Casting Wisdom: Traditionally Inspired Architectural Expressions by Women Architects from Across India

Abstract

Often looked upon as the underdogs of the profession, women architects across India have explored, designed, self-styled, and professed a surprisingly large body of highly acclaimed works. They respond by creating a natural flow, and their works are canvases for triggering uninhibited, intuitive responses, healing, and touching back into the past to re-interpret what architecture should be a reflection of.

In our explorations, a strong common inclination was revealed with a large section of women architects exploring ways of engagement with the traditional. Our intent is to understand the subliminal link between ‘traditionality’, as expressed in the design outputs and explorations, and the motivations that women architects have undergone in the last few decades in India. Traditionality is looked at as that which anchors people in the community, and in some way, this paper is an attempt to redefine the meaning of traditionality in architecture. This paper provides a critique of a set of works – it looks into the ways and manners in which culture and traditions become a part of the designed output. This paper does not collate projects and works by Indian women architects, track practices, histories or individual experiences of the women. It focuses on the nature and type of architectural outputs they have been involved with, which seem to have close links to traditional expressions, be it cultural, material, aesthetic or constructional. Through this investigation, we situate the sometimes direct and sometimes subliminal expressions of traditionality that these architects have displayed. Expressions are found to be embedded for most part, deep into the structure of the architecture. Our range is from spiritual to plastic and the tools applied herewith are of material thinking, material explorations and the role of the architect as the maker-thinker.

*This paper is a part of an ongoing work on the idea that will result in a book titled Casting Wisdom.