RANGESHWAR DHYANBINDU Area: 2,500 sq.ft. Location: Manor, Maharashtra Project Team: Lead Designer: Saket Sethi, Project Architects: Nagarajan Ramachandran & Shashank Shrivastva, Team: Rita Sethi, Twisha Desai, Govinda Kakulapati
Inspired from a recent trip to Holland, the client’s brief to the Architect was to integrate nature in an inspirational and spiritual home. “I knew the client wanted to thank the universe for her life, so I brought it to her. I knew it would always humble and inspire her at the same time.” – Saket Sethi The form of the house was straight forward: essentially a green roof and a temple. While the green roof was born of necessity, lifting the green ground of farm land – the temple was conceived as an optical galaxy in a primal object. The very first sketch shows that idea and thereafter, what was built was built without compromise.
DHYANBINDU
The temple’s primal objectivity references age-old familiar forms: whether an egg or a lingam, the form needed indivisibility. The optical galaxy ties a parikrama to the earth’s path around the sun: a surreal representation of day and night in the galaxy, which one can walk all the way around.
“While the galaxy appears outside, I grappled with the idea of a black night or a bright sun inside the galaxy.” – Saket Sethi
EVOLUTION OF PLAN
The ancient archetypal Indian home usually sees an internal courtyard and a temple in the north-east.
I redefine the relationship between the temple and the courtyard. I started by pushing it away, for purity and visual appreciation.
By pushing out, the introverted courtyard inside the house is lost, creating a new opportunity.
The new plan redefines the relationship between temple and house by inserting the courtyard between them.
In this new dialogue, the external courtyard blurs into the site, creating seamless fluid spaces where site, temple, and house are newly engaged.
There is also a new living space: one that goes out of the house all the way to the temple.
Elevation
Plan
Water feature
Lawn
Temple
Road
Landscape Plan
“The green house of man aspires to the temple universe of god, aspiring to and never being able to touch it. ” – Saket Sethi
“Not quite the duties of Atlas, nor did it shrug. It was more the unbearable likeness of being; less of the agony and more of the ecstasy of being an architect.” – Saket Sethi
THE ROOF Given that the site couldn’t have a permanent roof, Tata’s Kalzip steelframed green roof system was brought into the picture, which recycles CO2 into O2 and generates a healthy micro-climate around the building, Nature Roof also soaks up rainwater, releasing it gradually to help prevent possible flooding. The Kalzip system also supports solar panels, which could be integrated into the roof as an add-on feature. A walkway that goes across the entire length of the roof lets one view the temple and the surroundings from various perspectives. Rangeshwar Dhyanbindu has the largest residential green roof in India. The roof is designed to be a geometric manifestation of nature, and this instance I wanted nature to follow the geometry of a man-made intervention with respect, so the diamond pattern came about. The cantilevered glass roof extends the geometry of the roof, ever so slightly extending the reach of the roof to the temple. It is also one of the longest residential cantilevers in India, spanning 4.5 metres.
Exploded- Axo
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Then there is the Sunoo Temple House, a private house with a temple in the courtyard. The green roof of the house is a reference to keeping the head grounded in the roots of the earth. The temple outside is made in a mosaic of local stones to depict a galaxy.
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– Olga Mascolo, Domus Italia 10th October, 2018