Why an Architect Keeps a Tiny Indian Temple Replica on His Desk—and Sometimes Uses It as a Pencil
The designer and curator says the spiritual object from his mother’s hometown shaped his understanding of rituals as a child, and reminds him to form new ones.
The designer and curator says the spiritual object from his mother’s hometown shaped his understanding of rituals as a child, and reminds him to form new ones.
My parents are emigrants from India, and my older brother and I grew up in a house in Los Angeles with an at-home Hindu temple called a puja mandir. Up until middle school, the mandir was in a corner of my bedroom; there’s a little bit of an idea that spiritual protection or osmosis can happen if you’re around the mandir, so it’s not uncommon for it to be in the youngest person’s room.
A constant object in our mandir was this tiny replica of an Indian temple. It’s about one inch tall and made of lead. It’s heavy for its size. I got the temple on my first visit to India, when I was five. In my mom’s hometown of Ahmedabad, she allowed me to pick any object from a vendor. I selected this, and it gave my parents a smirk because my dad was a civil engineer and later a construction manager.
Years later, when I moved to San Francisco to attend architecture school at the CCA, I didn’t take much from home. But about ten years ago, I saw this tiny temple at my parents’ house and thought, This is a nice little object. It mostly lives on my desk now.
Today, the mini temple feels like a reminder of the time in my life when a spiritual object, the mandir, held some ground in my room. The values I gained from the puja mandir are instilled in how I see the world. I was always allowed to interact with our mandir and the accompanying rituals at my own pace and question them. It allowed me to find my own meaning, and that was powerful for me as a young person.
I’m still very motivated by questioning norms, especially in my design and curatorial work. We always dress things up and add little bits of flavor, but it’s rare to get an opportunity to reinvent an experience through space. Some of my favorite projects have been when I get to do this—reinventing how a cafe or a home functions, for example. At times when I’m thinking about a project and questioning the "why" behind it, I’ve inadvertently picked up the temple and used it as a pencil. It has a slanted top, which could be because I’ve doodled with it over the years. It’s a reminder that it takes a ton of human willpower to make anything, no matter how small.
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