Bijoy Jain

Podcast Transcript

[00:00:00] Bijoy Jain: Give me one second, I’ll just shut the phone off,

[00:00:03] Tim: When I started Superurbanism, I used the tagline, “the podcast that dances about architecture”. It comes from a quote from Brian Eno that said writing about music is like dancing about architecture. There’s a frivolity or a kind of incongruity about them which appealed to me. This week I’m talking to an architect, designer, maker, craftsman, not quite sure how to describe him for whom the phrase has a particular resonance. I’m speaking this week to Bijoy Jain: the leader of studio Mumbai. He was over to give the Royal academy annual lecture and took some time out to give me his unique view on the world.

I’d seen Bijoy’s work before at the Canadian Centre for Architecture nearly a decade ago, and adjoined the craft of every single moment of the work in their archive. The wooden maquettes, the paintings of flower, joy intensity. And purpose of an architectural vision. I was intrigued by the reviews of the latest work at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, which [00:01:00] seemed to show him expressing himself as an artist first.

So I wanted to talk to him. How things hung together? What a change, what was different? What was new in his work?

How did Bijoy feel about the past? I should have known better. I was about to get my attitude to history, given a strong working over.

[00:01:20] Bijoy Jain: My name is Bijoy Jain. I’m artist of Studio Mumbai based out of Mumbai.

[00:01:25] Tim: Generally I interview people in their offices and we are not in your office at the moment. If I was to be meeting you at your office, where would that be and what would I see?

[00:01:36] Bijoy Jain: It’s more a studio. And so I would say that it’s a open fluid space. There are no partitions. There are no specific desks. There are people working on the ground, people working on tables and it’s a space that is in constant movement.

So if you were there this week and if you showed up at the same time next week, the [00:02:00] space might be completely reorganized or adjusted. to whatever work is happening that day. So it’s more, I would say, like a space that is in constant movement and things are being made and things are being looked at. Change is the one aspect that is continuous and constant in the studio. Also, the studio is used as a space to test space out. Every day you can make a new plan or a new section. So that’s really why for me it’s more akin to a studio, let’s say, at university or it’s more rooted in that kind of practice and it’s less of an office.

[00:02:47] Tim: And say we were there today for an example, What might be happening today?

[00:02:53] Bijoy Jain: So there’s chairs, tests of chairs being made from bamboo. There’s some [00:03:00] color development that’s going on in terms of, because we’re doing a project that requires an investigation into color.

There is maquettes being made for furniture for a project we’re building in New York. . There’s production of a book that we’re making with with a publisher based out of Brussels, two young architects who started a publication called Gallery Magazine.

And so the production of those books are made in the studio. So there are many things ongoing at the same time

[00:03:33] Tim: It sounds as if it could be quite frenetic.

[00:03:36] Bijoy Jain: No, it’s not frenetic at all. If I might have discussed or exposed several things that maybe are not in necessary confluence with each other, but They are actually all in confluence with each other.

The practice of making is less about the finality , or the function of what is being made. But [00:04:00] more rooted in the movement of how things are being made. And that’s why I say that it is , it is in opposition to frenetic, and so when I was introducing you to the spatial expression of the studio, it really is all about how one moves in a space, how one engages with the space no matter what it is, whether it’s sweeping the floor, pouring a glass of water, it’s articulated or it’s expressed in movement within that space.

[00:04:27] Tim: So just to talk a little bit about that idea a space, a busy place can be, calm. How is that orchestrated? Is that through the space itself, or is that through the repetition of the actors?

[00:04:40] Bijoy Jain: So for me, it’s not busy, it’s immersive. There’s a difference between being busy, and I think that’s a default setting that has been conditioned into us, that we’re all busy, as opposed to maybe if we take a step back and say that we can be occupied, , or immersed.

They are, for the [00:05:00] same intention, right? And I don’t mean to correct here, but it’s more spatial, no? When you’re busy, it’s spatial. When you’re immersive, it’s a spatial notation, right? Language is a spatial notation. So I would say it’s more immersive and we’re not busy, but we’re, I would say as best as we can through the day, be immersed in what we’re doing, immersed in the making of things, the making of, or the interaction of people, the interaction of people and animals, the interaction of the space as a broader space of Mumbai or Bombay in relation to the studio, and it’s really being immersed in that environment and engaging from that. So you’re mindful and it’s not to be mindful out of intention, but mindful through movement of action.

