Indian archetypes - institutional architecture in India

Architectural Review, The, May, 1995 by Gautam Bhatia

After decades of neglect, institutional architecture in India has gradually come to embody an exemplary synthesis of form and ideals. Here, Gautam Bhatia considers three recent schemes.

For decades, an increasingly maligned, formulaic Modernism has been the norm for institutional architecture in India. Built by government construction agencies, municipal authorities and city Works Departments, public architecture became synonymous with bureaucratic citadels - inefficient, cumbersome and faceless. It is only in recent years that Indian bureaucrats have acknowledged the need for a change. Today, a greater share of significant public buildings are designed by private architects. Charles Correa, A. D. Raje, Raj Rewal, B. V. Doshi, among others, have all benefited from this association.

Though much public institutional work in the country is rooted in the self-contained isolation of campus design, the isolation has distinct architectural benefits. It allows the architect a free hand in determining links between buildings and conferring his own sense of order to a particular place. Consequently, the idealised vision of spatial order is best demonstrated in architecture by institutional design. Its archetypal nature as a place of learning, living, meeting and recreating among a particular group of individuals, and the development of its form as an independent self-contained entity express a microcosm of the country's social conditions - a place within a place. In a developing country, institutes become the generic symbols of that development - suggesting an idea that is first realised in the selected experimental ground of a campus, before being unleashed on the larger world outside.

While much of A. D. Raje's work is associated with formal aspects of teaching, research and training, he has for much of his professional career searched for a suitable vocabulary that expresses the idea of a public institution. His recent work highlights a kind of historical monumentality unprecedented in recent Indian architecture. Just as Louis Kahn had turned to Roman constructions for his inspirations for brick architecture, Raje maintains an undisguised veneration for the medieval ruins of central India. At his recently completed Indian Institute of Forest Management in Bhopal, the abandoned palace fortresses of Fatehpur Sikri and Mandu are interpreted in a contemporary idiom, through a vast assemblage of structural and spatial borrowings.

Designed for the Central Government, the 65-hectare complex, set up explicitly to promote a more ecologically sound national programme in forestry, houses facilities for teaching, seminars, residence and recreation. Its rocky site overlooking the lakes of Bhopal creates a setting of building and landscape that highlights the terrain and the surrounding vistas. Small rocky outcrops, hillocks and depressions on the crest of the undulating promontory have determined, to a large extent, the form of the complex. Administration, accounts and related offices form the main arrival court of the complex, while classrooms, seminars, library and auditorium are grouped around a more contained academic court in the rear. The sequence is closely linked to the adjacent cluster of student dormitories.

The synthesis of Raje's ideas is reflected in a building that is organised around monumental loggias, and creates a geometry of fusion and collision. The layers of double wall, the severe inflections of the plan or the subtler tilts and realignments of walls, which are invariably perceived in moving through the complex, appear as if successive archaeological layers have been deposited on the same site.

The design complements existing features at the eastern edge of the complex. Here, the building dissolves into pavilions sited along a promenade and a water channel - a reflective strip that acts as the datum for the complex and makes visual connections to the natural lakes beyond. Trees, shaded walkways and water bodies are used throughout to create continuous views from court to plaza, internal street to water garden. The manner in which the architecture is integrated with water and foliage creates small enclosures and monumental public vistas. The overall scale is reminiscent of Mogul garden design, and also refers to the larger Deccan palace at Mandu in Central India. Such contrasts of intimacy and monumentality are intended to coalesce the various elements into a visually and physically coherent composition. References to historical ruins for a modern solution suggest that India strives under the heavy, and often contradictory burdens of assimilating both progress and heritage. Yet at the Institute of Forest Management, historicism is transformed to suit a contemporary programme.

The particular concerns for an Indian language of building and an architecture oriented to regionally appropriate themes have been categorically endorsed in many new projects. The Entrepreneurship Development Institute outside Ahmedabad was set up with modest intentions - to provide a residential campus for the training of individuals interested in setting up marginal and small-scale business enterprises. Designed by Bimal Patel, the building utilises the local techniques of exposed brick construction, while the layout fragments the complex into its residual functions, bringing them together eventually in a sequence of linking terraces and courts.