Samira Rathod’s ‘Camera-House’ is an exploration in design reinventing for itself ideas of what architecture can be, from its elements, language and assumptions of appropriateness.
The padas and wadis in the peripheries of the old town are dotted with farmhouses and weekend homes, intermingled with resorts towards the beaches that are retreats for inhabitants of the city just across the water. The houses designed by Samira Rathod sit within this landscape, negotiating with these overlapping and intersecting geographies.
One of these houses, the ‘Camera-House’, stands on an anonymous flat landscape that eludes the desire for the picturesque. Here, trees and fields create an amorphous borderless expanse, with hills rising in the distance. The house itself is a low sprawl of rooms and corridors that allows it to disperse amongst the general scattering of trees and wild grass.
The house is made up of 2 volumes of living spaces connected by a bridge. It sits in a rough landscape with a few trees. As you enter the home, you are led by a long path flanked by a concrete block wall on one side, into a space that is at the intersection of the living spaces. This is a provisional verandah-like space that overlooks the pool. From the verandah space you perceive multiple scales - a staircase rises from it, the bridge cuts through it, the study-box overlooks into it, and tall steel columns prop up its roof while the space opens out to the expanse of pool and land. To the right of this space, the living room opens out. The living room is an open box, one side held by huge wall that is assembled out of lens-like openings that read simultaneously as camera lenses, potholes and pipes.
The house on the ground floor can be completely opened to the outside with low plinths that seem contiguous with the ground. The main bedrooms of the house are elevated on the upper levels. These are connected to each other by light bridges, suspended between the trees. The bridge that connects the 2 volumes intensifies the feeling of suspension with its light railings and flooring, and a roof that hangs precariously. The bedroom on one side is a scaled-up bunk bed accessed by a long walk across the bridge. The guest bedroom is tucked away underneath.
The house is but a playful collision. It is an assemblage of heterogeneous experiences of forms, spaces and materials. It makes references to the form of the camera - dismantled, tweaked and reassembled to become a house. Bison board, wood, and steel mesh each carry their own association while becoming window, railing and structure. Elements such as walls scaled up, exaggerated and dislocated, become actors setting up the drama of the house.
Rathod’s houses are unabashedly themselves: setting an urbane eye upon, and striking up conversations and frictions with, the amorphous rough landscape.