And so that’s really where the [00:06:00] focus is is drawn to, and then from that, what comes and what emerges can be a number of things, whether it’s a plant, whether it’s a, a tree, whatever that might be. But that’s really the core what would be the word best described what I want to expresses the core focus.

And then, be it architecture, be it painting, be it landscape, be it plants, that can then move into any number of things.

[00:06:35] Tim: And say, at the end of the day, we were to leave the office.

[00:06:42] Bijoy Jain: Studio.

[00:06:42] Tim: The studio, forgive me. Where would we find ourselves?

[00:06:46] Bijoy Jain: In the city. If you walked out of the studio, you would be, adjacent to a railway track, not that far removed from where the way we are set up right now, especially because you’ve got Waterloo right next door and you can hear the trains coming in and out and it’s exactly [00:07:00] that. If you just transplanted this in Mumbai , this is what you get. it’s the same thing.

[00:07:06] Tim: Perhaps we could just say just a little bit about where we are right now.

[00:07:09] Bijoy Jain: We’re very close to Waterloo Station, I’m staying at a friend’s Michael Anastasiades. who’s a very close collaborator and a very close friend. We worked here together when I lived in London way back in the early 90s.

And he makes lights and furniture and we work quite closely together. In some ways it’s not that far removed from the studio in Bombay. So for me, there’s no separation. It has the same sensibility or the same sentiment.

He and me have been working now since 92, so that would be, what, 32 years it’s a long time.

[00:07:43] Tim: And you mentioned that you lived in London. When was that and where did you live?

[00:07:47] Bijoy Jain: I lived in King’s Cross in the early 90s, a very different place to what it is now. It was an interesting time to be in London. It was very different from the way it is now.

But all of this was already had [00:08:00] been conceived and imagined and thought about. And of course, now you’re seeing, what had started then. You’re seeing the expression of that now in London and it’s a different place. But that would happen to any place. It’s not that it should remain the same or it should be similar, but it was a different time. I spent four and a half, five years of being a part of London.

[00:08:20] Tim: What are your recollections of that time?

[00:08:22] Bijoy Jain: The nicest part for me was on the weekends where I’d get up quite early in the morning and drive, whether it was Spitalfield Market at that time or EC1, I remember there was a pub called The Eagle in Clerkenwell, and for me, it was discovering all these places. theater, the music scene but it was the beginnings of, the rumblings of what you’re now seeing in a much more intense way, I think.

[00:08:47] Tim: When you say the rumblings, what do you mean?

[00:08:48] Bijoy Jain: What I mean the whole restaurant scene . I remember David Chipperfield had done quite a few restaurants at that time. It was also at a point when world economies were in a stasis, there was a [00:09:00] slowdown and sometimes it’s more interesting when, because you have to find other ways and other means and I had friends who were artists then, metalsmiths and It was still wilderness at that time, it was the fringe of the city. And that’s moved. And it’s good that things move and it’s good that things are in movement.

[00:09:17] Tim: And you moved.

[00:09:19] Bijoy Jain: I moved back in 96. I was warned of the London weather before moving here and I thought like, how, extreme, can it be?

Of course. ’cause the space I inhabited had no heating. And the gray London weather, especially from October all the way to yeah. But it was that. And then there was a project that we were involved in that I was at with a partner of mine and I think a few days before the project was about to go into inception the contract with the different parties was not signed.

So there were many things that led to this idea of returning to Mumbai. I think maybe intuitively I was already in that movement. So I cannot pin it to [00:10:00] a specific reason why.

There was no agenda to move from one place to the other in the same way that I moved to London. I did not know I would be doing the things that I would be doing when I was here in London. Just the idea of exploring a space. I think it’s more a spatial exploration when I think about all the movements that I have experienced in my life have been more to explore a space.

And of course you need some. reason to move to a place, maybe being in love, maybe work, maybe to go to school or to university. So there are a number of different reasons, but at the end, they’re more spatial explorations. I find whether it’s the exploration of a city, of a culture, of a language, of food.

And when you returned to Mumbai, what did you find ?

Or I’m still finding, maybe. I was not looking for anything in specific. I think for me it was more, of course, being back in tropical warm weather, which was something that I was longing for. It was not from nostalgia that I returned . But I do remember when I was [00:11:00] here in London that for me, I wanted to be in a space where I was able to be more intuitive in my actions or in my movement. And it was not it was not

what’s the word for it now?

[00:11:14] Bijoy Jain: Was it a longing?

No, It was a when an environment makes you move in a certain way. And I’m at a loss for words on that.

