non-text. Here is the first in the series
This passage is from “Theory and Elements of Architecture” by Atkinson, Robert and Bagenal, Hope. This text is exactly 100 years old to this year : published in 1926
2. MEANING OF ” THEORY”
But when information is in process of being collected and knowledge begins—how apply it? How shall deductions from the experience of the past be used in new problems and new plans? Only by means of “Theory.” Theory provides the link between the necessary knowledge and the activity of design. Theory is the first act of simplification in the mind, it is the planning of planning. A student can make no single design without having first drawn upon some source and linked and arranged a number of confused elements on some kind of a system.That system is likely to be compounded of his borrowings from others plus his native intelligence; but still it implies a criticism, a picture1 of the relative factors, a recognition of the enemy chaos and of the fortress design, in other words a”theory?” Theory is the framework of our whole thought it is the wealth plus the critical power we bring to our job. Upon theory unconsciously depends our standard, our range, our direction of development.
“This training is worth while, these preferences are sincere. I will go in this direction and not in that.”
Those are the kind of statements a student must be able to make, and to make upon sufficient grounds. His grounds are likely to correspond to his grasp of ” theory.”
Footnote : 1 The word “theory” is derived from the Greek ‘Theoria‘ to look at.
(All the bold emphasis are mine)
My note on this text :
I just admire the precision and claim of this text: “Only by means of Theory” — that feels like an excellent point of departure for this series. I deeply align with its emphasis on “how apply it?” and how theory “provides the link between the necessary knowledge and the activity of design.” It establishes theory as something practical rather than rhetorical “first act of simplification in the mind” suggests a clarification of thought, while “planning of planning” introduces a crucial meta-level: thinking about thinking. “deductions from experience” and the sense of thought being “compounded of his borrowings from others plus his native intelligence” strongly reinforce my premise that theory is not in opposition to experience, but as a sequence and structuring of it. theory + experience, not theory versus experience.
This paragraph is drawn from the brilliant opening chapter of the book on the notion of theory. What follows are chapters focused on the elements of architecture — walls, roofs, materials, and so on — but the clarity of this initial framing, at architecture’s threshold of modernism, is remarkable. The book’s grounding of theory before moving into architectural elements reveals an intellectual precision that feels both rigorous and very relevant 100 years later
This post takes a peek into the KVDF Workshop I participated in earlier this year. The workshop was spread over three days (Jan 30 – Feb 01, 2026). Kurula Varkey Design Forum is one of the key annual academic events in the country, revolving around shortlisted final year thesis projects from various schools. An event completely organized by the students at CEPT, which has been a consistent and distinguished platform since its inception. It is a vantage point to the finest thesis in the country. The previous formats had thematic discussions around curated categories of thesis projects . The discussions revolved around particular projects and spiraled from there to many delightful de tours attended by various mentors over the years. I had attended these forums between 2008 and 2010 at CEPT as a student. The ‘basement’ at CEPT would be buzzing with intellectual arguments for those 3 days. This is the 25th year since its inception.
KVDF, marking its 25th anniversary, embarked on an innovative format for its event. This year’s event was centered around workshops, featuring selected thesis students and CEPT students. Each group consisted of four thesis students whose work had been selected (and those who also have graduated since), along with three CEPT students from various years. They had to work together to create a project ( the outcome was open-ended; anything from a drawing to a video or a collage).
This is the list of participants from my group : Keerat Kaur Gill (SEA,Mumbai), Harshitha N Kumar ( SPA, Vijayawada ), Ria Desai (LS Raheja, Mumbai), Sachith Vithange (University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka), and CEPT Students – Kunal Barve, Priyanshi Shah, Nikhil Joshi
The other mentors were an impressive line of heavy hitters like Smit Vyas, Kunjan Garg, Ujjwal Dawar, and Saurabh Malpani. Before the workshop started and when the list was announced, I was intimidated by this list and the past legacy of the forum. It almost took me the first day of the workshop to settle. The new format and the premise of the workshop also challenged me. It was a nice opportunity to step from the everyday classes at Mysore and to experiment a bit with students whom I had not met before. The format was also an experiment, where I got to test some of my pedagogical ideas of drawing, tracing, and collaboration in creative work.
