A Hands-On Experience of Making a Rammed Earth Wall. Creating with your hands is incredibly satisfying. I had my first hands-on experience on our construction site, where, together with my teammates at Mason’s Ink, we built a feature wall made of rammed earth. Building a rammed-earth wall was both a technical feat of learning and…
Castle in the Sand
‘No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert…for this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.’ – Wilfred Thesiger, from ‘The Arabian Sands’ And yet man’s creation in this land of glittering sand and dune stands tall and unchanged….
Training in Thappi
A new day at Cheerville, a new technique to explore. Introducing Thappi – a traditional Rajasthani base plastering technique made from Surkhi and Lime. Under the mentorship of the lime plaster artisan Mr. Mohammed Rafik Muwal from Rajasthan, and with him decades of ancestral knowledge, the women of hobbit house were trained in these traditional…
Woven in Togetherness
A small shed sits deep in the shade of the Iyal Vaagai tree, its flowers long withered, and dried seeds scattered over the ground. The copper pods mix in with the deep brown of earth and they crunch under our feet as we approach the site. The previous day’s batch of mud mix lies wrapped,…
Timelessness in Lime
Illustrated by Nithyashree S. | Written by Thejeswini SR Click here to view a time-lapse of this exciting process in lime plastering!
Between the Lines of Rubble and Wire
Beyond narrow turns and dust-covered bushes, Passing by farmhouses of all kinds, Somewhere within a flutter of leaves, A bulbul sang into the late morning. Ten kilometers away from the state border, shade welcomed the Masons Ink team as we stepped into the property under our client Sindhoor. On-site, five women waited eagerly, seated underneath…
Soilful Skilling Tales
What felt like a hot afternoon to the group of Bangalore based architects was in fact a rather pleasant afternoon as per local Kerala standards. We, the Masons Ink team, were here in the backyard of our kochi office as part of the team’s internal skilling workshop on natural finishes. Gaia, the earth oven sits in the backyard,…
Muddy Trails
Illustrated by Akshaya Anna.
Biennale and Beyond
An outsider’s perspective
of Kochi Biennale
Walls of Earth
An illustrated recap by Chinmay Pathak
What If? – A walk down bygone intangibles
Returning to my hometown of Bhubaneswar after any given length of time is an interesting experience. It has always been a tug of war between my inbuilt nostalgia and the harsher reality. Walking down the streets of the Old Town was no different this time around and it threw up some tricky conundrums to ponder…
THE “GATEWAY TOWN” EXPEDITION
The geography of Dharwad earned the city its name “the gateway town”, derived from the Sanskrit word ‘dwarawata’; ‘dwara’ meaning door and ‘wata’ meaning town. The hilly city acts as a passageway between the Malenadu (western mountains) and the Bayalu seeme (plains) which made it an ideal site for defense and a nodal trade point…
Masons Ink 