So I am here ascending this vertiginous suspended steel staircase. I count exactly six standard angle sections held together in pairs by bolts between the three cluster hangers that hold up the five-storey cascade. I glance upwards along their length &mdash; all the way up to where they disappear into the anchoring concrete structure. I count 16 or 18 diminutive high tension bolts at the point of anchor under the concrete slab. That&rsquo;s it. I slowly run my fingers along them to take in that sense of powerful resistance to shear. Sometimes the enormous inherent strength of steel is both startling and a source of comfort. And then one wonders why one doesn&rsquo;t see such architecture more often. Honest, brutal, guts-out, there for all to see, workmanlike, beautiful in its sheer expression of the forces that hold the building up, and of course, together. Like those beautiful tension trusses no one unfortunately looks up to see at Bombay&rsquo;s Crawford Market, or that heroic concrete lattice that held up the sadly demolished Hall of Nations in Delhi. Architecture derives its sense of expressiveness and beauty from the articulation of material and technique, structure and joinery, assembly and construction. The staircase treads are industrial grating with no risers. So I can see all the way out on the sides and to the bottom &mdash; to where the Koi fish are doing their lazy laps four floors below. Through the grating. Through the loose-fit detailing of the staircase structure. Through the ever-so-minute gap between the office floors volume and the staircases that slide past each other without any structural connections, as if they have no business to do with each other. I should be terrified &mdash; after all I can barely look down a balcony on the third (or second?) floor. Instead, I feel this sense of exhilaration. I am elated, in fact! It&rsquo;s been a while since I walked on something that&rsquo;s pretty daring &mdash; structurally I mean &mdash; where one is so viscerally in emphatic connect with the forces at play, where the otherwise hidden structural elements are naked. So you stand naked too before it &mdash; observing, interacting, touching, feeling, gripping, grasping &mdash; a tactile engagement with phenomena and elements, few or none of which are redundant or exist as mere embellishment. This is like lying naked next to another human being, exploring. I keep walking through the building as if in a state of utter enchantment. Madhusudhan later shows me pictures of yours truly touching and (hugging?) stuff; like a steel hanger, for instance. I can recall that yes, I also touched the narrow, tapering base of the concrete portal when I was down on the ground floor like it were a trunk of a tree &mdash; living, breathing, heaving, doing exactly what it needs to do, with no sense of excess.<img src="https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/827/421069/5e615090bcd7a/1583435641731.jpg"" owidth=847 oheight=1129" style="height:1129px; width:847px" />Last month, I wrote in these pages on another practice&rsquo;s newly-built office building. There I happened to mention about how this particular exalted building type becomes an expression of the practice&rsquo;s value-systems and world-view. I had also made a loose identification of how an architect&rsquo;s office can be a meta-narrative &mdash; by putting the practice&rsquo;s ideas to work. In this case, the practices whose world-views the building represents, skirts across both sides of the table. Here architect and engineer fashion a cohesive and unified language of expression and materialization, such that it brings to mind earlier 20th-century obsessions such as HighTech and Neo-Brutalism. Although I will make a strict differentiation here; in that in this case, expression of structure is not a stylistic statement or assertion but rather its underlying motive is to achieve an efficient, affordable alternative, using everyday and off-the-shelf materials, thereby achieving an aesthetic that results out of it. An assertion that is born out of sheer pragmatism and belief in the need for solutions that are both expressive, efficient and, I dare say, economical. In that sense, this building is closer to Alejandro de la Sota&rsquo;s beloved and timeless radical pragmatism, than James Stirling&rsquo;s troubled flash-in-the-pan pre post modernist neo-brutalism.<img src="https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/827/421069/5e615090bcd7a/1583435677655.jpg"" owidth=1282 oheight=855" style="height:855px; width:1282px" />Let me explain. More floors are stacked within the same height limit so there is a necessary argument of inner-city densification, being sited in North Bengaluru&rsquo;s ever-expanding urban tapestry. This is achieved not by compromising clear floor heights, but by minimising structural depth and thickness. As I walk under the keel of the &lsquo;impermanent&rsquo; suspended lower half of the building, I can reach out to touch the floor structure &mdash; a web of ever-so-slender steel sections supporting a plywood floor structure that&rsquo;s barely 50mm thick. The staircase treads are industrial galvanised steel grating &mdash; I balk when Madhusudhan mentions how cheap they are. Bengaluru&rsquo;s affable climate also means that the building can be naturally ventilated for most of the year, requiring minimum air conditioning. Dense tree cover and passive cooling strategies such as a shaded verandah buffer on the street-facing south fa&ccedil;ade and a wood-and-metal scrim ensure that the harsh sun is kept out for the most part, while the upper overhang of the &lsquo;permanent&rsquo; half of the building programme has a concrete deck floor structure that with its thermal mass offers a heat sink, while also shading the inset floors below.