Slide 2: Between the Earth and the Sky
Slide 2: Between the Earth and the Sky: In the beginning : a conceptual plan for a Museum of Tantra Art (1967), based on a sacred diagram (or Mandala), having at its centre the “Sri Chakra” which represents the fusion of matter and energy as symbolic of universal creative activity. From this followed the projects on exhibit which continued the exploration of grounding ancient sacred principles in architecture. © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 3: The Projects
Slide 3: The Projects: The projects are spread over diverse locations in the Indian sub-continent in cities as well as rural areas. The buildings are mostly made by local craftsmen and their helpers using simple hand tools and natural materials with a minimum of industrial processing. 1 SRINAGAR  Kashmir University Staff Housing 2 DHARAMASALA   Monestary for Tibetan Refugee Nuns 3 NEW DELHI    Cooperative Housing for the Press Association   Private House   Buddha Memorial   Residential Development Chanakyapuri   Sultanpuri Community Centre 4 BHOPAL Village for Orphan Children 5 DAKSHIN HABAL VILLAGE Mother and Child Care Centre 6 PORT BLAIR   Tourist Guest House 7 CAR NICOBAR Tribal Dwelling © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 4: Cooperative Housing for the Press Association, New Delhi
Slide 4: Cooperative Housing for the Press Association, New Delhi: On a site of 4 acres in the southern part of New Delhi, this residential development consists of 180 houses designed as apartments on ground and 3 upper floors. Apartments of 3 different sizes are grouped in blocks of 5 houses each which join to enclose garden courtyards regulating the microclimate as well as providing community open space and access to the front doors of houses. The interior planning of houses is structured to provide thermal comfort by correct solar orientation and maximum cross ventilation by monsoon breezes. The structure is formed by parallel load-bearing brick masonry walls supporting short-span reinforced concrete slabs which significantly reduces the cost of construction. The parallel walls also generate deep plan houses with major openings on north and south faces allowing only the winter sun to enter the rooms. The long east and west walls are either shared between houses or have kitchens, bathrooms, and private open courts/terraces attached which provide mutual shading from the summer sun and protection from the hot summer winds. © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 5: Cooperative Housing for the Press Association, New Delhi
Slide 5: Cooperative Housing for the Press Association, New Delhi © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 6: Community Buildings in the Rural Areas of India
Slide 6: Community Buildings in the Rural Areas of India: These buildings were intended to be multi-purpose centres which serve as a base for rural development workers, provide working places for women to run income generating projects, and to become a focus for community activities. The centres were to be built by government agencies and/or voluntary organizations, with UNICEF assistance, in selected villages in all States of India. The main features of the construction programme were that the centres should be built with community involvement, be of low-cost design, use local materials and indigenous construction techniques, and be owned and maintained by the village community. Since the constructions were to be undertaken in fairly remote areas, and since no standard design could respond to the diverse climatic and cultural conditions across the country, the design exercise was initially reduced to sets of illustrated design guidelines which were distributed to the construction agencies. Visits were also made to many of the proposed sites to work out specific design solutions with the local people and the state government officials. © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 7: Community Buildings in the Rural Areas of India
Slide 7: Community Buildings in the Rural Areas of India © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 8: Mother and Child Care Centre, Dakshin Habal
Slide 8: Mother and Child Care Centre, Dakshin Habal: The Mother and Child Care Centre was planned as an experimental unit to demonstrate a culturally and climatically appropriate low-cost solution for accommodating basic health care and educational facilities in rural areas. It was sponsored by the UNICEF Regional Office for South Central Asia and East India, which assisted the West Bengal government after the 1978 flood devastation. The local community was actively involved in the planning and construction of the centre. Village artisans, using local materials and relying primarily on their traditional building skills, were employed. The central meeting place consists of a large verandah that protects against sun and rain, yet allows breezes to pass through. The corner storage areas, where educational and medical equipment are kept, are enclosed with half-brick thick walls. Single brick columns with cross bracing in timber protect the kitchen area against high winds. © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 9: Mother and Child Care Centre, Dakshin Habal
Slide 9: Mother and Child Care Centre, Dakshin Habal © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 10: Tribal Dwelling, Car Nicobar, Andaman & Nicobar Islands
