Beyond the measured house

Piyush Das & Zahra Yasmoon
(Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Dubai & VIT University, Vellore)




The presentation examines the historic domestic architecture in Southern India beyond its conventional reading through form, typology and climate response. Drawing upon documented rural dwellings from an inland agrarian landscape and matrilineal ancestral courtyard houses from the western coast, one investigates the houses as spatial systems constituted through gender, kinship, caste, ritual practice and the relations with the non-human world. One observes thresholds, courtyards, prayer spaces, cooking systems and the territorial systems of spaces where access and movements are conditioned by gender, family position, bodily & ritual state, and notions of purity. While the investigations expand to the idea of meaning of the biotic and the abiotic in the context of architectural narratives of the houses, it does pay attention to, and places measured documentation in dialogue with oral histories (while attempting to decode the dilemma of oral history vs. oral narratives) and situated accounts.