Note for the theme of the workshop – ( I wrote this before I went to the workshop as the premise to operate.)
The workshop will be anchored in the notion of tracing—both as a medium and as an act of thinking.
Building on this premise, the workshop will begin with the creation of a large base drawing (digital collage print to save time), conceived as a stitched collage of plans. This composite drawing will act as a ground. Over this, multiple layers of tracing will be developed—varying in scale, theme, and intent—using overlays to incrementally build meaning. The emphasis will be on layering, deviation, refinement, and the productive tension between continuity and departure.The workshop will be drawing-intensive, supported by a small number of short interactions to frame and reflect on the process. This is more on the method yet, finding a way to anchor with the theme of ‘time‘.
Process:
As this was an open-ended workshop, the mentors were given a theme note two weeks earlier, while the students’ work was shared only two days prior to the workshop.One of the starting points for me was the question: how can four students—deeply embedded in their thesis work, yet now carrying some distance after graduation—engage with the workshop together? Alongside them were three CEPT students from the third and fifth year. I was keen to explore collaboration within this mix. The students came from varied schools and backgrounds, with very different methods of enquiry. Coincidentally, all the theses in this group were related to adaptive reuse. At a personal level, I have been revisiting tracing as a way to slow down—an embodied mode of thinking and exploration. This became the premise I set for the workshop. The concept note on Tracing from Jessica Helfand and Niall McLaughlin explorations on the same theme (shared below) are key anchors and precedents for this workshop.
Act of drawing:
On Day 1, the four theses were collapsed into a single digital drawing and printed as a 6’×3’ sheet on cartridge paper. We spent time discussing the idea of collage—assigning each thesis a colour, negotiating scale, and determining the size so that all seven participants could sit around intimately around the drawing and work on it simultaneously.
Day 2 was devoted entirely to tracing. Each student worked on an A3 tracing sheet. A session of tracing lasted about 40 minutes, followed by an equally long break. In each session, students traced using a single colour. For the next session, they shifted positions and began again. After every round, we paused to discuss what each layer would engage with—colour, pattern, method, or emphasis. Over five such layers, the drawing began to transform. And the participants too. The original base both dissolved and re-emerged, gradually becoming a composite where individual authorship receded into the larger act of making.
[ Sachith, a team member, upon reading this blog, shared a much sharper perspective on how the 5 layers and stages of drawing advanced. His note :
“The layers had different approaches. The first layer was about drawing intuitively on others’ drawings, though by the end some of us felt we needed some kind of guidance. So for the second layer, we worked with the term ‘movement.’ We felt the first layer was better at collapsing the drawing, but we still needed some motive through which we could work together. In the third layer, we introduced a physical constraint: drawing a continuous line over the drawing, while still keeping the freedom to start and end at any point we liked. This layer was transformative. We felt that all of us really started to collaborate, and the base drawing truly collapsed and became ‘one.’
The fourth layer was about adding shapes and hatches. After that, we felt we had to add another layer similar to the third, so we ended the tracing process with the fifth layer—not as a point of end, but as a base to begin another process” ] Note added to original post on May 3, 2026
On Day 3, the students independently presented the outcome as a video with a voiceover, reflecting on both the process and their learnings.
Through this process, four distinct theses became one shared drawing. The slow act of tracing created space—for conversation, for digression, for ease. Much of the learning happened within this act of drawing itself.
Below are the key slides from the final presentation I gave, which covered the intent, method and precedents for this approach. Also some photos from the event
This is the final video presentation from the team, which they made as the outcome of the 3 day workshop – which capture the slow cooked process of this workshop.
Notes:
A note of thanks to Shreyas Baindur and Madhuri Rao for all the constructive feedback at the initial idea stage. All photos and videos are credited to the KVDF organizing team, participants in my team, Shubhanshi, myself and other members of the event.
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