#ArchiSpeak
Mr. Vivek J Bhole, Principal Architect, Vivek Bhole Architects Pvt. Ltd.
One of the top architects in Mumbai, Mr. Vivek J Bhole has been transforming the skylines in the financial capital of the country and across India for more than a decade now, through his 200-strong formidable team.r. Vivek J Bhole
Inspiring people’s lives has been the biggest design motivation
I believe that whatever space we design – be it exterior or interior or a garden or a plaza or just a living room – it actually influences the lifestyles of people, changing their behavioral patterns completely. For example, I design an interior in which the dining space doesn’t have a TV in view. So people won’t watch TV while dining, which eventually becomes a culture. Thus, we say that we actually design the lifestyle of a person when we design a house. We believe that architecture creates spaces that inspire people’s lives in some way or the other. That is how we start a design, bringing into its fold the minute details having to do with the way we live.
Nowadays people are upgrading their lifestyles, moving into bigger spaces having more amenities like swimming pools, skating rinks, playfields, and stuff. So children can learn swimming, or learn to skate or have more spaces to play.
Avoiding redundancy is a key to the good residential design
I don’t subscribe to working out fancy residential designs like matching the shape of a building to that of a falcon or something else. I believe that a residential building should be like a human body, where every part has a definite purpose to fulfill. Likewise, every part of my residential building should fulfill some technical and functional requirement. We design in a way that no single element in a building has redundancy. If you see One Avighna Park, you won’t find any redundancy. You don’t have those entablatures or cornices or false columns or any such unnecessary additional burden on the building which can make both construction and maintenance complicated. I derive aesthetics through the functional elements in a building.
For instance, for One Avighna Park again, I had created a composition of double-height terraces through which the basic aesthetics and form of the building was derived. There was nothing additional to that. Similarly, the columns, which were a structural requirement, fulfilled an aesthetic demand as well. Likewise, every design element in the building has some purpose. And at the end of the day, the building has been appreciated for its aesthetic value only.
On evolving challenges and expectations vis-à-vis residential apartments
Of the many challenges in designing residential apartments, one is to create a balance between giving each apartment in a complex a wide view, and adequate privacy at the same time. In a 6 or 8-apartment complex – One Avighna is an 8-apartment complex – the challenge is to distribute the 3600 view among all the apartments in such a way that each apartment gets at least 2000 view.
Requirements vis-à-vis spaces outside the apartments are evolving rapidly too. Expectations are growing. Previously having a swimming pool was not mandatory, and rather people used to say that it would increase the maintenance cost. Nowadays one swimming pool doesn’t suffice. Many of my projects today have separate swimming pools for children, toddlers, and ladies. A few of my big projects even have aroma pools, beach pools and the like, a total of 6 pools in a complex! Automation again, which used to be a fashion afforded by a very few, and was limited to interiors only, has now become a need for the apartment outdoors as well. Like smartphones, apartments are getting smarter too.
Creating unique spaces in a fast-paced environment
See, when you work on multiple projects, you tend to repeat your ideas. But then, to attain novelty, what we do is that we keep upgrading or changing our software, i.e. the medium of thought process. We have been very fast in adapting new technology. Like we started working with Revit in 2006. People are learning now. Today we are able to look at the virtual rendering of the building while designing, and thus expand or widen our thought process much more compared to the earlier days of manual drafting when we had to depend entirely on our capacity to imagine. Having mastered Revit, we shifted to new software like Rhino, SketchUp etc. Any software has got its own limitations and your imaginations get confined to those limitations. So every time we change our software, our ideas evolve as well. You can create unimaginable spaces with Rhino, for instance, which help you to create those unique spaces.
The software is getting smarter and smarter today, enabling you to not just see the building while designing, but also to do various environmental simulations on the building. During the design process itself, you can track how much you are exposing your building to heat gain. However, even in the best of the best projects, you have 5 or 6 spaces featured as unique. You shouldn’t overdo and try to bring about uniqueness throughout a building. It would be like having a plate with way too many sweets on it. That doesn’t work.
Emerging innovative options in ACP in recent times are encouraging
I had used ACP predominantly until a phase came when it stopped offering anything new. We started finding alternatives to ACP. The kind of innovation that was called for wasn’t happening in ACP. 50 different suppliers used to offer similar kind of shades, and every building started to look the same, be it in China, UAE or India.
But in recent times we have started using ACP again, thanks to the various innovative options that have got introduced. We found Aludecor’s Rustic, Sand and other matt finishes. That is what my taste is. I love your Sand Series, which I am specifying in several projects of mine.
We always look for innovative options. And if this continues, ACP will certainly retain its pride of place.
On ZCM (Z-A), Zinc Composite Material with zinc at the top and Aluminium at the back
When I came across Aludecor’s Zinc Composite Material, I immediately started using it instead of pure zinc panels. The self-healing character of ZCM is a big advantage.
Uncontrolled development giving rise to ghost cities
From what has happened in China after the real estate slowdown, we have learnt that growth should be sustainable. Although right now in India we are still way behind in taking that kind of pace in development, when we do, we should know where to stop. Countries like China, the UAE, and the US didn’t know where to draw the line in development. It spiraled out of control, and development that wasn’t necessary went on till they got those ghost cities.
In China, since their real estate was entirely being financed by the banking sector, and was not dependent on sales, they kept on developing big malls and residential complexes at a speed so abnormally high that they ended up building almost 50 cities a year. Eventually, the cities having the capacity of accommodating 2.5 billion people far outgrew the actual population of 1.3 billion. So there are now many fully completed cities with fully completed residential complexes, malls etc., absolutely deserted. They have indeed overbuilt.
Enduring buildings contribute to sustainable architecture
For me, long-lasting buildings contribute to sustainability. And for that, we should choose materials with big lifespan so that we can minimize redevelopment. The whole world should shift its focus to long-lasting materials only.
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