Creating an oasis amidst the heat and dust of Hampi

[By Frederick Noronha] Some 30 kilometres away from Hampi -- the impressive ruins of once prosperous Vijayanagara empire, the largest and most powerful kingdom of its time in all of India -- architect Gerard da Cunha moulded a piece of arid soil into a scenic township.

In early-February 2006, Cunha received, somewhat belatedly, the Prime Minister's National Award for Excellence in Urban Planning and Design 1998-99, offered by the Ministry of Urban Development. But the jury was unanimous in giving him the prize for his unusual project.

Cunha makes a point: "In India where our towns and cities are deteriorating at such a rapid rate, an award of this sort makes such good sense, creating role models which others can follow."

In urban India, the worth of this project might have taken its time to get appreciated. It's located in a hot, arid region, one which gets just 13 inches of rainfall a year. It was built as a Rs 150-crore self-contained township for an integrated JSW Steel plant.

Cunha shows photos of the local houses in an area, which gets temperatures of upto 45 degress Celsius. "There are often no windows, and the houses are covered with a lot of mud, to act as insulation," he notes.

Going to such a setting, he dreamt up an oasis.

"I was given this whole town to do. It turned into a place where I had to house some 10,000 people over a short period, and many more over a long period. It was a very idealistic project. It was very exciting. We had to plan on how to make whole t-o-w-n," he says, stressing the last word.

So he first framed his guidelines. "I took ten points, which I thought of as my Ten Commandments. Issues which were were vital for me," Cunha explains, and then goes on to outline his ideas. (See box.)

But the story starts a decade ago.

"We had many teams working on the project. But the starting was very daunting. There was *nothing* there," he says, with a stress on the word 'nothing'. "There was not a tree. It was so hot. And the soil, gravely." For three years, it was very intense work. It involved putting everything in place -- transformers, sewage lines, treatment plants, telephone systems and more!

Their work is on the local stone, granite. They used a pre-fabricated system, with pre-fab concrete joists, on top of which was cuddappah stone, and topped with waterproofing and insulation. "This allowed us to work with cranes, so we could build fast," he explains.

Gerard da Cunha (now 51) went and studied many townships. HMT in Bangalore, IPCL in Gujarat. "And I realised the towns were often conceived as little bits -- some housing, a school, a shopping scentre. They just kept on splattering it on a plan," he says, looking back.

"Nobody looked at it as a cohesive unit, to house the life of a community. So I went about using the house as a building block to create an interesting urban landscape. Where the unit (the house) was subsidiary to the main purpose to the town. Often you see very beautiful houses, but they don't make any town (when take together)," he added in an interview, held in an artistically restored old house in the still somewhat-green Goa suburb of Torda (near Porvorim).

[Gerard da Cunha's dad worked for the State Bank of India. He says with an embarassed laugh that he was born at Godhra, a place now notorious for the communal conflagration it sparked off. "We spent two years in one place and three in another," he says. He did most of his schooling at St Mary's at Mazgaon and college in Delhi. "I first came to Goa at the age of 18, and liked the place so much that I said I was going to come down and live here. At 27, I came down to Goa, in December 1982," he narrates.]

In the arid setting of north eastern Karnataka, Gerard da Cunha and his team then made their own options. A main maidan is located in the centre of the township. In each segment or sector, comprising of 18 houses each, they located all kitches in a way these overlooked a space where the tiny tots could play. This meant mums could easily see the children at play. Likewise, children could go to a playground without crossing any roads. Traffic has been kept on the exteriors.

"It was an idealistic situation where you would never worry about your child hitting traffic," Cunha smiles.

He had to face up to other issues too: how does one make a town -- and an industrial town at that -- exciting? "At every corner, you have to think of some interesting gateway, a park. You have to paint the scene. You're creating the lives of many people here," he says.

Look into the plans, and the big-picture becomes clear. In one centre, there's a playground. On the right is the recreational area. There's a temple, and a lake. A botanical gardens too. Just off the centre is the club, shopping centre and restaurants. "At every corner there's something interesting, so that you can relate to it. The only building I didn't do was the temple. That was built by temple-builders from Gujarat," he says.

