Aranya Low Cost Housing. Indore, India. The master-plan provides housing for economically weaker sections (EWS). This also includes. May 20, 2012 Aranya Low Cost Housing. Existing features:. 1.85 hectares allotted forexisting light industries.Geographical features:. Flat site. A natural water channelrunning diagonally across theSW corner. Top strata of the black cottonsoil 2-2.5 m thick. Gradually sloping (Gradient:1:110 approx.) towards thenorth-west corner.
Aranya township is one of the wonders of India, houses are arranged around open spaces, organized into 10-home clusters to create a sense of community, but also includes a private courtyard.
Mar 13, 2018, 12.38 PM IST
By Mihir Sharma
Here in the City of London, you can step out of Bank underground station and walk half a mile in any direction to see what Pritzker Prize-winning architects can do when they push themselves. At Bank intersection itself, breaking up the heavy imperial-era neoclassicism of Soane, Baker and Lutyens is James Stirling's Number One Poultry, whose postmodern curves softly echo the other buildings' grandiose lines. Stirling won the Pritzker, 'architecture's Nobel Prize,' in 1981; Number One Poultry, still controversial, is nevertheless now the youngest building to be officially protected, or 'listed,' by the British government.
QuickTake India's Aspirations
Most architects who have been awarded the Pritzker are best known for buildings like this: grand and controversial office buildings such as Lloyds' headquarters, vast museums like the Tate Modern, unforgettable set-pieces such as the Sydney Opera House. But, last week, the Pritzker jury gave the 2018 prize to the Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi, who is best known for very different designs.
Doshi, now 90, has had his share of landmark commissions -- the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, for example, and Ahmedabad's Tagore Hall. But he is best known for Aranya, a low-cost housing project in the central Indian city of Indore. Aranya is one of the wonders of India: a housing project that actually works. Houses are arranged around open spaces, organized into 10-home clusters to create a sense of community, but each also includes a small private courtyard to the rear. Rather than completely erasing the dense urban clusters which it was meant to replace, Aranya seeks to replicate their neighborly social spaces. As some observers have pointed out, Aranya essentially imitates the slums that dot Indian cities like Indore -- except with infrastructure and more open space to make it more liveable.
The architecture celebrated by prizes and popular acclaim is the most macho, egotistic side of the profession. Consider that the most memorable -- if abysmally written -- architect in literature is Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's 'Fountainhead.' The Pritzker itself is regularly assailed for not recognizing more women. But Doshi's award is a reminder of what good architecture should actually be: As he told the Guardian last week, architects should 'move away from their focus on the designer as individual to being far more collaborative, compassionate and invested in the dignity of those they house.'
Doshi seeks to create places where the borders between commercial and personal space are blurred and shifting; where individuals and businesses have the ability to change and modify their spaces so that a new genius loci can emerge; where people of differing backgrounds and income levels can live together. Perhaps this is a quintessentially Indian project. Yet it's one that is too little seen in today's India, obsessed with gated communities and harsh, exclusionary Chinese-style infrastructure.
It was not always so. Doshi's principles are a reminder of the possibilities and promise that seemed everywhere in the first decades after Indian independence in 1947. On the wall of my study at home is a 1940s advertisement for Tata Steel. The ad highlights the government's plan to build millions of low-cost houses that would require the company's materials. What stands out, though, is how the company illustrated what it thought these new townships would look like: compact but adaptable houses, with little yards, capable of accommodating many generations of one family, set around shared and semi-public areas.
The picture shares a great deal with Doshi's vision for Aranya, suggesting an unusual consensus between professionals, companies and the state. You would look in vain for such projects in today's India. Every year, the federal budget sets aside a little for low-cost housing; every year, people expect big construction companies to make money off federal money without providing actual, liveable townships. As a result, 10 million upscale homes lie empty in India while a vast proportion of Indian town-dwellers live in slums.
Across the developing world, whether India, Brazil or South Africa, governments will increasingly be judged on the communities they create. Drive into Cape Town and you pass, on one side, the informal settlements for which South Africa is famous; and, on the other side, the vast new development known as N2 Gateway where residents are agitating for Doshi's principles to be applied: Why are we being given flats, they ask, when we want houses?
