I don’t know what it is about the journey, I am always in a mad rush,” Akshat Bhatt speaks in the sub-dialect of a sub-caste of creators, who have no use for those live-in-the-moment moral science messages that are shared around like gum in social media neighbourhoods. Doers of dreams, are they better off away from the ways of the world?
On a Saturday morning that was scarcely slept into, I walk past the relatable signage and smells of Costa Coffee, Beer Café and some tea and pastry places deeper into South Delhi’s SDA market complex. As is expected from the backside of any municipal building, the entry of the studio (not office) of Architecture Discipline looks dull grey; an instagrammer’s delight. Upon entering the carpet-cosy studio, things are cherry again. I’m escorted towards a wooden wall that suddenly slides open, absorbs me into a library setting, and slides shut. Inside sits the studio’s founder and principle architect, Akshat Bhatt. His 35-year-old hair is peppered with salt. In black-rimmed glasses and a T-shirt of the same colour, he looks comfortable in a space made by him. Other than assembling structures from naturally available resources, the multi-disciplinary studio he set up in 2007 also concerns itself with urban design and product design. In February 2015, the firm was commissioned to design the India Pavilion at the Hannover Messe 2015. To piece and weld together the country’s broken nationalism, they constantly liaised with German, Indian and English contractors, in three different languages. Corresponding to information that was constantly changing, sometimes painfully discovering some materials couldn’t cross borders and coming up with solutions that were technically legible to all of them, they set up the 15,000 sq ft pavilion in 44 days. “It wasn’t as manic as it seems,” says Bhatt, now light-hearted in retrospect. “I feel a certain amount of uncertainty needs to be present till the time the project is complete, otherwise there’s nothing to keep you going,” he adds. The achievement resulted in a felicitation for the firm by the Minister of Trade & Commerce and the Department for Industrial Policy & Promotion. While stirring the morning’s first espresso, he suddenly feels a new kind of energy, “Actually, if you really ask me, only dialogue can quickly bridge the gap between what is being considered and what is being desired.” Bhatt, whose clients range from Bhartia to The Oberoi and Unitech, says it’s rewarding to talk things out. Unlike the end user, who may have a vague but intellectually aggressive idea of what he or she wants, the designer, at least this particular designer, has an evolving knowledge of scale, proportion, size and colour. “If clients insists on a red wall, we go deeper and ask if they’re basically searching for something intense, like an angry or an intense space, maybe just a stark red patch,” he explains how critical intimacy is built into a conversation.
Among his recent projects are the Discovery Centre in Bengaluru and the Mana resort in Ranakpur, Rajasthan. Both buildings have been awarded for energy conservation. “In some places, the top soil is used in contouring, and in other places, walls are filled up with quarry waste,” The local materials are investigated for sustainability for years by his team.
At some point, he points to the industrial-looking tube light we are sitting under. “That’s a Richard Rogers design. There are very few of these in existence.” I excuse my inept awareness and ask him who that is. Bhatt springs up, pulls out a book and points to a picture of the British architect’s work in the Pompidou Centre in Paris. He announces British architects Norman Foster and Peter Cook as his other favourites.
Ask him how he started out and Bhatt sinks into boyhood nostalgia, which is usually a mix of curiosity and boredom. He once took a sack load of cracker bombs and filled them into crevices and holes in the walls of his house, just to hear their sound ricocheting like bullets (nobody lets him forget that). “I had two left thumbs and I wasn’t too good at math,” he thanks his shortcomings, for they left him with little choice but to be unconventional. His spirit of invention is unchanged. Bhatt’s firm doesn’t buy components out of catalogues. It engineers elevation systems that ventilate themselves, and concourses fortified by nuts and bolts that can be pulled apart.
The 42 guitars that he plays and admires in his free time teach him that those destinations he hamster-runs towards are just the structures he creates. The destination is then a part of the proverbial journey; nothing is waiting at the end.