Being of, in-between

COMMUNE RESEARCH FELLOW 2022, Sanjana Bhatnagar is entering her final year at Pitzer college in Claremont, California where she is double majoring in Philosophy and Environmental Analysis. She has been exploring the nature of entanglement of self and the space at Kallayi, Calicut. She is interested in understanding and designing built environment which are fully integrated within their ecosystems, holding space not just for humans, but all who make up an ecosystem (such as plants, non human animals, and soil). Next year she will complete her thesis which delineates a phenomenological framework for biomimetic architectural practices.

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Home as a Grove - Jayan's Abode

Jayan's Abode began as an exploration of incremental nature of building a house, through the nature of growth of a family into a community. The act of building here is like the act of growing a grove: a meticulous controlled planting yet leaving room for the tree to communicate and grow in its own direction, thus forming a grove - a community of trees offering solace to organisms of all kinds. This Indo-Portuguese family envisages to build one such grove for their four member family to host their guests who travel annually to this abode for ayurvedic rejuvenation and yoga camp. The seed design is a residential unit that can house the four member family. The house invites guests every evening for shared dinner, thus offering an active kitchen yard and a sacred grove adjacent to the bedroom block. The private bedroom block and the public kitchen are connected by living space for select guests to engage with the family. In the later phases, the residence is integrated with the other...

We are not all humans! So why engage with architecture merely as humans do?

We are not all humans! So why engage with architecture merely as humans do? This question emerges from the fundamental question of who dwells in a building? The exploration of context and the artefacts (especially architecture), for our practice as Studio Commune emanate from this provocation that architecture is a connected ecology of beings as against architecture as an artefact or product of and for human consumption alone.Machine knowledge has impregnated our everyday life to the very extend of deciding the atmospheres we dwell in, the mood set within the habitable interiors, to what to see and how to see. Silently, yet in a significant way, non-human living beings have also shared our built environment creating spaces within spaces and home within homes. Responding to the growing literature on decolonisation of architecture, this proposal attempts to take a post-human and more-than-human position to understand, decipher, record and create architecture through the powers...

Who is a house?** - An exercise through conversations

Sometimes we ask the wrong questions, most often we never question. In the process of creating a product, we forget to ask who the object is or will be or what happens in the life of an object? As architects we often forget to ask: Who is a house? Who are the people who meet the house? What conversations take place? What culture is born? At a time when even the minutest of an artifact and its position in the house is dictated by the architect whose hegemony imposes a kind of aesthetics on the society, the transition from a house to a home takes multiple encounters between the object, the people and the environment. Every encounter adds a new layer of meaning through constant conversation, adding to newer narratives - multiple formations of a new house; a new HOME. A house is never static, the textures, the paint, the objects, every spec of dust particles, movement of the people etc. constantly alter the very essence of its sole existence. For an architect, designing a house...

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