<img src="https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/827/421069/5e615090bcd7a/1583435707328.jpg"" owidth=847 oheight=565" style="height:565px; width:847px" />Programmatically, the building offers an inversion of the generic &lsquo;future-expansion-ontop&rsquo; model. Here, the fixed component of the building programme &ndash; architect&rsquo;s studio, offices and administration, and conference and meeting spaces &mdash; make up the upper two-storeyed-half of the building. These &lsquo;permanent&rsquo; (as both Madhusudhan and Manjunath call these) aspects of the programme are thus articulated in heavier, earthbound reinforced concrete, in this case, three slender sculpted concrete portal frames that reach up to the lowermost &lsquo;permanent&rsquo; level (the third floor) &mdash; off which are supported another set of lightweight steel portals for the floors above (in the opposite direction, and thus those brackets seen projecting off the outermost concrete portals that support the foot of the steel portals above). The future expansion is in this case, below &mdash; underneath the permanent ones &ndash; envisaged as two-storeyed steel web suspended off the concrete structure above.<img src="https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/827/421069/5e615090bcd7a/1583435816149.jpg"" owidth=1064 oheight=708" style="height:708px; width:1064px" />Thus the &lsquo;impermanent&rsquo; and flexible bit of the programme &mdash; as the designers prefer to refer to this &mdash; is conceived of in lightweight steel and plywood. To state a case in point, Madhusudhan points out how the two-storey high volume lacked an intermediate floor for a long time, while it was being used as a space for events. Recently let out for rent, the intermediate floor was built using plywood sheets over the existing steel frame. In case the users need to build an internal staircase, all they need to do is cut a hole in the plywood floor. The two halves of the programme are also distinctly wrapped: the lower suspended one in a light skin of glass and wood on all four sides and completely detached barring the steel ties at the lowermost level and the access bridges from the suspended staircase with the service spaces at the rear along with the elevator and staircase core. Thus there is a clear delineation of the building&rsquo;s anatomy akin to Louis Kahn&rsquo;s &lsquo;served&rsquo; and &lsquo;servant&rsquo; space. The upper half of the building is more opaque &mdash; with two sides in aluminum sheeting with the street-facing vitrine as the major source of light for the relatively shallow plan.<img src="https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/827/421069/5e615090bcd7a/1583435847214.jpg"" owidth=1064 oheight=851" style="height:851px; width:1064px" />The lower suspended floors impart the distinctive experience of being within a treehouse &mdash; loosely yet assuringly put together, lightweight, with floors that murmur as you move through them, free from all sides and offering panoptic vistas, through the belly of the forest &mdash; in this case the concrete portal structure &mdash; which then becomes this lantern close to the street level at night. The upper floors are more conventional in their experience, inflected by furniture that extends and reminds one of the building&rsquo;s daring structure &mdash; suspended, hanging, cantilevering.<img src="https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/827/421069/5e615090bcd7a/1583435877070.jpg"" owidth=635 oheight=846" style="height:846px; width:635px" />Walking around this diminutive building, one forgets its scale and becomes immersed in the grandeur of its gestures. The sense of space is alleviated and expanded within this constricted generic Bengaluru plot, even as soon as one walks in and becomes aware of the lack of any structural impedances on the sheltered ground, the low-hanging keel of the suspended floors that seem to reach down and graze their welcome, and the triple height explosions of vertical volume in those interstices around the hanging lantern &ndash; like when you walk through to the stair at the rear. Being suspended within this space upon the bridges that lead to the office spaces is another experience &mdash; as one&rsquo;s body traverses through a strange sense of being suspended between, and yet within, another body; a deeply phenomenal (and visceral) experience. And you need to touch that body. Thus the visceral finds its tactile foothold. The building is not perfect. The architecture has its rough edges. And within this it finds enough room to offer the user a sense of exhilaration and an immersive experience. That&rsquo;s what the best buildings do.

Architecture: A Daring and Visceral Pragmatism

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