TY - ART T1 - Wedding Wall at Villa Shodhan Y1 - 1990 A1 - Anant Raje KW - Mud Architecture KW - Scenography KW - Semi-Arid PB - Anant Raje Foundation CY - Ahmedabad N1 -

The bride’s family, in a traditional Hindu wedding ceremony, receives the bridegroom. This was to be located in the compound of Shodhan Villa, designed by Le Corbusier. We pondered over this structure, the entry point for marriage vows, and felt that it must be in an aesthetic vocabulary of the platonic solids that Corbusier thought of in his language as the cube, the cone, the cylinder …

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The cube already existed (as the house), and we decided to bring in a cylinder. We made the cylinder about 8 feet high. The two parts of the cylinder (walls) were made in sundried brick. They are asymmetrical – one side is smaller than the other in terms of its perimeter.

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The cylindrical shape also gave stability to the masonry walls, which we made as though they came from the stepped foundations – broader at the base, narrower at the top, to give them stability without having to make foundations which would have destroyed the existing concrete driveway.

We introduced alcoves (niches in the walls) and embellished them with ‘abhala’ (આભલાં, mirrors) – you find these on the textiles of the region. There is a great art about these ‘abhala’ and we started to make some abstractions of trees, and also tried to accentuate the steps by having the simple ‘abhala’ pressed into the mud plaster.

The canopy for the wall structure was a huge mango tree. During the day – the magnificence of the shadows cast on the wall and the mirrors! In the evening, every member of the family placed an oil lamp in the alcoves, marking the wedding event.

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