Funky House

More is more, less is a bore.

Bright and early on a Sunday morning, photographers, textile designers, landscape architects, finance bros, homemakers and ceramicists from across the city joined architect and urbanist Suchitra Deep on a walk in Malleswaram. Gathered on a street corner of this 134-year-old neighbourhood, Suchitra thoughtfully pieces together moments from global history. She uses these tidbits to introduce our motley crew to the context of this century-old design style of Art Deco that started in Europe before mushrooming all over the world.

Love at first sightline

As she paints a lively history of the early 1900s, we’re standing on the street imagining imperial ships laden with the cultural riches of their far-flung colonies to the gleaming machinery of the industrial revolution. She drops gems on the germination of the Suffragette movement to the rebel art movements like the Vienna Secessionists led by Gustav Klimt, we learn about the discovery of King Tutakhamen’s glorious golden tomb to Picasso’s boundary-pushing Cubism – all of which influenced the sleek, geometric stylings of Art Deco architecture. We learn about its origins at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris and “pastiche of worldly influences” that birth this style. She hazards “that the first batch of architects graduated from Sir JJ School of Architecture in Mumbai around Independence and were inspired by this aspirational style of architecture” and contributed to its popularity in India.

And like a magic trick, she turns us around and suddenly we notice that the house behind us has been a great example of this style of architecture all along.

She helps us take note of the architectural elements and throws it back to its historical influences. The smooth curves and rounded edges of the walls of an Art Deco building speak to its influences drawn from “the aerodynamism of early aircrafts and large ocean liners like the Titanic,” and the parallel and intersecting lines running on the facades “are called speed lines” created from “fluting or reeding,” also reminiscent of travel and movement. She answered a nerdy enquiry on the difference between fluting, “a method of hollowing out the surface” to create the speedlines and reeding, where the surface is contoured like speedbumps stacked closely together.

We come to notice the arrow designs embossed on the walls “again speaking to emergence of global travel” and the intricate, endless pattern combinations in the metalwork of the windows and gates composed of lines and curves. She points out the “stepped pyramids” on the top of the columns in the boundary walls and reminds of “the Sumeric temples called ziggurats.” It’s sweet when she informs us that “the overhangs over windows when continuous are called eyelids and eyebrows when broken up.” She draws our attention to the “sunburst” design on gates, and “local flavour” like the adoption of floral motifs and red oxide flooring and flourishes in Art Deco buildings in the city.

Key to happiness

Suchitra, a long-time resident of this North Bengaluru neighbourhood, leads the walk with an easy familiarity. Over a decade ago, she founded Malleswaram Social, “a group that focuses on the community and bettering civic amenities” and is deeply invested in returning the city to its “walkable status” by working with different government entities. Over a year ago through a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts, she created a website that “continues to digitally archive the cultural, social, ecological and architectural legacy of Malleswaram” from Suchitra’s years of research on the neighbourhood and the collecting of a plethora of oral histories.

It’s clear that Suchitra is deeply embedded in the neighbourhood evidenced by the heads popping out of windows and sleepy bodies appearing in balconies to greet and encourage her along our route. While we’re gathered outside a house gawking at its well-maintained features, the homeowner rushes out for a quick chat with Suchitra but also invites all of us into her home. Within the lush, blooming garden, we’re granted a rare opportunity to have a closer, more intimate look at the features of an Art Deco house but also “a chance at experiencing what it might be to live in one of these homes.”

Grout expectations

Towards the end of our two-hour walk, Suchitra’s earlier disclaimer that “now you’ll begin to see the elements of Art Deco everywhere” began to ring true. We walk past a house, and someone in our gaggle points out a building where the speedlines on the wall seamlessly blend into the metalwork of the balcony’s balustrade. We’re all playing eye-spy: suddenly every gate or window grill has a sunburst pattern, we spot metalwork designs rendered in masonry, we catch sight of fluting and reeding features that move from wall facades to furnishings like doors, and the ziggurat that doesn’t just feature as the capital of a column but as a window design too.

These design decisions aren’t always architect-led in the Indian context, Suchitra reminds us, instead she speaks to the “creativity of the workers” like the masons, contractors, and supervisors, who bring their vast experience into play. While noting the local modifications made to the Art Deco style in Malleswaram, she points to the ways these “decorative flourishes were also used to denote caste markers too, like a Saraswati motif above a doorway indicates the homeowners are Saraswat Brahmins and so on.” Throughout the walk, Suchitra’s knowledge shines through in her telling of the magnificent and murky history of this “aspirational” architecture style.

On our auto ride back home, we ended up continuing the previous game of eye-spy: even beyond Malleswaram, we spotted many eyebrows, eyelids, speedlines, sunbursts, and more. It’s like Suchitra’s walk has gifted us with a language with which to read our own city anew.

The details: This two-hour Art Deco Walk in Malleswaram takes place once-a-month. INR 1000 per individual (all proceeds go towards community projects in the neighbourhood). For information on the next walk, log on here or follow them here on Instagram.