In the centre of the gallery at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, there’s a big ball of manure wrapped with twine, like a gift from the world’s largest dung beetle. It is surrounded by an assortment of primitive seats, some hacked out of chunks of granite, others fired from slabs of clay, all encircled by a bamboo enclosure that has the look of a shamanic hut.
Other curious props are arranged around the space, like offerings awaiting the start of a ritual. There is a carved stone block slathered in bitumen and adorned with gold leaf. It sits next to a little altar covered in chalk and a dark ball wrapped with white thread, inside a conical bamboo cage. There are tiny clay models of what could be temples, and intricate landscapes featuring steps carved into blocks of asphalt, echoing Indian stepwells. Above it all, a bronze bell hangs from the ceiling, as if ready to announce the beginning of whatever occult proceedings are about to occur.
The high priest and creator of this cosmic tableau is the Indian architect Bijoy Jain; the name of his religion, Studio Mumbai. A tall, imposing figure, dressed in a long, dark lungi skirt, with swept-back silver hair and a penetrating gaze, Jain has built a mythic aura around his practice over the past two decades. His buildings are praised for their timeless air, deploying raw elements of basalt, bamboo, concrete and earth to create homes around courtyards and pools of water that feel in tune with their tropical surroundings. While modern Mumbai tends to favour glass and glitz, Jain summons a premodern sensibility, drawing on vernacular forms and traditional craftsmanship to channel an ancient sense of place.
The aesthetic might be primitive, but Jain’s clients are a rarefied bunch. He has built villas for India’s elite, created a range of papier-mache furniture for French fashion house Hermès, and he is working on a rammed-earth winery in Avignon. His chairs are sold for thousands of euros by a Belgian gallery, while his work features in international biennales and the collections of major museums.
Like other self-styled reclusive masters, Jain is known for his exacting standards, his tough work ethic, and the length of time it takes him to build anything. When asked what it takes to work with him, one of his clients simply says: “Patience.”
At the age of 58, Jain has downsized his studio and now seems keen to be seen as an artist, eager to transcend the earthly realm of commissions for a higher spiritual plane. Hence the exhibition in Paris, Breath of an Architect, a long way from your standard architecture show. There are no models of his buildings, no drawings or photos of celebrated projects. Instead, Jain has created “a space of contemplation and calm, an invitation to slow time down”. Visitors are encouraged to linger and explore their “emotional relationship with space”. There are panels of woven brambles on the walls, plinths of plaster and mud on the floors, gnomic bamboo structures hanging from the ceiling. Downstairs, there’s a grid of little stone sculptures displayed like ornaments at a garden centre. But there is not a caption or wall-text in sight, leaving many gallery-goers bemused.
“I want visitors to make their own story,” says Jain, in his slow, methodical manner, as if imparting a profound truth with every breath. “When you hear Mahler, there is no text. When you fall in love, you don’t have any explanation. Beauty, or otherwise – that is all that matters.”
A few weeks earlier, in an attempt to unravel the enigma, I travelled to Mumbai to meet the architect in his studio and see work in production. Shielded by a high, solid steel gate in the former textile mill neighbourhood of Byculla, Jain’s compound unfolds as a lush oasis. His practice is based at the back of a complex of six courtyard homes (including his own) that he built here in 2014, flanking a planted path on the ruins of a former warehouse. It’s an oasis of calm amid the chaotic bustle of India’s most populous city (20 million and counting).
Inside, it looks less like an architect’s office than an alchemist’s workshop. Shelves are lined with jars of natural pigments and silkworm cocoons. Glass cabinets brim with models made of tiny individual clay bricks and hair-thin threads of bamboo. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, workers are busy conjuring Jain’s visions as he drifts between them barefoot, advising and admonishing in turn. Some spin silk into long spools of thread to be stretched taut to form seats. Others rub dye into slender bamboo canes to be knotted together to make benches. One is sanding what was once a solid tree trunk into the form of a chair while the architect looks on to ensure the radius between the back and seat is just so.
“I don’t believe in the conventional separation of architects and artisans,” says Jain. “Here, the process is not one of instruction, but of collective exchange. I don’t have an office or a desk. There are no drawings. It’s about a mutual understanding of posture, weight, stories.” He bristles whenever his practice is described as sustainable, or praised for using local materials and reviving traditional crafts. “There is a sentimentality about the artisan,” he says. “This is not that. It’s about using what is readily available.” Where does he see his work in the broader context of Indian architecture? “I am part of a much more complex organism,” he says. “It’s an ethos, not bound by geographical boundaries.”
Born in Mumbai in 1965, Jain recalls having a visceral reaction to modern architecture at an early age. He remembers being driven to Chandigarh with his family when he was seven to see the brutalist concrete capital of Punjab and Haryana, designed by Le Corbusier in the 1950s. “We stopped outside the Secretariat building,” he recalls. “I had never experienced anything of that enormity – and I had a very severe response. I didn’t get out of the car.”