[00:11:23] Tim: That is very interesting because what you’re describing is very physical experience and physical relationship. Because you began by talking about the kind of absorption of making then you’re talking about the opportunity to be more like that?

[00:11:36] Bijoy Jain: Yeah, it was something that you’re more in the flow. I wanted to be more in a intuitive flow. And of course, now having had the experience of both to find a neutrality I can find a way to also be in something which can be quite unfamiliar to the way that I have lived in for a long time.

So in a way, it has [00:12:00] allowed me to free myself of one and the other. That’s why I express this notion of of spatial explorations, whether it’s LA, whether it’s New York, whether it’s Mumbai, whether it’s an agrarian landscape, where I had the studio for a long time before I had it in Mumbai, and so these are more spatial explorations both physically intuitively and viscerally.

[00:12:23] Tim: We’ve leapt over an interesting episode, which was when you were working for Richard Meier. I believe you were working in with models?

[00:12:30] Bijoy Jain: I was making maquettes, but these were large models. I was at that time employed as an apprentice. And I wanted to work in a model shop, but it was a very sophisticated, very rudimentary tools, but very sophisticated. And for me, it was a special place. I think it was in some ways, an independent studio where we were, testing what was being drawn up at the main office in this case, office.

And the model shop was more like a model [00:13:00] studio where we had, where seven, eight of us that were moving in a rhythm our actions and our movement were reliant on each other because what the other person was doing had a direct impact on what you were doing and vice versa.

So it was, it’s like a relay team of a hundred metre sprint, across, around a track or a pool or a jazz band that, you’re in a certain rhythm in that making. And for me, that was a very special part of that learning process, I would say. It was a very special moment and it was wonderful to have eight people that were aware of the presence of each other and how we had to interact with each other.

There was a sense of presence of knowing that someone else was present in your presence and that your movement would have an impact on their presence and the reverse. I’m saying it a bit more In this very loose way

[00:13:57] Tim: I’m reminded of, Matisse’s [00:14:00] dance of that kind of figuration

[00:14:01] Bijoy Jain: Yeah, it’s a dance. Absolutely. I keep coming back to this notion of how one moves in a space. And it’s about the movement that in some way is what gives an expression to a physicality, whether it’s a building, it’s a It’s a performance, it’s a musical piece and it’s, that’s the the residue of that movement that creates the form.

[00:14:27] Tim: The way you describe the model studio for Richard Meier’s office is, it’s a very interesting a particular process that you’re describing. And forgive me if I go out on a limb here. When I interviewed Anupama Kundu, she talked about Auroraville as this site in which the traditional and the contemporary went together where she learned to negotiate this relationship it wasn’t a synergy at all, it was something new. Because when people describe your work, they describe it as a marriage between the [00:15:00] traditional and the contemporary, and that in many ways is a nonsense, of course, because it’s something complete, separate, different, unique.

It’s your process. It’s your art. And I was just wondering, was it when you went back to the the agrarian site where Studio Mumbai was first based? Was it a number of different sites where this creating and bringing together these different elements becomes one?

[00:15:24] Bijoy Jain:

I have no interest in tradition. I have no interest in, in, in this nostalgia of of time gone by or time, I’m interested in what is present and the whole notion of in the movement of mind, body and spirit. And that’s really where the tuning is.

Now, mind, body and spirit, that’s who we are, right? That’s what makes us. That’s independent of future time, or past time, or present [00:16:00] time. And the interest lies in how to work and to move where it is now. And free, out of that sentimentality, but very much. tuned into the sentiment. And really if I’m able to articulate more clearly now than maybe before, I would say that’s really what I’ve understood and come to learn, in, in what I’ve

been doing for a period of time, that’s really the only interest.

[00:16:33] Tim: Absolutely. I was very fortunate to come across your work when I was working for the Canadian Centre for Architecture a series of houses which you made from what is it, 2010 to 2015? That’s about the time and the maquettes, they were the things that when I was fortunate enough to go down into the bowels of the CCA and pull out the drawers and have a look, they were the things that really spoke to me.

We’re talking, we’ve talked about your kind of [00:17:00] interest in the immediacy of the moment. And I think it’s a good opportunity to talk about materials because that’s your relationship and your manipulation, your search for poetry within those materials is perhaps one of the most compelling things about your work.