Slide 10: Tribal Dwelling, Car Nicobar, Andaman & Nicobar Islands: As part of Government of India programme for providing shelter assistance to marginalized communities this prototypical dwelling was designed for the tribal people of the island of Car Nicobar. The only building material available on this coral island is timber, and the islanders use the simplest of hand tools to craft wooden structures. The design adapts the indigenous patterns and proposes a new structural geometry to improve durability and withstand cyclonic winds, yet keeping costs within the tight budget. © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 11: Tribal Dwelling, Car Nicobar, Andaman & Nicobar Islands
Slide 11: Tribal Dwelling, Car Nicobar, Andaman & Nicobar Islands © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 12: Tourist Guest House, Port Blair, Andaman & Nicobar Islands
Slide 12: Tourist Guest House, Port Blair, Andaman & Nicobar Islands: Port Blair is the capital city of the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. An addition of 30 guest bedrooms with common facilities for reception. Lounges, dinning and service areas was designed to fit on the grounds of an existing guest house built and designed by the local Public Works Department. The new guest rooms are sited on the sloping portions of the site, while the public facilities including the front garden are on the flat ground adjoining the main road at the top of the site. The guest rooms are layered along the contours of the slopes and interlocked vertically in section. Access is provided to the rooms by stairs placed across the slope and connected to corridors running below each layer of rooms. The corridors are lit and ventilated by small open-to-sky courts adjoining each room. Unrestricted view of the sea is provided from each room through windows running along the length of one wall. The roofs slope from below the window sill of one layer of rooms to the top of the windows of the lower layer of rooms. This protects the interior spaces from the heavy monsoon rains and regulates the natural airflow through the open courts and corridors. © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 13: Tourist Guest House, Port Blair, Andaman & Nicobar Islands
Slide 13: Tourist Guest House, Port Blair, Andaman & Nicobar Islands © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 14: Kashmir University Staff Housing, Srinagar,
Slide 14: Kashmir University Staff Housing, Srinagar,: The site is adjoining the University Campus and was originally an orchard on the edge of the beautiful Nagin lake. On an area of 12.5 acres the requirement was for 150 houses and a community centre having a boat club, guest house and teachers club. The fruit trees had all been removed before handling over the site to the University. The housing design seeks to recreate the environment for an orchard with mostly two-storied houses set within a new plantation of fruit trees. All houses are oriented facing, south to maximize solar heat gain and with all rooms overlooking south-side gardens connected by footpaths descending gradually across the slope to the lake edge where the community centre is located. A maximum use of indigenous construction technology is made to reduce costs and to maintain harmony with the existing built environment. © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 15: Kashmir University Staff Housing, Srinagar,
Slide 15: Kashmir University Staff Housing, Srinagar, © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 16: Private House, New Delhi
Slide 16: Private House, New Delhi: Located in a western suburb of New Delhi, this house is a home for a couple who are both doctors, as well as his aged parents. The site is a rectangular plot of 400 sq.yds, with a long south-facing side and a short west-facing side fronting access roads, while the north side is a party wall and the east side fronts a service lane. The design was evolved around a central courtyard into which the major openings focus. The courtyard is screened from the street outside by a timber frame inset partly with louvers. The frame extends over all the external walls with the louvers set at different angles to provide visual privacy, to allow the winter sun to penetrate into the courtyard, and to protect the windows from the monsoon rains. The interior planning allows the house to function as two discrete but connected sections – an open plan series of spaces on 2 levels for the doctor and his wife, and a more conventional series of bedrooms around lounges for the parents and live-in guests. At first floor level the courtyard is bridged across the south side by a gallery which connects the two sections and shades the courtyard in summer. The main building materials are brick and timber, with roof/intermediate floors of reinforced concrete, and flooring of stone. © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 17: Private House, New Delhi
Slide 17: Private House, New Delhi © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 18: Private House, New Delhi
Slide 18: Private House, New Delhi © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 19: Village for Orphan Children, Bhopal
