Busting myths and trending without following trends
Tapan Maharishi (Interview PART-1)
In this generation of social media handles, following trends and cut-throat competition to have maximum visibility, it is indeed rare to find people who do not use social media to run their business. But then again, for someone who does not wish to ‘run a business’, it is not surprising that he never uses WhatsApp. AR Tapan Maharishi is indeed an inspiration for aspiring architects who is a fourth generation student of Vastu Shastra and is successfully running his own Architecture & Interior Design firm since 2014.
Tapan Maharishi – Principal
Tapan Dharnidhar Consultants LLP
Tapan is of the firm belief that architecture and design should not be a business but be practiced as a discipline. And since Vastu Shastra is a science, it should not be solicited. He believes in keeping it simple, real, being efficient and honest in his work.
Philosophy and Initiatives
Tapan has been following the philosophy that, design and architecture; just like medicine, education and law should not be run as a business. He rues how over time all of these fields have fallen into the trap of business. Tapan has followed his principle very diligently right from the start of his own firm where they don’t solicit business. He admits at times it gets too idealistic in today’s times to wait for your work to be noticed by a prospective client and for work to come in. His design practice has no webpage / social media page / social media engagement, and he claims he has stopped carrying business cards for the last four years in a bid to test his belief. But inspiration lies in him running a successful design practice with projects scattered across the country purely on the basis of one-project-leading-to-another and getting new projects from people who have happened to visit a space designed by him. So then one is forced to ask whether he thinks he runs a successful practice and if so, what is his definition of success. To which his matter-of-fact reply is, “There can be no upper limit for success. To me running forty projects in a year or doing 5-star budget projects isn’t really the true parameter of success. Given its boutique approach, my practice avoids running more than 10-12 projects at a time, and the parameter of success for me is that I have never drawn a blank when I have received a query call from a site, hitherto; because I know what we have proposed in every corner of the project and what was the last discussion pertaining to any site glitch, whether it’s a 800 sq.ft. site or a 28,000 sq.ft. site”. He says, “To me, giving my hundred percent to every project is the only key parameter because the client has decided to hire me and not a bunch of staff in my office, and hence whatever little I might know about my field it is my duty to give it my all”
Given the exposure he has had to authentic literature on Vastu Shastra and seeing its myriad applications over the years, he successfully integrates the principles of this science in all his projects for a holistic design.
Effective Leadership
Tapan’s firm prefers hiring architects and interior designers with an experience of atleast 1-2 years so that they know the basic grammar and can learn the rest through the course of a given project. He believes that a firm should look out for the learning and growth potential that work can offer to its employees. His puts this to practice by letting every team member irrespective of work experience or seniority, engage with all aspects of a project – making BOQs, co-ordinating with contractors & vendors, visiting sites; while parallelly engaging them with design development. He asks his employees to keep a tab on their growth every three months and whether they have become better at their craft every three months, by making use of the various opportunities given to them.
He abhors turning any design practice into a ‘factory’ where sets of people are assigned with very specific jobs, because then someone who prides himself/herself in having mastered ‘working drawings’ for plumbing and carpentry has no exposure to cost impacts, and someone who has a hang of rates and BOQs isn’t well versed with design aesthetics and someone who may have great ‘design’ skills might be at sea with practical issues at site. This factory culture of a design office is something he feels is doing great disservice to a whole generation of architects and designers, because despite spending years employed in offices they do not have a comprehensive skill or outlook as architects/designers.
As a leader, Tapan likes being hands-on with his sleeves rolled up anytime to dip his hands into anything needed, thus leading by example. His office functions without a peon and clients or vendors are served tea/coffee by Tapan himself and not his staff.
His style of leadership is about willing to learn himself and inspiring others to apply themselves irrespective of their qualifications and skill sets.
Challenges faced
Tapan admits that not having the standard tools for visibility does make it difficult to know what is the flow of projects going to be like. Add to that his practice prides itself in not having a signature design style so there is no one word that his prospective clients can hold onto in terms of what to expect. Clients who have already used his skills and services recommend his design practice as “great design with an efficient layout, no matter what the budget is”.
Since he has no Instagram page of his firm or even of his own, he actively discourages clients from using reference images and does not entertain any such images from clients. He insists that they articulate and describe what are the things they are liking in a photograph that they want to share with him. He then helps them contextualize those elements to the actual nature of the site at hand and help the clients understand that picking up design elements or material palette from images from across the world would not work in their given space.
In his bid to deliver every penny’s worth to his clients, sometimes in the case of commercial office spaces he has had to debate and convince his clients to not repeat a design template incase they have multiple offices to be done. So while the clients are OK with paying fees for three offices where actually the firm would have to design one office and repeat the template to two other locations, he says his fees is not worth it if its simply about copy pasting. To be continued.