The Brick Kiln House is located in a small village in Munavali, close to Alibaug, Maharashtra. While driving through Maharashtra one may find several brick kilns - with an evocative, mastaba-like presence, scattered across the landscape. Often unnoticed, the brick kiln is a manufacturing unit of sorts involving labour, material and the networks of demand in the building industry. In this project the heavy-duty and active complex of these kilns became the design cue for a weekend home, a retreat from hectic city life.
For us the act of building is a process of engaging with the tool box of architecture, its materials and its values. The bricks in this house are more like pieces collected from the vast environment of kilns and architectural history that celebrated the brick.
The house rests in a three-acre plot which is partly a grove of mango and tamarind trees. Part of the plot was four feet lower and was an unkempt paddy field. The front of the property is a not so busy asphalt road. The design was informed by site features like foliage, orientation, aspect, and wind and rain direction. Not only were all the existing trees retained but two hundred more trees were planted on the site.
The house is only a stack of bricks in a grove to a passerby, but once you enter it, it opens up as a farm building with verandahs enclosing a courtyard with a pool. It consists of two main wings sitting at right-angles around an awkwardly leaning tree.
Here the brick is not burdened to be a weave of jaalis, or form patterns that we may identify with regional interpretations of the material and lifestyle within architectural paradigms. The brick is material, it is landscape, it holds within it blemishes that came from its making process, and these now become part of the home.
It is typical of Indian country houses to have peculiarly dark interiors offering respite from the sun–scorched outdoors. In response to this, here every room is cut on two sides with openings, supporting easy cross ventilation and ingress of just the right amout of light.
The living room has a curious shed-like volume where the materials of the house come together rather loosely insinuating incompleteness and creating a sense of being immersed in the vegetation around.
Every experience allows for an intimate interface with the outdoors, in marked opposition to urban life. Here the bathroom, which sits in the grove, is partially open to sky.
The country home seeks to forget its architecture, or architecture will simply become landscape, nature and environment...
