Rahul Mehrotra

Throughout your practice, have there been recurring references? Are there drawings, objects, textures, scapes, or materials that you revisit? 

I have a keen interest in history—to take inspiration from it rather than rendering out a caricature of what it once was. I believe we need to cultivate an attentiveness toward the ‘immediate past,’ which helps us construct a bridge to the past. To understand the circumstances under which something was conceived and conceptualized. Otherwise, we are merely looking at an image of the past—often an illusion at best. Current archives worldwide on architecture have very little from the 1970s to the 1990s. In the future, this will be a critical period to understand when this planet made many transitions to our state of affairs in the present. The ‘immediate past’ can be contextualized, and there is clarity with temporal distance. Architects tend to get obsessed with understanding the context. The more ambitious ones will excavate its history. Personally, I am interested in the intersections that occur when you understand a context in its context or interrogate the context of the immediate or tangible context. It is at this intersection of the tangible and the material and the more intangible forces that lie the moments of the most exciting as well as productive spaces of intervention for architecture. 

What interests me is to abstract lessons from the past to inspire the future and not take the formulations of the past literally. Let’s say you look at a traditional house with ventilation achieved through a courtyard or the gradients of privacy designed to regulate the penetration of gaze; contemporary architecture can take these traditional techniques, abstract the architectonics, and keep their values intact. 

Architecture also has the power to create thresholds. These thresholds define differences and can be soft or hard, depending on what is under consideration. A biometric system is a strong threshold that leads to separation, but a courtyard at the entrance of a house can make social segregation porous—giving you two examples of what I mean. Firstly, we did a weekend home in Alibaug. The project is called Film-maker’s House. Alibaug is a coastal town on the outskirts of Mumbai, where the rich go off to build sanctuaries away from the city, often located adjacent to villages of agricultural land, thereby, in a sense, polarising society. On the one hand, there are luxurious homes with pools where the elite engage in extreme hedonistic pleasures. And on the other hand, the villagers who have sold them that land work as gardeners or staff in these homes. So we see a stark difference in the financial equity of the different residents of Alibaug. For the Film-maker’s House, we inverted the plan and made the living room a large canopy that gives direct access to the ‘guest’ of the house, regardless of their economic standing. Even when the house owners have locked the premise to leave and return to the bustle of Mumbai, the caretaker still has access to this canopy. Therefore this one element, even if just symbolic, allows for multiple worlds to co-exist, breaking down barriers between social strata. 

The second example would be that of a corporate facility designed in Hyderabad. Its green facade not only allows it to humidify the building but also creates a soft threshold. The gardeners maintaining the facade, who are also the lowest-paid wage workers, have direct eye contact with the higher-remunerated workers in the office. This is done through the porosity of the facade. The fabrication of a threshold of this nature allows them to maintain dignity through the medium of architecture. As an architect, I aspire to continually challenge architecture to understand and respond to the complexity of a context understood by placing that specific context in its broader context. ‘This nestling of the context in its context for me is extremely nourishing and really the way to make architecture relevant.