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Acclaimed architect Bijoy Jain talks about straddling tranquillity and trauma

The calm that his architecture exudes is furthest from his state of mind.

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Bijoy Jain, architect and founder of Studio Mumbai Architects
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Devious are the machinations of the mind. Sitting by a serene courtyard at his home-workspace-studio in central Mumbai, architect Bijoy Jain is overcome, grappling perhaps, with the latent memories that have been stirred in his psyche. “There are parts of me that I don't even know exist,” says Jain. “I'm myself perplexed and surprised... The last four years have been so intense that am trying to get my centre back now.”

The candid admission offers a glimpse into his collected experiences: a carefree childhood in the 1960s, the abandoned pursuit of a dream, an intuitive exploration into the world of architecture, the abrupt departure of an influential teacher, the sudden demise of family, a logical move far away from home, an emerging pattern of beliefs, the simultaneous blossoming and struggles of an architectural practice, the hard work of love amid the glory of recognition and a lifetime dedicated to the unflinching endeavour to participate in things unfamiliar.

His tall frame perched on a daybed, sleeves and trouser legs rolled-up, a conversation with the international award-winning architect between sombre recollections, hazy disclosures and lucid postulations. The 51-year-old is generous to pauses and pondering glances during a tête-à-tête punctuated by the sound of bird call, pattering rain, a drill machine, kitchen utensils and the hurtling of local trains past the nearby Byculla station (62 times over the course of two hours).

Jain talks about building with care and empathy, about retaining tradition, the significance of unlearning, and about letting go his indulgence for chocolates and sweets in between snatches of wondering how Michelangelo decided upon the precise space between the digits of Adam and God in The Creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel's painted ceiling, and the outlook of the monks who chiselled away for years to carve out the magnificent Kailash temple at Ajanta-Ellora.

“I get scared to imagine that the first artists (at Ajanta-Ellora) knew that what they were doing would not be something they'd experience in their own lifetime. And yet to participate and engage in that effort... that's very powerful,” says Jain, who has a distinct memory of sitting on the Kailash temple stairs while on a family visit during his childhood. “What do you call that... that kind of distance that they were travelling? Faith? Belief?”

Wonder years

The older son of a doctor couple, Jain grew up in Juhu, attending a Montessori school, playing chor-police, devouring neighbour Mrs Burhan's home-baked cakes and developing a deep affinity for the sea. “I was a very good swimmer from a very young age,” recalls Jain of his time as a national-level competitor, training for the Olympics. “A series of setbacks meant that I never made it there.” When a later desire to get into marine sciences didn't appear feasible in India, Jain ended up going to architecture school to explore. After the first two years in Mumbai, he moved to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, US.


For someone who views school as a place that offers a formal framework and architecture as a means of expression, learning is a lifelong endeavour. “School is for life. You don't have to go to school to be an architect. That's just technique. Sure, there is some importance in technique, but not quite fully,” says Jain, who is known to encourage exploration among his students. “There are no limits to how we can express ourselves. That's the most important part of being in school.”

Being tethered

Miniature models flourish in the workspace of Studio Mumbai Architects, the 30-40 member studio, led by Jain, which keeps more carpenters and masons than it does architects. The story goes that following his early years of practice in the US and UK, Jain decided to work with mock-ups upon his return to India as workers and contractors failed to comprehend technical drawings. But the journey of a new project doesn't start with a drawing or a form, he says. “The site already inhabits you,” he says. “Much like a barren ground sprouts blossoms after the first rains, it latently sits. I keep that close to the centre such that when the work is finally conceived, it contains the experience that provoked it in the first place.” Refer just two of the studio's buildings — the Ahmedabad House and the Palmyra House (Nandgaon), shortlisted for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture — both of which imbibe their respective immediate resources.

For Jain, architecture stems from relationships, from spaces that are inclusive and full of possibilities, those that are not limited to the amount of water or light they conserve but are sensitive to the environment. “The idea that we can do things with care, with the greatest amount of empathy, that's really our work,” he stresses. “Empathy is what is sustainable. Love is what is sustainable. Being in love requires a lot of work, it's not easy.”

