PREPARED BY

JAMBAVATI GOUDA

MODULE -02
5. Modern Architecture in India-4:
Enrichment of Indian experience- Cost effectiveness and local influences. Lauire
Baker (Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram and St. John
Cathedral at Tiruvalla) and

Anant Raje(IIFM, Bhopal and Management Development Centre, IIM-A).

Enrichment of Indian experience- Cost effectiveness and local influences.
Lauire Baker
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
1. True to material and expression, exposed brick work, concrete and structural elements.

2. Climatically responsive designs.

3. His buildings tend to emphasize masonry construction, instilling privacy and evoking history with brick jali
walls, a perforated brick screen which invites a natural air flow to cool.

4. Laurie Baker's architecture focused on retaining a site's natural character, and economically minded indigenous
construction, and the seamless integration of local material, crafts men and construction technique.

5. Curved walls enter Baker's architectural vocabulary as a means to enclose more volume at lower material
cost than straight walls, and for Laurie, "building [became] more fun with the circle."

6. Baker's architectural method is one of improvisation, in which initial drawings have only an idealistic link to the
final construction, with most of the accommodations and design choices being made on-site by the architect
himself.
7. Discourages extravagance and snobbery, avoid opulence and showing off.

8. Study of potential services within the site( water ,drainage, power etc)

9. Well known for designing and building low cost, high quality, beautiful homes.

10. Used many cost efficient methods and design.

 HIS WORKS:
 Centre for Development Studies (CDS), 1971, Ulloor

 St John’s Cathedral, 1973, Thiruvella

 Leprosy homes for Mission to Lepers across India

 Pithoragarh house, school and hospital complex

 Nepal Hospital

 Allahabad Agricultural University

 Centre for Social Studies, Surat

 Ahmedabad & Baroda – factories

 Children’s Village, 1965, Kulashekaram, Tamil Nadu

 The Indian Coffee House, at Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India

 Nritygram bangalore
CENTRE FOR DEVELOPMENT STUDIES, Trivandrum, 1972-1974
The building of this centre also incorporates all the elemental characteristics of Baker’s
style- the jali’s, the traditional roofs, the stepped arches, the over-hanging eaves and
the skylights.

• The design of CDS demonstrates how Baker is able to transfer vernacular architecture
to suit the requirements of a modern academic institution.

• The Centre for Development Studies consists of a group of buildings located on a

hillock on the outskirts of Trivandrum.

• An area of 9 acres accommodates administrative offices, computer centre, amphitheatre,

library, classrooms, housings and other components of an institutional design.
Main features of this building:

• The design is in response to its sloping contoured site and seems to grow out of it.

• Baker simply moulds his walls around the trees so as not to disturb it.

• He designed the buildings at the Centre to practically cool them.

• He renders jails, a perforated wooden screen found in traditional Indian architecture, in brick;The open
grillwork allows cool breezes to waft into the interior while filtering harsh, direct sunlight.

• Some buildings include a series of small courtyards containing shallow pools in the center, whose
evaporation helps cool the air..

• In evaluating the campus for the Centre, Baker planned roads along the lower, while footpaths were routed
along naturally occurring elevated areas; following the natural topography helps to limit erosion and
despoilment of the environment.

• Brick walls were left unplastered and brick corbelling was used rather than more expensive concrete lintels.
With his mastery over his medium, Baker creates a variety of textures and patterns by simple manipulation
of the way in which bricks are placed in the wall. Each structure curling in waves, semicircles and arcs

• The architecture of this academic complex was conceived as a demonstration of economically responsible
building practices.

• The teaching block, the largest of the buildings, occupies the highest point.

• Its circular, brick-textured library tower is the core structure providing a visual focus.

• A special staircase provides access to the different library floors.

Areas for administration and teaching radiate out from the library.

• The Library dominates the centre with seven storey tower, the administrative offices and classrooms
are scattered in a randomness determined by each ones position on the slope. However, the building
remain tightly connected through corridors that snakes upwards to the library along breezy
walkways and landscape courts.

•
MEN’S HOSTEL

• Student hostel is set apart from this central complex across an informal amphitheatre fashioned from
excess building material, and made by merely consolidating the contours.

• 8 rooms in a single file opening onto a verandah and 4-stacked floors give a formidable linear space
to the plan.

• Each room is entered simply down a rare corridor built into the shade walls.

• This inordinately regimented organization is offset by playfulness of the circulation and the entrance
block – both of which move away from an excessive rectilinearity into the magical realm of curve walls,
circular staircase and deep set wall niches.

•
WOMEN’S HOSTEL

• The rooms, like those of the men’s hostel, have the rigid layout of differentiated rectangular, opening
into the privacy of a forest behind the building.

• The wall forming the circulation to the room is curved not merely for structural stiffness but the curves are
made as to incorporate the interactive hostel life.
COMPUTER CENTRE:

• The 2-storied high computer block with a double-walled building with an outer surface of intersecting circles of
brick jails which followed the design of the main academic block, while the internal shell fulfilled the constraints
and controls necessary for a computer laboratory, the space between the 2 walls accommodates the secondary
requirements for offices and storage areas.
St. John Cathedral, Tiruvalla, 1973, Area: 1140 M2
• The design of this provincial cathedral is away from the massive Baroque prototype of church
architecture first imported by Portuguese Vatican Council of the early 1960s encouraged a reinterpretation
of many traditional forms and ideals with a view to encouraging a more personal involvement of the
worshipper in the church.

• Implicit in these changes was call for more accessible and culturally appropriate church architecture.

• With its circular plan and tent –like wooden roof, this Kerala cathedral is a response to the modern
Vatican; an attempt to design an indigenous church type.

• The building is sited in a semi-rural context adjacent to a main road.

