With a bamboo façade, this artists’ home in Delhi blends into nature

By Amy Bradford

Architects have been reusing and recycling buildings for millennia, but the climate emergency has made this approach imperative. Indian architecture practice Studio Array demonstrates how impressive the results can be with their latest project: a bamboo-clad artist's home in New Delhi that's nestled in a verdant pocket of an otherwise densely packed urban village.

Designed for artists’ collective Farm 8, it’s the culmination of a decade-long journey for the group’s founders, Ranbir and Rashmi Kaleka. In the beginning, they had hopes for building a studio space for their own use on the five-acre farm site; they got as far as constructing foundations and supporting columns before they were unexpectedly forced to abandon the project. In 2020, they began anew, this time aiming to set up a sustainable farm using permaculture, a low-waste philosophy that draws inspiration from ecosystems to “co-operate” with nature.

Accompanying this would be a new residence for multiple visiting artists, writers and environmentalists. The Kalekas wanted it to be in harmony with the land, so they brought in Studio Array to resurrect their erstwhile project. “The intention was to craft an escape that would allow visiting artists to connect with the natural habitat, while disconnecting from their busy, demanding urban lives,” explains principal architect Rachit Srivastava. “To reduce waste, we sought to retain and wrap around the infrastructure that was built years ago. The new building ‘caps’ and ‘envelopes’ these elements while creating a contrast with lightweight steel, bamboo and wooden drywall construction.”

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Hand-woven bamboo screens are the lynchpin of the design of this home in Delhi. Used as both permeable walls and doors, they’re arranged in a grid format over an exposed steel skeleton, and double as indoor screens that offer privacy in the living quarters. “Contextualising natural materials found in farm environments, the bamboo will age and change colour over time, mimicking and inviting nature to take over in the years to follow,” says Srivastava, who also created double-height, semi-open verandahs so that the living spaces would connect to the outdoors.

Other finishes in the building are intended to develop a beautiful patina as time passes. “Brick flooring in the pavilions, used without mortar, has the possibility of allowing grass and weeds to enter,” says Srivastava. Raw materials, such as lime plaster, wax-stained drywalls and hand-cast, hand-polished cement floors, have surprising softness and warmth, their subdued earth tones complementing a series of courtyard gardens (these have a distinctively Japanese feel, with raked sand and arrangements of rocks and wood).

Other finishes in the building are intended to develop a beautiful patina as time passes. “Brick flooring in the pavilions, used without mortar, has the possibility of allowing grass and weeds to enter,” says Srivastava. Raw materials, such as lime plaster, wax-stained drywalls and hand-cast, hand-polished cement floors, have surprising softness and warmth, their subdued earth tones complementing a series of courtyard gardens (these have a distinctively Japanese feel, with raked sand and arrangements of rocks and wood).

Farm 8’s low-level design is another nod to sustainability. There’s no grandstanding here: the rooflines blend modestly into the tree canopy. “The modular, insulated sloping roofs are consciously manoeuvred to create a myriad of spatial scales that ‘dematerialise’ the built mass,” says Srivastava. “They forge a passive, humble envelope; a gesture that draws attention to the verdant landscape outside.”

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Unassuming yet thoroughly contemporary, this is arguably what more architecture should be striving to achieve: a glorification of its habitat, rather than an attempt to outshine nature.

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