architect Benny Kuriakose’s dreams of solar-powered apartments that exist off the
grid but for air-conditioning, where a planted indigenous forest
co-exists with rain-harvested water bodies, where each home opens into
his trademark courtyard and ornate veranda, and each floor hosts common
living and dining spaces, where terrace farming feeds its inhabitants
and the aged find convenience and purpose; where the best of commune
living meets the standards of urban design.
Only, these aren’t just dreams.
They’ve materialised into site drawings and floor plans,
multi-dimensional projections and cross-sectional views, and most
recently found a Coimbatore-based buyer. For the architect best known
for designing DakshinaChitra’s public buildings and heritage homes, for
fronting Chennai’s alternative architecture subculture, and for helming
the Muziris Heritage Project as conservation consultant, this foray into
“green living” is his next phase of reinventing the definition of
sustainable architecture.
The seeds to his career path were sown as a young idealistic student
working with Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad that nurtured in him the
science of sustainability. In 1984, fresh out of College of Engineering,
Thiruvananthapuram, Benny interned with Laurie Baker, whose philosophy
of architecture synced perfectly with his personal ideology. From 1985,
he grew from strength to strength in Kerala, building low-cost houses
that mirrored Laurie’s style, until his popularity peaked in 1992 with
the building of actor Mammootty’s house. “Deep within though, I knew it
was time to move away from Baker buildings and discover my own
architectural voice,” says Benny. It was Laurie himself, who directed
Benny toward DakshinaChitra, where he eventually made a name
transplanting and reassembling entire traditional Kerala homes. Talent
aside, Benny says he owes this young success to the anonymity and
freedom to experiment that Chennai offered him, away from the arclights
in Kerala. “Chennai gave me creative rebirth.” It also gave wings to his
first love, conservation architecture, the subject of his masters in
University of York, England.
For the last five years, Benny has given this passion full expression
through the Muziris Heritage Project. Floated in 2008, it is India’s
largest conservation project that would spread over 25 sites and links
Kerala’s histories of Dutch, Arabic, Chinese, Jewish, Greek, Portuguese
and Roman roots in the forgotten port of Muziris from 1 Century BC
onward. “Research and excavations have shown that there were close to
400 historic buildings here, about ten per cent of which we’ve begun to
restore. It’s not even scratching the surface.” Under the leadership of
the then Kerala finance minister Thomas Isaac, Benny and his team drew
up the project’s master plan, immediate among which were the successful
restoration of the 1615 Paravoor synagogue, with even a replica of the
original ark of the testament made, and the renewal of the Dutch 1663
Paliam Palace. The first phase of the Muziris Heritage Project is
finally set to be inaugurated by the President of India next month.
For the scale and ambition of the project, it’s been compared to the
conservation of Greece’s Athens and Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, and the
UNESCO hopes to integrate it into its worldwide Spice Route trail. But
for all the efforts Benny and his team have showered on the project, its
progress has been slow, courtesy characteristic political hiccups.
Benny’s satisfaction though, comes from the local community’s
involvement with the project, which included even the rehabilitation of
the still-thriving Kottapuram and Paravur markets. “We had no model for
this project; our only guiding principle was to never approach it
top-down with forced legislation, but to build it grassroots upward.”
The success of this outlook was most evident when the regional heads of
the Cherman Juma’ah Masjid, believed to be India’s oldest mosque, built
in 629 AD by Malik Ibn Dinar, requested the project to restore the
mosque to its original state. Over the years, atypical minarets and
domes, metal sheets and GI roofs had been appended to the structure,
modernising it out of character. “The older generations simply mimicked
stereotypical Persian architecture when they re-did it. Our restoration
will replicate the turn of the first century Arab mosques, which will be
more consistent with the times Cherman was built in.”
In the two decades that Benny has worked in conservation architecture,
the sphere has mushroomed in India from nonexistent to flourishing,
thanks to greater awareness of heritage preservation. “Back when I
began, there were hardly any projects. But one needed to live! So I took
to building new houses that drew from the traditional Kerala and
Chettinad styles I’m familiar with, and reinterpreted them
contemporarily.”
Today, Benny is known for structures built of natural materials, timber,
timbre, stone, exposed brick and much else, that are energy efficient,
thermal controlled and environment friendly. Nature segues seamlessly
into his houses’ interiors through broad courtyards and verandas. “I
begin each new house on a blank slate. All I’m sure of is that our homes
must cater to our various moods, not force occupants to adjust their
personalities to the concrete boxes we now build.” Benny’s
unconventional material choices have often led his architecture to be
labelled low-cost, but as he is quick to clarify, low-cost is relative,
and means “performance approach to cost reduction,” a definition he
imbibed from Baker. In practice, it took spacious lands and a
considerable budget for these artisan homes, a luxury often affordable
only to the elite.
To balance the tilt of this see-saw, in some sense, Benny spent three
years of his life, from 2005, in Tharangambadi and Chinnangudi villages
in Nagapattinam, designing almost 1,500 individualised homes for fisher
folk under the Tsunami Rehabilitation Project. Earlier this year, he
completed his Phd on low-income housing from IIT, which focuses on the
social and cultural factors that dictate the success or failure of
public housing, where current research has only zeroed in on its
physical aspects. “It’s true that we have public houses built in the 80s
collapsing barely 25 years later; if we could build better, surely
they’d last longer.” But an ignored aspect, says Benny, has been in
examining what degree of ownership inhabitants have over these houses,
and whether their sense of community encourages or dissuades upward
social mobility. A book of this thesis is set to release this year.
“It’s taken me all these years to realise just how important it is to
theorise in academic terms, what I’ve learnt from over two decades of
practical experience,” says Benny. His home-office on Ranjith Road is
flooded with interns and young architects eager to learn from him; more
books are in the pipeline and, in two weeks, Benny will also conduct a
three-day workshop at DakshinaChitra on his brand of vernacular
architecture.
There’s an example he loves to tell his students of how when he built
Chandramandapa and Chandramandala at Spaces in Besant Nagar, in honour
of dancer Chandralekha, the skeleton of his structure already lay in the
Natyashastra’s ancient stagecraft design principles. His task was only
to modernise our native wisdom. “In the 50s and 60s, we made mistakes
imitating the Western concrete and glass trends that were never meant
for our needs.” Says Benny, “We mustn’t make the same mistakes with
alternative alternate and green architecture either.”
And that explains Benny’s decision to enter the apartment market with
his new vision for the vast possibilities of green building. “If there’s
one critique I may make of Laurie Baker, it is that while he pointed
out the pitfalls of mainstream architecture, his own remained niche.
With public housing, Muziris and now the “green living” project, I’m
attempting to step out of my comfort in the alternative and into the
mainstream, but, of course, in my own terms. Is this wise? Only time
will tell!”
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