Notes from Model House 610
What a wall of terracotta jali taught us about light, privacy, and the difference between a screen and a decoration.
Model House 610 fronts west. In Telangana, that single line of the survey is a problem statement: the rooms you most want to live in face the hardest sun of the day, and everything the elevation does must answer for it.
The conventional answers are curtains, tinted glass, deeper verandahs, or surrender. We chose an older instrument — the jali, the perforated screen that has been managing Indian light for centuries, from Fatehpur Sikri’s sandstone lattices to the humblest ventilator block over a village door. Stretched across the full width of the first floor in terracotta, ours takes the raw force of a western afternoon and breaks it into something a room can hold: a field of small suns that moves across the floor as the day leans, bright enough to live by, never sharp enough to squint at.
A screen has to earn its wall
A jali justifies itself only if it works several jobs at once, and this one was made to.
It shades — the balcony behind it drops out of the direct sun for the worst hours and becomes a usable room instead of a heat trap. It ventilates — the perforations keep air moving through the section where a sealed pane would still it, and moving air at body height is worth degrees on a thermometer. And it negotiates privacy without blindness: from inside, the street resolves through the openings; from the street, the house resolves into pattern. The lattice is a boundary that lets both sides keep something.
By evening the arrangement reverses like a photograph developing. The house glows through the terracotta, each perforation a small warm aperture, and the facade becomes a lantern the street can read from a hundred metres.
The pattern is not applied to the building. The pattern is the building, doing its work.
What it left behind
Details have afterlives. When we came to draw the studio’s own identity, the dot-grid texture that now sits quietly on our dark surfaces was abstracted directly from this facade — the same perforation rhythm, thinned to a whisper.
We kept it as a standing instruction to ourselves: the ornament we permit must first have been structure somewhere. If a mark cannot point back to a wall that worked, it does not belong on our drawings — or our website.