Girija Regmi · Dwelling
Chautari
Tiny houses, eco villages,
and the rooms inside them.
A chautari is a stone platform built around a peepal and a banyan planted together, at the point on a path where a person carrying a load would want to set it down. It is the only public building in the village that nobody had to be persuaded to use.
The whole of it follows from that →The position
I do not design plans, façades, sections. I design space.
Adolf Loos
Plans, sections and elevations are instruments for describing space, and they are all partial. The drawing is not the object. The object is the volume of air a body moves through.
Two things follow, and they govern everything here. The exterior is a result — the residue of the interior, not a composition; if the outside is being designed directly, the method has been abandoned. And the section is the primary drawing, because it is the only one that shows height, and height is what makes a room.
Four names stand behind the method, and each answers a different question.
- Adolf Loosthe medium — space, not drawings
- August Schmarsowthe measure — space from the axes of the upright body
- Häring & Scharounthe method — form found organ by organ, inside out
- Laurie Bakerthe proof — the curve built by local masons, affordably
A house is carved out of solid material from the inside; it is organised the way a body is organised; the whole of it is present at once; and it does not end at its walls.
Four claims, and each one is a departure from how a house is normally arrived at.
- The interior is subtracted, not assembled.rather than plan-then-fill
- The organising logic is anatomical.rather than the grid
- The whole house is available at all times.rather than rooms as single-purpose cells
- The design object extends past the envelope.rather than building against landscape
They are tested by one question, and the question came from the chautari before it was ever written down: does a person use it without deciding to? A platform nobody had to be persuaded to use. A plinth at 520 mm, which is the height a person sits down on without deciding to. Anything that has to be explained, signposted or argued for has failed, however good the reasoning behind it.
The design language in full →The work
Four of them so far, and they disagree with each other.
All four were arrived at by the method above. One is a unit that has to be repeatable forty times on one hillside; one is a family's house at 2,300 m that argues with the weather; one winds itself round a hole in the middle of its own plan; and one is small enough to stand on a single terrace, with its one lit room at the bottom. None has been restyled to agree with the others.
01
The village
Nine houses on terraces that were already fields, a house of 4.6 by 6.2 metres with its gable to the path, and no house more than ninety seconds from the tree. Three models you can turn over in the browser.
Walk through it →02
The Body House
A house at 2,300 m in the Nepali high mid-hills. 113 m² on a 70.62 m² curved footprint, every dimension descended from one body measurement — M = 520, the same 520 as the village plinth. Twenty measured sheets.
Read the drawings →03
The Brahmasthan House
No storeys. Five inhabited levels, every one of them a whole number of 173 mm risers above the paving, wound round the room that was left out. Sleeping at the bottom, blind to the outside; work alone on top. Forty-two risers and exactly one turn between them.
Climb it →04
The Tiny House
5850 square over the walls, with the floor at seven different heights inside it. One room has light — the tall centre, at the bottom — and every other plateau in the house is a gallery over it.
Look down into it →Published as it matures
Drawings and dimensions included, so that it can be built by someone who is not us. That includes the parts that were wrong: six massing versions, five drawing stages, and a roof that shaded the entire ground floor at midwinter noon before anyone checked the arithmetic.
How it was got wrong first →Build it with us
If you have land, or a house you want designed around your own day, write.
Chautari is the studio's own work, and some of it is for other people.
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