British High Commission Housing

Klaus-Peter Gast

Description

Raj Rewal’s apartments for the British Embassy bring tradition and Modernism together. Set in the centre of New Delhi and surrounded by roads on all sides, they define an entire quarter as a coherent residential complex. The concept of a ‘centre’ formulated here is still valid for recent Indian architecture. It is an important characteristic of many traditional building categories, from family homes to temples. The ‘centre’ expresses the element of constantly being together that is so crucial and fundamental to Indian social life, but also the sense of turning to the middle, of ‘concentration’.

A symbolic circle in the form of a green area with six semi-detached buildings grouped around it forms Rewal’s centre. Their dimensions admit the character of independent family homes, clustering together but at the same time distanced from each other. Consequently, access to each of these ‘individuals in a group’ is from the centre. Each has an entrance hall on the ground floor, along with the living and dining area, which faces the garden, adjacent kitchen and a little servants’ apartment at the end. On the upper floor there are two bathrooms in the inner zone near the stairs, and three bedrooms on the periphery, with terraces and loggias. The overall form of the buildings is dominated by the interplay of strict structure and a strongly differentiated cubature of firmly defined masses that are then dissolved. Rewal uses sandstone as a homogeneous façade material, thus including a classical motif from Indian architecture that here especially succeeds in synthesizing tried-and-tested and new design motifs.