When your practice begins in Studio Mumbai, what are the materials you’re working with? You’re working with wood, you’re working with

[00:17:22] Bijoy Jain: I think malleability more than manipulation, no? We’re all malleable in some way, right? We’re material too. So I worked with a stone– I don’t want to call him a stone mason, but I worked with someone who cut stone since he was 14. Shinde. Shinde Mama is how we would affectionately, call him. And he passed away early last year at the age of 88.

And he was, for me, very much the center of the studio because this man had this discipline in the way that he would I did not have very much work at the time, or had no work actually. And he would take me into these landscapes and just show me [00:18:00] rocks sitting in a landscape.

And he would, often we would point to these rocks and say, that one you can cut and this one is more difficult to cut because now it’s a harder rock for these reasons and time and weather and so on and so forth. But he would say that, if you observe the rock has something to offer itself to you.

What is it that you have to offer to the rock? And for me, that is material. That sentiment is material, not the rock, not me, but in the coming together of the two and how both are able to in some way assimilate in a rhythm and shape something.

And hence the word malleability is more appropriate because, after all, it’s a dialogue, right? We all have a certain lag, right? In time lag, which creates a prejudice,

and so if I’m cutting a rock and I want the rock to in some way respond to that, to the chisel and the hammer, cutting through it to express a certain quality. And as you move through it, it might [00:19:00] respond in a completely unfamiliar way that was not how you were, imagining as you move through, so in some ways you have to be neutral and just be in the motion and that’s when you develop a, back and forth communication. So responding to your very specific question about materials. I’m interested in or if I understand myself a little bit better, if it is really being open to that dialogue and that’s why I said in the studio, it could be watering a plant too, or sweeping the floor. It’s as much part of the action of making as, as rudimentary as it may appear.

So material is not so much, Oh, I prefer to be in wood or plastic or a steel, because that’s when we give it nomenclature. It has its own, inbuilt DNA that will respond in a certain way. And it’s in that movement between these elements that we are calling material and the malleability of how you can [00:20:00] shape it beyond its imagined capacity, right?

That’s when you find potential two or more than two things that become greater than their parts.

[00:20:11] Tim: But we cannot master all materials at the same time. You told me that one of these first understandings came through your relationship with working with stone.

And then you apply that understanding to other materials,

[00:20:23] Bijoy Jain: That’s a technological transfer.

[00:20:26] Tim: Absolutely. It’s more, it’s also a personal history

[00:20:29] Bijoy Jain: it’s metal, it’s carbon fiber.

[00:20:32] Tim: Sure.

[00:20:33] Bijoy Jain: It’s just transferring a sentiment.

[00:20:35] Tim: Indeed, but you didn’t start with carbon fibre.

[00:20:37] Bijoy Jain: It was not stone either it could be timber because that’s what I was modulating in the wood shop, right at model shop. It’s more in the discipline of honing that and tuning that and how that is then applied to a diversity of things that are available.

But for me, the most important materials are air, water, light. So if you ask me what are my first [00:21:00] materials, breathing and how you enable that spatially and they’re extremely malleable. They can change from one state to the other. That really, if you ask me what am I building blocks. Those are my building blocks.

[00:21:14] Tim:

One of my favorite projects is the Copper House 2. And it’s that central space, which is the space. , it’s not the material around it. It’s the space within it.

[00:21:23] Bijoy Jain: The physical notion of, material, whether it’s stone, or concrete, Or metal that also has a resonance and reverberation, though they also emit energy at the end. But it’s in consideration to something far more complex a chemistry, right?

Whether it is successful or not is of course something that one can only uncover through the process of time and time being a material as much As abstract as it may seem, it can be considered as a center to all material.

[00:21:59] Tim: Is there a [00:22:00] material that you’ve tried that you’ve just, that has resisted this process that you’ve just thought I should put this aside ?

[00:22:05] Bijoy Jain: That maybe is only if it is my limited understanding or my limited ability. So it has nothing to do with the other, but more to do with myself and not having the the insight to participate with

[00:22:21] Tim: A really interesting quote from Peter Zumthor. Materials are not in themselves poetic.

They can assume a poetic quality only if an architect is able to generate a meaningful structure for them. It sounds as if meaning is not something that you really are trying to convey. You’re trying to have a dance, a conversation, a dialogue with the material and meaning is for other people. Would that be a fair assumption?

[00:22:46] Bijoy Jain: I think the best we can do is work towards the idea of reverie it’s in the notion of reverie. where music, dance, poetry, and all of that emerges from. So it’s more in the pursuit of reverie. And if [00:23:00] reverie then takes on meaning, it’s wonderful.

There’s a sense of giving life to something, right?

