Anupama Kundoo: Redefining the Principles of Architecture

Noted architect Anupama Kundoo sits down for a tête-à-tête about her work that has spanned three decades and many unconventional courses, her guiding philosophies and creative journey that has garnered much international recognition

Interview: Nisha Kapil

Profile Photograph: Swati & Rajkumar /ARKA

Architect Anupama Kundoo’s approach towards architecture has always been unconventional and experimental. “I knew that I wanted to pursue my questions and my curiosities and make my own path” says Kundoo who started her journey as an architect at a very young age. Hut Petite Ferme was her first project, just after she graduated as an architect from
Sir J. J College of Architecture and was travelling around in rural India. Her practice as an architect builds on her
research into Indian building traditions and use of materials, and into future ways of living. Translating ancient techniques into a modern vocabulary in her buildings, she rethinks the potential of a more collective and sustainable lifestyle. She is one of the very few Indian female architects who have made a signifi cant impact at international level due to her unwillingness to be bound by any conventional notions of architecture. Recently this year, Anupama received 2021 RIBA Charles Jencks Award forher unprecedented contribution towards sustainable architecture.

In a candid conversation, she talks about her vision, architecture as human-centric profession, about the choices
she made and the perspective she followed which is still relevant even after three decades.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE IDEALIST

Nisha Kapil (NK): You made some difficult choices very early on in your career when one would go with the flow. Instead, you took the bold step of completely changing your narrative. Tell us more.

Anupama Kundoo (AK): I looked at my profession as an idealist and I recognized some of the problems that needed to be addressed. I was not particularly interested in commercial success for its own sake. So, after I graduated from college, I was certain there had to be other, better ways of doing things. I took the time to venture out of Bombay and re-examine those habits of mind and body that humanity has adopted during the long process of industrialization. Foremost among these are the notions of time and its scarcity. If time is perceived to be scarce, then it follows that a rational professional (an architect) would prefer to specify pre-designed, standardized materials and components, and outsource to experts those tasks she believes she isn’t qualified to handle.

I preferred to ignore arbitrary rules and norms, and examine everything from first principles. And the first principle of architecture is that it is merely the stage on which the stories of our lives are lived out. So, I chose to put people—with their stories and aspirations—at the centre of the design, rather than have standards and codes (i.e. other people’s notions of how everything ought to be) guide my decisions. I have always thought it foolish to ignore the building occupant and the craftsman, and instead design for the component manufacturer and building inspector. Eventually, I began to experiment and find those ways myself.

(NK): Looks like you came out of the rat race a long time ago and followed your passion and idea of architecture. What gave you the courage to come out of the cocoon and explore your ideology?

(AK): I think if you live in the comfort zone (cocoon) of old habits and spend your life not daring to develop your ideas for the sake of playing safe, then that is a huge loss. I always felt that giving up before having tried is such a fearful way of living. It is like not living at all. Sometimes life unfolds in such a way that it takes away the easier choices. I knew that I wanted to pursue my questions and my curiosities and make my own path. I had no idea that it would be this particular one and bring me to this place today 30 years later, but I am happy it worked out the way it did. And in a way I am not entirely surprised. There were many crossroads on the way that were met with conscious decisions.

PERSPECTIVE AND APPROACH

(NK): Your practice is research-oriented and experimental in approach—be it your first house, Hut Petite Ferme where you experimented with materials like granite, clay and coconut fibre, or your involvement in planning the Auroville city. How feasible was it to sustain this along with a perspective like yours?

(AK): I have never found it hard to say, “I don’t know, but let’s run a small experiment and find out.” Clients don’t expect you to know everything and if you can outline the benefits of a small experiment—say, to save costs by saving materials—you will be surprised how enthusiastic some clients are, as well as other collaborators and members of the team.

Also, I was too curious to let ideas go by untested, so whenever I had a little time and money, I would try some new material or process on my own. Eventually, it became a habit. Such an approach may not be automatically financially sustainable, but I needed also to sustain my soul and my spirit and my sense of purpose. I did not believe in doing things efficiently without questioning if they needed to be done at all. I was more concerned with this sense of purpose of life; I believe that we are each in charge of our own destiny, and that as individuals and communities we mostly become what we imagine ourselves to be. So, thoughts matter. And a crucial thought that has guided my work is to always be ready to work from first principles. Another first principle of architecture is that it must facilitate better lives for makers and users alike. We feel fulfilled when our purpose extends beyond ourselves. I found my calling in architecture, where I could create something from modest inputs and in doing so help others find refuge, purpose and engagement.

