No.124 — Read old posts here.
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Bhu.
Sa.
Dharti.
These all mean land in different languages.
We never saw land as an object that
we can level or exploit.
We see it as a living organism.
A vital and diverse ecosystem.
We always saw site as the context
and the architect both.
We recently fell into a long podcast conversation
with landscape architect Aniket Bhagwat,
where he poured his heart out.
He talked about what it means to
practice landscape architecture,
his own journey,
his father Prabhakar Bhagwat,
his studio work culture
and so much more.
He said the thing we'd been circling for years and waiting for permission to say out loud. Out of the many profound things he said on the podcast, his diagnosis of architecture as a profession was blunt.
Architects treat land like a flat, stainless-steel plate.
They level it,
draw on it,
build.
But land is an organism.
There are microbes in the soil.
The tuft of grass that keeps returning
to the same patch for a reason nobody
has thought to ask about.
It's an entire ecosystem.
Aniket says, “ You can't read an organism off a survey drawing. “
His studio spends months drawing sites:
including barren ones with nothing on them.
Drawing the texture.
Where the soil turns lumpy.
They have made drawings of how leaves fall,
because three different trees on a site drop differently:
some leaves settle into a soft bed, some scatter,
some are heavy and fall straight, some travel on the wind.
This shows you looked deeper.
This shows you care.
He further asks,
“ Have you been there at midnight?
Have you seen it at sunrise?
Have you stood on it at three in the afternoon in May,
when the sun is genuinely cruel?
Because if you haven't,
on what basis are you designing? “
One visit at 11 am with a measuring tape is not knowing a place.
It's like photographing a stranger and calling it a portrait.
We couldn’t have agreed more.
Instead of making incoherent wacky forms
using the latest software,
inspired by Western architects,
and imposing them on the land,
if we meditate and listen closely to the land,
it speaks to you.
Sometimes it takes more time.
But it speaks;
it tells you where the building should sit.
It can be anchored to a rock or a tree.
Or perch on top of the hill.
It will tell you where it wants you to repair it.
We see the land during monsoons,
how the water flows
and how it wants to travel naturally,
where it speeds up,
where it slows down.
We observe how the sun moves across the land in person,
not on software and simulations.
We notice how it forms the tapestries of light and shadow.
If the land is a living system,
a dead building sits on it like a stone on a chest.
From the moment concrete cures,
it can only degrade,
and its ending is rubble that nobody wants.
It doesn't participate in anything.
It sheds water rather than exchanging it,
holds heat rather than moderating it,
and makes the ground beneath impermeable
We choose to build more with mud and lime,
less with concrete.
A mud wall breathes,
it takes on humidity and releases it back,
moving moisture the way skin does.
Lime keeps curing for decades
and heals its own hairline cracks.
Timber contracts and expands with the seasons.
These materials have a metabolism.
They respond to weather,
they patina,
and at the end of a building’s life,
they return to the soil as food rather than as waste.
He described the landscape architect's job in a way we're going to steal outright:
Our job is that the land should be better
after the project than before it.
Not preserved.
Not minimally damaged.
Not net-zero.
Better.
Love and light,
Raghav and Ansh
P.S. - If you are on LinkedIn, let’s connect! You can also watch our previous videos on YouTube and subscribe to our channel as we publish more videos soon.
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What You Can Read - Design with Nature by Ian L. McHarg
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