De Earth , a philosophy in the making

Philosophy of our practice has evolved over time. Each project, each client, each context is a new learning. As your journey progress, you will find cliffs, valleys, sharp turns, junctions and sometimes even roadblocks. But more you travel, more you learn to negotiate these, appreciating your little experiences, continuing your journey in the right path. Your philosophy get nurtured along.

When we realised the potential of having a philosophical body in practice, we renamed our firm, to “de earth”, with a tagline, “nurture, create, belong”. This was around 10 years before. It helped us to conceive projects not just as professional assignment, but as an extension of our life. When we agree to take up an assignment, we were just not signing an agreement, but then sharing dreams, ideas, concerns, habits, potentials and limitations of our client. We nurtured these as if it’s ours. Being sensible to the actual need of the client, was one of our most important baseline. The idea of developing a meaningful brief was equally or more important than developing the design itself.

As the name suggests, sensitivity towards Mother Earth, is among our fundamental responsibility. Any intervention on earth, will have its affect on its ecology, geology, hydrology and overall eco system. All we can do is to minimise the negative impacts, and to nurture a new ecosystem where the built become a subsequent part of the nature. You need to listen to your site, to hear, what it tell you on how and where to intervene. You need to engage with it, to imbibe the pulse of its neighbourhood & surroundings. And slowly the site will inform you about the potential characters it can play in the life thereafter.

It’s not yet time to get on to the drawing paper yet. conversations with client and our site have just given us the background of the story to nurture. We also need to know, about the thread, which will connect these little bits into a meaningful narrative. That’s where culture & context become so important. culture informs the design, there after the spaces play the major role in nurturing it. Every home is a repository of memories, and these memories fuel the life. It’s challenging to forget ur self and your ego, to make yourself capable of appreciating those little nuances, which would play a major role in connecting families & nurturing relationships. Your eyes need to be sharper, your ears keen to capture the essence of life, to make timeless spaces, which your client’s family will cherish for generations. A quality brief is just taking shape. It’s beyond the number of rooms or the area requirements. It’s about the life itself and how we need to nurture it from then.

Context will give you clues, on how to give shape to these dreams, on what materials to use, what craft is available, what technology to be adopted and how to bring the best out of the natural environment. If we begin each of our project as our first project, and end each one as if it’s our last one, the whole perspective get influenced. We should be as curious as kids, to find out the real potential of materials and craft, to suit romantic narrative of spaces. If we begin to engage with the materials, materials will begin to converse with you, giving us clues on its endless potentials. When you explore this potential, we end up creating structures which ages gracefully. We are still at the shores, looking at the vast ocean of possibilities.

An immersive & a participatory process of design bring life to these thought process. More you engage with your cognitive abilities during the process of design, more personalised, sensitive and unique become the result. The participatory process help us to fight “self” and iterate the design with multiple view points & perspectives, though guided by a common philosophy. The informal nature of communication helps us to transfer the energy of thoughts, to our clients, to our co workers, to our craftsmen, without getting it diluted during the process.

And from the moment the activities begin on site, it’s an interesting journey with the client, slowly inspiring them to take the driving seat, bringing in ownership & facilitating the making of their home, nurturing their dreams for a meaningful life. They slowly belong to the space. Attending to each little detail, to talk about their aspirations however silly it may sound to be, and to find ways to picturize each of them, is as exciting as creating a movie, frame by frame, and in the end which leave you in a state of nirvana.

We have enjoyed every bit of our journey, as every little project gave us an opportunity to live a new character. We struggle to identify architecture as a profession, as it has became a part of our life. We belong to it. So “nurture, create, belong”, have been the foundation of our practice till now. But, 36 days of lockdown, and this time to pause, think & reflect have made us travel through our philosophy again and to contemplate how we can make it more meaningful. And it’s really interesting how it turned to be....

Vivek