Architectural structures are significant beyond functionality; they create a liveable space for cultivating intangible memories and experience. A building could be a visual treat, a site to escape or a safe spot to ponder upon reality. Structures witness power dynamics making them a historic cache of information about past technologies, not necessarily rudimentary and an artistry riposte to the contemporary muddle.
Delia Kinzinger, popularly known as Didi Contractor was an autodidact architect who lived amid the majestic hills of Kangra in Himachal Pradesh. Her galvanising encounter with Frank Lloyd Wright’s exhibition, impacted a lasting impression that dwelled on her mind and developed her ceaseless inclination for architecture. Her unflinching implementation of the ultimate art of sustainable architecture lasted for three decades. Never encouraged by her artistic parents to pursue architecture, she formally completed her graduation in art at the University of Colorado. Her background in arts and compassionate proclivity towards structures and designs, guided her to channelise the colloidal idea to create the structures from the naturally available raw materials deriving from the earth.
Didi’s work is an inordinate paradigm of the harmonious relationship between human-built structures and ecology. This perpetual exchange occurring between humans and their ecology transpires to further evolve into a symbiotic relationship that stirs her idea of planning sustainable designs. She believed in the idyllic notion of marrying the earth to the building assembled as a part of nature rather than creating a peculiar conflict with the landscape.
“I am very interested in using landscape as a visual and emotional bridge between the built and the natural. Look at the old buildings, they are beautiful in the landscape, and the new ones are at war with it – they say something. So, we are in conflict with nature, and nature will be in conflict with us. I imagine a building as growing, like a plant, within a landscape. Landscaping is really a key to this thing of marrying the earth to the building. I would like to emphasize playfulness, imagination, and celebration. By celebrating materials, by noticing their qualities, and celebrating them as you put them into building, celebrating the quality or the plasticity of the mud, celebrating the inherent, innate and unavoidable qualities of each material. What the slate does to light, how the materials play within nature. I try to create something that is as quiet as possible. What works, should just look natural, as if meant to be.”
– Delia Kinzinger
Roused by dame natura, Didi’s vision and intention could be witnessed in the structures designed for Dharmalaya Centre for Compassionate Living at Bir and other visionary projects. Contrary to the contemporary establishments, edifices conceptualized by her, give out a vivacious tellurian essence equivalent to the experience and comfort of being embraced by our loved ones. The materials being used in a peculiar way creates a sense of belongingness, cheerfulness and humbleness. Experiences are often associated as a mechanism to retrieve information, a tangible facet gained through experience of the materialistic culture of worldly desires. A physical place holding the energy of a good structure attracts, holds an experience and memories associated with it.
Delia believed in constructing eco-friendly structures, built in synchronisation with the cycle of nature and the rhythm of the universe. Significant to her style was the stylised use of staircases which, in accordance with Delia, acted as a guidance to a person’s emotional pathway and manoeuvring natural light to reveal textural contours. As a part of burgeoning complex societies, it is very crucial to understand the requisite significance of expanding our civilization in tempo with our environment rather than in opposition to it, solicitous towards ecology and accepting ourselves as a part of it like any other species. Didi’s empirical practices of vernacular eco – architecture is a ruminate vision that has substantial potentialities to inspire the extant and subsequent architects.
Text by Davangi Pathak
Image Courtesy: Dharmalaya Society and the Earthville Network, Joginder Singh
Find more about Delia Kinzinger and her architecture designs:
https://www.architecturaldigest.in/content/meet-octogenarian-architect-speaks-language-mud-clay/