[00:23:06] Tim: I suppose that’s more significance, isn’t it?

[00:23:08] Bijoy Jain: It’s from what I understand on Peter’s quote is how do you bring something into life, you give it life Just in the way that we conceive And birth,

that’s what humans do, right? It’s giving birth to something that carries meaning in it.

[00:23:23] Tim: It brings me nicely to my next point. One of the joys of looking at that, those archive pieces that were part of the exhibition Runes You May Have Missed, which you were paired with Umberto Riva, what was it like handing over your material to the, to be given to an archive? There gorgeous things to, to develop. Did you give it freely? Did you have to wrestle it from you?

[00:23:49] Bijoy Jain: I think it has to be done freely because if you can do it once, you can do it again. And that gives opportunity for something new to emerge in doing it, so [00:24:00] that’s part of what we do and it would be rather constrictive spatially for my own self if I’m not able to share it, right? When we make buildings or when we make, it is space that has to be shared, even if it is this notion of. A private one or a public one, right? At the end, it’s a shared space so….

[00:24:24] Tim: goodbye.

[00:24:25] Bijoy Jain:

It’s never a goodbye. It’s letting go of something because otherwise you hold on to things and when you hold on to things, that builds a kind of a status code that is not malleable. And so if you, one has to remain malleable, I think the important part here is the notion of care.

And when something is given in care, Then I think it’s going to charge an environment with possibilities and nourishment and life. We said meaning.

[00:24:55] Tim: It enables you an opportunity to conceive of a period of your work in [00:25:00] a particular way.

These houses from twenty fifth, twenty ten, twenty sixteen, beautiful, all sharing a certain quality. Do you think of them in that way? Do you see a particular period in your, career as an artist can you characterize certain periods?

[00:25:17] Bijoy Jain: Maybe in their expression, you could give it a lineage of time. But underlying that, movement of time, I think that sentiment remains constant. It’s just an evolution, right?

[00:25:30] Tim: Because in one, if we look at those, that period I compare it to the Fondation Cartier exhibition. And the ones seems to be very much the work of an architect. The one, the later one seems to be of an artist more.

[00:25:42] Bijoy Jain: For me, there is no separation between one or the other.

[00:25:45] Tim: You have to work within a more controlled condition to build architecture.

[00:25:49] Bijoy Jain: I think that’s when we are concerned with consequence. A house has a consequence, for me none of them are based on consequence. If I examine the practice, [00:26:00] it’s not consequence, it’s not based on a consequence.

And maybe I can cite a more recent example to respond to this notion of house and so I do maybe and so I’m, we’re making a house for Mike, the space where I’m out in Greece and an island called Kastellorizo, it’s one of the last or it is the last island closest to Turkey’s only a kilometer away.

And we have to build on an existing footprint that has existed, from a few hundred years, maybe a little more than a few hundred years. And so the foundations are already there. A large part of structure has over time slowly, dismantled itself naturally. Anyway they have photographs and documentation of what these places were like, way back in time. And so we have to express it physically in the way that they were built as part of the regulations . What we’re doing is to really connect back in a way of movement, of building, not for mimicry alone, but more for the integrity, [00:27:00] for me, it has to be that more than look that. And so there’s the whole movement, the materiality, how it’s being made, how things are being carried. What is the movement of chiseling the stone? That the whole making of it.

It in some way is in sentiment because it has to be in sentiment to what it was, back in time, 300, 400 years or whenever back, when, whatever that exact date was. And that is really the main singular exercise. So we’re actually encapsulating a spatial condition, while it is in the form of a house.

We’re capturing that movement and hence I come back to movement. And the same thing with Cartier that you mentioned because that’s just the way that our eyes have been conditioned. It’s just the way that, we’ve been in a way trained. This is art. This is architecture. This is house. This is language. Everything has been given these compartments in the way that we [00:28:00] can see things, maybe to make it easier, but I’m not sure about that. But coming back to this notion of movement and Kastellorizo. And so our, the whole work is towards that it’s not lost. It’s not something of the past. It’s here now and present. Because there is no more a sense of loss, no more a sense of nostalgia, no more this notion of cultural loss or that we’re losing our tradition because here we’ve not lost anything.

That for me is what, for me, if you ask me, is the artistic endeavor. So if you are in that immersive, then everything is an artistic endeavor because an artistic endeavor is not one of consequence. You’re already in presence of the possibility of that being, And so you inhabit that and inhabiting it is the potential for the creation

[00:28:58] Tim: it’s very interesting [00:29:00] this house in Greece, because you talk about there is no loss. And you talk about looking at the photographs of the prior property. As you’re building it, are you driven formally by your own expression or are you trying to remake a form?

