|
|
|
|
Quaid Doongerwala & Shilpa Ranade
playing with austerity
DCOOP treats street architecture as an ongoing exhibit, bringing a local identity into a diverse world. Shalini Seth unravels their multi-layered approach to building institutions, creating products and designing interiors.
When Quaid Doongerwala talks about Colaba market in Mumbai, he is not speaking about the intricacy of Indo-Saracenic or Gothic architecture, which makes its way on to postcards of the city. Instead, he treats today’s busy, kitschy marketplace with a colonial backdrop as an exhibit to be walked into and be informed by.
“If you look at shopping or if you look as kiosks in the city, at the act of selling things... you will see how people innovate...the ingenuity which street architecture has, morphing, adapting itself to situations, using strategies. Visually and graphically, it has been of great interest. There is a merging and intertwining of the informal with the formal. It has been some kind of a collection to go to, look at and enjoy,” he says.
Story continues below 
It is individually informed observation of urban spaces and gender that enriches the practice at DCOOP, or Design Cooperative, headed by Doongerwala and Shilpa Ranade. DCOOP encompasses the small – from product design in light fixtures – and goes up in scale to large institutions such as the postgraduate campus of Sri Venkateswara University in Cudappah, Andhra Pradesh, which they designed after winning a national open competition in 2005.
In between there is everything from interiors for offices such as Ensemble (2001-02) and Indigo (2004, 2009), Tarun Tahiliani’s store in Mumbai (2003, 2008), a private gym, office on a jetty (2006) and several private homes. Doongerwala was also invited to present Mumbai at ARCAM Exhibition, Amsterdam, in 2008.
Doongerwala and Ranade have worked together since 1999. Both graduated from the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT), Ahmedabad, “which has a strong modernist architecture and teaching philosophy”. Doongerwala was an exchange student at TU Delft in the Netherlands where “you felt the shadow of Rem Koolhaas very strongly”.
Ranade earned a postgraduate degree in cultural studies from the University of Arizona, Tucson, and has been a research associate with the Gender and Space project at Pukar, an NGO.
Rather than be as pupils to teachers, Doongerwala and Ranade go ahead with their work with a nod to the masters, acknowledging the reference.
“For example, in the university, we have used a lot of screens. There were two references. One was traditional Indian architecture – jaalis that are used in Islamic as well as other traditional architecture. More contemporary was (the late) Joseph Allen Stein, the Delhi-based architect. We had him at the back of our mind. One was conscious of Stein. But one does not want to simulate or take things directly, instead, putting it together in one’s own way. So if one was using screens one wanted to use them in a different way than Stein had,” says Doongerwala.
Popular aesthetic plays a part too, “It has influenced us over a period of time and still does. We have done a project, Indigo, where you see corrugated metal and fluorescent acrylic.
It almost transcends itself, taking kitsch material and transforming it into an elegant material,” says Doongerwala.
Whether in product design in lamps made out of metal pipes and fluorescent tubes, or at a larger scale in an interiors projects at Ensemble entirely done up with particle board to give a “monolithic look”, the absence of the extraneous is striking in their work, displaying foresight rather than hindsight born of decades of trial and error.
Ensemble remains a favourite with both. “It is a very small and well-crafted office, clear in interiors. The particle board goes on the wall and the underside of the ceiling. It’s one constant space. Where we need to have openness and transparency, we have used glass,” says Doongerwala.
At the university, given 400 acres of area to work on, the duo limited building on 100 acres. The heat in Andhra Pradesh, where the university is located, dictated that the buildings not be randomly placed, which would necessitate students to bicycle or walk long distances.
Instead, the campus is divided by a road. The site plan has the buildings clustered according to use and come together at one place such as the auditorium or the convocation hall. “A part of it is marked as nature reserve. We did not want to build more than necessary,” says Ranade.
This integral green approach is very Indian, says Doongerwala. “A lot of Indian architecture, by default, is environmentally much more conscious and sensitive than a lot of Western architecture. The materials we are using are far more sustainable. LEEDS is based on a Western model, which is already highly energy consuming. A lot of corporate offices are going by LEED.
But it is misleading to think that it is environmentally more sustainable or better. In India, in economically more constrained budgets, the quantum and extravagance of material is not there, so they are automatically more efficient and sustainable,” he says.
While many architects are doing good, niche work in India, the duo believes it’s only a minuscule quantity compared to what the country is building. Much of the rest remains dismal, with little thought consciousness at the building and city level.
“India is going through a transitory stage. There has been good influx of money. People are spending more on buildings and are open to what they have seen all over the world. But, at the same time, there is a lot of the work that is heavily influenced by the West. This is a passing phase. Richer architecture will come out soon. We are moving fast and we surprise ourselves,” says Doongerwala.
At DCOOP, the approach is well-defined. “As a professional practice, DCOOP aims at bridging the gap that exists between concerns of ‘pure’ design, the contingencies of construction and sensitivity to the demands of the end user.
It is an appropriate response to its particular reality that gives each DCOOP project a unique sense of identity. Pragmatically planned, meticulously put together, subtly fine-tuned to stimulate out senses; our projects are characterised by their refined proportions and a sense of balanced restfulness.
At the core of the work is our belief that architecture should be constructed well, it should function well and should look and feel beautiful,” says the duo.
The material may be a dream material such as silicon or “concrete, brick, plaster – being used in India for the past 50 years”, but it is possible to push limits. In one of t
| Articles | |
 |
Site Map
 |
 |
 |
 |
|  |
COMMENT
Comment on this article