Project of the Month: Jetavan

Courtesy of Edmund Summer

For religious societies, heritage and traditions play an important role in maintaining identity, culture and allowing for the community's self-improvement, both spiritually but also in a spatial sense. Therefore, the way people occupy the place in which they live leads to the material fulfillment of religious aims

With the creation of a place that follows their sacred order—the Jetavana—the community can be enriched while performing their traditions and rituals in a specific and proper way through architecture.

Created for a religious community with poor economic resources, this project designed by Sameep Padora & Associates achieves this purpose and delivers a space with great spiritual significance and value through the reincarnation of materials, minimal intervention in the natural environment and by gathering a community’s traditions. In the following text, the architects elaborate on some of the factors that made this ArchDaily's Project of the Month for July.

Courtesy of Edmund Summer

Jetavan / Sameep Padora & Associates

Criteria used for selecting re-used materials

The primary driver was a monetary and material frugality, but ease of access to construction material as well as their maintenance over time were important concerns. The seasoned wood for the roof structure came from ship breaking yards; the fired mangalore roof tiles from older dismantled buildings and the rammed stone dust walls from a basalt stone quarry nearby. The design process became almost reactive, responding to our fast-changing understanding of context, an understanding that evolved in tandem with the construction of the project. I think the significance of the project lies in this

Almost all of our assumptions about locally sourced materials are challenged in this project: rammed earth needed too much cement for stabilization, bamboo and thatch for construction were both of poor quality. This light-footed, nimble and reactive process, divorced from the weight of a fixed and preempted solution, enabled a response that is both appropriate and rich.

Courtesy of Sameep Padora & Associates

Stone Dust: What features does this material have in comparison to concrete? What other possibilities can this material give to local design?

The extremely hot and dry climate of Sakharwadi required a material that would insulate the interior from the heat. As opposed to concrete the thick rammed stone dust walls keep the interior extremely cool.
The aim of the stone dust rammed wall construction was also to turn the project into a demonstration of how local material which is traditionally seen as waste could be used to catalyze a new form of indigenous construction. We hope that it kickstarts a new "local" technique, not one based in nostalgia but specific to its time.