[00:29:18] Bijoy Jain: The only expression is movement, everyday movement.

[00:29:22] Tim: What’s it look like then?

[00:29:23] Bijoy Jain: For me, it’s interesting, Mike can second back, it doesn’t matter whether it’s complete. It’s of no consequence anymore, what it looks like. I have no interest in what it looks like, because what it is special, in its completeness or incompleteness, and depending on how you want to see it, is it going up or is it coming down? I think the word for it is, it’s an equilibrium. And so form is equilibrium.

[00:29:50] Tim: An equilibrium between what?

[00:29:52] Bijoy Jain: Time, energy, people, culture, movement, transition.

[00:29:57] Tim: You mentioned a project in New York that you [00:30:00] are doing. What is that?

[00:30:01] Bijoy Jain: We’re making a house and a performance space on the ground floor this is in Williamsburg. And again, it’s the same thing, it’s New York. Okay. And what we can facilitate in New York. Okay. It’s the way that something is put together, how these parts come together.

It’s cross laminated timber frame. On a concrete foundation, the basement because of the way the regulations are defined so there’s an elevator shaft that’s in concrete and that acts as a, like a lateral tie, there’s a cross laminated timber frame that is piggybacks on a concrete base and a concrete shaft it’s not rocket science, right?

You have to push through the bureaucracy, really. If one is willing to go through that, there might be a little bit of pain at the beginning just like if you haven’t used your body for a long time and, your muscles or your ligaments hurt, it’s just because of the habit that it has gotten used to and it’s the same thing here. It’s just a habit of bureaucracy that the easiest path is to use cinder [00:31:00] block and steel so forth. And there’s nothing wrong with that, to be honest with you. But here we’re trying to achieve some efficacy in the movement more than an efficiency, so it’s an efficacy in the movement of materials and the way they come together and the way they coexist with each other to find an optimized, economy of means and , if the output is far exceeds the input, then there’s an economy to it, right? There’s a you’ve gained efficacy so the pursuit is to find those logarithms. It’s like coding, right? It’s like the way you code something. It’s not that different from coding.

[00:31:38] Tim: That’s fascinating. That’s a fascinating analogy architecture in Williamsburg and algorithms and coding. You are here to speak at the Royal Academy of , their annual lecture. What will you be talking about there?

[00:31:51] Bijoy Jain: Movement.

[00:31:51] Tim: Movement. That’s where it’s at.

[00:31:54] Bijoy Jain: Language. You were asking what’s it like when in the evening when you finish the studio, [00:32:00] [00:32:00] Tim: yeah

[00:32:00] Bijoy Jain: And what’s it like. And I was understanding what remains, right? For me, it was more about not more than going out into the city, but this notion of what remains, right? And like, when you listen to music or when you read a book, it’s what remains. And for me, that’s really the project. The rest will come and go. It’s the best way I can describe physicality. It’s what remains.

I think there’s an amazing counterfactual to explore that what would have happened if Bijoy Jain had had central heating in is flat in Kings Cross in the 1990s, could things have been very different. I doubt it. There is a certain sense of fate playing itself out. And I really appreciated the corrective that this conversation gave to the theater radical discussions about tradition craft. The past. Modernity. This was the real stuff.

[00:33:00] I’m not sure we can all afford to design without consequence. But I’m glad someone does. I think what Bijoy is saying about the immediacy of the relationship with material, the understanding of ourselves as body in space, addressing the material condition around us, is really important. I like the intensely physical aspect to it too. Get yourself somewhere where you feel good and get down to work with the stuff at hand.

Really looking forward to seeing the house in. Greece. What on earth is that place in Williamsburg gonna look like? Fantastic. I get some intimation from it by being in Michael Anastassiades house near Waterloo, which is just a beautiful place. Um, just unexpected going into this London terrace and suddenly finding this whole space opening up around you. Thank you so much for letting us into your home, Michael. Please like share and pass this on.

This is what this stuff is for, these conversations are the things that I used to have for myself when I was talking to someone before I went to see their building, these are the things that I would learn for my own [00:34:00] interest and I want to share them with you. So please carry on the sharing. email me mail at Tim Abrahams dot net with any questions and suggestions. I might listen to them. Talk to you next week team. I’m, I’m off to Rotterdam. See what we’ll find there. Bye.