The Uncertainty Project

The dreary sameness of architecture calls for a renewal, where form follows malfunction and error becomes an effective tool of design

- Gautam Bhatia

Scholars often interpret tradition as a way of making that forbids personal design decisions, relying instead on ideals perfected in an unchallenged historic continuum. People build the way they have always built. Innovation, material and technique require no statement on paper. How then does such a cultural imperative adapt to digital technology, and that too in a country where architecture remains a hand-made product, built brick by brick, crafted in wood, poured by cement and chiselled in stone? Does its conception in an architect’s office conflict with the messy reality of the construction site? Is the disjunction between the two itself the cause of constructed errors?

In 2002, a project for a mountain resort came to the office with precise client instructions of introducing a state-of-the-art design into an area too long used to low-slung shabby stone and wood structures assembled by local masons. On paper, a series of cantilevered steel structures with wide swathes of glass, all hanging precariously offthe mountain edge were applauded for the daring structure, and the sparkling newness they introduced to a derelict hillside. The value of their intrusion was not measured against modes of comfort, familiarity or organic natural siting, but by the visible brand of uniqueness they would display. Their presence was further loaded by an international reading of the architecture. The glassiness was seen as a form of decisiveness and precision, clean and un-local, an architectural imagery controlled by design digitisation rather than local craft, and altogether liberated from historical tradition.