The Brahmasthan House

A storey is a decision to stop thinking about height

A floor level is normally set once and then every room on it inherits it, whether the room wants it or not. A bedroom you lie down in and a room you stand and cook in get the same ceiling because they happen to be on the same slab. That is a construction convenience promoted to a design principle, and it is the thing Loos spent his career refusing.

So there is no slab here. There is a riser — 173.3 mm, one third of a 520 modulus — and every floor is a whole number of them above the paving. Forty-two of them from the brahmasthan to the work floor, arriving exactly, because the levels were chosen in risers and converted afterwards rather than the other way round. Three risers is 520, which is one M, which is why the kitchen can sit above the lounge and the dining above the kitchen with no wall between any of them.

The consequence is that a change of room is a change of height, always, and you feel it in your legs before you see it. Three risers up from the lounge and you are in the kitchen. Three more and you are at the table. Three down and you are in the bowl. There are no doors doing this work and no corridor: the section is the plan.

What that used to mean on this site is that the drawings could not carry the argument. This version answers that differently — see the seven sheets, which are plotted from the same file the model is built from, so a plan and a section can be published without either being able to lie about the other by omission.

The court is a room, so it needed an edge, not a wall

For four versions the centre was left out correctly and then walled in by accident — v4 is kept as it was, and its section is the clearest statement of the mistake. Each room above the ground had a masonry upstand at its inner edge and the drum between the piers ran unbroken to the head of the building, so the brahmasthan was a shaft you glanced into on your way past. It was the middle of the plan and nobody was in it.

Only the sleeping ring keeps a wall to the court now, because it wants to be dark. Above it the drum stops at every floor. Between the six stone piers each room meets the void at a bench sill of 520, timber balusters at 173 centres up to 1.040, and nothing at all above that. Open rim, room by room: 1.33 m to the kitchen, 1.62 m to the dining, 3.90 m across the lounge and its bowl, 6.00 m to the work floor.

One detail decides whether that is true in the body rather than only on the drawing. The beam carrying each storey across its opening sits inside the 520 floor build-up above the soffit, not slung below it. Hang it below and the room loses 340 of clear height at exactly the point a person stands to look over the edge. Placed properly, the full height survives at the rail: 2.60 in the kitchen and on the work floor, 3.12 in the lounge, 2.08 in the low dining.

The rim also steps down with the floor behind it, which is the raumplan stated at one line: 4.160 at the lounge, 3.640 where the bowl drops three risers below it. And the void widens as it rises rather than funnelling — 14.0 m² at the paving, 10.7 m² at the top, pinched to 7.8 m² only where the lounge leans over it.

Three things the model is actually about

The climb. One helix, hung against the spine inside the void: 42 risers at 173.3 on a 260 going, 33.7°, 2R + G = 607. Forty-two goings plus six landing goings is 12.480 m on a court perimeter of 13.628, so the flight turns once and stops 1.148 m short of its own first tread. It therefore never passes under itself — there is no head-height conflict anywhere in it — and that 1.148 is the walk-off at the entry. By the time it is at bedroom-window height it is round in front of the bath and the store, so it crosses no bedroom window. Where it lands, the gallery rail opens: a rail you cannot step through is not a landing.

The bowl. The lounge leans one modulus out over the void on three corbel courses, and between 222° and 278° its own floor drops three risers to +3.120 under a coffer 4 M below the lounge soffit. That makes it 2.60 clear inside a 3.12 room — lower floor and lower ceiling both, which is what nesting means rather than dipping. It needs no structural depth of its own: it bears straight on the sleeping ring's masonry soffit. Three risers is 520, the height a person sits down on without deciding to, and the same number as the village plinth. The climb's one rest is here, so you arrive in the nest rather than beside it.

What is dark. The sleeping ring is dark plaster floor to soffit, lit only across the void. The entry is dim and low before it lets you out into the open middle. The dining is the low room by 520 and reads as the intimate one for that reason alone. Everything else is lime render and pale ash, and the work floor at the top takes even north light all day. This is not a palette — it is where the house wants you to be at which hour, and it is the one decision a plan could not have recorded at all.

Seven sheets, plotted from the model's own file

The Body House publishes twenty measured sheets, exported from the drawing set and lifted onto this site path by path. These seven work the other way. There is no export: brahmasthan-v5-sheets.js reads the same geometry file the model above is built from and draws it, in the browser, when you load this page. Change the riser in one place and both the model and every sheet move together, because there is only one place.

They are drawn at annotation size and pan sideways below about a tablet, the same as the Body House's. Nothing here is traced.

They keep the drawing set's own numbering, which starts at two: sheet 1 is the level ladder, and on this page that is the ledger beside the model above.

Where it disagrees with the Body House

The two houses no longer disagree about the modulus. Both are 520 now — this one arrived at it from the stair, three risers at a time, rather than from the upright body, and the fact that two independent derivations landed on the same number is the strongest thing either project has to say for it.

They disagree about everything else. The Body House is a single volume under one ridge and it faces outward: a gable to the path, a wall of glass to the south, and a brow calculated to the millimetre so that glass takes December sun and refuses June. It argues with the weather.

This one turns its back on the weather and organises itself around a hole. It has 148.3 m² enclosed against 113, on a footprint of 94.9. Its bedrooms have no window to the outside at all, which in a valley you would want to look at is either the point or a mistake, and which one it is depends entirely on the arithmetic below that has not been done. It would cost more per square metre than the Body House costs in total.

Both were arrived at by the same method, from opposite starting conditions, and neither has been restyled to agree with the other. That is what the method produces when it is used honestly, and it is the reason the record of corrections exists.

What this is not, yet

It is a spatial study and it is published as one. The Body House has twenty measured sheets and a sun you can drag through the year behind it; this has a geometry file, seven sheets plotted from it, and a model. Specifically, none of the following has been done:

1. No structure sized.the spine carries every platform and the spans are drawn, but not one member has been calculated
2. No site.the ground under it is a study surface, not a survey, and the north cut is assumed at 3.120
3. No services.and a house with a tree, a basin and a firebox in the middle has a drainage problem to answer
4. No daylight arithmetic.which is the one that changes the plan rather than the specification

The fourth is now specific enough to state as a number, which is progress of a kind. From a bedroom's court window head at +2.880, the sky is a slot between 64.2° and 67.0° — 2.8° of it — because the lantern roofs the void 7.520 m above that head and leaves only six risers of open air. The well index, height over the short dimension of the court, is 2.86.

That is dark enough to sleep in and too dark for anything else, and no clerestory ring at the top of a shaft this deep can repair it: lift the cone by a further metre and the slot grows by about two degrees. So there are two honest ways out and they are different houses. Open the brahmasthan to the sky — the slot becomes 64.2° to 90°, the court becomes a chowk, and the monsoon and its drain become the design problem. Or light the sleeping ring from above, through a monitor on the loggia dropping into the bedroom ceiling, which keeps the rooms blind at eye level and still measurably lit.

Until that is worked out the way Sheet 06 was on the other house, this is a room arrangement rather than a house, and this page will keep saying so.