‘Immediate Landscapes’- Studio Mumbai at Venice Biennale 2016. | Courtesy: www.designboom.com

Studio Mumbai has put on display an installation, ‘Immediate Landscapes’ at Venice Biennale’ 2016, the 15^th international architecture exhibition. The installation is all about basic materials being used to create elite structures and reveals how the concept is perceived in India.

The firm, which is deeply rooted in testing materials and exploring their possible application in architecture has produced a set of building instructions in the form of plans and technical specifications. Its concept falls somewhere between a yard full of materials and handmade prototypes. It comprises a full-scale design mock ups where craftspeople and architects have tested the idea in an open workshop environment.

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The Mumbai-based company has managed to integrate their local knowledge and building techniques of India to construct the project, not as purely intellectual rhetoric, but as a way of life.

The approach of the studio focuses on the scarcity of means; only admissible in a low-cost, humanitarian context, thus, making no distinction between houses built for wealthy clients and ordinary people. The studio believes in bottom-up approach that encourages the upper classes to embrace local crafts and skills as a sign of quality, rather than insisting on global technologies and building innovations, hence, paving a way for the democratisation of quality in an efficient top-bottom method.

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“We live in overlays of varied landscape, natural and cultural. Our notion of the world is formed through continual engagements with these landscapes. We would like to constantly traverse these landscapes physically and metaphorically to continually expand our world,” they said.

Through a continued research and documentation of these landscapes, they have discovered many ways that are discreetly present, but non-existent in the collective conscious.

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Elaborating on the concept, Bijoy Jain, founder of Studio Mumbai, said, “Civilization is built on an aqueous foundation, a world that is in constant flux, a culture continually in an ebb and flow.”