Gerard da Cunha, whose work is influenced by Kerala-based low-cost natural-material architect Lawrie Baker -- but, thanks to his work, this form now has wide acceptance from the Goan upper middle class and elite -- says his emphasis was on natural material. "It's granite country," he adds of the terrain, in a region equidistant from both Bangalore and Goa, and which one reaches via the hot and dusty train that connects north Karnataka with Andhra Pradesh.

Did he feel like an artist doing the work? "Not really," he brushes it off, with a laugh. "It was more like a management consultant." He then explains how many tasks went into the coordination of this project.

"People (living there) are very happy about their township. They won the Prime Minister's award. There's no other township which has that kind of charm around it," he adds.

This place takes the sewage, filters the water, and ploughs it back into the system. They deploy composting and vermi-culture on their garbage. For the last eight years, no plastics are allowed in the township, says Cunha.

"Every house, because it is a hot arid area, either has a garden or a terrace. It's very nice to sleep out in the terrace at night. Even if you have a small house, the terrace really makes up for the smallness of the house," he says.

Then, they have also introduced a cable duct. So all telephone lines, cables everything has a "pre-ordained place", as the architect puts it. "Everybody is not just ad-libbing along the place. We're not digging all the time at cross purposes."

For some time the project went slow. "Steel (the firms main business interest) was not doing so well (globally). At the moment steel is doing well. So we're expanding more now than ever before. It's a lifelong project. As it grows I get more work," explains Gerard da Cunha.

But in a place growing in prominence as a tourist destination, this township has the only air-strip in the region. Gerard da Cunha is blunt about his achievements: "It's not a great piece of architecture, it's a great piece of urban planning."

He believes it's possible to replicate some aesthetic housing plans elsewhere. Houses vary from 30-square-metre sized houses to the director houses. To have a "healthy" community, there is some level of mixed use among categories too. Directors are mixed with VPs and general managers.

Explains Cunha: "(Some of the) houses are very small also. And built very cheaply. These are low cost houses but built within the system -- with contractors. Otherwise, if you really want to do low-cost houses, you have to eliminate the middleman. But that's not possible if you have to build a thousand houses in 300 days, for example."

"Time schedules are really punishing", says Cunha, who credits Sangeeta Jindal of Jindal South West for hiring his skills and overseeing the whole project. "Once a month we have a meeting of all the representatives of all the places in the township. I'm answerable (to sorting out their problems). We meet and they complain. If, for instance, there is a dangerous corner in one place, or a locality doesn't get water with sufficient pressure." One benefit of the corporate model is that immediate decisions are taken.

Is it possible to replicate such success stories? Yes, says the bearded architect, but only for company towns. For places where the staff needs to be kept close at hand, and the company is willing to pay for it.

Cunha says the place is also sought to be kept "happening". There are movies on Saturdays. They're building a movie theatre -- "not a multi-plex, a single-plex," he corrects himself. There's a good school. An airstrip, and one of the most modern steel plants in the world, in his view. This township spreads over 200-300 acres.

But that's Gerard da Cunha for you. He can take part in a Goa carnival -- as he has done in the past -- or create a museum dedicated to the Goan home. When we met, he had on his mind plans to join Laurie Baker's 92th birthday celebrations in Kerala in early March, and also work on a book and film celebrating the achievements of Goan cartoonist Mario Miranda! -- [Posted on GoanetWiki http://www.goanet.org/wiki ]

------------------------------------------------------------ Gerard da Cunha's ten commandments (for himself) ------------------------------------------------------------

These are the concerns Cunha kept in mind while creating the oasis near the site of the ancient empire:

* Unique in its identity. * Climatically comfortable in this hit region. * Safe for children. * Where houses are homes and have individuality (and are not identified by a mere number). Built built largely with pre-fabricated systems. * Flexible in its planning to cater for expansion and change. * Modern, and uses state of the art technology. * Visually interesting with wonderful streetscapes, unfolding views, surprises, vistas. * Urban in character. * Inspired by the region. * Meant primarily for people, the services and traffic being secondary. Services must be put in a network to cater to expansion and change.

----------------------------------------------------------------- Frederick "FN" Noronha is a Goa-based writer, active in cyberspace, who writes on issues both within and beyond Goa. Email contact: fred at bytesforall.org