Slide 19: Village for Orphan Children, Bhopal: To rehabilitate some of the children orphaned as a result of the Bhopal gas tragedy, the SOS Children’s Villages of India (a national voluntary organisation) established this village on the outskirts of the city of Bhopal. On a site measuring 10 acres, the village provides accommodation for 160 Children in 16 family houses with associated facilities for education and healthcare, as well as staff residences and a community house having offices, a village shop, and guest rooms. The family houses are arranged in clusters of four unites around vegetable gardens connected by foot-paths to front gardens arranged along the periphery of a playing field. This formed the first phase of construction which also included the kindergarten, the community house and the health centre. The second phase is separated from the first by a plantation of hardwood trees and contains a preparatory school, a temple, a residence for 20 older children (called the Youth House) and a workshop. The second phase construction is in progress. The materials and construction technology is chosen to be climatically responsive and for ease of maintenance. Foundations and plinths are in local stone masonry walls are of brick masonry rendered with plaster, and roofs are of clay tiles supported on a framework of reinforced concrete edge beams with hardwood rafters and softwood planking. The second phase roofs were modified to replace the timber rafters and planking by rectangular section steel tubes and mild steel angels to support the clay tiles. The flooring for all buildings is of polished stone, while the footpaths are of hand cut local stone. © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 20: Village for Orphan Children, Bhopal
Slide 20: Village for Orphan Children, Bhopal © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 21: Village for Orphan Children, Bhopal
Slide 21: Village for Orphan Children, Bhopal © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 22: Buddha Memorial, New Delhi
Slide 22: Buddha Memorial, New Delhi: As a symbol of gratitude His Holiness the Dalai Lama presented a statue of Lord Buddha to the people and Government of India. The statue was installed under a canopy set in a garden designed to be public monument. The location chosen was a public park situated on the Delhi Ridge, a spur of the ancient Aravali mountain range, which once formed the western edge of New Delhi. The canopy design embodies a cluster of Buddhist symbols. The iconography was carefully chosen by the Tibetan Lamas including the Dalai Lama. The construction of the canopy was entrusted to a team of Rajasthani stone masons who belong to a community of traditional temple builders. The architect’s role became one of  mediating between the esoteric knowledge of the Lamas and the constructional expertise of the stone masons as practiced for many centuries. The statue and canopy are set on a large rock which forms an island within a system of water channels running through the park. The island is treated as the sacred enclosure while the garden around the waterway is landscaped for the day-today recreation of the general public. After the statue had been consecrated it was necessary to indicate its location on a map of New Delhi. It was only then discovered that the statue coincidentally extends the ceremonial axis planned by Lutyens between the Viceroys House and the War memorial. Today the House (now the residence of the President of India) sits on this axis with the War Memorial at one end and at the other end the Buddha Memorial with its message of universal peace. © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 23: Buddha Memorial, New Delhi
Slide 23: Buddha Memorial, New Delhi © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 24: Buddha Memorial, New Delhi
Slide 24: Buddha Memorial, New Delhi © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 25: Buddha Memorial, New Delhi
Slide 25: Buddha Memorial, New Delhi © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 26: Monastery for Tibetan Nuns, At Sidhpur, Dharamsala
Slide 26: Monastery for Tibetan Nuns, At Sidhpur, Dharamsala: The Tibetan Women’s Association has undertaken an extensive program to resettle many of the nuns fleeing their homeland in Tibet to escape persecution by the Chinese government. The site for this Nunnery is piece of agricultural land, measuring about 6 acres, situated in the valley below Dharamsala where the Dalai Lama now lives. The requirement was to house 250 nuns along with teachers and support staff. The plan provides for 125 rooms and 12 classrooms, an assembly building containing a hall for religious assembly, a library, a large lecture room and a residential suite for the Dalai Lama; as well as common dining hall with kitchen, a workshop for craft activities, a health centre, an office, a guest house, and staff residences. The site slopes to the south and was terraced for farming. This region experiences extremely heavy rainfall during the monsoon making it the second rainiest place in India. The design makes use of system of verandahs which distribute the built spaces around a series of courtyards and terraced gardens which are drained by a network of water channels lined with locally quarried stone. The common facilities are placed on a central axis across the contours with the office at the bottom near the entrance, the dining hall in the center, and the assembly building at the top. The nuns rooms are placed along the contours overlooking south-side terraced gardens and connected by north-side verandahs to the common facilities and the central courtyards. These courtyards are flanked by the main verandahs to form a ceremonial route rising up the slope and culminating in the assembly building. A water reservoir on the north-east corner of the site and  a water channel running along the northern boundary act as a moat to protect the buildings from the flash floods which inundate the fields above during the monsoon. The construction is being done by local masons and carpenters supervised by volunteers of the Tibetan Women’s Association. The construction techniques are chosen to be easily managed by a somewhat inexpert building team. The main building materials are locally quarried stone and slate tiles, as well as local bricks. © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 27: Monastery for Tibetan Nuns, At Sidhpur, Dharamsala
