FINANCIAL TIMES FEBRUARY 10/FEBRUARY 11 2007 ★ HOUSE & HOME 9

H O U S E & H O M E

WORK IN PROGRESS

Taking the wraps off an ancient artIn the first of a series, Janice Blackburn talks to Indian designer Gunjan Gupta about modern furniture inspired by the opulence of the Mughals

In some respects, GunjanGupta’s career mirrors theprogression of India from athird-world country stuck inits past to a sophisticatedsociety competing on a glo-bal stage.

Gupta grew up in subur-ban Mumbai and after highschool studied interiordesign at the Sophia Poly-technic, a school famous fortextiles. She says the pro-gramme “wasn’t great” butshe parlayed it into anapprenticeship with VarshaDesai, a leading interiordesigner in India with manyprominent industrialist fami-lies for clients.

Although the “tradition-ally opulent old style” wasnot exactly one Guptawanted to replicate, theexperience gave her anopportunity to “explore theworld of luxury”, travellingto top furniture fairs andporing over the best cata-logues. This bought hersome time since she was still“figuring out what to do”with her own career.

In 2000 she married andrelocated with her husband –an environmental engineer –

to Delhi, where she discov-ered Sharma Farm, a vastwarehouse complex packedwith antiques and exotic arte-facts from every corner ofIndia. She describes it asinspirational. “It put me intouch with the idea that therewas a history to many tradi-tional skills,” she explains.

She began to travel aroundthe country seeking outsmall artisan workshops andrare materials and, inJaipur, unearthed a tech-nique that intrigued her. Sil-ver and gold wrapping was atype of ornamentation his-torically used on Mughalthrones as a way of display-ing their value while alsodemonstrating attributes ofpurity in a socio-religiouscontext. It is documented asbeing the oldest form of fur-niture design in India(referred to in sacred Hindutexts such as the Rig Veda,Mhabhatara and Ramayana)but most modern-day exam-ples “are very degraded andof poor quality”, Gupta says.

Having decided that shewould revive and reinterpretthe craft by applying it to herown contemporary furniture

designs, she enrolled in Lon-don’s St Martins College ofArt. This was not an easyleap. She had a two-year-olddaughter, Sitara, at the timeand so negotiated to studyfor a two-year research-basedmasters degree, juggling hertime between London (fourweeks each semester), Delhi,Jaipur and Udaipur. With thesupport of her husband andmother and the encourage-ment of Simon Fraser, coursedirector at St Martins, shealso developed prototypes ofsilver-wrapped furniture.

At her graduation show inJuly 2006, she showed threestunning, minimal, silver-wrapped pieces. Luckily, shesays, “people loved them”and in September shelaunched her newly formedcompany Wrap at London’s100% Design trade fair. Itwas an ambitious first step.But “I wanted to testwhether there really was amarket for something asinsane as gold- and metal-wrapped furniture,” she says.

The gamble paid off. Fol-lowing favourable press cov-erage not only in the UK butalso from as far afield as

Russia, Elle Décor gave heran award for her DiningThrone, a wooden chairwrapped in gold leaf andthick sheets of pure silver,and Eastern Recline, a lowIndian-inspired loungingchair. Pamploni, the Florence-based silver manufacturer,has asked her to design acollection and well-knownNew York interior designerPeter Marino is interested inher making reflective walltiles for him in gold and sil-ver. Maithili Ahluwaliea,owner of Mumbai designspace Bungalow Eight, hascommissioned an exclusiverange to launch this sum-mer. And Aston Martin haseven contacted her about asilver-wrapped car interior.

Gupta now has two full-time employees working inher Dehli design studio andhas linked up with a team ofcarpenters that makes thewooden frames for tables andchairs. These are then sent tobe wrapped by a communityof skilled artisans in Jaipur.Production takes six to eightweeks and the pieces arepriced from £500 to £1,500,although the seed money for

the business came from herinterior design career savingsand from family.

The next big step willcome in May when Guptapresents her work at NewYork’s International Con-temporary Furniture Fairwith the support of the Brit-ish European Design Group.Polly Dickens, design direc-

tor of the group, also wantsthe designer to explorecheaper forms of the craftusing brass and white metalinstead of silver and gold.

