45° Brick House

The house, by Indian Architects, which I particularly liked. How well they managed to combine modern architecture and pleasing patterns! Two years ago I wrote a post about an ethno-trend that seems to be emerging. This house is a fitting illustration.

A lot of vernacular humanized design has been lost and replaced by a unified international approach, where any pattern or pleasing excess is perceived as a crime against the idea of rationality. And of course this approach excluded "old," "naïve" art as a relic, and ethnic design seemed to threaten the globalist project.

I'm all for finding a balance. You don't have to throw the baby out with the water. Corbusier is good, but this radical lacks softness. A house is not only a machine for living, but also a place of aesthetic experience. The house should be pleasant for the child and the old lady, not just the man in the suit. A home should remind us who we are, where we come from, and where we are going.

It's interesting to be in good-quality "historic" buildings. When you get from the context of the decades in which my Soviet rational house is built into the context of the centuries, it's a different scale, a different perspective.

Ethnic style speaks to me on an even more general level - the level of millennia of human history. That's why it's so interesting to be in Indonesian villages. Traditional arts and crafts are alive there while building modern homes to please tourists. This unification gives birth to surprisingly comfortable and beautiful spaces.

Native patterns, carvings, weaving, give such nice filler.

Here are some details in the arch review on this house: archi.capital/howto/144