INFLUENCES AND INSPIRATIONS

(NK): You have spent some time in your early career working at Auroville. Do you think it played a major role in shaping you into what you are today?

(AK): Yes, of course. But the real shaping force was Auroville’s founding vision. A few people like Roger Anger, Auroville’s chief architect, built a life and practice around that dynamic vision and that helped shape my early thinking as well.

I saw Auroville as a laboratory for how an ever-evolving humanity might wish to arrange its affairs. Auroville didn’t just permit experiments. It demanded them. For example, when I first arrived in Auroville it had few amenities. But it had one big advantage—there is no private ownership of land in Auroville. It celebrated the liberation from the need for too many private possessions. So, if you were willing to live without many creature comforts and tolerate the occasional snake or scorpion, then you could inexpensively build your own home and try things that no one would consider. So I did just that, and later, I designed and built more things for others. After that I had enough resources to build a more substantial home, Wall House in which I experimented with a variety of materials and design concepts.

Auroville let me experiment from the very beginning. In that way, it has shaped how I think about my life and work. Also, its founding vision is very ambitious and focuses on the future of human society and its evolution. The high standards it set for a laboratory city also raised my own standards and what I expected from myself and the potential of my profession.

(NK): Your work centres around traditional craft and construction techniques, and you have been closely involved with craftspeople. Did these aspects help you in shaping your design principles and philosophies?

(AK): More than a nostalgic approach to traditional crafts and construction techniques, I think of technology as simply the practical questioning of assumptions that may have long gone unexamined. So, if we build a structure of unfired bricks stacked together with a mud paste instead of cement mortar, and set fire to the whole structure so that the house itself acts as its own kiln, then that, to me, is a technological innovation and not about perpetuating crafts. Incidentally, that approach is a whole lot cheaper for humans and for the environment.

I have been rather concerned about understanding the expenditure of human resources alongside the implications of saving time, instead of carelessly spending our finite natural resources. Discussions of natural resources are pointedly silent on the one natural resource that is not only renewable but that grows and gets better over time—human resourcefulness. Because our current economic system does not account for the full environmental and social costs associated with the extraction and use of natural resources (and the energy required for the same), it is easy to see why a machine powered by the energy equivalent of hundreds of humans will be cheaper to operate than hiring a human being. (The energy contained in a barrel of oil approximates the work output of 2,200 humans.)

The downside of the modern predilection for over-mechanization is that it diminishes our engagement with the built environment, reduces the potential for skill acquisition and intellectual and spiritual growth, increases our propensity to accept the choices of “experts”, and accept an entire way of life that is alien to our needs and natural condition. This is a case where a bit of faith in human ingenuity—backed by only modest investments in time taken to think and experiment—could yield substantial savings and a lighter environmental footprint. Repeated a million times, these sorts of small decisions can greatly develop the human potential to create compounded economic, environmental and social benefits.

Our time is not an “expense” to be minimized. Rather, it is a wasting resource that we should be eager to employ. It is the misguided disuse of our time (and therefore, our intelligence) that leads to wasteful overconsumption of finite natural resources and a lower quality of life. Far better for us to imaginatively and purposefully use our time to create an abundance that can benefit all. We’re in such a rush to get things done that we’ve outsourced our very thinking to overbearing mechanistic processes and codes created to address conditions that may not even apply to the specific situation at hand. In my projects, I have tried to advance the idea that architectural imagination must transcend design and enter the realms of materials science and economics where some of the bigger questions reside.

It is not that I have been wilfully promoting ‘traditional’ crafts for their own sake. My early works situated in the rural Indian context were the result of finding ways to ingeniously use what was locally available not just in terms of materials, but also in terms of skills. With the larger socio-economic and environmental concerns in mind, I was keen to spend a larger proportion of the building budget on ‘labour’ rather than on ‘industrially purchased material’ that would need to be imported from far away. I do not have any kind of nostalgic attraction to Indian craftsmanship, but I am concerned that the industrialised world of over-standardised solutions and corporatised business culture are reducing the quality of life as well as the possibilities of creative expression. I am more concerned about losing the human capacity to make things, rather than the loss of many ancient well-crafted objects. We are not fully aware of the implications on society when we will no longer know how to do basic things with our hands, like stitch a button. Making has an impact on the mind and its evolution. Making is a way of thinking, and I am interested in prolonging the opportunity of thinking with the hands. So, I find it interesting that if we resort to handmade technologies, we can build whatever we imagine without any restrictions that machines carry based on what they are designed to do.

