The act of tracing is an elemental part of me being able to practice architecture. One needs to know only how to trace well, capacity to draw (non-tracing kind) will tag along. In the process of tracing, one is joining the act mid-way, hence there is no pressure to face a blank paper. Here is brilliant quote from Jessica Helfand from her brilliant article from Design Observer.

“Tracing, it turns out, is more than an involuntary narrative delivered by a relaxed mind: it’s a process and a practice, a verb as well as a noun, and a flexible, foundational material that functions, in the studio, as a kind of connective tissue. Tracing allows for a new idea to be layered upon another, or sketched over in such a way that new and old can be viewed together: the magic here is that drawing on a diaphanous surface provides the opportunity to both refine and deviate from visual thinking in real time. It’s a membrane that exposes the underbelly of an idea—a way to think in stages—and seeing those stages pulls you along in your thinking…Trace, on the other hand, is a revelatory material, a conceptual hinge shepherding you from what was, to what is, to what could be….In the act of tracing, the past is in view, the process is revealed, and the journey is powerfully exposed”

Below is tracing of Kamala House – Doshi’s own house. One of his brilliant projects but under-discussed. I have traced it a few times. The act of tracing not only allows me to look closely the order of the house, but also to recover fragments of memory of visiting the house. I was part of a group of students who visited. He personally showed us around the house. A rare privilege. In this process of tracing, both the memory and the order of the house are remembered. One starts noticing the subtleties of the plan – the extended landing of the staircase becoming an aedicule, the consistency of  the grid and also its deviations, the thickness and thinness of the wall, recalling the memory of the peacock playing and the sound of water in the garden, noises from the kitchen, the soft light from the clever skylight, the idiosyncratic dining table he loved showing us and how it folds and unfolds and how one can sit cross-legged and reach the table.  I always refer back to this house as a reminder that good design can be sharp superimposition of simple and precise ordering principles – cadence of the grid, minimal material palette, articulation in sections, distinct play of smaller and larger rooms – to name a few.

Tracing is taken to another conceptual level by Niall McLaughlin in this installation/experiment Losing Myself. A note from the website says : “The mind is in constant flux: it observes, remembers and projects in multiple and unpredictable ways; constantly shifting and distorting the reality it encounters. To explore this kind of experience, we employed hand-drawing where the act of drawing valued as much as the final outcome. We created an analogy between inhabiting the world and inhabiting the page. We found parallel associations between the mind wandering in rooms and the hand sketching on sheets of paper” .

This above image (link to the complete page) from the installation gives us an unfamiliar chance to look at the drawing from below, and to look at the maker through the drawing. As if an idea/thought is tracing the mind of the maker, inverting the creative association between them.

Extending the enquiry from Part 01, these are some of the drawings i tried to make the readings on the ‘cave’ and the ‘pavilion’ a bit more palpable. Different configurations on the similar theme. 

The terms ‘stereotomic’ and ‘tectonic’ came much later into my vocabulary and helped to make the notions of the cave and the pavilion more precise. In a series of posts I am planning to share this enquiry, which led me to sharper readings of space and thus perception of it. 

“These virtues of shelter are simple, so deeply rooted in our unconscious that they may be recaptured through mere mention, rather than through minute description. Here the nuance bespeaks the color. A poet’s word, because it strikes true, moves the very depths of our being”

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

In the process of teaching second semester design studio, i have had the opportunity to revisit some of the fundamental ideas in architecture. In a table discussion with a student, once i casually used the analogy to imagine a ‘cave’ like space to talk about a room which looked inwards . And this word led me to the term ‘pavilion’ to mark the other end of the spectrum in the ‘degree of enclosure’. The remembering and recognizing of these two terms ‘cave’ and the ‘pavilion’ marked an important transition in articulation about space for me. It was a small moment of clarity.  In teaching process one is constantly in search of such didactic devices to illuminate ideas about architectural space. In speech, we use the phrase going into ‘cave’ mode, when we want to focus intensely on some given activity. To look inwards. These two ‘phrases’ led to interesting directions in the second semester studio. The students had to choose particular professions for their user groups (say like writers or painters). So in the design discussions, we had the opportunity to speak through these analogies better. Would the painter or the writer would like to work from a ‘cave’ or a ‘pavilion’ like space. Would this preference of enclosure say something about the character? Or add value to his working environment?Talking about a ‘cave’ like space leads to discuss further conditions of openings, views and light. The ’pavilion’ idea leads to the conditions of privacy, translucency and boundaries  Enquiring the dialectics of the ‘cave’ and the ‘pavilion’ allows one to investigate the conditions of the interior – exterior relationships in a palpable manner .

In later extension to Kamala House, Doshi adds a ‘cave’ like bedroom which extends itself into the garden in the back. And he adds a ‘pavilion’ on the top of the bedroom. These two situations of the enclosure demonstrate well the extreme conditions in the spectrum of degrees of enclosure. From the maximum enclosure of the ‘cave’ – the phenomena of light, view and weather can be precisely framed. This condition is emphasized by the load bearing brick walls punctured by the doors and windows allowing precise connections to the garden. Wherein in the case of the ‘pavilion’ the singular concrete ‘frame’ marks the boundaries of implied ’space’. Sitting on an elevated level, the ‘pavilion’ pronounces the vantage angle of viewing the garden from the terrace. 

The terms ‘stereotomic’ and ‘tectonic’ came much later into my vocabulary and helped to make the notions of the cave and the pavilion more precise. In a series of posts I am planning to share this enquiry, which led me to sharper readings of space and thus perception of it. 

Notes from ‘The Thinking Hand’ by Juhani Pallasmaa

“In addition to operative and instrumental knowledge and skills, the designer and the artist need existential knowledge moulded by their experiences of life. Existential knowledge arises from the way the person experiences and expresses his/her existence, and this knowledge provides the most important context for ethical judgement. In design work these two categories of knowledge merge, and as a consequence, the building is a rational object of utility and an artistic/existential metaphor of the same time

All professions and disciplines contain both categories of knowledge in varying degree and configurations. The instrumental dimensions of a craft can be theorised, researched, taught and incorporated in the  practice rationally, whereas existential dimensions are integrated within one’s own self identity, life experience and ethical sense as well as one’s personal sense of mission. The category of existential wisdom is also much more difficult to teach, if not outright impossible.” (119)