It's time for today's architects and planners to take a step back and listen to Doshi. Perhaps, after contemplating Number One Poultry and what it says about modern architecture, they could walk around the Royal Exchange to look at the statue of George Peabody that stands behind it; his Peabody Trust, which practically invented inner-city low-cost housing, still exists -- many of its buildings sharing with Number One Poultry the yellow stripes on their exteriors that are somehow emblematic of London. Steps from the British parliament buildings in Westminster, in the former Devil's Acre -- the place that gave birth to the word 'slum' -- the Peabody Trust replaced one community with another, far safer and more liveable, in the 19th century. Surely governments can do the same in the 21st?
(This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.)
(Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was a columnist for the Indian Express and the Business Standard, and he is the author of “Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.”)
Here in the City of London, you can step out of Bank underground station and walk half a mile in any direction to see what Pritzker Prize-winning architects can do when they push themselves. At Bank intersection itself, breaking up the heavy imperial-era neoclassicism of Soane, Baker and Lutyens is James Stirling's Number One Poultry, whose postmodern curves softly echo the other buildings' grandiose lines. Stirling won the Pritzker, 'architecture's Nobel Prize,' in 1981; Number One Poultry, still controversial, is nevertheless now the youngest building to be officially protected, or 'listed,' by the British government.
QuickTake India's Aspirations
Most architects who have been awarded the Pritzker are best known for buildings like this: grand and controversial office buildings such as Lloyds' headquarters, vast museums like the Tate Modern, unforgettable set-pieces such as the Sydney Opera House. But, last week, the Pritzker jury gave the 2018 prize to the Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi, who is best known for very different designs.
Doshi, now 90, has had his share of landmark commissions -- the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, for example, and Ahmedabad's Tagore Hall. But he is best known for Aranya, a low-cost housing project in the central Indian city of Indore. Aranya is one of the wonders of India: a housing project that actually works. Houses are arranged around open spaces, organized into 10-home clusters to create a sense of community, but each also includes a small private courtyard to the rear. Rather than completely erasing the dense urban clusters which it was meant to replace, Aranya seeks to replicate their neighborly social spaces. As some observers have pointed out, Aranya essentially imitates the slums that dot Indian cities like Indore -- except with infrastructure and more open space to make it more liveable.
The architecture celebrated by prizes and popular acclaim is the most macho, egotistic side of the profession. Consider that the most memorable -- if abysmally written -- architect in literature is Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's 'Fountainhead.' The Pritzker itself is regularly assailed for not recognizing more women. But Doshi's award is a reminder of what good architecture should actually be: As he told the Guardian last week, architects should 'move away from their focus on the designer as individual to being far more collaborative, compassionate and invested in the dignity of those they house.'
Doshi seeks to create places where the borders between commercial and personal space are blurred and shifting; where individuals and businesses have the ability to change and modify their spaces so that a new genius loci can emerge; where people of differing backgrounds and income levels can live together. Perhaps this is a quintessentially Indian project. Yet it's one that is too little seen in today's India, obsessed with gated communities and harsh, exclusionary Chinese-style infrastructure.
It was not always so. Doshi's principles are a reminder of the possibilities and promise that seemed everywhere in the first decades after Indian independence in 1947. On the wall of my study at home is a 1940s advertisement for Tata Steel. The ad highlights the government's plan to build millions of low-cost houses that would require the company's materials. What stands out, though, is how the company illustrated what it thought these new townships would look like: compact but adaptable houses, with little yards, capable of accommodating many generations of one family, set around shared and semi-public areas.
The picture shares a great deal with Doshi's vision for Aranya, suggesting an unusual consensus between professionals, companies and the state. You would look in vain for such projects in today's India. Every year, the federal budget sets aside a little for low-cost housing; every year, people expect big construction companies to make money off federal money without providing actual, liveable townships. As a result, 10 million upscale homes lie empty in India while a vast proportion of Indian town-dwellers live in slums.
Across the developing world, whether India, Brazil or South Africa, governments will increasingly be judged on the communities they create. Drive into Cape Town and you pass, on one side, the informal settlements for which South Africa is famous; and, on the other side, the vast new development known as N2 Gateway where residents are agitating for Doshi's principles to be applied: Why are we being given flats, they ask, when we want houses?
