Building Blocks

At first glance, the architectural plans for the Apollo Hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh, look like those of any other metropolitan medical facility. The stainless steel and glass façade of the building and tidy landscaping would blend into a typical cityscape in Dallas just as easily as it does in Dhaka.
But peer a little more closely at these plans and you may be surprised to see the mystical details that emerge.The plan for the main entry and its soaring, winglife roof are marked with the element Air.
The building’s boiler plant is marked Fire. The bulk of the building’s mass is in a corner of the property marked Earth, and a water tank is situated in an area called the Water quadrant. This state-of-the-art medical facility is being built according to a principle thousands of years old: vastu shastra, the Indian art of placement that predates feng shui.
There are already a few hospitals in India built to vastu specifications, but “This is the first time a big institutional
building on this scale has been designed this way,� says Viren Ahuja, 36, head of a team of three architects at work on the project for the Smith Group.
When the Apollo Hospital group – the single largest private healthcare provider in India — decided to build its first-ever hospital in Bangladesh, it turned to the Smith Group, a San Francisco architecture firm that’s considered one of the best in the world for hospital design and construction, with 400 projects around the world to its credit.
And Ahuja, a Delhi native who came to the United States seven years ago, just happened to be the right guy in the right place at the right time.
“Yes, you could say they put me on this project because I’m Indian,� he says. “But I also know health care projects. I know what works in India, and I know what works here in the West.�
Two of the Apollo group’s other hospitals, in Colombo, Sri Lanka and Ahmedabad, Gujarat (under construction), are also built to vastu principles. Ahuja described what it was like to stand in the completed Colombo hospital: if you didn’t know it was vastu, you probably wouldn’t notice anything, except “it just feels good to be in that building,� he says.
“Good vastu design will always respond well to a tropical climate,� by keeping a lot of open space and air circulation as top priorities.
In literal terms, vastu means “to dwell� and shastra means “science�; vastu shastra defines the concept of space as a dynamic element out of which all objects of nature come into existence.
If a part of that space is enclosed by walls, it becomes in effect a living organism, and the enclosed space is believed to vibrate at a certain frequency. Vastu proponents believe the “health� of a building directly affects that of its inhabitants.
Construction on the Dhaka hospital is still at the foundation stage, and is due to be completed in July 2003 at a projected cost of $16 million (Rs 778.4 million). At 100,000 sq. metres the hospital will house around 250 beds, up to 20 per cent of which will be reserved for charitable cases.
Although the hospital runs on a for-profit basis, medical care costs are expected to run around a quarter of what they’d cost in the West – making the hospital a potential destination for foreign patients as well as locals able to pay for top-flight medical care.
The hospital’s CT scanning equipment and MRI and digital imaging facilities will be the best available, and specialised care will focus on cardiology, orthopedics and oncology. “This hospital will have a quality of care on par with the best in the world,� says Ahuja.
Dr K Chandramouli Reddi, a well-known and highly regarded vastu consultant to many of India’s top companies, politicians and celebrities, was called in to advise the architects on the project.
The challenges that arise on such a huge project are even more complicated than you’d first imagine. First off, although vastu is a Hindu tradition, up to 88 per cent of Bangladeshis are Muslim, according to statistics in the CIA Factbook.
This means “you can’t orient the toilets toward Mecca,� Ahuja explains, nor should you aim the patients’ feet toward the West.
However, vastu dictates that you can’t have the patients’ heads facing north either, “so the solution is to give the beds a little tilt, say 40 degrees or so, so that they’re not on axis.�
They couldn’t build a basement, because vastu rules call for as little disturbance of the land as possible, but that actually works out for the best in a flood-prone location like Dhaka. The hospital entrance is elevated, so that it seems like people are entering on a higher level.
And the front door of the hospital had to be moved off a busy thoroughfare to a tiny road on the site’s north side to conform to vastu principles. This required a major redesign of traffic flow in the area.
As hard as they try, Ahuja and his team realise that they’ll never achieve 100 per cent adherence to vastu rules. “If we meet 75 per cent of them, we say it’s a good job!� he exults.