He later studied architecture in Mumbai, then at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, before moving to Los Angeles to work as a model-maker for Richard Meier for four years, where he honed his carpentry skills. In the US, he became intoxicated by the work of macho land artists such as Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and Richard Serra, gaining a taste for elemental, tectonic heft. After a brief stint in London (“The weather was not to my liking”), he returned to India in 1995 to establish his studio in Alibag, a coastal area near Mumbai, where he lived in a basic hut to reconnect with the landscape and “explore what it meant to live and work with the elements”. There, he endured monsoons, days without electricity and venomous snakes. “Had I known what I would have to go through,” he says now, “there’s no way I would have gone!”
In Paris, a white panel hangs on the gallery wall, inscribed with a dark blue circle. It is an architectural drawing, in Jain’s eyes, of part of a textile studio he built in Bhogpur, north of Delhi, in 2017. Here, in the foothills of the Himalayas, he created a campus for Japanese textile designer Chiaki Maki, where four L-shaped buildings define a loose courtyard housing spaces for dyeing, spinning and weaving, with a round water basin in the middle – represented by that momentous circle in the show. The buildings are built of brick and lime plaster, with stone columns and beams from Rajasthan, and bamboo from Bengal. As usual, every detail was agonised over, with bespoke door hinges, electrical boxes and cabinetry meticulously assembled over four drawn-out years. “We were really sweating,” says Maki, breaking off from stirring a big barrel of fermenting indigo leaves. “After three and a half years, we said: ‘Bijoy, we have to start working!’”
The buildings have aged before their time. The painted steel beams have spalled and the lime plaster walls are stained with mildew, while the bamboo ceiling suffered an infestation and has had to be replaced with fabric, which is now spotted with mould. Jain says they are working on a solution. Maki’s own studio wing is built in a more rustic style, with bamboo walls plastered with mud and dung, and an earthen floor.
“We have to redo the floor after every monsoon season,” she says, “and it got so hot I had to move out. It’s so impractical, but I still love these natural materials.” Despite the constant need for repairs, she seems happy. But it is strange, for an architect who spent so long immersed in the elements, that his buildings don’t seem particularly resistant to them.
The other project we visit together is an apartment for a young pharmacist that Jain recently created on the 17th floor of a luxury tower block on Mumbai’s Worli Sea Face coast. As you enter, it looks as though there has been an explosion in a brick factory: the concrete walls are covered in pink dust, the floors are carpeted wall-to-wall with tiny bricks and an octagonal brick dais stands in the centre of the room. A single pink concrete sofa faces out to sea, while pieces of Jain’s woven bamboo furniture are placed here and there.
“We fired all of the bricks here in the apartment,” he says, describing how the octagonal dais serves as a latent memory of the kiln they built on site. Why do such a thing? “I wanted to go down into the ground of the city and bring the clay up into the sky.” In the exhibition, a little octagonal brick model hangs on the wall, which possibly alludes to this project – or perhaps it doesn’t. It’s unlikely a visitor would ever know.
Pondering the details of Studio Mumbai’s work, such as a pair of tables made of thousands of minuscule bricks, it’s hard not to think of the hours of manual labour involved in their production. Back in the studio, I ask Jain about his relationship with his workers, and his reputation as a hard taskmaster. Former employees have complained of late nights and harsh conditions. On the careers website Glassdoor, Studio Mumbai receives 2.3 stars. “If you respect your wellbeing,” says one review, “do not go.” But the intensity clearly appeals to some: a four-star review from last summer reads: “Working full-time, even 24/7, eating, sleeping, living there. So intense, that a week may seem a month to you … You need to surpass your own limits every day. Good luck.”
“You have to give your life to it,” Jain says, matter-of-factly. “It’s not just a job. It’s a choice that a person makes for themselves, about what they want to experience. No one is forced to do anything – they can always leave.” He laments that too many graduates see architecture offices “like fast food”, spending a year here and a year there to bolster their CV. Instead, young architects must “come with the right mindset and have resilience”. Jain insists that all employees are properly paid and given time off, and that no one joins the office without prior knowledge of the expected working hours. I ask what he thinks of the recent global movement to unionise the architecture profession, and he looks blank. “You tell me when things get unionised,” he says. “It’s interesting that we don’t talk about self-governance. It seems we’re creating another state.”
So what’s next for Jain, after the villas, furniture collections and art exhibitions? “I want to open my own small bronze foundry,” he says. “I don’t know why, but I feel motivated to explore fire as a material.” Might he one day turn his talents to some of his country’s pressing needs, tackling urban issues and public housing? “When it expresses itself, absolutely. But you allow things to come to you. I am already building cities here – they are just in miniature.”
• Bijoy Jain/Studio Mumbai: Breath of an Architect is at the Cartier Foundation, Paris, until 21 April.