Also in the design process and in design education, I have found that a hands-on approach helps to demystify things and unleash a lot of imagination, creativity and also a sense of empowerment, leaving people with more knowledge and confidence. If we lose contact to ground realities including contact to materials and real scale, we may become more redundant as architects and use our expert consultants as crutches, if we do not know the first principles ourselves.

THE PROCESS AND THE EVOLUTION

(NK): How do you start a new project? What is the process behind it?

(AK): The project itself defines what is good and necessary. My projects have too much to do already —provide purpose, refuge and engagement for all stakeholders—without also having to accommodate an Anupama Kundoo signature style.

(NK): You have been practicing architecture for more than 30 years now, how do you think architecture has evolved with time?

(AK): I think of architecture as the stage on which all human stories are lived out. Where once this stage was constructed by everyone, today it is almost exclusively constructed by professionals, virtually all of whom specialize in one trade or another. The growing, economically motivated separation between professional builders on the one hand, and users of the built environment on the other, is socially and environmentally destabilizing. “Ordinary” human beings are losing their ability to participate in the construction of society’s largest undertaking—the built environment. That loss is leading to a slow erosion of human skill, social and physical engagement, and individuality.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the construction and operation of the built environment has consumed natural resources at a rate that has exceeded global population growth. In too many cases these resources have been wasted only to create urban ugliness. Technological advancement, standardized industrial processes, and our own unexamined belief systems and habits—especially those that have been promoted as saving time, reducing costs, or offering more comfort and amenities in our built environment—have delivered uneven benefits. Homes and commercial real estate are becoming more expensive and are increasingly out of reach for the majority. Cities around the world are shedding their identities and buildings in different climatic and cultural contexts are practically indistinguishable from one another.

Hyper-specialization is another trend that is altering the profession by turning design from a holistic process with a single point of accountability into something of a collaborative assembly of various experts’ recommendations.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF LIFE – AN ALTERATIVE APPROACH TO ARCHITECTURE

(NK): Let’s talk about your exhibition at the Louisiana Museum that was highly applauded by intellects and which gave a closer view of your working style, studio and thought process. What was your purpose behind that?

(AK): I was invited to showcase the three decades of my practice in a huge solo show under the series called ‘The Architect’s Studio’. I had chosen to show my theory and practice, including my research and teaching, as a holistic journey of questioning many assumptions and sharing my reflections for the future. I called it ‘Taking Time’ and called for reflection on ‘Time as a Resource’.

The interesting thing about the time value of money is that it nudges us towards code-based design and the industrialized production of building components, and sometimes, even entire buildings themselves. So what if you often get ugliness at an urban scale? At least you get it quickly. We’re in such a rush to get things done that we’ve outsourced our very thinking to overbearing mechanistic processes and codes created to address a range of conditions that may not apply to a specific situation far removed from the problem at hand.

I have shown through the work I produced over these three decades that there is no absolute scarcity of time. What we have is a scarcity of initiative and imagination to challenge a system designed to produce and consume at speed.

In her first section of her exhibition ‘Taking Time’ at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Kundoo displays her collection of collected objects demonstrating how she observes the world through the perspective of time. The passage of time leaves its imprint on the world around us. Even before man existed, architectural constructs existed. In other words, with the passage of time and various circumstances we see the evolution of matter, form, space and order. From sedimentary rocks to volcanic lava, ice formations, boulders shaped by water, etc. the earliest architecture was perhaps about the transformations of matter with the passage of time as it recorded the circumstances that left the imprint of time on the architecture of matter. Then there is the imprint time leaves on the architecture of life itself. The passage of time and life continues to shape matter by way of other programming that is contained in the DNA of the cells. The architecture of life is expressed through complex order and geometry, where form, space, light and all the key elements of architectural thinking come together synthetically and according to structural principles. The structures of trees and flowers, or mushrooms and shells, networks of arteries and veins whether in animals or in leaves, birds’ nests, termite hills, beehives and spiders’ webs, continue to inspire architecture for human habitation. Then there is the architecture of the mind, where the evolution of the mind and the ‘thinking hand’ have enabled an architecture where tools were created first, in turn leading to sophisticated developments that have shaped the fabric of architecture accordingly.  The other sections of the exhibition show her design process and the resulting architecture covering 15 projects including a section on co-creation and the celebration of imperfection. 

VISION AND PURPOSE

(NK): At this point in your creative journey, what is it that you are seeking as an architect and as an individual?

