House 1

House 1 is a modern Indian home with a contemporary interior completed recently by our firm. Located in South Delhi, this house brings an elegant simplicity to the design of the façade and interiors.

The homeowners’ specific requirement of reducing the bedrooms from four to three  extended the leeway to experiment with the area, but the load bearing walls of the 1960 home meant there were constraints in making modifications to the structure. 

The house was north-facing and there was minimal light percolating in to the interiors. The whole house was jacked up, exterior walls were broken and additional steel beams and columns were added to strengthen the building from the core. This made way for larger windows and a new floor plan. A family lounge was created in the centre of the house & was connected with the external facade by an angled roof over a part of an existing courtyard.

A design feature that presented itself by accident has been incorporated in the living room - Stacked glass and stone create a brilliant light pattern, so instead of using only glass blocks, glass slabs were used these with cut up waste pieces of stone. Eight-inch gaps were built into the walls and fitted with these stacks that now stream in light, yet lend privacy to the room.

The new floor plan relocated the bedrooms to areas where these could get more natural light. The kitchen was moved to the centre, bringing light to the courtyard. Custom-designed furniture has been placed in the living and lounging spaces. Local materials form the basic fabric of the house - Natural Kota stone was used for the flooring while laminated jute sheets were applied on the wardrobe fronts.

In collaboration with Ms. Preeti Harit

Location
New Friends Colony, New Delhi
Client
Undisclosed
Typology
Residential
Climate
Composite
Built-Up Area
4500 Sq.Ft.
Completion
2006

© AKDA | Amit Khanna Design Associates
Photography by Amit Khanna & Andre Fanthome

Transformation

Transformation is a modern Indian home with a contemporary interior completed recently by our firm. Located in South Delhi, this house brings an elegant simplicity to the design of the façade and interiors.

The challenge of this project lay in transforming the dated house created by the previous owner into a modern residence for a growing family, while they continued to inhabit the space. A small addition was also required on the upper floor to accommodate an extra bedroom suite.

Located in an upscale neighbourhood which has gradually been overrun with apartments created by builders, this was a single storey residence. By only adding area where necessary, the living spaces on the lower floor fit into the old shell and maintain the residential scale crucial to the notion of a “house”. 

A dense mango tree at the front of the property had grown substantially over the years and its shadow was not permitting the evolution and maintenance of the ground floor garden. Rather than risk excessive pruning by the owners, the garden on the ground was sacrificed to create a large patio and the garden was shifted to the first floor terrace where it occupies the open area to the front of the property. Not only does this insulate the living areas below, it also creates a view for the upper lounge areas.

A large part of the furniture for this project was designed & manufactured by AKDA.

Location
Sukhdev Vihar, New Delhi
Client
Undisclosed
Typology
Residential
Climate
Composite
Built-Up Area
3500 Sq.Ft.
Completion
2010

© AKDA | Amit Khanna Design Associates
Photography by Amit Khanna & Akshat Jain

Happy Diwali

Here's wishing everyone a very Happy Diwali.

 At AKDA, we have had a great year, getting to work with some wonderful clients and been given the opportunity to design some thoughtful buildings and for that we are thankful. We hope to do better this coming year than we did before and wish everybody a joyous festive season. 

So time to feast on goodies, exchange presents and brighten up your home with lights. And please, no crackers, they are awful. 

For those looking for some interesting and low impact ways to light up their home, stick candles in brown paper bags. Not only do they last longer, the glow is very festive.

House 8

House 8 is a modern Indian home with a contemporary interior completed recently by our firm. Located in South Delhi, this house brings an elegant simplicity to the design of the façade and interiors.

The existing house had been designed to maximise cross ventilation and embodied some of our trademark restraint in the materials and exterior form. Rather than try and upstage the existing character of the house, the attempt was to seamlessly blend the large addition required by the growing family.

The brief was to add 2000 sq.ft. of living spaces, an elevator and design a general upgradation of the entire house. Instead of putting the elevator in the tall courtyard space as originally intended, it was inserted into the core of the house, necessitating structural changes, but hiding the elevator from view. The addition on the top floor was set back from the main façade with multiple benefits: the 10 foot overhang shades the glass wall from the west sun, creates a large covered deck and prevents the house from looking top heavy.

