Perfecting the past

As Ahmedabad aspires to become India's first Unesco World Heritage City, it is important to remember that heritage is not limited to history, nostalgia and aesthetics. It is also a treasure trove of knowledge, such as the exceptional traditional construction techniques that not many use today. Among those attempting to revive this knowledge system are architect couple Parul Zaveri and Nimish Patel.They employed these methods to make their home.
Situated on a plot spanning 350 sq m in a small cooperative society in Ahmedabad that abuts a municipal garden, the house is built on the principles of Vastu. All spaces - living, dining, kitchen on the ground level and bedrooms, and the study on the upper level - wrap themselves around the central wooden staircase which ends in the basement in a sunken courtyard.
"We believe nature, traditional wisdom and craft should be the basic ingredients of design," says Nimish about their design and conservation practice. "Our intention was to achieve resource conservation in a holistic way, to use crafts at all levels of design and also create comfortable environs with minimum use of electrical and mechanical energies." Thus, the traditional lime mixture - consisting of lime, gur, gugal and methi - was used as mortar, as coloured plaster, painting coat and even as the screen for garden lighting.
Further, earthen pots providing insulation on the terrace and broken china forming exquisite mosaic patterns on the flooring are the micro-details that fill the house. And all these have been created by expert artisans, of course.
"While the intensity of light mirrored from these mosaic floors varies with every changing hour, the unpainted lime plaster lends a timeless quality," says Parul. "Most of the methods employed in making the house are the ones we have learnt in our practice over time from vernacular architecture. It is very important to revive traditional methods of construction which are often climatological and naturefriendly."
Curiously, the couple graduated in the early 1970s that was the period when a manifestation of Modernism became evident in Ahmedabad. Many brick-and-concrete structures bore the signatures of iconic architects like Corbusier and Louis Kahn; these structures spawned a legion of similar buildings. So, in a sense, uniformity was beginning to jostle with India's inherent cultural plurality.
Some like Nimish and Parul, however, felt 'plurality was as much the strength of Indian architecture, as was the anonymity of its designers.' Their house stands testimony to this belief.