Gupta is talented andsavvy, a woman focused onbuilding a profitable businessaround an ancient art. Justlike India itself, she is a workin progress.

Aston Martin haseven contactedher about asilver-wrappedcar interior

A giant with an eye on ‘the little man’In a new exhibition, Shigeru Ban pays tribute to his fellow architect and humanitarian Alvar Aalto, writes Nicole Swengley

F inland’s Alvar Aalto was one ofthe great 20th century archi-tects. Japan’s Shigeru Ban isone of today’s brightest stars.Aalto, who died in 1976, worked

primarily in his home country throughan age in which hand-craftsmanshipsegued into industrialisation. Ban, 50,studied in the US and now worksbetween offices in Tokyo and Paris,navigating an increasingly computer-ised and automated industry.

The two men come from differenttimes and cultural, economic and tech-nological backgrounds. Their work dif-fers aesthetically and technically. Yetthey are united by a design philosophythat ranks humanitarian values abovestyle. And that is why London’s Barbi-can Art Gallery has asked Ban to co-curate the first UK exhibition celebrat-ing Aalto’s work.

“I hold Aalto’s compassionateapproach to architecture in the highestregard,” Ban says. “His ultimate goalas an architect was to promote comfortand happiness to ‘the little man’ – toordinary people. His great innovationswere not just intended for his ownartistic expression but were an explora-tion of ways to distribute better hous-ing and living conditions to the greaterpart of society.”

So Aalto worked not only on innova-tive private residences and civic and

cultural buildings but also low-costhousing and industrial estates. Hefocused on the details – furniture,light fittings, glassware, textiles, jew-ellery and book covers – as well as thebig picture – town and even regionalplanning projects. Taking the environ-ment as an inspiration, he employedor created organic shapes and pro-moted the use of natural and localmaterials. His rational approach toproblem solving resulted in some won-derful ideas. And a capacity to explorea structure’s emotional and psycholog-ical impact led him to believe that“architecture is not mere decoration;it is a deeply biological, if not a pre-dominantly moral matter”.

For Ban – who founded the VolunteerArchitects Network charity in 1995 andis known for designing emergency shel-ters and temporary housing for survi-vors of wars and natural disasters inRwanda, Japan, Turkey, India and SriLanka – Aalto’s ethos is deeply reso-nant. In fact, Ban’s eureka moment –his realisation that he could use light-weight, low-cost paper tubes structur-ally – happened during his involvementwith an earlier exhibition of the archi-tect’s work at Tokyo’s Axis Gallery in1986.

This came two years after his firstin-person exposure to Aalto-designedbuildings as a photographer’s assistantin Finland. “In Aalto’s architecture Ifound a space created to complementits context,” Ban recalls. “It was the

kind of space that one wouldn’t be ableto comprehend through photographsand text in a book; one would need toexperience it on the spot in order tounderstand the quality of it.”

Although Ban’s architecture is differ-ent from Aalto’s, it is clearly fired byit, with natural shapes and innovativeuses of materials. Aside from the inter-national aid work, he has been laudedfor private homes, including the Cur-tain Wall House, which has glass wallsfolding back to open the rooms, ele-mentally, on two sides, and the PictureWindow House, in which a terrace,

garden and front room are designed asa single space.

For the Barbican exhibition, Ban hascreated curving cardboard tube wallsand platforms and undulating paperceilings, transforming the gallery inte-rior. He and Juhani Pallasmaa, formerdirector of the Museum of FinnishArchitecture in Helsinki, have selected15 key projects to chart Aalto’s careerand designed analytical models to showhow he used materials, handled spaceand dealt with details.

These sectional models are, in them-selves, quite beautiful. The one of the

House of Culture in Helsinki, famousfor its undulating brick walls, showsnot only their shape but also a cross-section of structural brick-work, whilethe Baker House model shows howlight was diffused within the Massa-chusetts Institute of Technology dormi-tory. Alongside these are specially com-missioned photographs of Aalto build-ings that highlight the beauty of hisshapes, textures and details.

