The People that make ‘The Walls and Vaults House’ a Home
During a visit to capture The Walls and Vaults House at Kanjirapally with my photographer friend, I found myself captivated by how subtly the family interacted with the spaces we had designed. As we moved through the house, it wasn’t the architecture that took center stage in my mind, but the people living within it. They navigated the house with a quiet familiarity that spoke volumes about how deeply they had made it their own.
What fascinated me most was not the spaces themselves, but their absence in my perception. Instead of focusing on the walls, vaults, and courtyards, I became more attuned to the movements, gestures, and rhythms of the people moving through them. The architecture seemed to recede into the background, becoming an invisible framework that shaped their lives without demanding attention.
As I sketched, I made a deliberate choice not to depict the spaces directly. These were not architectural studies, but glimpses of life in motion. The absence of space made it all the more present in the drawings. In some ways, the house felt more alive in these sketches than if I had focused on the architecture itself. The family’s gestures – the grandfather lying down for a siesta on the patio after working in the vegetable garden, the grandmother watering plants in the courtyard or garden, and the kids turning the central courtyard passage into a cricket pitch – were enough to suggest the spaces they inhabited.
Back in the studio, I refined the sketches, drawing from both my memory and the candid photographs shared by the homeowners over time. My intent wasn’t to capture the house’s literal details but to convey how the space shaped and was shaped by those living in it.
This approach felt fitting for The Walls and Vaults House. The architecture itself was designed to recede, allowing life to take center stage. The absence of spaces in my drawings mirrored this, with the house quietly supporting the family’s routines, conversations, and moments of reflection.
Though absent in form, the space is alive in the presence of the people who live within it. This absence creates a powerful presence, reminding me that architecture is as much about the invisible relationships between people and space as it is about the visible forms we design.
Year :
2015
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