AD Visits Rajeev Sethi's Home-Studio In Delhi

Welcome home, AD. I'm Rajiv Sethi, and I've been living here now for two years. Actually, I've been living for 30 years. A house my mother built, then I bought it down to accommodate six floors of need, a bit of greed. In all my seven decades of living, and maybe about five or six shifts, we have never had my mother's dowry chest and my father's working desk sit together. And here they are, just as I leave the part where I live. And I pause for a while, and I think it brings me together. There are many parts here which remind us of a legacy and responsibility, and a sense of who we must be. The lessons that we were taught where I'm sitting is a place where I begin my day with watchful eyes and a hand on the shoulder. The tangible and the intangible work together. And space making is finding tangible things to create a very intangible resonance. Those are spaces I feel at home because we walk, talk, think with layers settling in us. Everything here in the house has a meaning. So you point to anything, and there's a story. The only way to put all my excess baggage into visual storage was to use the neighbor's wall. So I created another wall and put lots of stuff that I've been collecting over six years, not collecting, it just kept happening and hung it up in a way that acts like visual storage. You know in this age of AI, words like intuition, instinct, spontaneity, improvisation have greater significance for me. Look at this fragment I found somewhere near Agra, but in a village I can't remember. You can't imagine the two colors here. There's white and there's a pink, but you can't see it on the surface. You can't see these as you would if you were to, you know, after a nice rain. So these are actually two colors on a single stone, but imagine the skill and the intuition of the artisan that picked up the slab and cut deep into the white sandstone to reveal the pink. This is way beyond AI at the moment. To find a stone, to find a pattern that would best reflect it in the same depth, search that vein of color that would in fact determine that pattern. There are hundreds of such specimens, the 40,000 in the museum, each with a story. And if there is a tomorrow for skill, it's in the stories. Otherwise, the most tragic thing would have happened to our country, to our world, if we de-skill it without knowing what we are losing, throwing the baby with the bath water. We have to understand that this is one of the most supreme instruments ever. Only humans can do this. Monkeys can't. They have long palms to hang on branches. We can. And so it's empowering. I often end my lectures to students with five mudras that this is what gives us diversity, connectivity, empowerment, conservation, positioning, and peace. So I think let's not forget how to jog this. You go jogging and you go to health club for the body. But remember, this instrument, there are millions of microbes that connect you to your heart and to your head, mostly to the brain. Your brain has evolved and made you different from a monkey because of this. So the Curtain has many, many stories of associations, relationships, and projects all around. My relationship with photographs, photographers, has been very important. And several of them, with great fortune, have recorded it. That's my dearest Raghu Rai, and that's Pandeep, that's Lord Snowden, and that's Cartier-Bresson. Artists too, that's Anjali La Menon, Manjeet Bawa. And as on the Curtain, there are all the projects unwind. There is the Louis Vuitton special design that I did over a whole year with all their products. This is a real memory Curtain. My days with Pierre Cardin, my time with the cultural policy at the planning commission on basically on creative and cultural industries, the Washington Silk Route, and then there is the entire Golden Eye, which is a huge exhibition. So there are many, many memories that have been kept by my team in a scrapbook, which has found its way on a Curtain. We're trying to create a railing that will best reflect the five symphonies that we've chosen. It's an actual railing at the Hayat, at the Bangalore Hotel, which is all based on sound and music. So you will respond to five different ideas. There is Pastoral, which is going to be all of Beethoven's and Indianized version. Then there's a Triumph in the Fifth Symphony. Then there's Leon Strauss's Walls. And then you have the Swan Lake of Tchaikovsky, and then finally Vivaldi's Five Seasons. So that needs to come across. Craft in architecture, not just craft as ornament hanging on a wall, it becomes a functional object. It is the main, main stairway, which also is acting as a proper balustrade, but also has craftsmanship, sculpture, a certain poetry of representation. It's music, it's without boundaries. You've worked on the Belan. It's the kind of music, poetry that has to be created for new generation to understand what this ubiquitous Belan is all about. We need, as architects, to find the structural vocabulary of a ubiquitous everyday object. And this concept of structure, this architecture, is there within the community for whom we are working. So if you look at this winnowing tray and see it as a form that inspires new architecture. Now, this is long before Bucky thought of making the big Buckman's dome. But can we decode this in contemporary architecture with materials that are not much different? Bamboo, but not in the miniature way. Actually, the bamboo, that's going to be the key for the next in architecture, which is what takes us to understanding the various samples that are here, the complex weaves, its ways of structuring from chute to bamboo to grass. The great Dharamachakra, where the Buddha has just seen light and his words are forming quicker than thoughts can translate. And there's no one to listen except the dears who got the benefit of the sacred word, Dharamachakra, at the top of it. That's for you. Come.