Interview with Bijoy Ramachandran, hundredhands - Bangalore, INDIA - 5 February 2014

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• published: 25 Aug 2014
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This is an interview with Bijoy Ramachandran, architect and partner of the practice in Bangalore called hundredhands. Watch the short Oxlaey SNAP with video of Mr. Ramachandran's buildings here: http://youtu.be/XjfHv1W_5Os "Even in our office and outside with craftsmen and contractors - we depend on many people to work together to make nice things. A lot of us who have been educated abroad and come back to India to work here find it very difficult to impose those planning ideas on a city like this - Bangalore, particularly, because the growth, the densities are just far more intense. And a lot of people think that associating with glass and steel mean you are now an international brand. It’s something one has to fight against, when you talk to a client to try to convince them of using alternative means by which to do buildings. I mean use local materials use; use the climate to your advantage. This hotel is another example where we’ve used a lot of stuff made by craftspeople across the country. All the furniture is made here locally by a person who has a workshop. The way we bring color into the building is by the use of natural materials, so we have a lot of timber in the building so there’s this rich kind of deep brown hue. And then we’ve done an apartment building here and it’s got all of these movable timber screens which you can shut off if you want privacy but you can also open it up so that you then get the air and the wind. And that’s the key. How do you use limited resources to create beautiful things."