Toda Mangra House
The Toda mangra House is unique without creating noise. It attempts to resume conversation with the traditional buildings in the neighbourhood, while simultaneously addressing contemporary needs and aspirations of its inhabitants. It avoids nostalgically clinging on to the courtyard house-type, which has not only lost its social relevance in today's fragmentation of communities, but its climatic significance is also being replaced with gadgets for weather control. The courtyard here is redistributed to create generous margins, offering release and autonomy to the public, semi-public and intimate spaces, and along with the play and flow of volumes through the house.
The Man of the House Squats Down Cross-Legged
…whether it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner, or whether it’s at the dining table, in the yard or on his bed, watching TV. I don’t wish to change that; I have, in fact, offered him more spaces to do the same.
Perhaps a radical shift isn’t always necessary; however, what is necessary is an elaboration of the frame to offer newer perspectives and deeper insights into the extant and desired ways of living. Ways of living also include superstitions which surprise and challenge the design process often assumed rational. The process, in the first place, tends to be intuitive, and, in its unexplainable parts, also superstitious. So, the frame just needs to elaborate itself enough to accommodate, beyond the author’s superstitions, the inhabitants’ as well. However, how does this accommodation take place, what is the nature of expression, the position of the superstition which will help the house acquire an organic form rather than end as caricature? Perhaps, the process needs to integrate surprises. Could we seek such accommodative structures that allow for a participatory authorship, which accepts the collaborative yet autonomous roles of the architect, the inhabitants and crafts persons involved, inherently necessitating and acknowledging their equal contribution towards the manifestation of an image? It may amount to ill-informed, nostalgic surmising, but it appears that traditional vernacular building types and techniques allowed for situational adaptations around an abstract core. For instance, space (not necessarily rooms) would be layered around a courtyard. The kit of locally available materials and building elements set the dimensions and broad articulations of the building, while still leaving scope for customized detailing or ‘individuation’. The primary reason for this could perhaps be the inseparable identities of one’s place of living, and craft & profession from one’s place in the society. Jeopardizing one could jeopardize all. There seems to have been a matter-of-factly approach to building and architecture; however, there didn’t seem to be any lack of care.
Colonization, particularly carried out the way the British did post-industrialization, the socio-economic rupture from traditions, and the proliferation of RCC and the predominant construction material have all changed both matter and facts of our contexts. Families are only growing smaller in size – reducing from an extended network to a nucleus; gradually, but with a serious impact. Courtyards have metamorphosed into air conditioners and laundry machines. Activities that were nurtured within and sustained the courtyard no longer depend on social exchange; instead, they have either been outsourced or are available in packages for consumption against a payment in money. Service and utility spaces, which were hidden away (some hardly found any place in the house) are now ‘attached’ to living spaces – inevitably, inseparable and unavoidably.
If one’s profession as an architect were defined by the commission to be earned in a project, one wouldn’t find value in questioning either of the two extremities: holding on to an inanimate courtyard, or succumbing to its relegation to irrelevant margins. Fortunately though, India lives in several epochs at once: primitive intelligence, space-age sophistication and stuttering urban smartness. Not only does this challenge the linearity of evolution, but there is also hope that each will learn from the other, sustaining our inherent diversity.
The Toda mangra House seeks diversity and attempts to accommodate eccentricities, whether in the form of responding to the body and postures of its inhabitants or their choice of placing a red granite threshold piece at the entrance to welcome fortune or hanging a tyre tube on the most visible wall of the neighborhood to ward off evil.
The House: a Distinct Weave in the Fabric
… the climatic extremities of Rajasthan, the invasions and colonizations – from the Moguls to the British… the harshness of the environment, of light, of air… the building heritage [ranging] form the vernacular to royal palaces and forts… the richness of the cultural heritage – food music, arts and crafts… all embedded into the landscape... there has been a very conscious attempt to frame and address these extreme contrasts…
The Toda mangra House is unique without creating noise. It attempts to resume conversation with the traditional buildings in the neighbourhood, while simultaneously addressing contemporary needs and aspirations of its inhabitants. It avoids nostalgically clinging on to the courtyard house-type, which has not only lost its social relevance in today's fragmentation of communities, but its climatic significance is also being replaced with gadgets for weather control. The courtyard here is redistributed to create generous margins, offering release and autonomy to the public, semi-public and intimate spaces, and along with the play and flow of volumes through the house.
The flow of space within the house is established and articulated by essentially ordering the service and utility spaces – toilet, bath, closet, stairs, kitchen and so on. Services here are not ‘attached’; they are anchored, allowing the inhabitants and events to meander in between. The plan can be read as two halves – each oriented perpendicularly to the other – of interspersed bands of mass and void. While one half contains the bedroom, dining and living – each opening into its margin, the other half contains the entrance, the kitchen and the staircase – each with their yards, the latter being covered.
There is clarity in the logic of material application: exposed stone masonry forming the envelope, plastered brick masonry that emerges as a protected contrast to the envelope and lime finished walls on the inside which require no painting – all offering their base characters to experience. In this, the house attempts to resonate with the vernacular buildings in the context – rich in their simplicity.
Stone forms a prominent material in this house not only for its finishing but also for construction. This is, primarily, owing to our natural affinity to the material, which includes its organic response to changing temperature and weather. At a secondary level, use of stone, though not necessary, is also significant since it is the material in which the client deals. Further, not only are these base materials natural, they are also sourced locally.
Dark grey slate masonry forms the enveloping mass of the house, while mirror polished white marble furnishes the interiors - not only as flooring but also as parapet and stair-wall cladding. Single polish grey Kotah is applied as floor-finish in the courtyards in between. The use of marble in the interior is not for the physiological coolth alone, its exaggerated but austere application also reinforces this quality psychologically. The dark slate on the exterior represents, besides a strong boundary, a down to earth distinction. The relationship of contrast is significant in the application of the two stones: the dark slate outside is rough, tactile, thick and integral to the construct, while the white marble inside is highly polished, thin and applied in layers. Each reinforces the experience of the other's environment within and outside the house.
The Question of Sustainability
The effort is to revive, preserve and conserve the heritage, the knowledge, the art, craft and skills, the construction and building techniques of Silawats which have given rise to a diverse and timeless character to the architecture of Rajasthan.
The Toda mangra house is situated in a low-key middle-class residential neighbourhood of Raj Samand's undulating terrain. Although most houses here have succumbed to the mediocrity perpetuated by RCC frame & brick infill construction, there still are several subdued yet sublime examples of vernacular architecture in apparent disorder of the earthy dung-marked neighborhood.
The selected stones are almost easily available and therefore economical; it is in the highly skilled application that they become inimitable. However, one peculiar constraint an architect will face from his upwardly mobile client is resistance to applying anything ‘local’. The resistance springs from the prospering client's social association and aspirations. He believes that his economic success, which the new house will personify, should be represented through exotic embellishments rather than local forms, materials and artifacts. However, such a situation is fodder for improvisation for an architect: local materials and building techniques ought to be reinterpreted and adapted to contemporary needs and aspirations; which the Toda mangra House does in its pursuit of identity. Unique forms and spatiality are derived from the very materials and life styles which the inhabitants are simultaneously rooted in and desire to set themselves free from.
The honeycomb architecture of the house negotiates the weather and climate without relying heavily on mechanical devices for lighting and ventilation. Thus, through conception, to construction and into its life as a place of inhabitation the Toda Mangra House represents processes of energy and conservation and environmental responsibility. It is not a product on exhibition, rather a process on demonstration; it is the documentation of tradition, implicitly adapted and reinterpreted in the process - an on-going dialogue that culture is.
