Studio Mumbai architects build a slice of their city inside London's V&A Museum

1:1 Architects Build Small Spaces is an on-going exhibition that uses the landscape of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London as a test site for compact architecture, the sort that makes up much of Mumbai. 

The museum invited 19 architects to submit proposals that responded to spaces within the museum, but with the overriding premise that the concept should not be grand in scale but personal and sensitive, "to examine notions of refuge and retreat", issues that tend to get lost in most of today's grand projects and commissions. 

From these 19 concept submissions, seven were selected for construction at full-scale, and one of them was by Studio Mumbai, an architectural practice founded by Bijoy and Priya Jain in 2005. 

"Small spaces such as these can push the boundaries and possibilities of creative practice. A shift in scale towards smaller, bespoke structures encourages a heightened sensitivity to materials, texture and proportion. A renewed clarity emerges, allowing architects a freedom of expression that often struggles to survive in larger building projects," says the museum's exhibition note. 

I couldn't help thinking how no one had conceived of this, as a curatorial venture, in a city like ours. In Mumbai space is at an unimaginable premium and the inequality of circumstance continues to shock. Here, a driver's rent for a 10x10 square foot slum tenement could be more expensive than a 1940s rent controlled 2,500 square foot South Bombay apartment his employer could be staying in. At the V&A exhibition which I visited in London, I was happy to see Mumbai's problems represented.

Mumbai architect Bijoy Jain, along with co-curators Kate Dineen and Michael Anastassiades, found a home for his installation in the Cast Courts under a spectacular glass roof and amid marble copies of iconic European classical statuary.

Outside the room was a boxed video display and interview with the architects who spoke about why they had chosen a simple, unauthorized Mumbai tenement as their submission and placed it in the middle of all the grandeur of this room. The unauthorized structure had occupied a narrow corridor between two buildings next to the Studio Mumbai offices and has since been demolished. But here at the V&A, the model of a humble dwelling placed amid Italian splendor preserves its memory. 

Using two "pukka" or real/existing walls, an Indian family of eight carved out their own intimate living area, even incorporating an existing tree within a "courtyard". Duchamp may have championed the "found object" and made it a sensation in the gallery setting, but it is these "found spaces" in the megalopolises of the world, from Sao Paulo to Mumbai, that are truly modern. 

In their usage of freely found material for construction and the clever sectioning of "found" space; in their accounting for utilitarian needs like light and movement in tight boundaries, Mumbai's architectural marvels display an ingenuity of functionality over aesthetic, and yet wandering through some of these homes makes one marvel at the innate design sense apparent in the execution. 

Studio Mumbai brings all these aspects to the fore in their slice of Mumbai at the V&A. And a literal slice it is. Sandwiched between two walls, all you see is a narrow L-shaped structure as you walk into this naturally flood lit gallery. The walls of the installation are pierced by tiny openings, seemingly randomly from the outside. But once you enter you realize nothing is random. The narrowness does not seem oppressive anymore but intimate spaces are carved out precisely. Stairs here, a courtyard there, a tiny window framing a view to the outside all open to sky allowing light to stream through and perhaps a breeze to funnel through in its natural tunnel-like structure. An upstairs loft is a tiny eight-by-eight foot room, a functional space for sleeping -- no standing room here. A tiny window looks onto the courtyard. This is no glossy magazine loft living for an individual or couple, but a space used in rotation by one, very large Indian family. 

Studio Mumbai architects note that the real-life inspiration for their "In-between Architecture" project represents "...more than basic shelter. They are houses that consist of multifunctional spaces and include not only community living environments but also places for refuge, contemplation, worship. They are agile spaces that are capable to quickly adapt to personal and emotional needs." 

"These unauthorised settlements constitute more than half the city's built landscape," says the project note, "yet they are ignored in the official surveys of the urban footprint. Though seen as parasitic, they offer intelligent design solutions in a city where space is scarce and land values are escalating... The Studio Mumbai structure does not seek to replicate these dwellings in a literal manner. Instead, it proposes to distil the poetic qualities of these agile living spaces, their order, calm and dignity." 

Jain and his team reconstructed their chosen structure from scratch. Casting plaster moulds of the building stone which seems to resonate somehow with the mass of travertine in the Cast Courts' Italian setting. Cleaned up, and set up to delineate the architectural spaces and inter connectivity of low-roofed and open-to-sky elements in this narrow confine, Studio Mumbai's submission successfully manages to capture the clever adaptation, struggle and triumph of how an overwhelming proportion of Mumbai's population live: unauthorized, cramped, but with ingenuity and emotion. 

1:1 Architects Build Small Spaces runs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from June 15 to August 30 2010. View the image gallery of Studio Mumbai's "In-between Architecture" installation at photographer Pasi Aalto's portfolio. Or take a video tour with Studio Mumbai founder architect Bijoy Jain, as the installation was being set up.