Journal

“We couldn’t afford a structural engineer”

It’s not everyday you hear that.

“If it stays, we’ll use it as a roof, if it fails we’ll use it as a floor.” quips architect Senthil Kumar Doss .

Senthil is talking at London Design Festival about his restaurant for Deva Dhare Resort in Karnataka, Bangalore. So how do you build a catenary vaulted roof on an ecologically sensitive site without a structural engineer? Senthil shows us.You sketch, and model, and prototype, and test and load, and test, and make,and test. You use local labour and materials that are at hand. And ultimately you end up with a building that feels fully at one with its setting.

Senthil and Poonam Sachdev are principals at Play Architecture, based in Bangalore, now coming to London.

Their experimental, raw, regenerative (using earth, timber and stone), hands-on,place-based approach is a world away from our code-dominated, NBS-specification laden, procurement-heavy industry.

In his first project Senthil describes how the site topography would literally shift under the heavy Bangalore rains forcing him to abandon designs and work directly ont he site adapting and responding to tread lightly on the ecologically-sensitive landscape.

On his own house, Senthil tested the limitations of stone construction within a simplenine-square arrangement prototyping connections on site and loading beams to test structural capacity.

“That’s one way of doing architecture” states Senthil. It is indeed. I’m excited to see what they bring to the London architecture scene.