(AK): I think that the role of an architect is the same as it has always been—to envision human habitat and shape the built environment in a way that society can be steered forward according to its changing and evolving needs. The spaces created are to ensure the wellbeing and health of humans, individually and collectively. But as the materiality of contemporary architecture raises many concerns, triggering environmental, social and economic imbalances, I think this area requires radical rethinking. Particularly in countries that have not seen mainstream industrialisation, it is important to critically examine the direct import of building trends as in the developed countries, where buildings are high consumption objects that are expensive and spend a lot of energy to operate. If these standards of consumption become globally accepted standards, where local labour cannot participate and large construction firms source industrial elements and assemble them, then apart from a huge loss of quality of architecture, we can anticipate social segregation due to affordability as an emerging natural consequence.

I have many other interests apart from architecture that have constantly influenced my work. I am interested in poetry, philosophy, art, biology and now anthropology. These influence my designs as I see the multi-facetted and lasting impact on humans of the architecture we create. Biology helps me to understand all the various ways in which nature has solved almost every structural question through design. I discover with fascination the geometry and order embedded in the DNA of cells of living beings that unfold over time. I am currently rereading Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. The unending quest for knowledge in various fields have inspired many new ideas and areas for experimentation. They also help to zoom out and see the big picture and contextualise our insignificance or possible relevance. Above all, I am interested in the human potential, and what we become through what we do or make.

(NK): Right from the beginning, you have been a keen advocate of sustainability in architecture. But the term is loosely used nowadays. What advice would you give to the new generation of architects?

(AK): Experiment boldly. Investigate conventional wisdom and discover for yourself how much you really need to get things done. We waste a lot due to overdesign and habit. You can get a lot more out of a budget if you are willing to challenge the status quo. I urge the young architects and designers to step out of your comfort zone from time to time and challenge yourself. That will keep you young. Do not underestimate the creative power of an individual, so do not follow trends blindly. Think for yourself and do not submit to actions that you disagree with, fearing consequences. Each action you do creates the tracks for your next action and either imprisons you or empowers you. Do not be discouraged, be patient, keep your aspirations and standards high, it will surely be rewarding!

ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS – IDEOLOGY AND CONVICTION

(NK): You talk about the architecture of happiness. Tell us more about this philosophy of yours.

(AK): I mentioned that in the context of remembering that the purpose of architecture is to provide the backdrop for human life to take place in all its nuances, while keeping in mind the impact of architecture on health, happiness and well being. In that sense, architecture and the built environment that is created by humans is the largest collective project undertaken by society over generations, as a cumulative asset that is left behind for the future generations to come. In the last hundred years of a post-industrial development, the materiality of architecture poses huge challenges environmentally, socially and economically. The question we face now is how to maximise the efficiency of natural resources and labour, while at the same time providing a sense of joy, beauty and identity. For me this is born of a wilfully objective assessment of resource and circumstance.

It was from Shumi Bose’s piece in the Wallpaper magazine recently where in this context I had mentioned, “I don’t see happiness as something frivolous or something. I feel there is no other aim: to be alive is to be happy. When we are not happy. It indicates that something in us is not alive.” I described the significance of the processes involved in the production of architecture and not merely the products seen for themselves. Afterall, each project is an opportunity to build knowledge and build community while building buildings. These consider and prioritise the progress of human society as a whole, rather than perpetuating the existing social segregations through affordability or non-affordability of housing (not only in money terms). The result is the emergence of new building technologies that lead to an aesthetic that signifies a different way of doing things (its construction and operation).

(NK): Why do you think that Indian media do not appreciate your work as much the international media does?

(AK): I don’t have much to say about how I am perceived in the media—in India or internationally. I am happy with the work, my associates and I have helped create. I have clients who appreciate us and craftsmen whose pride in their work is humbling. Who needs more than that to know one has made a difference?

(NK): Do you think the pandemic will impact the way we build and live? What do you propose for a post-pandemic world?

(AK): Covid has helped us to spend more time at home, and to realise not only whether our homes work for us, but also if it helps us to confront the more essential things. We have a great opportunity to face who we are, to know what is most important and to recognise what is superfluous. It has shown that many modern systems of heating and cooling and sealing off of windows that we can operate ourselves, will be put in question. We have understood that our buildings need to breathe again as they used to before industrialised systems became the norm. We have also seen how adaptable we are as humans, and how we have managed to review many habits. We have understood through daily experience what is the need of the individual and our relationship and dependence on the collective that we are a part of. It has helped to dismantle habits that do not serve us, but that we didn’t have the courage to do ourselves before. It has made us all humble. It is a moment of great hope.

The pandemic, however, changes nothing about an architect’s role. If the architect knows the first principles, then based on imagination, willingness to experiment and adaptability (these are the qualities that humans are known to have that drive evolution), we will be able to navigate our way into a future where we not only survive but thrive.