While drawing this, I had some sense of what I wrote below, but I had to draw and then write to clarify that thought.

A strongly modulated, weighted ground paired with a lighter, almost dematerialised roof sets up a clear gravitational dialogue: the ground as anchor, the roof as release. The roof “wanting to float” but being held down suggests a tension between earth and sky, heaviness and lightness, permanence and transience. This is not accidental—it frames architecture as something negotiated between forces, not simply assembled.

Drawn digitally in Procreate. Text edited with help of AI.

Sketches (some real / some imagined) from my recent trip to Kannur (July 2023). This is my second visit. Incidentally both the times I visited (almost 9 years apart), it was during monsoon. I witnessed concentrated spells of rain, very different from the Mysore rains. I was amazed by how the sloping roof modulated scale, view, water and heat – as elemental as the ubiquitous umbrella – light and playful. The 300 yr old estate bungalow we stayed provided ample reminders in the fundamental quality of architecture – surfaces, colour, light, landscape (both contained and wild), connection to nature. I loved how some of the walls, which meandered through the landscape. They articulated shifting topographies gently. They were holding earth with different attitudes. The form and shape expressed its loyalty to the ground it was holding. The colours stood in delightful contrast to the lush green rain drenched surroundings.

Ending here on a note from Chipperfield, reminding the “fantastical reality” of an old building :

In the book, you wrote, “The length and sequence of the architectural process isolates us from the substantial matter of the project……. from the simple, physical consideration of our craft”
Shouldn’t the physical realisation of things influence your conceptual process? All architects have the problem that conceptualisation and realisation are separated by our professional process. If I am a sculptor, the relationship between my conception and my ability to realise it is absolutely direct, through my hands. If I am an architect, this realisation can pass through many, many layers, so by the time that realisation is done, there can be no feedback to the conceptualisation. So the conceptual process is removed in time and it has to anticipate the physical, material reaction. In a way as an architect, I am jealous of the sculptor who can understand the result, because sometimes the physical result can relax you, and my belief is that sometimes ideas that are only explored on paper can be too nervous and unnecessary, and when you see something in reality – you go to an old building and you can see a very beautiful room with a window, a stone floor and two columns -, it’s nothing, but it has a fantastic reality. On paper, we have to convince ourselves that our idea is a good one. We need stimulus from our designs, but they are not necessarily reality. So I think that for architects generally, this dynamic or sometimes loss of dynamic-between the concepts we are working on and pure reality is problematic.

Source : El Croquis, David Chipperfield (2006-14), In an interview with Juan Antonio Cortes titled “Concilcation of Opposites: Concepts”

A note on the drawing : 

This drawing is from my 2008 sketchbook. It was my first month at CEPT as a post grad student. I was still overwhelmed coming to this new city and esteemed campus. The move from Mysore to Ahmedabad was both exciting and anxious. We were elated that Prof. Doshi will be visiting our design studio. Prof. Snehal Shah was our design studio faculty, who insisted Doshi visit our studio and also teach. We were fortunate he made a few visits to our class at regular intervals from the beginning to the final review. It was also a rare privilege, as this might have been one of his last longer academic engagements being part of a studio. In one of the early classes, to introduce ourselves, he asked to bring sketches to share our interests and skills. This was one of the drawings i showed. I made some sketches of the SA building.  It was both an embarrassing and fertile moment for me. Doshi pointed out that only the central grid has 3 frames and and other grids have 4 frames (not 3 as i had drawn!). I also embarrassingly argued with him that there was only was 3 frames even in the other grids. He drew on my notebook (right bottom corner), to explain me.  Our studio was also located inside the same SA building . He took me out of the studio and showed the four frames in the building he designed . Now you can imagine how naive and overwhelmed i was then. As a constructive lesson, he upped the assignment for the next class, where we had to measure a part of the CEPT Campus and draft to scale – so  we had to be more careful and observant of what we drew. On that day he asked us to pin up the drawings and not say or explain anything. I remember very vividly him saying that, with an impish smile, that our ‘drawings will reveal the background, interests, skills and everything about us’ – without us speaking a word. Drawing a small sketch cross section on a paper, he said one should draw slowly, the skin should feel the scale and profile of the space you are in – and one should sense if the height of the corridor in the section is 2.1 or 2.4 m high – so the scale is both perceived and registered in the drawing. 

A vivid learning experience for me.