Embodied energy

It is this uneasy nature of the process, his participation in it and the anticipation of not fully knowing the result of the collective input that thrills Jain. “However wide and however vast my imagination may be, when it (the outcome) exceeds all our imagination, that's when it becomes really special.”

One such commission Jain is excited about is a weaver's studio amid the mountains of Uttarakhand. The hands that have laboured on this site would make for an anthropological study — the Japanese owner tills the ground to plant seeds, cultivate plants for the worms, grows the cocoons and the indigo and prepares the dye; the stone cutters are descendants of workers who built Fatehpur Sikri; the brick layers are from West Bengal's sericulture hub Malda; and there’s a Swiss master lime mason, who offered himself for a pittance for the scale of the work.


For Jain, who is taking faith in what he calls “embodied energy” — the notion that when you make by hand you transmit energy into another medium, which then has the ability to emanate — this site is providential. “Four acres of land has been touched by hand, not once but at least twice,” enthuses Jain, who counts painter-chess player Marcel Duchamp among the great thinkers. “The reason I know that it will transcend time is not because of the design of the building, but because of what is embedded in it. That's what instils it with a certain kind of energy.”

Imprints in time

Distilled by the belief that buildings are spaces that have the capacity to heal, Jain holds critical the function of paying attention to the quality of light, air and water. “The idea is to contain and hold, and in some way evoke an idea of calmness and tranquillity,” he says, in the process explaining his penchant for courtyards. “I like being connected to the sky. Courtyards are permeable spaces... they give me a sense of being contained and held.” Is that why his buildings exude tranquillity? “Far from it,” he lets pass in a muffled laugh. “If they are tranquil, then I'm furthest away from that calmness... and maybe that's why I've to do what I do because it allows me some sanity.”

The suppressed laughter fails to conceal the sense of duty. “There has to be a sense of reciprocity to what has been given to us, no? What do we leave behind for a civilization that we don't know yet,” he poses. “We've made things finite in the way we think about them. My interest right now is in materials that have the evolutionary capacity to get better as they age, that they only improve,” says Jain, who admires Russian architect Alexander Brodksy, Finnish architect Sami Rintala, Bangaldesh's Muhammad Rafiq Azam and Japan's Toyo Ito and partners at the practice Sanna — Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. “Or if my buildings, if and when they need to be torn down, can their parts go back and assimilate themselves into where they came from or be shaped into something else?”​

Absorbing the self

Materials apart, Jain has been on a mission to mould himself in the last few months. Exercising for it allows him “to be more calm” is a critical part of each day. He rises by 4.30-5 am for yoga three times a week, leaving the other days to go to the gym or to swim, which he describes as a meditative experience. “I've committed to being in the studio four hours a day as opposed to 12 hours earlier. I've slowed things down to recoup, re-assimilate and focus,” says Jain, the winner or the 2009 Global Award for Sustainable Architecture and the 2012 BSI Swiss Architectural Award.

Among the many projects he pays attention to in these four-hour work days are the MPavilion in Melbourne, Australia, a hotel in Nice, France and the Onomichi Community Centre in Japan. He hopes to make time to read more even as he flits between pages of Mrityunjaya, the autobiography of Karna, Thoreau's Walking, and picture books — childhood fixtures that his father would insist on stocking, saying to Jain: “Don't worry — if you don't find them, they'll find you.”

The first thing that comes to Bijoy Jain's mind when you say:

Delhi's Humayun's tomb: Gardens

Cambodia's Angkor Wat: Giant resistors... like copper windings and resistors... It's a reservoir of energy, vast amounts of unlimited, infinite amounts of energy. More than the architecture, it's the trees... it's a living entity, an emanating entity.

Barcelona's La Familia Sagrada: Genius. He (architect Antoni Gaudi) was experiencing light... he was a receiver of something.

Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum: Maybe indulgent... but not in a bad way. You are always at an incline when you are observing a painting, you are not flat... it's better for sculpture than for paintings.

Beijing National Stadium (Bird's Nest): It's a mangled mess of steel... it's propaganda

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