An 84-year-old bungalow listed by the AMC as a heritage structure is to be run over by the civic body’s own road department.  The road-widening drive of the AMC threatens the bungalow, near Madalpur underpass, which is considered an architectural landmark in the city. It was designed by one of the pioneers of the Art Deco movement in India, Claude Batley. Art Deco represents ‘new architecture’. 

The building will be chopped from two sides and then halved. The only option the building’s owner has is to wipe it out of existence. Recently, the AMC issued a notice for road widening of Madalpur underpass road. This has put the owners of the bungalow in a fix as restoration activity is currently underway at Shodhan House. It figures on the AMC’s own list of protected heritage buildings1. 

The AMC’s zonal road department is widening an existing 18m road to 36m. Unfortunately, the department did not bother to see how the road will rip right through the drawing room of the bungalow, only leaving behind 2.5 rooms of the total 7. Batley’s Shodhan House currently belongs to Harsh Navnitlal Shodhan. 

• 1. “Batley’s Shodhan House was put on the AMC’s heritage list in 2016 as stated in the deputy municipal commissioner’s letter to the owner on April 17, 2018,” said architect Riyaz Tayyibji. “There has been no change in its Grade 3 status. The house is almost in its original state, interestingly only being painted twice in its 84 years. It is in a good conserved state after some minor retrofitting.”  Tayyibji added that Batley had designed the Town Hall, Vijali Ghar (Electricity House) at Lal Darwaza, and MJ Library in Ahmedabad. These were examples of the Indian architectural fraternity embracing modernism with design that was both international in outlook and contemporaneous in sensibility. Batley’s ‘new architecture’ which took roots nearly two decades before Indian independence, proved that modernism was gaining ground among the Indian middle-class. Functionalism formed the core of Batley’s architectural philosophy.