Traces And Presences In The House Of Shadows

Conceived in multiple shredded layers, the Shadow House in Alibaug unravels myriad spaces, each rendered in a different intonation of light. These layers of the contemporary architectural envelope articulate the structure’s tectonic vocabulary — both for its design and landscape. Re-establishing a relation with the immediate outdoors, the living experience is designed to be gentle, dark, and quiet, with its hierarchy of volumes and spatial textures

- Sonal Sundararajan

Our homes in the city, efficient and hygienic, are spaces of transparency and light — exorcised of dust and darkness — and of mystery. As a counter to this, the ‘weekend home’ on the outskirts is a retreat from the functional time of the city and as its primary programme, it has the encounter between the body and the space of nature. There is an inherent opposition between architecture and nature, as architecture in its first impulse is the ordering of nature to its own demands. They also embody two opposing senses of time and space. One contrives to be unchanging and solid, while the other is characterised by growth and change. The house of shadows by SRDA, is configured around a tension, between the order of an architectural type and its encounter with the landscape. It is a mixed space, gathering into itself, traces of encounters between the landscape and the body that takes pleasure in it. On her blog, Samira describes her visits to the site. “By habit, I always go around the site when under construction, and find my quiet happy moments, after the haul of a gusty site meeting. This time, with the camera at hand, the building began to offer moments. A delightful serendipity of callously arranged objects, mostly building materials, soaked in the afternoon light, abstractions of stillness.” Perhaps the photograph can be used as a metaphor for the receptivity of the spaces and surfaces of the house to absorb incidental traces as memories of encounters with the landscape. The photograph is always a memory object, always denoting a lost moment and a presence. “It is the order of the natural world that imprints itself on the photographic emulsion….. it is nothing but a presence (one must continually keep in mind the magical character of the photographic image). Its reality is that of having-been-there, because in all photographs is the amazing evidence this took place in this way.” Photographs, like footprints, scr