Bijoy Jain / Studio Mumbai: Pt III

III.


Tara House, Kashid, Maharashtra, 2005. Photo Hélène Binet.

ART iT: Now your projects are getting bigger and bigger and taking on a broader social scale. I think it will be a test for your working style, because to date you have worked closely with clients and built on your own using local materials, not with mass production.

BJ: It’s ok. The interest lies not in the material or the mass production. I point out again and again, however limited mass production might be, how can we find a space where we can express ourselves from as close to how we feel and what’s fundamentally within us? Creativity is independent of mass production, independent of tradition, independent of Modernism. It’s got nothing to do with any of that. It’s just what you express. So when we get there we can deal with it. And we do deal with it. Even at the National Museum of Modern Art here in Tokyo, we’ve used materials like plywood that are mass-produced. It’s the appropriate nature of how it’s used, where it’s used and in what combinations. It’s finding the potential in every thing, every material, every system – a constructive creative potential. It’s like sieving. We are doing a big project right now, for us, because it’s about 2,000 square meters. You can say it’s mass-produced in a certain way, but I don’t see the difference.

ART iT: So no matter the country or project, you use what you can use and express. But maybe a bigger project means a bigger or more systematic way of working?

BJ: I think that’s fine. It’s only a problem when you give up your individual responsibility and put everything into the system and make the system responsible for your expression – and that’s what the system was designed to do anyway, that’s the default setting of a system.

ART iT: Do you have many younger Indian architect trainees?

BJ: There are young architects training with us from India, from Japan and from across the world. We also have many young artisans who are very good. Of the three carpenters who are here in Tokyo, the youngest is 27, while the oldest is around 30. They all offer so much depth. It’s not that they only work in wood. They work in brass, wax, plaster, plywood – any material. Wood is difficult because it’s a very precise material, not everybody can work with it. But the carpenters can do many other things because, relative to the precision of wood, other materials are more tolerant. That’s the potential we found. It’s not that they are used only as carpenters. They happen to be trained as carpenters, but they can work in any material, they can paint, work with cloth, do all of that.
In the case of the architect interns, they do not have training for working with their hands but they can speak English or other foreign languages. They can make drawings. It’s a learning process. That’s the whole idea that the formal education also has something to contribute. For example, communicating by email – that can be a simple contribution they do with us. That’s the learning curve. They work from the skills they have and exchange them with the people working with them. A professional artisan goes through years of training starting from around age nine or 10, so by they time they are 20 they already have 10 years of experience, but when you have someone who has never held a saw until the age of 20, it takes time. But they can contribute even by taking photographs. The carpenters don’t know how to use the camera, so that’s a simple exchange right there.

ART iT: You are really open-minded and positive. I imagined before that you had made some kind of commune for yourself, but now I understand your idea was to have different people working together to find their own expression. It’s a very simple process in a way.

BJ: Yes, it’s simple, but it’s also difficult. The difficulty is having trust. That’s something that I’ve had to learn over several years. The trust is what gets tested. That’s where we falter, and that’s why we have systems, because a system operates on a lack of trust. I’m not against systems, but if you can incorporate it into what you do based on trust, then you can make it part of the process. You have to know and be aware that there’s a limited capacity to what the system can understand. We all have limitations, and understanding the limitations within each other is where you build trust. That’s when you give up control. To accept the limitations of the collective within each one, while also allowing them to be as they are, means you have to give up control. So how does one begin to trust, and how does one give up control? That’s why I call it a dance, or aikido. It has to be continually adjusted on an everyday basis. It is constant. The body is always in movement.


“In-Between Architecture,” Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2010.

ART iT: I understand your stance. It sounds general, but why did you choose architecture, or why do you continue to do architecture?

BJ: I often say that I could be doing mathematics, or I could be doing music, or I could have been a doctor. It was just something that was intuitive to me. It can be very trying. Architecture is not an easy profession. It’s something that I fell into naturally. You could use it anywhere else. You could be a weaver, like we visited just now. It’s the same thing, no different. She happens to be a weaver, but they’re doing exactly the same thing.

ART iT: I have visited India many times to see many buildings. The architecture of the 6th and 7th centuries is amazing. The country has a great history of architecture in a certain period, yet it seems the contemporary life of the people is removed from architecture as such.

BJ: Right, but if you look at the smaller towns and villages, the informal architecture might not agree with the aesthetic of how we’ve been conditioned, but I think they still have something in them that is carried forward, just like the carpenter’s recognition of the temple roof as the wings of a bird. While it might not be brick and mortars and windows and doors, they are still able to capture this quality within them, whereas what we call formal architecture has lost that quality. It’s been sterilized. You clean to the point where there’s nothing left.
We have to regain that sensibility. We all have it. It’s just that over time we carry so many other things that we’ve lost sight of it. All is not lost. Just three hours ago it was like we were in another world: in the middle of the mountains, it was raining, there was mist – everything was ok.

Pt I | II

Bijoy Jain/Studio Mumbai: Building Potential

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