Despite the tight construction schedule of just 5 months, the house incorporates many custom details, including a virtually frameless insulated glass wall and a hand beaten copper sheet main door.

Location

Sukhdev Vihar, New Delhi

Client

Undisclosed

Typology

Residential

Climate

Composite

Built-Up Area                 

8000 Sq.Ft.

Completion

2012

© AKDA | Amit Khanna Design Associates
Photography by Amit Khanna

Happy Independence Day!!

Since tomorrow is our Independence day, I thought of making a list of things that architects (and mostly me) would love freedom from.

1. Those *$#%#$%% Byelaws!

I understand why municipal authorities make building byelaws. They want to maintain a certain minimum quality of buildings and having some basic guidelines is usually a great idea. Sadly, these have mutated into a monstrosity that nobody has had the foresight to change with the changing times. They are archaic, unreasonable, non-contextual, non site-specific and do not take into account a million technological innovations that have taken place since they were first written on papyrus. My pet hate - setbacks! Why the hell do we need to leave setbacks? Some of us architects are smart enough to decide how much space we need to leave around a building and possibly the best judge of that on a particular site.

2. Irresponsible Contractors

If you ask me, the biggest hurdle to making a great building is not having a great client(although it is a prerequisite) and not being the best designer(i am sure other people have this problem) but getting it built to a certain quality! Anyone who has tried even the smallest of home projects will agree that the toughest issue is trying to make people understand the notion of quality - It requires a shift in attitude and cant be done overnight. Good contractors understand that quality matters and Great contractors have people at site who understand that quality matters. It is definitely top-down approach and like i said, the attitude of the actual person working at site is the most critical component of getting the job done right.

3. The CAD Monkey Approach

I often say this in college(I teach at my alma mater) that designing & drafting are two very different things. There are so many times during a day when I sketch out something only for it to be handed back to me as a print with a thousand things wrong. The problem is not that there is a lack of drafting skill or a lack of comprehension of what was required. The problem is that the importance of the end result was lost in the translation of the medium. While the discussion was happening on paper, there are ideas and mutual understanding. The moment the CAD screen comes up, the lines are simply an abstraction of the issue and take precedence. The reason of why the drawing has to be made gets lost in the actual making of the drawing. I struggle with this in office occasionally  but as employees slowly understand what is required from the drawing, their design skills improve to match their drafting skills. Drawing is only what is required to communicate design.

4. Delhi's Unbelievable Traffic

Do you live in Delhi? If not, then you simply won't understand. Let me tell you what I did today. I started off in Vasant Vihar, went to Anand Niketan(1km), then ITO(18km), Sunder Nagar(6km), Defence Colony(3km), Kailash Colony(4km), Panchsheel Park(6km) and back to Vasant Vihar(8km). One of our senior site supervisors is off for the week and I thought I might have a look at some of the ongoing projects in the city. I actually thought I could cover some more, but by the time we reached mid-way, I cancelled some of them. Let me give you a summary of the distance travelled, time actually spent in site review and total time spent from start to finish. I travelled all of 46km, spent a sum total of 4hours 40minutes in meetings(of which 2hours and 45minutes were in one long one) and was out for 7hours and 30minutes. That's a 2hours and 50minutes on the road to travel 46km. Admittedly, I was driven around, so it wasn't personally stressful and I did get some sketching done in the back, but really! What a colossal waste of everyone's time.  

5. Technology that Acts Up

As architects we spend a whole lot of time in trying to make things better. We  take time to design spaces well, even going so far as to simplify construction details so that things are easier to build. Why can't everybody do their job properly? I hate it when technology that is working just fine for 6 months suddenly decides that some TLC is required. Printers, Phones, Networks, Software - you name it and something related to it is going wrong as I type this (Ctrl+S) Why cant things simply work the way they are supposed to? I understand that things grow old and malfunction from use/abuse, but then we must establish a reasonable period of how long a product is supposed to last when we buy it. If HP told me that the printer is going to be tip-top for the first year(the warranty period, how ironic), may act up from year 2 to year 4 and thereafter may simply pack up without warning, I probably wouldn't be very upset when it happens. Be predictable please.

