Soft Thresholds: The Context As Generator Of Practice

Held in New Delhi in 2017, the second edition of the Cyrus Jhabvala Memorial Lecture, delivered by architect Rahul Mehrotra, focussed on why it is necessary to go beyond polarised binaries during the making of architectures — soft thresholds and spaces — that are visually and physically porous, plural in spirit and expression, and, most critically, encompassing of context.

- Rahul Mehrotra

As a point of entry and exit, a threshold has a dual coding in society as both a physical and symbolic marker of separation and connection. Thresholds are often explicitly hard-edged or even brutal in their expression, demarcating rigid boundaries, as in the definite lines of walls, barricades, and security checkpoints in buildings, around cities, or across larger territories. Too often, thresholds also divide human activity or communities according to social, ethnic, national, or economic characteristics. Architecture and planning can unwittingly contribute to these different forms of physical separation, especially in ways made visible through their practitioners’ interpretations of culture, religion, or legislation. As the academic disciplines that inform spatial practices, architecture and planning are themselves often similarly separated by disciplinary thresholds, inhibiting porosity between fields of research. By definition,an individual discipline is necessarilyorganised around a self-referential center of discursive production, but this often happens at the expense of the richness found at the intersection of multiple disciplinary perspectives. Is architecture, in its compulsive drive to create the autonomous object, inherently hardening the thresholds separating it from other disciplines and, by extension, reproducing those schisms within the built environment? Can architecture and planning intentionally construct soft thresholds — linesthat are easily traversed, even temporarily erased — thereby allowing for multiple perspectives across different modes of research and practice and catalyzing disciplinary and social connections? What, then, is the physical expression of a soft threshold — a space that is visually and physically porous, plural in spirit, encompassing of its context, and yet rigorous in its expression? Architects working in India, as well as many other parts of the globe, confront these questions and challenges in