Double milestones.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The building changes over the course of the day. At peak sunlight, the roof of the terrace expands. The edges loosen from the concrete and extend outward.

This, of course, is impossible. A building cannot shift its shape. And yet it appears to do just that. Thanks to the way it is designed, especially in relation to daylight and shadows.

This shifting terrace feels like a suitable reason to revisit the building today. As this day Delhi marks the intersection of two milestones: the 114th birth anniversary of architect Joseph Stein with the 75th year of Triveni Art Gallery, the first major Delhi building that Stein designed.

Triveni Kala Sangam must rank among Delhi’s most wondrous works of architecture. It houses a much-loved cultural institution. Yet how many visitors notice its most extraordinary feature: architecture transformed into poetry?

Surely every artistic Delhiite has been to Triveni—if not for exhibitions or classical music classes, then for the tasty carrot cake at the atmospheric Triveni Tea Terrace. Designed by the American architect Joseph Stein in the post-independent years, the complex embodies his signature basics.

Like many of Stein’s garden buildings, Triveni’s concrete structures blend seamlessly with the surrounding trees and grass. Flowers and vines cling playfully to its walls. At times, the walls of the building corridors splinter into droplets of light, because of their jaali construction. The perforations in the jaali admit daylight, which falls onto the floor and adjacent walls as enlarged patterns of these same openings. Consequently, light and shadow entwine in shifting patterns, a characteristic echoed in Stein’s other Delhi landmarks, such as the India International Centre and India Habitat Center.

Only upon stepping onto the rarely visited first landing does one fully enter the understated surreality of Stein’s vision. At first glance, the terrace appears simple: an open-air expanse with a roof supported by two slender pillars. Yet this roof, composed of narrow slabs, allows the daylight to enter through its wide gaps. As the sun moves, a jugalbandi of light and shadow unfolds, which expands, contracts over the course of the day.

The interplay recalls the architecture of Fatehpuri Mosque in Chandni Chowk, where light performs a similar, meditative drama. By late afternoon, the corridor’s arches at Fatehpuri begin to reproduce themselves as soft, shifting silhouettes on the floor and walls. These shadows are more fluid than the structures that cast them.

Fatehpuri’s brilliant architect remains unknown, but one senses that Stein might have found inspiration in a long, attentive afternoon spent there.

Whatever, standing beneath the afforementioned roof at Triveni, the spectator feels as though one is witnessing an abstract poem. Something fleeting, yet exact. Much like watching one of those sublime music or dance performances that are routinely hosted at Triveni’s beautiful amphitheatre.

PS: The photo was snapped in another season