Bijoy Jain / Studio Mumbai Breath of an Architect .

Studio Mumbai Saat Rasta, 2016
Mumbai, India

Seven studio/homes of varying size slip discreetly into a walled enclosure of an old Mumbai warehouse. A long narrow open space acts as a street connecting these dwellings.

Walking through this passage, one encounters the rhythm of different courtyards filled with undulating light. These spaces are entered through verandahs that interact with the neighbors.

The inward sloping roofs provide shelter from the sun and rain and collect the water through the courtyards into underground storage tanks. A slender steel structure provides a frame to the interior spaces and courts.

This project seeks to create an interiority that is intimate, secure yet open to the environment, providing respite, and absorbing through time, the ever changing landscape of the city.

Ganga Maki Textile Studio, 2017
Dehradun, India

Ganga Maki Textile Studio is a project for a live-work complex in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India. Commissioned by Chiaki Maki, a Japanese textile weaver who spends her time working in northern India, this complex in the Himalayan foothills provides working space for a studio of fifty people including weavers, dyers, tailors, designers, farmers, hand workers, care-takers from all over the country.

Tuned to the cycle of the sun and the moon, it is conceived as a cyclical, self-sufficient farm system that integrates into all aspects of the weaving process, from cultivating indigo and henna for dye to gathering silk from cocoons and spinning wool. Based on the flow of water through the land, how the site had been previously cultivated, the design works with the landscape’s existing traces of pathways, terraces, water channels and mango groves. Nearly all construction materials - including the brick, lime, and phosphorescent river stones used in the foundations and to treat the brick walls-come from within a two-kilometre radius of the studio.

The five-sided building occupying the centre of the site is the workshop itself, which frames a courtyard for work and gatherings. A gallery in the complex displays the weavers’ work, while the linear buildings accommodate different activities such as weaving and processing of fabric, washing and dyeing, reeling of silk cocoons, dining facilities, a guest house, and residences for Maki and her partner as well as the site caretaker and his family.

Extension and renovation of the Beaucastel winery, 2018
Courthézon, France

Domaine de Beaucastel is located in the south of France, in the wine growing region of Côtes du Rhône. The estate, situated in the heart of the Quaternary terrace of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, is known for its exceptional terroir, producing quality wine from this landscape. For over five generations, the Perrin family has been engaged in the cultivation of this land, producing wine through a bio-dynamic process. The family intends to expand the existing winery and provide for an infrastructure that will endure for future generations.

Our proposal for the extension of the existing winery is rooted in the idea of terroir (a French wine-growers' term that refers to the combination of natural factors including the topsoil, the subsoil, the climate, the slope and the altitude). Attuned to the cyclical flux of the moon, the project harnesses materials found in the immediate environs. The construction primarily uses the excavated earth, compressed and relocated in a balance of cut and fill. It provides a volume of space for the wine cellars and a water cistern set in the earth. The cistern collects water from the rain and from what is used in the wine making process. The cistern-reservoir is also used as a passive mechanical device to modulate the Mistral air through the interiors in a passive heating and cooling process. This allows the spaces to maintain an optimum temperature and humidity while the wine matures.

Archetypal building materials such as brick, stone, lime, clay and earth are used in a way that allows the quality of the building and its environment to be self-reliant and to age with grace in time.

Lantern Onomichi Garden, 2018
Hiroshima, Japan

The project sits between Shiga Naoya's experiences of Onomichi, described in his book A Dark Night's Passing (1936), Yasujiro Ozu's film Tokyo Story (1953), and the present day. The city itself is an allegory of the emotional struggle in the succession of times past from one generation to another, a place that one leaves and yet returns to, a palimpsest of sorts.

The Onomichi project is like an archaeological site. What remains is a spatial story of time found between the architecture and the artifacts of the site: an old shrine on top of the stone cliff, a single-storey traditional tea house on stilts, a modern concrete structure abutting the mountain, creating a courtyard with a two-storey house inside it. A lush garden overgrown over time contains these structures.

The two-storey house in the courtyard was carefully dismantled and the materials repurposed for the renovation of the building and site. The 1950's concrete frame structure was opaque and heavy. Our aim was to make it open, light and porous to the environment, to reduce its occupied weight and mass and connect it to the landscape between the temple sitting atop the hill and the distant silhouetted mountains of the harbour on the other side.

The idea of working with hands was to instill intimacy and care in the way things were done. It was also a way to humanize the concrete frame into a more sensory environment.

The building, entered through a small court along steps leading to the ancient shrine, opens up to a garden and a gathering space on the ground floor, where theatre, film, dance and other activities can be held. Bar, dining rooms and galleries are located on the middle floor, where an outdoor staircase connects one back to the garden facing towards the harbour. The higher floors are more private and intimate. Rooms wrapped in Wash paper provide cocoon-like spaces to sleep, read, rest and reflect. The building culminates on an open terrace for viewing the Onomichi sky.

Victoria & Albert Museum, In-between architecture, 2010
London, United Kingdom

Our proposal explores architectural spaces formed between the boundaries of existing buildings. The structure is a slice from a series of dwellings sandwiched between our current studio and the adjacent warehouse. Although it is inspired by a real condition, our aim is not to produce an exact replica within a museum environment.

This is a distilled architectural study of a dwelling, a home of multifunctional spaces consisting of communal living environments, places of refuge, contemplation and worship. They are a series of intimately proportioned spaces that are able to adapt to personal and emotional needs. They inspire versatility as well as order, calm and dignity.

The structure is ambiguous, creating an abstraction of the relationship between artificiality and nature. It is a depiction of another reality, seen almost by accident; we imagine it will be explored in ways other than specified, allowing for personal interpretation. Our purpose is to show a genuine possibility; to create a refuge from a constricted spatial condition that emerges from imagination, intimacy, and modesty.

Tara House, 2005
Kashid, India

A tropical garden, filled with Plumeria, ferns, grasses, bamboo and jasmine grows within the courtyard of a family home. Wrapped around are mountains, forests, and the turquoise waters of the Arabian Sea.

Hidden beneath the courtyard lies a secret filled room with water from a subterranean aquifer. Light diminishes as one descends the stairs through a stone corridor intensifying a sense of passage into the earth. Excavation and construction balance sky and water, solid and liquid, empty and full. The pool has a comforting silence, as water enters the building with no ripples or sound.

The experience inside the stone-lined cavity is akin to a conch shell held to the ear; ocean sounds reverberate from above and water fluctuates freely, responsive to the seasons and tides.

The summer room is a refuge from the hot Indian sun, piercing light across the stone walls into water. Then it rains, water from the roof of the house percolates to the well recharging the aquifer. As the room floods stairs, walls, light, sky all begin to dissolve into the water.