Design Anthology - Asia Pacific Edition
Studio Profile
Studio Lotus’s ingenious approach to adaptive reuse, which extends from buildings and materials to traditional craft forms, presents a new, resilient model of urbanism for India
Modern urban India abounds in stark dichotomies — skyscrapers cast shadows on ancient ruins, gated enclaves share walls with ‘urban villages’, and cars and buses jostle for street space with rickshaws, thela (hand-pushed carts) and sometimes even herds of cattle and sheep. The paucity of space, infrastructure and resources is something I’m reminded of as I make my way down a narrow, winding alleyway in Lado Sarai, an endless web of closely packed two- and three-storey buildings in southern New Delhi. India is projected to more than double its building stock by 2030 and grow by more than 400 million urban dwellers by 2050, both of which will increase its net carbon emissions manifold. But local architects and urbanists are beginning to take note; a growing school is exploring the potential for reusing buildings and materials to reduce capital and energy directed towards new construction. At the forefront of this movement is New Delhi-based architecture and interior design firm Studio Lotus, which is where I’m headed to meet two of its five design principals: co-founder Ankur Choksi and his protégé Pankhuri Goel, who leads the practice’s adaptive reuse initiatives.
Studio Lotus’s experiments with reuse began in 2004, two years after its founding, when the team was invited to renovate a museum memorabilia shop within the 15th-century Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur. ‘We were horrified when we first visited the site,’ recalls Choksi. ‘Nails had been hammered and holes drilled into the fort’s sandstone walls, and partitions erected across its arcades.’ Further investigations uncovered several layers that had been applied onto the historic interior shell: washes of lime and paint on the walls and ceiling, and a ten-year-old cement floor.
Working with conservation experts, Studio Lotus carefully removed the contemporary additions to reveal the fort’s exquisite original materials and spatial proportions; the team also devised a display and lighting system with all fixtures held in place by pressure clamps or rods. ‘The intent was to be as non-intrusive as possible. We didn’t want our intervention to leave a footprint,’ says Goel.
Meanwhile, barely a kilometre away in the heart of the Walled City, enterprising brothers Nikhilendra and Dhananajaya Singh had acquired a 6,000-square-metre site and three 18th- and 19th-century buildings, with the vision to establish a boutique hotel. Studio Lotus’s remarkable demonstration of restraint and sensitivity at the fort caught their eye, and the practice won the project — its biggest commission yet — with partners Praxis. Over the next few years, the firms worked with more than 100 local artisans to painstakingly restore the three historic buildings in original materials, while three new buildings were strategically inserted into the site. ‘The vocabulary is contemporary,’ says Choksi of the additions, ‘but we’ve adapted from the same age-old palette of skills and materials so that the experience is authentic.’
When RAAS Jodhpur finally opened in 2010, Studio Lotus was catapulted into the national limelight and a flurry of international awards soon followed, including a nomination for the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture. The success brought a host of exciting commissions from across India, where the practice would go on to apply its learnings from Jodhpur. ‘We’d ask ourselves if we were doing anything that could be done without, if there was something that could be reused or recycled,’ says Goel.
149
In 2013, for instance, Studio Lotus fused together two adjoining run-down buildings in New Delhi with a series of connections to create flexible live-work spaces for artists. Two years later in Mumbai, in collaboration with GPL Design Studio, it transformed a cluster of industrial buildings into a marketing centre for a real-estate company.
The practice also sustained its commitment to engaging with local artisans and ‘contemporising craft’. In 2016, the designers reinterpreted thikri (mirror inlay), casting and foundry work in fine-dining restaurant Baradari at the City Palace in Jaipur, and adapted azulejos (Spanish and Portuguese tinglazed ceramic tilework) a year later to create hand-painted installations at the Royal Enfield Garage Cafe in Goa. At the Krushi Bhawan in Bhubaneshwar (completed in 2018), however, these beliefs manifested at an unprecedented architectural scale. The 12,000-square-metre government facility is imbued with a vibrant narrative of traditional Odisha craft bred from local folklore and mythology that comes to life in hand-carved lattices and bas-relief sculptures in stone, screens and installations created with the ancient dhokra tribal metal-casting technique and, most distinctively, a brick facade inspired by regional woven ikat patterns.
Today, a considerable portion of India’s population is engaged in the crafts sector, which despite its contribution to the GDP, is still largely tied to rural economies. But as citizens become increasingly aspirational, the demand for artisanal products is declining; increased urban migration means that traditional intergenerational skillsets are being lost at an alarming rate, while the exodus threatens to choke India’s metropolises. In this context, Studio Lotus’s ingenious approach to adaptive reuse assumes immense significance; by reinvigorating regional, craft-based economies and revitalising the decaying urban fabric of Indian cities, the practice seems to be presenting a new and resilient model of urbanism for India — one of multiple, optimised and self-sustaining landscapes.