Thursday, 16 July 2015
The Center for Vernacular Architecture is a Co-operative of building craft persons spearheaded by R L Kumar, established in the late 80’s. Building on the work of practitioners like Laurie Baker and Hassan Fathy, our architectural practice promotes the use of locally available materials, traditional building techniques, culturally and climatically relevant building design.
CVA has been designing and executing various turnkey vernacular architectural projects in South India as also other parts of the country. Vernacular Architecture is a little known and less explored field that is concerned with Architectural building traditions/practices that are cost effective, ecologically sensible and culturally relevant.Initiated as a project of the CIEDS Collective, it was registered as an independent trust in 2009.The Team Kumar leaves behind......
After Kumar’s passing away, his wife and friend of many decades Madhu Bhushan, a social and women’s activist with Vimochana, has joined the CVA team and is committed to holding the Trust together with the spirit of critical, creative and compassionate curiosity that drove his philosophical search to understand and respond to the world through a unique architectural practice. A philosophical search which was given initial focus and direction within the CIEDS Collective, where both of them met and lived out their separate, yet connected, work lives from 1983.
The CIEDS Collective was initiated by visionary human rights and women’s activist Corinne Kumar and several other colleagues in 1976, to search for meaningful ways of life and politics rooted in and relevant to the specific realities of India and other non-western cultures. The Collective has been working on a range of concerns — human rights, women, rural, urban and tribal communities, environment and ecology, housing rights, film and communications, art and culture, peace and militarisation. And in the process has given birth to many dreams, ideas, institutions and organisations, CVA and its earlier avatar, Shramik being one of them.
As part of the Collective’s efforts to secure land and housing rights and access to basic civic amenities for slum dwellers Kumar began working in Khader Sharief Gardens, one of the city’s biggest slums. Participating in community-led initiatives included taking English classes for young girls and boys and intervening in local body elections along with other members of the Collective including Altaf, Kalpana, Lakshmi and Madhu, Kumar went on to initiate Shramik in the late eighties as a cooperative of skilled and unskilled workers who resided in the slum.
Murgesh, one of the local community leaders who joined Kumar as an idealistic social worker became a lifelong friend and partner, central to Shramik whose members included carpenters, plumbers, masons and electricians. The seeds of construction sown in those early years when Shramik took up humble repairs and minor interior projects took creative wings when Kumar befriended architects Jaigopal from the Laurie Baker school of architecture, Stanley George and other architects of Costford through the National Campaign for Housing Rights and worked on projects with them.
The years that followed brought in independent projects that shaped and sculpted Kumar’s inherent talent for materials, textures and architecture. Nurtured from within the CIEDS Collective, the informal building workers’s cooperative that grew over the years in incredible proportions was formally born as an independent Trust, the Centre for Vernacular Architecture, in 2009. Murgesh who steadily walked this path with Kumar over the many years became a senior Trustee of Centre for Vernacular Architecture and as a seasoned Site Manager is also now at the forefront of taking this initiative forward.
Early 2003 saw the entry of Khalid Rehman and Goutam Seetharaman, both Trustees and Principal Architects. Affectionately referred by Kumar as ‘my left and right hands’, they were formally trained in all aspects of Vernacular Architecture, from design to construction. Khalid handles the day-to-day affairs in our main office in Bangalore and Goutam handles our Chennai office.
Manju, our office in-charge, Mani, who heads our Electrical team, Palani, who heads the Plumbing team, Muthuraman, senior mason, Manikantha and his team of skilled carpenters, Arun and his crew of painters, Kuppa, the young mason who came in and has today grown into an independent site manager, Bhuvana, Murgesh’s daughter who in true Kumar tradition was groomed outside the formal education system into a skilled architect involved in both design and construction, Durga, fellow architect who is consolidating and deepening the Kumar/CVA vision of architectural practice through documentation, workshops and training programmes… the innumerable craftspeople who have brought in their masonry skills... have each toiled hard to build with much camaraderie and care, the dream Kumar shared with generous abandon. In addition to such longstanding members of the CVA family, we also have a strong team of young architects who both design and manage on-site construction as well. And now we have Kalpana, from the CIEDS Collective and also Kumar's cousin who many years ago he dragged into the field of social activism and Shramik, who came back to join us just before his passing, as a part time accountant.
We are also fortunate to have Mr. Sambasivan and Mr. Ramadorai who have joined us as advisors to our Trust.
As is tradition and Kumar’s mission, a steady stream of interns continue to work with us, inspiring us and in return being transformed with their introduction to vernacular architecture. Many architects trained under Kumar and worked with CVA may have now returned to their hometowns and/or taken up independent projects. But continue to work with CVA as associate architects. Chaitali, Charmy and Himanshu in Gujarat, Sindhu in Hyderabad, Raji in Tamil Nadu, Sundeep Nagraraj and Raina Nazareth in Bangalore are but some who are committed to walking this path inspired by Kumar.
We are indeed a community and our collective knowledge and individual talent is what binds us together with the support from CIEDS Collective and the families and friends of Kumar and Madhu. Kumar gave freely of himself, shared his passion and knowledge and inspired people from all walks of life. We are privileged to have been nourished by his genius quite inseparable from his eccentricity.
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