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“Sustainability has become rhetoric. Magazine editors might have a role to play in that but it doesn’t take away from its immediate, essential importance. To not be an afterthought, but a starting point, a given, a life choice, that’s the agenda. So year after year, we focus one edition on sustainability and highlight practices and projects that are, in the words of architect Abhimanyu Dalal, “buildings with a conscience”. Curating stories from this lens continues to be a learning. It’s fascinating how the definition expands and contracts, from specific material or process choices to addressing consumption patterns and the idea of longevity, and sometimes it can mean a family or community taking ownership of a building, and inherent in that is a sustainable way of life.
Our cover story this time is, at its surface, a nostalgia piece. It is a discreet home in Ahmedabad, built in the 1970s, restored last year by AD100 designer Kunal Shah with the intent to stay true to its origin. It is someone’s grandfather’s home, yet it is also all our homes. A generation of Indians have grown up in spaces like this: a low-set bungalow, not too large, human scale, with excellent proportions, a line of sight, a front veranda to catch the morning sun and a back veranda for privacy, a staircase with a curved balustrade, steel almirahs, crocheted table covers, wooden cabinets full of trophies, photographs, and souvenirs. A familiarity exists in these kinds of homes. When you go back, you slip into your childhood, unconsciously and effortlessly. Your language, if you belong from there, switches to the local dialect and just the passing of the day returns to, let’s say, the ’90s. It’s a softer version of modernism, crafted to suit our local domestic rituals. And sustainability is part of the ethos. Using locally sourced khadi or repurposing existing Nakashima furniture and extending its life, or placing a Sholapur blanket as a framed tapestry on the wall are all aesthetic and ideological choices but also super sustainable.
Among the other stories that stood out for their sustainable side effects is the MCD Pratibha Vidyalaya, a public school near Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, designed by Vishal K Dar. With its brick vaulted roof and double-insulated windows to cut the noise from the basti outside, this is architecture that can transform a childhood experience and could become a template for public schools in crowded neighbourhoods. The Healthy Planet school in Noida by Vir.Mueller Architects, with its curved walls and light-filled atrium, is a space designed to nurture, to be free and playful, to support a community of families. Then there’s the Hampi Art Labs by sP+a designed as an art residency to further patron Sangita Jindal’s continuing contribution to the arts. Khushnu Panthaki and Sönke Hoof’s modernist interventions in a private home in Ahmedabad are softened by the rolling landscape and majestic trees that surround it. The restoration of the iconic Afghan Church in Mumbai by Kirtida Unwalla is yet another heritage building saved and revived. Palinda Kannangara’s first project in India is a home in Bengaluru crafted with a classic Sri Lankan talent but purely belonging to its site and context. And finally there is Ajith Andagere’s restoration of a rural home in the Bagalkot district of Karnataka. Andagere borrows from the eloquent Mexican poet Octavio Paz to define sustainability, and says, “We must touch the earth lightly.”
Clearly, AD’s May-June issue reads like a roll call of some of the most brilliant minds in architecture and design in India today. It is a ray of hope then that they all have sustainability at the heart of their practices.
Art Director: Chandni Mehta
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