• One enters it through a large brick gateway proceeding down a broad set of stairs to the level clearing in
a grove of coconut trees in which the building nestles.

• The structure is built of local materials. Stone piers are the main load – bearing elements. Non –load-
bearing brick infill, as intricate grill work, allows air and light to filter into the hall.
Long plywood trusses, assembled at the site, spring from the piers to meet at the apex of the structure
about 25 meters above the floor.

• The clear –span conical roof, which has a collar of dormer windows, is crowned with an impressive
cross.

• The sizable structure was erected with innovative adhoc engineering with the help of unskilled laborers and
local parishioners(members of church community)

• The interior experience is inspiring, moody and reminiscent of soaring Gothic spaces.

• The building is a fine example of the architect’s arts and crafts training in England.

• This is well displayed in the Ruskinian harmony between the tectonics of the construction and the
decorative and textural development of the architecture, a creative collaboration between the architect
and various artisans who were responsible for some excellent iron and stained – glass work.
Architect Anant Raje (1929–2009)
Design principle:

Raje follows Kahn in many aspects: Building within a Building, Expression of Material, Expression of
Construction, Arched Openings, Precise works of brick masonry, Scale of open spaces.

 Believed in designing based on transition from spontaneous to formal spaces.

 Excellent understanding of the elements of building, and the laws of construction, that give it the
sense of ordered presence.

 Enriched by the patina (exterior) of materials he chooses and his sensitivity of light.

 Raje believes in the essence of history and its continued presence in design.

 Conceptualization of any project before it went for drawing and construction stage.
Design principle:

Combination of romanticism (the natural surroundings around the building) and monumentality
(buildings out of heavy, solid materials and forms ) resulting in humane spaces

 Use of large open spaces in the outer skeleton for natural ventilation and lighting.

 Most of his buildings were of brick masonry and exposed concrete surfaces.

 He used geometric patterns to emphasize the façade of the building.

 Simple, functional, platonic forms and compositions

Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal . Architect: Anant D. Raje
Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal . Architect: Anant D. Raje

1. Building on his smaller – scale institutional an experiment Anant Raje has conceived this large government
project with a combination of romanticism and monumentality unprecedented in recent Indian architecture.

2. The architect’s deep veneration for Louis Kahn is undisguised, but he has allowed himself exceptional license to
distort and enrich Kahn’s idiom.

3. The primary inspiration is historical.

4. Just as Louis Kahn turned to Roman ruins as a source of architectural forms and relationships, this campus derives
its complex assemblage of spaces, elements and arched masonry from classical Deccan architecture.

5. The enigmatic majesty of the ruined palace of Mandu as captured in the architect’s sketches – is translated into
contemporary structures more delicate in mass and proportion, but characterized all the more by that gaunt and
haunted quality of a ruin.

6. The plan: a formal base order half effaced by an overlay of autonomous, sometimes colliding geometries, like
successive archaeological deposits on single site.
7. Bordering the complex is a linear reflecting pool that serves as the datum for the composition.

8. A series of monumental loggia make the transition from this water body (spontenous spaces) and its esoteric
formalism to the more mundane complex of office and teaching blocks behind(formal spaces).

9. Structural order is determined by functional and symbolic criteria.

10. The plan is resolved into distinct components, some of which are repeated, as in the faculty offices, or
skewed off the base grid and distinguished by their own geometry.

11. The dense congregation of structures creates a romantic sequence of semi – enclosed and open-to-sky
spaces intimate enough in scale to be a useful, sun-protected extension of the architectural environment.

12. Structural order is determined by functional and symbolic criteria.

13. The experience of a ruin, with the silence and the presence of the past is captured in this complex
by; varying geometry of the foot print (like in an archeological site), pavilions bordering the water
body, and the oversized openings.

14. Two large courts are created to act as extended learning areas, one with the class rooms and
library bordering and the other with faculty offices and admin functions.

15. Building is clad on the exterior with kota stones of varying color, inside face is grit finished
plaster.

16. Precision, which is the hallmark of Raje’s architecture, is evident in formal, spatial and at craft
level.
Management Development Centre, Ahmedabad, 1982, Area: 4500 M2
1. The honor of carrying on the work of a master was a difficult challenge well met in this prestigious
academic building.

2. The Management Development Centre is the last important element to be added to Louis Kahn’s campus for
the Indian Institute of Management left incomplete at his death in 1975.

3. The architect has shown due respect for that powerful context by assiduously employing Kahn’s brick
vocabulary.

4. It Kahn’s ideas on the intrinsic order of materials and light a step further.

5. The centre is a self-contained school with library facilities, shared with the main institute.

6. The play of light on fair-faced concrete is exploited originally, for example, in the elegant light shafts that
pierce the central academic block of the complex.

7. Taut planes of concrete like stretched parchment retains a narrow interface between the major spaces in the
dark brick core of the building
8. The complex is organized around a landscaped court.

9. Two wings of guest rooms extend from the teaching block to complete the long sides of the quadrangle

10. Two circulations spines each serving thirty-two rooms on either side, for a total of one hundred and twenty-
eight participants. The two spines are connected through foyers and a concourse to lounges and dining halls.

11. The C-shaped double-storied structure so formed encloses a terraced courtyard

12. The fourth side enclosed with a brick wall and a screen of trees.

13. The symmetrical positioning of a pair of descending stairs in the concourse of the academic wing creates a
large veranda – like terrace on the central axis of the block.

14. Board arches from the view of the court.

15. The comfortable, domestic scale of the quadrangle is established by manipulating its levels.

16. Despite a masterful fidelity to the formal language of Kahn, this intimate, introverted composition is
refreshing exception to the overbearing weight and masculinity of the earlier campus buildings - a landmark in
itself.