Ban thinks the chosen projects arefundamental to understanding Aalto’sarchitectural philosophy and directlyrelate to contemporary building

dilemmas. Others include the PaimioTuberculosis Sanitorium, Villa Maireaand the AA System houses, all ofwhich are in Finland.

The first project embraced numer-ous humane concepts – splash-freesinks for patients’ rooms, mobile sidetables that double as patients’ diningtables, sloping floors near windows toavoid an accumulation of dust anddouble-glazed windows to keep outcold air. Aalto’s attention to detailmeant finding the exact angle for abirch bentwood chair that would bestaid a sanitorium patient’s breathing.

Examples of it are still produced andsold today.

Villa Mairea epitomises Aalto’s sig-nature style in terms of space arrange-ments, use of materials (forest-likevertical wooden pillars) and its nod totraditional Japanese architecture,rustic Finnish farms and continentalmodernism. The architect aimed to har-monise buildings within their settingsand blurred indoor-outdoor boundaries,often reversing convention. So the villaliving room became a forest space witha corner garden gazebo. Furnishingsand lighting designed for the housewere later produced commercially byArtek, the company that he set up withthe villa owner’s wife, Maire Gul-lichsen, and design critic Nils GustavHahl, and which still exists today.

Because Aalto hated the idea of mass-produced houses, he strived for “flexiblestandardisation” – a way of offeringmaximum variation through differentbuilding parts, using them as “livingcells”. This concept is exemplified bythe prefabricated wooden AA Systemhouses commissioned by the AhlstromCorporation in 1940 and intended torelieve wartime housing shortages.

Two other projects – La Maison Car-rée in France and Scinasoki, an Aalto-planned Finnish town – are presentedalongside one another to show how hisideas about space, access and flow wereconsistent, regardless of scale. Thehouse’s hall serves as a communalspace, much like a village square.Tomoko Sato, the Barbican Gallerycurator, observes that Aalto’s civicbuildings were also designed like com-fortable houses rather than monumen-tal institutions. “His interest was tomake people feel at home, not to createa hierarchy,” she says.

Aalto’s focus on lighting is highlightedby his Viipuri City Library reader’sroom, where rows of cylinder-shaped toplights minimise the shadows cast underreaders’ hands, and the Church of theThree Crosses in Imatra, Finland, whereskylights and sculptured white wallstransform the building into a luminouslight source. Aalto “explored the mostefficient ways to take in natural light inthe northern latitudes,” Ban explains.“When he designed a building, he alwaysseemed to have been conscious of incor-porating an efficient system to diffuse[light] indoors.”

It’s ironic that the venue for thisexhibition is the Barbican Centre – aplace that is architecturally uncom-fortable, cluttered and not easy to use.It’s a far cry from the “earthly para-dise” that Aalto believed to be “theultimate goal of the architect”. Still,thanks in large part to Ban’s involve-ment, the show is an interesting one,that says as much about the future asit does about the past.

“I hope [it] will raise questions aboutarchitecture’s role today and generatedebate about issues such as sustaina-bility and resources that are commonto all of us,” Sato says. At the veryleast, visitors can observe the interplaybetween two architectural soulmates.

‘Alvar Aalto: Through the Eyes ofShigeru Ban’ runs from February 22-May 13 at the Barbican Art Gallery,London. A rare talk by Shigeru Banabout his work and Aalto’s legacy willtake place at 7pm on February 20.Tel: +44 0845-120 7550; www.barbican.org.uk/gallery

‘It was the kind ofspace that one wouldn’tbe able to comprehendthrough photographsand text in a book’

‘Forest space’: the living room at Villa Mairea. Top, l-r, Alvar Aalto, details of his work and Shigeru Ban Eva and Perlti Ingervo/Shigeru Ban Architects

Gunjan Gupta, and, left, some of her work Amit Bhargava/WPN

FEBRUARY 10 2007 Section:Weekend Time: 7/2/2007 - 16:56 User: spencern Page Name: RES9, Part,Page,Edition: RES-01, 9, 1