Tirtha is a Sanskrit word that means "crossing place, ford." In India, there are dozens of these places, some of which have become pilgrimage sites. In this project the temple is at the core of the tirtha, but ‘the crossing’ is a drawn-out spatial and temporal process that encompasses the whole site and its program. In that sense the tirtha is embedded in a type of ‘temenos’ or sacred area, the intensity of which is thickened over time and use.
The basic epistemic conceit of the project is "....something becomes something else....". The laws of physics suggest, indeed require, that everything in the universe, 'dead' or 'alive' is made of the same sub-atomic particles and forces and is subject to all the same laws, without exception. This suggests therefore that birth and death, while indisputably significant 'events' in this complex sub-atomic particle configuration we call life, are in fact little more, and nothing less, than reconfigurations of sub-atomic particles and forces, a process that is enacted in the universe in a myriad different ways, everywhere. Life on planet earth is no doubt a very special event; even so, it is part of the infinite diversity of particularly re-configuration - "...something becomes something else..." again and again, that is fundamental to the processes of the universe.
Eschewing the traditional modernist pretension that purports to derive form from “fundamentals,”, OUR designs by entangling ourselves into the perennial river/rain of architectural, intellectual, symbolic and formal “references” (need better word).
Scroll Detail: introduction to the island, ghats and the temple © Mark Jarzombek and Vikramāditya Prakāsh/ Office of Uncertainty Research
Our research unearthed that Native American, Mongolian, Zoroastrian and in an indirect way Hindu funerary practices already intuit this epistemology. OUR approached the design through a robust exchange of ideas that incorporated ‘Shades, Shadows, Haunts’ - as opposed to the more conventional idea of ‘program’ or ‘precedents’. These various Shades, Shadows, Haunts emerged in the conversation and in the design process and are based on the two author’s various past experiences and influences. A Shade was seen as an influence with a neutral valence, a Shadow was something more pressing whereas a Haunt was something perhaps darker and more difficult to ‘explain’ in any rational way. We associated Haunts with the psychosomatic imponderables associated with our biographies. For Prakash, for example, Le Corbusier was a haunt, for Jarzombek, it was the ‘factory.’ Both of us recently experienced the death of our fathers and that too factored into the background of the conversation.1
Credits: OUR would like to thank Michelle Hook, Amelia Jarvinen, Jung In Seo, Dalma Foldesiand, and Elias Jarzombek for their contributions.
Copyright by Mark Jarzombek and Vikramāditya Prakāsh, and may not be duplicated, copied, modified or adapted, in any way without our written permission. Our Website may contain our service marks or trademarks as well as those of our affiliates or other companies, in the form of words, graphics, and logos.
- 1. Source: Jarzombek, Mark, and Vikramaditya Prakash. Architect's Statement In Tirtha: An Architectural Opera. Office of Uncertainty Research, 2020.
See also …
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Crematorium, Ashwinikumar. Matharoo Associates, 2004.