Slide 27: Monastery for Tibetan Nuns, At Sidhpur, Dharamsala © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 28: Monastery for Tibetan Nuns, At Sidhpur, Dharamsala
Slide 28: Monastery for Tibetan Nuns, At Sidhpur, Dharamsala © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 29: Monastery for Tibetan Nuns, At Sidhpur, Dharamsala
Slide 29: Monastery for Tibetan Nuns, At Sidhpur, Dharamsala © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 30: Monastery for Tibetan Nuns, At Sidhpur, Dharamsala
Slide 30: Monastery for Tibetan Nuns, At Sidhpur, Dharamsala © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 31: Monastery for Tibetan Nuns, At Sidhpur, Dharamsala
Slide 31: Monastery for Tibetan Nuns, At Sidhpur, Dharamsala © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 32: Design for a Community Center at Sultanpuri, New Delhi
Slide 32: Design for a Community Center at Sultanpuri, New Delhi: The Master Plan for the Development of Delhi proposes a hierarchy of facilities among which there are several commercial centers (called community centers) each serving a population of half a million persons. Sultanpuri is an old village in western Delhi where a large population of squatters was resettled in 1976. The community center for Sultanpuri is to serve the needs of the local population for retail shopping, commercial offices, a fruit and vegetable market service and repair facilities, a cinema, a hotel, a post office, a petrol pump, a telephone exchange, and cultural center. The area of the site is nearly 15 acres and the Delhi Master Plan specifies the maximum ground coverage for the buildings to be 25% with a maximum floor area ratio 1:1. the total built up area to be provided is nearly 57000 square meters. Keeping in view the specific characteristics of the site and of the local population, the urban design proposal emphasizes the importance of pedestrian circulation, a predominantly small-scale open space structure, and buildings based on traditional forms like the bazaar and the courtyard. © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 33: Design for a Community Center at Sultanpuri, New Delhi
Slide 33: Design for a Community Center at Sultanpuri, New Delhi:  CONTEXT Sultanpuri is one of the resettlement schemes of the DDA, developed in 1976 for the housing and resettlement of a large squatter population within the Delhi Urban Area (DDA) Located in the peripheral areas of Delhi, these schemes comprised of large-scale land sub-divisions with provision of basic services like water-supply and surface drainage at the cluster level and provision of sanitary facilities at the community level. The Sultanpuri Resettlement Scheme, located on the western periphery of DUA, covers an area of 225.76 Ha (DDA 1984). It is situated north of the main line of Northern Railways, which runs parallel to Rohtak Road, and on the western side of the Nangloi Drain. It is at a distance of about 15 km from the Central Business District (CBD), and is connected to the rest of DUA by Rohtak Road and the Outer and Inner Ring roads. These links provide access to the transport nodes, wholesale and warehousing centres, the CBD and other facilities. Three district centres and one community centre have been proposed within a radius of 3 km from the scheme area in the PDP – 2001 DESIGN PRINCIPLES Nature of Development The design of this community centre, being located in a resettlement scheme, demands some difference in approach as compared to community centres in other parts of the Delhi Urban Area. These differences have already been cutlined in the foregoing sections of this report. Access to the Sultanpuri Scheme area is primarily from two directions, from Rohtak Road in the south and from Outer Ring Road via Mongolpuri in the east. Both these approaches are constricted by traffic bottlenecks as mentioned earlier in section 2.2 of this report. The development of the community centre here is contingent on the removal of these bottlenecks. It is recommended that the approach from Rohtak Road, which goes across a level crossing over the main Northern Railway line, should be enhanced by the construction of a vehicular overbridge across the railway line. The approach from Mongolpuri, proposed to be widened to 45 metre right-of-way, will need the widening of a bridge over the community centre site. The road junction next to this bridge also needs to be rationalised to accommodate traffic to and from the institutional facilities proposed on the north of the community centre site. To properly connect these institutional facilities with the community centre, a subway is proposed as shown in Fig, 4 overleaf. Keeping in view the specific characteristics of the site and of the local population, the design proposal emphasizes the importance of pedestrian circulation of a predominantly small-scale open space structure, and of a building scheme that relies on traditional forms like the bazaar and