On the outskirts of Durg and the steel city of Bhilai, where IIT students have recently been relocated from their transit campus to one that is now their own, over 150 panels of Gond art depicting the myths and beliefs of this Adivasi-dominated state of Chhattisgarh have moved in as well.
Delhi architects Sanjay Kanvinde and Tanuja, who, together with their team of architects and consultants, won the competition for coming up with the masterplan and the plan of academic buildings of the campus, completed ITS phase I recently. They say the layout, art and architecture are meant to be a counterfoil to the usual academic preoccupations of the IITians. On the way to a laboratory, a chemistry student may or may not develop the soul of an artist, but some ground for it can be laid. There is no inherent contradiction between the arts and the sciences (and technology); they are not two opposing cultures, points out Kanvinde.
“An ‘IIT student’, and one immediately thinks that’s a nerd...Both Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai were great connoisseurs of performing and visual arts.... ” says the architect with a chuckle at his office in Connaught Place. “These are kids at an impressionable age, we thought we should create an environment to expose them to different aspects of culture, to be sympathetic to nature.”
The principal contractors tasked Sibanad Bhol of Craft Collective with the execution of the artworks positioned on either side of the walkway in the academic area. He, in turn, appointed Gond artist Ram Singh Urveti to make the drawings depicting Gond beliefs.
The Craft Collective also appointed a team of welders, painters and wrought-iron artisans of the region to fabricate and install these panels. There is here a work in metal on the birth of the river Narmada imagined as a mythical figure diving into the water with her upturned tail spreading out as a tree to symbolise bringing life to earth. Another depicts the forest as a nurturing hub.
Other metal works depict scenes from the Ramayana, the cycle of seasons, and of Bada Dev, the top god of the Gond community, and through all of them can be spotted a mature mahua or a peepul or a cassia tree of that region nearby, retaining a dimension of nature for a net-zero campus (a sustainable campus using all of its available resources).
“We have to build according to the brief and the site. As architects what we bring to the table is a design philosophy with a vision. These are straightforward functional buildings in the modernistic idiom integrated with some informal outdoor spaces that need to stay relevant for the next 20 years when it is anticipated to house 12,000 students,” adds Tanuja.
Modernist legacy
The ‘House of Kanvinde’ has an architectural legacy that goes back to the early days of architectural modernism in India. Sanjay Kanvinde’s father Achyut Kanvinde, who started the studio in 1955, built close to a thousand buildings in pre- and post-Independent India such as Delhi’s The Indian Council for Cultural Relations and St Xavier’s; Mumbai’s Nehru Science Centre, inspired by the Bauhaus design philosophy that began in Germany in the ’20s and swept Europe and the Americas and came over to India in the ’40s, maintaining its hold till the ’80s.
In a nutshell, it was a philosophy that meant that form must follow function—a house is determined by who is moving in and what is going on inside—and that houses must be sturdy above all. In the ’60s, he built the IIT Kanpur campus in its first phase; here the notion of isolated departments was replaced by interconnected buildings.
Moving in, moving out
Sanjay Kanvinde and Tanuja, who now helm the studio and specialise in institutional-campus design and that of large-scale dairy projects, had the same approach for the design of IIT Bhilai. Or, as Kanvinde puts it jocularly: “It was about how to build a Greenfield campus without mauling it.”
The buildings talk to each other as it were; daylight reaches the inner courts through the large skylights and the balconies with large overhangs at different floors; the library gets in a softer diffused light. “The entire masterplan was about establishing the relationship between the inside and the outside, between the students’ (and the faculty’s) place of study, place of stay or relaxation. The access corridor also touches all important points of the campus—moving in and out should always be easy and under cover in our climate,” Tanuja says.
Student life is as much about living together as about living with the buildings and spaces they create—on this aspect the architects had a keen eye. Around the natural features of water, mature trees, free flow of air in the academic core, the young can assemble and pause and create their own memories. Between four- to six-storey high, there are no gigantic staircases to climb up or down.
The buildings are designed neither to work anyone up nor bring anyone down to earth; they have been built to evoke a sense of ease and comfort. Says Kanvinde: “There are no imposing towers, whatever has been built, has been with an intent to relate to human scale and with universal accessibility.”