Taking Time 

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, 2020

The fourth monographic exhibition of a series called

The Architect’s Studio, Anupama Kundoo – Taking Time showcases the process of the studio in acknowledgement of the value of time, cooperation and collaboration. As Kundoo says “Time is the most essential resource that we have access to as living beings.

What else do we have that is truly ours, except our own time? The work of our lifetime occurs as part of a large collective action in time and in space; we build knowledge collectively.  The first section of the exhibition, THE ARCHITECTURE OF TIME, gives the visitor access to her research archives, which include her first sources of inspiration, processed materials and architectural works. Under the categories Life, Mind and Matter, we see Kundoo’s investigations into the nature of materials, the tectonics of the earliest living beings, and mankind’s ways of processing the material, which she calls “the thinking hand”.

The collection of processed materials and tools falls into three categories: Stone and Wood, Earth, and Ferrocement and Concrete, each illustrated by a number of 1:50 models, all of which are crafted in a reduced scale, in the original materials.

On the balcony between the two large rooms of the exhibition is a 1:1 construction of a single residential cell that forms the basis of her Auroville co-housing project. The unit is an extension of her previous Full Fill Home prototype.

Kundoo’s work stands on three “legs”: her own practice, research and teaching.  Her research-oriented practice and practice-oriented teaching are embraced in the second main theme of the exhibition, CO-CREATION.  Here we see her concepts for a large urban development Line of Goodwill, for the city of Auroville. It is a prototype for high-density co-housing that rethinks urban habitat in the context of non-ownership of land.

Radical social innovations become possible through the creation of human-scale communities, including circular systems and the sharing of resources. A model (1:50) of the entire 240,000m2 housing project is shown in the exhibition, and part of the facade is built in 1:1
as an example of Kundoo’s development of intelligent facades.

Kjeld Kjeldsen

Mette Marie Kallehauge