It's time for today's architects and planners to take a step back and listen to Doshi. Perhaps, after contemplating Number One Poultry and what it says about modern architecture, they could walk around the Royal Exchange to look at the statue of George Peabody that stands behind it; his Peabody Trust, which practically invented inner-city low-cost housing, still exists -- many of its buildings sharing with Number One Poultry the yellow stripes on their exteriors that are somehow emblematic of London. Steps from the British parliament buildings in Westminster, in the former Devil's Acre -- the place that gave birth to the word 'slum' -- the Peabody Trust replaced one community with another, far safer and more liveable, in the 19th century. Surely governments can do the same in the 21st?
(This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.)
(Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was a columnist for the Indian Express and the Business Standard, and he is the author of “Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.”)
The winner of architecture’s “Nobel prize”, Balkrishna Doshi, has called on his profession to rethink the way it approaches building for the most impoverished communities.
The internationally noted champion of housing for India’s poor, Doshi was awarded the Pritzker prize last week, in large part for the Aranya low-cost housing project. It accommodates 80,000 people with houses and courtyards linked by a maze of pathways in the city of Indore.
A celebrity in India where he speaks to packed lectures, 90-year-old Doshi, who studied under Le Corbusier, has worked on other projects – including mixed-income housing for a life insurance corporation in Ahmedabad and the underground Amdavad ni Gufa art gallery – but it is Aranya for which he is best known.
Speaking to the Guardian after the announcement of his award, Doshi said that architects and urban planners involved in low-income housing projects – as well as architectural education – needed to move away from their focus on the designer as individual to being far more collaborative, compassionate and invested in the dignity of those they house.
And in the chequered history of slum clearance and relocation – including in the US after Roosevelt’s New Deal, and in countries like France and the UK in the post-war era – Doshi’s Aranya stands out as a success story in a country with substantial and persisting housing issues for its poorest citizens.
“They are not houses but homes where a happy community lives. That is what finally matters,” Doshi has said in the past of the organising credo for this project.
Doshi believes that a large part of Aranya’s success has been because instead of presenting those who would live there – often in a purpose-built house for the first time – with a ready-made design, the development allows residents the space and opportunity to adapt and improve their homes.
Built around a central spine to accommodate businesses, Doshi’s brick houses – in sizes from a single room to larger homes for wealthier families – were designed around parks and courtyards, with groups of ten houses forming inward-looking clusters.
Beyond aesthetics, Doshi argued that architecture and urban design – done right – can and should be socially transformative for the world’s poorest.
“If you empower people then what happens is that it creates incentives for people that are self-generated. The promise of a home is not a limited hope, but the sky becomes the limit.”
If at times Doshi speaks more like a humanist philosopher than a designer, it is an outlook that was explicitly recognised by the prize committee that “projects must go beyond the functional to connect with the human spirit through poetic and philosophical underpinnings”.
“Housing as shelter is but one aspect of these projects,” the Pritzker jury added in its citation.
“The entire planning of the community, the scale, the creation of public, semi-public and private spaces are a testament to his understanding of how cities work and the importance of the urban design.”
Echoing that theme, Doshi added: “As architects we are supposed to be social, economic and cultural designers. But really we are exclusive when we need to be inclusive.”
“If I as an architect am not able to do something for my people and provide them with what they need, then I should say my job is incomplete.”
For Doshi that has not only meant designing places like Aranya to replace slum housing but to have the curiosity and humility to learn from slums, not least how and why a successful sense of community coalesces, even in situations of extreme hardship.
“I used take students to slum areas. When you talk to the people living there they are lot more open and willing to share and modify because the human being is basically a compassionate animal.
“In Bombay,” he added, “we have a large slum near the airport. When we were studying you could see that besides the situation of living there in absolute misery, people were also willing to challenge themselves to find a better way of life, and seeking to overcome the problems.”
The balance, for Doshi, is a subtle combination of factors including access to the “essentials” of life – shops, cafes and places to do business – with the housing maintaining crucial “privacies” while leaving room for cooperative communities to develop through their own negotiations.
“That means borders that are diffuse. What you need to find is how to create not separations but buffer zones, places where there is room for variation.” Doshi said he found such models in Indian temples and old cities.
“You want slight shifts – to create gaps – because architecture is not mechanical.”
Instead Doshi sees communities and the physical places that they live as “organic” and “messy” and inevitably adapting what the architect has designed.
Commenting on the importance of the award for India, Alok Ranjan, Jaipur-based professor and member of the Indian Institute of Architects, told AFP last week: “This is very good news for Indian architects because he is our godfather. We are very proud.
“What stands out about his work is that it is for all strata of society … not only for the elite but also for the middle- and low-income groups.”