Architectural practice cannot be a coin at rest… it has to keep rolling. Once on a roll, the coin may rock and roll, but roll it has to. Starting architectural practice with practically no background is not everyone’s cup of tea either, especially when you have become an architect accidently, like me.

I was a graduate in Chemistry, working in a chemical plant in 1972 when I met a fourth year chemical engineering student trainee from I.I.T. Kharagpur who inspired me to appear for IIT JEE to pursue studies in chemical engineering. I cleared the JEE 1973 but not well enough to qualify for admission to chemical engineering course. Fate placed me in the architecture department at IIT Kharagpur and there was no looking back.

After graduation I divorced the drafting board and had a four year long affair with construction site as a site supervisor, a duration in which I unlearnt everything that I had learnt in the college. Thereafter I re-married the drawing board by teaming up with two college friends and also started moonlighting a one man practice in the big melting pot of Mumbai, most of the time doing perspectives for other architects.

My first real project was not architectural, but structural. A time when non-architects did not hesitate to design buildings and paid architects for their signature on the drawings, I did a structural design and paid a structural engineer to sign the drawings… one structural design followed another in which I tried to smuggle in some architectural work, so that I could sign the drawings and put my stamp of registration number below.

Life was a mundane routine to keep the one-sided coin of practice rolling, running between municipal corporation office, clients and site… a routine which sapped dry the juice of creativity. More than eight years since graduation, in the hum drum of life for survival I had not seen even one good book on architecture. Then one day my eyes fell on an obscure advertisement calling for fresh teaching faculty in Sir J.J. College of Architecture. I applied, not out of love for teaching, but to get access to an old wonderful library of architecture books…

‘Teaching’ in the real sense by me never happened in the hallowed precincts of Sir J.J., as I was learning, to interact with a younger generation, much better informed than I was and also getting better equipped with digital technologies in their infant stages. By being on the side of students I learned AutoCAD which was banned in educational institutions! My enthusiasm made one final year student Sandeep Kalsi do his thesis drawings in AutoCAD which when printed and presented for thesis jury was outright rejected by the jury with a comment that it was done by computer, where are your drawings! Finally Sandeep had to bring all his rough sheets and sketches for jury to secure a pass percentage…

 AutoCAD and later ArchiCAD took the professional world by storm but remained a smuggled enterprise for making drawings in schools of architecture for several years. But I have guided thesis for some smart guys those days, who did all drawings on AutoCAD, but presented after tracing them from printouts manually, complete with color pencil rendering! The hawk like eyes of the jury members couldn’t see the difference, they only praised the presentations… the last laughs were mine and my students…

When the flood gates of architectural education opened up to privatization in 1992, I quit the perceptibly safe pensionable Maharasthra Shasanachi Naukri, much to the chagrin of my family members and shock of friends and relatives, to latch on to an unknown educational entrepreneur who shared my surname, to develop Pillais’ college of Architecture at New Panvel… The apostrophe after s indicated that I was his plural partner, so said the entrepreneur Pillai, which I discovered later, was only a glib sales talk by him to rope me in to the venture… For me it was just another architectural project, as I had the responsibility to design the campus too… developing the teaching environment was only incidental. Thus I lived on the cusp of practice and teaching for eight years, as the Principal of Pillais’ College of Architecture.

Those eight years of teaching, while developing the college year after year was a great period of learning for me in management of education. All that pushed me slowly into that corner of no escape in everyone’s life called the ‘middle age crisis’. Also a realization that the big melting pot of India called Mumbai had nothing more to offer me in life, other than a humdrum existence.

Once again, much to the chagrin of my family, friends and relatives I jumped off the ‘Cusp’ between academics and profession and went back to school to pursue doctoral studies in the relevance of traditional architectural systems in contemporary times… Explorations and field trips into the hinterland of exotic Kerala looking at traditions of building made me quit the melting pot Mumbai and shift lock stock barrel to the God’s Own Country. I built my final resting place (hopefully), my home ‘Aradhana’, the foundation of which rests on the cusp of academics and profession, making it as a design statement based on traditions of living in Kerala…

I am still at the cusp, though retired from the 9 to 5 routine of both academic and professional world, seeking harmony in the daily life as an average human being…I wonder, as an accidental architect all these years, was I Harmonizing the Cusp or Harimohanizing the Cusp… I don’t know…

Dr. Harimohan Pillai . Once Upon a Time Architect...