This week I spent days inside a single house. The Palmyra House, by Bijoy Jain and Studio Mumbai, assembled by hand inside a working coconut plantation on the Indian west coast. We’re making a video about it with Synaps, and the more time I spent with the project, the more it kept pointing at something uncomfortable about how we build here in Belgium, and the western world really.
Architecture is no longer about craft, it’s about law, money, and trust.
Let's get into it.
The Sketch: The wall that is more, by being less
Palmyra house by Studio Mumbai.
The Thought: Craft in architecture
Craft vs bureaucracy.The Work: The master builder that is no longer a builder
The architect’s who can’t build.
This Sunday’s live session will again be at 21:30 C.E.S.T.
Hope you can join me,
1. The Sketch
The wall that is more, by being less
The 2 volumes of the Palmyra house
The Palmyra House has four kinds of walls if you sort them by opacity.
1. Opaque walls in a gray green stucco that mimics the lichen on the palm trunks.
2. Fully glazed panes.
3. Operable shutters.
4. Walls made entirely of louvers, cut from the outer part of the palmyra palm's trunk.
This is what gives the house its name.
The permeability of the house built for air and light to flow through it.
That last wall is the argument. It is neither opaque nor transparent. Light and air pass permanently; blinds behind it give the inhabitants a say in how much. A wall here is not a boundary condition. It is an instrument, tuned daily to follow the inhabitants’ comfort requirements. The most interesting wall in the house is the one that does the least.
the play between solid, opaque and permeable
But this house is much more than a combination of interesting and not so interesting walls. The explanation behind these walls goes beyond environmental control, and what made them possible goes beyond the reach of a standard architectural practice.
The house is located within a dense, functioning coconut plantation. These palms take about 4 years to reach productive maturity, and about 20 to 30 years to reach these heights. In addition, their high crowns and slender trunks protect from solar radiation while allowing air movement. This mitigates the adverse aspects of the hot and humid climate of Nandgaon in west India. Tearing these down was not an option.
But the problem is that the roots of these palms are not anchored deep into the soil. They spread in every direction on a 4m. radius from the trunk and remain close to the top. Heavy machinery was an absolute “no” as it would damage these roots. This meant the house had to be built by hand.
I can’t prove it, but I’m willing to bet that the roots of these palms are the reason the pool is raised.
This is where Studio Mumbai’s unique approach takes center stage. In this “office”, architects, carpenters and craftsmen work together from the start. Often “building before drawing”. They test materials and mock-ups in the campus. They don’t have to call each other over phones or send emails, they work hand in hand.
The structure of the house was essentially built on campus, taken to the site and assembled by hand through a system of interlocking joints.
I went really deep into this one, so if you’d like to learn more about it, join me in the live session and or watch the full video when it comes out. It promises to be grand!
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