Ganju has also been a member of several Government of India committees and won prizes in national and international design competitions.
He described the evolution in his thinking to one interviewer thus.
When I went abroad for studies, half a century ago, there were relatively few Indian architecture students in the UK, where I went. The experience for me was quite transformative. I was 19 years old when I arrived in London, and this was the beginning of the sixties when London was becoming the centre of a cultural renaissance that was sweeping through Europe. I was attending the Architectural Association School of Architecture, and it was a hotbed of the avant garde. By the time I returned to India five years later, my perceptual make upwas quite transformed. The environment that I had grown up in now evoked an unfamiliar set of responses. This became a great challenge, full of promise to discover a new reality. This process of discovery is continuing to date and I find it fascinating.
On another occasion, in a memorial lecture for an Indian social reformer, he described how he saw the history of Indian architecture.
‘[When] the Islamic invaders came and stayed on, they adopted much of Indian tradition and identified themselves quite well with the ethos of India. So, their thought, their religious dynamic, their architecture- all had the definitive Indian dimension. Such was not the case with the Europeans. They never identified with India, they never became one with the land and its people. They caused a break in our cultural tradition and a very, very deep rift in our cultural make-up. This has influenced the architectural process.’
One of Ganju’s current design projects is for the Tibetan refugee community in Dharamsala. He combines this work with researching the practice of sustainable architecture in the Himalayas.
The master architect is known for sometimes using craftsmen who do not read drawings, and has created a new geometry- where construction is a handicraft.
Based in New Delhi, Ganju cares about the fact that over a quarter of Delhi’s population lives outside the law in unauthorised colonies. He lives and works on the urban fringe, to demonstrate by example the principle of urban renewal by citizens. I visited him to experience his bespoke-design living quarters first hand.
Singh: Can you describe to me how you incorporated change into the conventional design landscape?
Ganju: My first major project started in 1972 – a residential development of 180 apartments for journalists, known as the Press Enclave in Delhi. The innovations attempted here were on two fronts. First the architectural design was based on energy efficiency using solar passive techniques (making this probably the first ‘green’ building in modern India), and second, making the design user-centric by active consultation with the residents throughout the design process. At that time, forty years ago, such thinking was not commonplace.
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