A conversation with Anupama Kundoo

Anupama Kundoo is an ar­chi­tec­tural world trav­eller. She spreads her time between her office in the Indian town of Au­roville and Madrid, where she holds a pro­fes­sor­ship for af­ford­able housing. She studied in Mumbai and got her doc­tor­ate at TU Berlin. She is pre­sent­ing at the Venice Bi­en­nale of Ar­chi­tec­ture for the second time since 2012. We met with Anupama Kundoo at the opening of the bi­en­nale in Venice to talk about low-tech, high-tech and how she wants to al­le­vi­ate housing needs with a beacon of design.

At the 2016 Bi­en­nale of Ar­chi­tec­ture, you are pre­sent­ing a house pro­to­type called ‘Full Fill Home’. You’re using it to demon­strate the pos­si­bil­i­ties of fer­ro­ce­ment as a build­ing ma­te­r­ial.

It was Pier Luigi Nervi who in­tro­duced fer­ro­ce­ment to main­stream ar­chi­tec­ture with his shell struc­tures. He recog­nised that the in­trin­sic weight of con­crete had a detri­men­tal effect from a certain span width and tried to reduce the weight using fer­ro­ce­ment. It’s a ma­te­r­ial that can be made very thin; you don’t need more than two and a half cen­time­tres.

You use chicken wire for re­in­force­ment instead of steel. But it’s dif­fi­cult to eval­u­ate fer­ro­ce­ment struc­turally because the wire frame goes through every­thing. Unlike with steel-re­in­forced con­crete, tension and pres­sure zones are not struc­turally sep­a­rated. But fer­ro­ce­ment still has the same in­gre­di­ents: steel, sand, cement, water. Only the gravel is missing. My hope is that fer­ro­ce­ment can be used to build more square metres with much lower use of ma­te­r­ial.

‘Full Fill Home’ is based on the prin­ci­ple of mod­u­lar­ity. It’s created from fer­ro­ce­ment blocks.
The house is a con­ceiv­able ap­pli­ca­tion of modular build­ing blocks. The blocks are hollow and we utilise this space for storage or fur­ni­ture. The usable space of the home stretches into the empty space in the blocks. The house there­fore seems to be bigger than it is – it’s ac­tu­ally just three by five metres. You have a bed, a kitchen block, every­thing you need. ‘Full Fill Home’ is a simple so­lu­tion to the complex and arduous problem of pro­vid­ing housing

The pro­duc­tion is low-tech; builders can easily produce the fer­ro­ce­ment el­e­ments them­selves. It can be built within a week. But this house is not a uni­ver­sal so­lu­tion; we de­signed it for the trop­i­cal climate of south­ern India, which is why it is so open.

The pro­duc­tion of the house is low-tech, but the concept behind it in­volves German high-tech en­gi­neer­ing. We are working with Mike Schlaich from the In­sti­tute of Civil En­gi­neer­ing at TU Berlin on this project.

Our aim is to use as little ma­te­r­ial as pos­si­ble. We brought crafts­peo­ple from India to a work­shop in Berlin to work with Schlaich and his stu­dents on further de­vel­op­ing the fer­ro­ce­ment modules. After all, if you work the ma­te­r­ial with a high degree of skill, you can exploit its prop­er­ties even better. For example, we ex­per­i­mented with tex­tiles as a re­in­force­ment ma­te­r­ial. Several of the blocks have re­mained in Berlin and are being ex­per­i­mented with further. The project is en­rich­ing for every­one in­volved – it’s in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary and in­ter­cul­tural.

You spoke about your in­ter­est in calls for tenders. How would you de­scribe the German ten­der­ing system?

It’s a huge problem, not just from a po­lit­i­cal point of view, but also from a cul­tural build­ing per­spec­tive. The ten­der­ing world is full of in­ces­tu­ous re­la­tion­ships. What I mean is that it’s always the same players in the game. Nothing can really happen in this type of sit­u­a­tion. You see certain design types sub­mit­ted again and again over a period of three, four years and then they die down. There’s no real con­tri­bu­tion to the build­ing culture! Because the re­quire­ments get more and more de­tailed: we have to cal­cu­late facade areas and write pages and pages on bar­rier-free con­struc­tion. Then along comes an entire army of as­ses­sors who review the whole thing in the eval­u­a­tion phase and then submit a report to the panel of judges where they say a design is ‘bar­rier-free but to a limited extent’

Who does that benefit? They spend 6,000 or 7,000 euros to get this de­ter­mi­na­tion – and that’s not even taking into account the costs of the ar­chi­tects. It’s com­pletely useless for an ar­chi­tec­tural concept.

Where did this ob­ses­sion with detail come from?

The clients want to cover them­selves in all di­rec­tions. I think that’s the main reason why calls for tenders today are no longer drivers of in­no­va­tion like they were before. Ar­chi­tects are shack­led by the huge cat­a­logue of re­quire­ments they have to meet and have much less time to spend on their con­cepts.

What is your opinion of the re­stricted access to calls for tender – and there­fore the reduced op­por­tu­ni­ties for young ar­chi­tects to win con­tracts?

We've been having this debate for years, but our opinion is that there are always ways to get by. When you’re a young firm, you can join forces with es­tab­lished ar­chi­tects, which is what just hap­pened in the call for tenders for the Bun­destag vis­i­tors centre. Two young ar­chi­tects worked to­gether with a larger firm and won the bid. The com­plaints about not having access are some­what ex­ag­ger­ated. Before when my brother and I did not yet have our li­censed ar­chi­tect stamp, we found someone to apply their stamp on our behalf. But we are ad­vo­cates of open com­pe­ti­tion. Our theory is that if all calls for tender are open, the numbers of par­tic­i­pants will reg­u­late them­selves.

To spread your concept, you need part­ners.

Def­i­nitely. Housing is a problem that you cannot solve alone. For us the project is a beacon of design: we are showing what we can do and hoping that others see it.

The in­dus­try has already started paying at­ten­tion, and that is im­por­tant. We built and ex­hib­ited a further pro­to­type in India. At the moment we are testing it in our office.

We also have an order to build twenty of these houses. But the ‘Full Fill Home’ is just the start. Fer­ro­ce­ment has so much more po­ten­tial.