That's enough of a wishlist for now. Have a good weekend(those of you who are deviously going to take Friday off) and Happy Independence Day!

Ak

p.s. I made that graphic from a pictures of our projects and was pleasantly surprised with the result so its going on the home page of our website for the day.

De Stijl House, New Delhi

The legacy of early modern domestic architecture in Delhi is hard to fathom. Apart from the odd home built by the master architects post-independence, houses in the capital follow a distinct pattern, almost like a vernacular tradition was at work. The stately houses of Sunder Nagar & Golf Links in the Lutyens Bungalow Zone (LBZ) were designed, it seems in retrospect, all at once and the ones that have not been replaced by stacked apartments betray their mid century European roots. Long horizontal lines of projections shade ribbon windows and are interspersed with large blank volumes. The structural slab is not expressed on the elevation and there is always a strong horizontal balcony thrust out, testing the limits of the concrete. The parapet line runs unbroken around the buildings and even the staircase is visually tucked behind it; this line visually connects all the houses along the street.

The contemporary situation is very different. Developer-driven apartment blocks have completely overtaken most of urban Delhi as well as the local context. These apartment blocks typically occupy the complete permissible envelope and then embellish the peripheral walls with whatever is currently most fashionable, whether it be unsustainable wooden panelling or florid mouldings and cornices. The resulting urban condition is one dominated by forced facades that are 50ft/15m tall, punctuated only with unusable, authority mandated three feet balconies and large expanses of inoperable glass with little or no protection from the climate.

The hallmark of the original De Stijl House, the Rietveld-Schröder House (Utrecht) was to make a building that seemed to be composed entirely of surfaces and volumes that were gliding past each other, dissolving the boundaries of inside and outside. It was inspired by the early 20th century art movement, which helped spawn the modern movement in architecture. The early houses in Delhi were an offshoot of the same movement, albeit a little customized to local conditions. This is the modernist legacy that is referred to in this house.

The owners were originally residents in the LBZ and wanted to incorporate their large art collection in their new home along with the requirement of additional living arrangements for a family of two generations. Situated directly opposite an earlier project designed by AKDA (Transformation, 2010), they chose to frame the views to the same mango tree that shades the earlier house. The project was designed with three distinct zones- a ground floor apartment, a basement gallery space for the daughter’s art collection and a duplex apartment on the upper floors for the owners. The terrace is partially enclosed to provide a small studio space and an alfresco dining area and the rest is left open as a garden. Landlocked by party walls on 2 sides, large skylights punctuate the terrace, bringing light to the floors below. There is a large courtyard that can be looked into from the formal living areas and a smaller one brings light to an internal stair for the upper apartment. A stepped arrangement of verandahs on the north corner brings light and green views to the lounge areas on all floors.

The interiors are finished in muted tones of white. The regular dark tones of local wood finishes were eschewed in favour of the blonde, honey coloured quality of oak wood and a similarly light cream coloured stone has been used to create a neutral, yet domestic backdrop to the art on display. A structural wood stair, dramatically lit from below, descends to the basement from within the house. On the terrace, a deep verandah opening onto the garden makes a relaxing space for evening dining. The walls are raised to avoid the unsightly views and the only thing that can be seen is the sky.

The facade is the most important element in trying to create a reference to the original De Stijl House. The brick box is established as a primary volume which is then punctuated with openings. These continue the same theme, with various elements first being designed as a composition of horizontal and vertical rectangles and then given contrasting material finishes. A long window is designed in the vein of Mondrian’s paintings, a composition of rectangles and squares in various proportions and colours. A large horizontal balcony thrusts out of the centre of the building on the upper floor, shading the large ground floor window and providing an outdoor space for entertaining. The parapet line is reinforced with a thick grey band that also projects from the facade to disconnect the stair volume from the rest of the building. A round column on the corner, detached from the wall behind, supports this projection as a structural expression. Holding the entire composition together is the large square window of the master bedroom on the top floor. Brick, Grey Granite and Exposed Concrete were chosen for their longevity and colour.