courtyard. Buildings The foregoing analysis suggests three discrete types of architectural development. The first is of a formal bazaar, combining retail and commercial facilities in a walkup building section of ground plus three floors. The ground and first floors can accommodate the retail activities while the second and third floors can be utilized as offices. The access to the upper floors will have to be controlled in order to minimize cross-circulation between the retail and commercial areas. The second type would connect to the first and be a two-to three storied development of informal retail and commercial facilities around courtyards. The fruit and vegetable market would be variation of this type with single-storey structure. The third type would be of multi-storeyed blocks to accommodate commercial offices in the final stages of the development, when economic consolidation of the user population has taken place. The first two types of buildings would be linked primarily though the pedestrian circulation network. For access of service and devliery vehicles as well as for the private transport users, there would be vehicular access zones segregated from the pedestrian network. The service areas would also be segregated from the parking area. For the multi-storeyed blocks, vehicular access would from the primary link with the rest of the develo © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 34: Residential Development at Chanakyapuri, New Delhi
Slide 34: Residential Development at Chanakyapuri, New Delhi: Lutyens’s plan for Imperial Delhi located a dairy farm behind the Viceroys House on the forested Delhi Ridge, a spur of the ancient Aravali mountain range, which formed the western edge of the new city. After the independence of India in 1947 the city expanded rapidly and the area around the dairy farm was developed as the diplomatic enclave which became one of the most prestigious residential neighbourhoods of the capital. The dairy farm was taken over by a real estate company which obtained permission from the local government for a residential development. The site covers an area of 25 acres and contains the abandoned milk processing plant, its ancillary buildings including workers quarters, two bungalows for managerial staff, and a large number of trees growing wild in the factory compound. Three sides of the site adjoin low-rise private house on plots, while along the fourth side runs a storm water canal which separates it from the government-owned bungalows of Lutyens’s Imperial Delhi. The master plan proposal for the new residential development on this site provides a mix of 70 individual plots for 3 storey houses and 84 apartments in a 5 storey block. The plotted housing is located on the periphery to maintain continuity with the surrounding development. The apartment block is located in the center of the site with public open spaces around it. The configuration of roads, houses, apartment block and open spaces is specially arranged to preserve most of the mature trees existing on the site. The plan seeks to find a balance between the market pressures on this extremely expensive piece of real estate and the developers stated objective to enhance the urban quality of one of New Delhi’s most attractive residential neighbourhoods. © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 35: Residential Development at Chanakyapuri, New Delhi
Slide 35: Residential Development at Chanakyapuri, New Delhi © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 36: Garden of the Great Arc
Slide 36: Garden of the Great Arc: The garden of the Great Arc will commemorate one of the most significant scientific endeavors of modern times. In April 1802, Col. William Lambton began the enterprise of measuring the length of a degree of latitude along a longitude in the middle of peninsular India. The intellectual quest underlying this enterprise was to study precisely the curvature of the earth’s surface. The Great Trigonometrical Survey, generally considered to be the foundation of topographical surveys, was the means for achieving this end. The Great Indian Arc grew from the baseline measured at St. Thomas Mount in Madras and triangulated its way across the entire length of the subcontinent to reach its pinnacle in the hills of Mussoorie above the Dun Valley. This monumental task undertaken by the Survey of India became the basis for the topographical mapping of the Indian subcontinent. The Survey of India is headquartered in the city of Dehradun, where the Garden of the Great Arc is proposed to be located. © MN Ashish Ganju
Slide 37: Garden of the Great Arc, Landscape Concept
Slide 37: Garden of the Great Arc, Landscape Concept: The design proposal envisages the creation of a unique Urban Park which will celebrate the fascinating tale of The Great Arc within the natural matrix of the site. The story of the Great Arc is to be brought to life by the symbolic representation of the Great Trigonometrical Survey in the design of the Park. The north-south linear configuration of the Garden of The Great Arc is a reminder of the journey undertaken by the intrepid surveyors from the southern tip of the Indian Peninsula to the northern reaches of the subcontinent at the base of the Himalayas. The triangulated pathways traverse the Garden connecting at the apex of the triangles in specialized small gardens. These will also become locations for specially commissioned sculptures depicting the story of The Great Arc. © MN Ashish Ganju