Sabu Francis & Associates

Mr. Sabu Francis has believed in John Zeisel's book, Inquiry by Design right from college days. He says that an architectural practice that does not inquire is like a rampaging elephant who does not think (!). He keeps referring to his life as Jekyl and Hyde existence. By daytime, he is an architect and by night time he turns into a demonic programmer inquiring into why things work or don't. As SFA kept going forward, his inquiries went backward right into the representation of architecture.

Stephen Covey refers to this aspect in his book The Seven Habits of Most Effective People. Mr. Covey says that one characteristic of effective people is that they "Begin with the end in mind". This phrase basically means, that you must be focused on the eventual objective. This is what Covey says:

"Begin with the end in mind" is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or a second creation of all things.

Research into the mental creation is what has occupied Sabu in much of his career. It is a difficult enterprise with the kind of manpower and logistics issues that an architectural practice throws up in India. Therefore much work still needs to be done. However, today, there is evidence of progress. Sabu's software TAD (The Architect's Desktop) -- though not fully finished, has been successfully used in almost all of SFA projects.

TAD has been successfully used in two research projects with Dr. J.K.Nayak and his team at the Energy Centre, Mechanical Engineering Department, IIT Bombay. TADSIM, was an energy simulation packaged developed on top of TAD at IIT Bombay. The project was sponsored by the Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy Sources. See this discussion here: http://www.gard.com/ml/bldg-sim-archive/msg00906.html

A paper regarding TADSIM can be purchased from Amazon

The poet+architect Mr. Masood Taj had referred to Sabu's approach as that of an archer: Everyone sees the archer's hand as going backward. But that is the only way the bowstring can be tightened, and only if the bowstring is taut will the arrow shoot off towards the target, and there would be more likelihood of hitting the bulls-eye.

Here's an article that Sabu has written about the context for such an approach for research at SFA