Set In Stone

How does an architect aesthetically negotiate rows and columns in the world’s fastest-growing economy – but also do it sustainably? Anagram Architects founders Vaibhav Dimri and Madhav Raman have a master plan for minimalism.

One of the biggest talking points of the 2019 Kochi-Muziris Biennale is not a painting or an installation, but a temporary mound-like building in the heart of Cabral Yard. Created by Delhi-based design firm Anagram Architects, the Biennale Pavilion is a partially buried half-opaque, half-transparent steel-bamboo structure; one Raman calls a “koodaram” (“tent” in Malayalam). “It’s a counterpoint to the koothaamablam, the traditional performance space in Kerala temples. Our tent references it in form, but interrogates its formality.” The skeletal structure, built in a record two months, draws from the famous Chinese fishing nets of Kochi, “a remarkable symbol of its cultural syncretism.” Perhaps most crucially, the koodaram will be dismantled completely come March, allowing the land it was built on to “rejuvenate for the next biennale.”

Raman and Dimri’s collaboration began out of a mutual passion for collegiate theatre (while at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi). They founded Anagram in 2001, on the back of “not much more than mutual admiration and fresh air”. “We tried our hand at almost anything to do with design,” recalls Dimri. “We designed a print ad campaign for a now defunct underwear brand, sets for TV, film and bridal fashion shows, painted a giant mural at the entrance of a dodgy dive in the seamier end of Karol Bagh. Those years were hand-to-mouth and seat-of-our-pants.” In 2006, they received their first proper architectural commission: a “hand-me-down assignment from one of our seniors emigrating to Dubai,” to design the office for the South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre in Delhi. Housed in a red brick structure, with a façade that appears to undulate when the light is right, the space instantly put Dimri and Raman on international lists of rising stars.