ROMI KHOSLA

• Romi khosla is an architect and urban development planner.

• Educated at cambridge university and the architectural association london.

• He has written four books including buddhist monasteries in the western himalayas and has built new and restored buildings in himachal for three decades.

• Apart from having designed some award winning buildings, he has also worked in the conflict zones of kosovo, bulgaria, romania, cyprus and tibet.

• Romi khosla is well known for his research and writing on architecture and urbanism, and also for his professional work for more than three decades.

• His architectural commissions include large educational and recreational complexes.

• He has served on the aga khan award jury as well as the izmir city revitalisation competition jury in turkey.

• He has participated in extensive urban planning, revitalisation and tourism planning missions to the balkans, cyprus, central asia and tibet

• More recently, he has been asked to carry out an appraisal for the delhi master plan 2020 by the confederation of indian industry.

SCHOOL FOR SPASTIC CHILDRENROMI KHOSLA DESIGN STUDIO,

1985–1995

• The first custom-design school for physically challenged children was initiated by funds made available from the British government which supported a local NGO.

• The school is designed for 500 handicapped children and provides not only specialized facilities and training. But also courses for the parents of handicapped children

• Romi Khosla’s design of the School for Spastic Children with its use of abstract forms is regarded as a classic example of post-modern architecture in India.

• The architect’s concern was to create a secure world for children with special needs.

• The structure is well secured and almost fort like, a building which has often been compared to a mother’s womb.

• While developing his design,Khosla also visualised a ship with many decks; the numerous balconies in the building came out of this idea.

• He deliberately did not set aside any spaces for a specific function and sought a building where movement was easy and space expansive.

• Attention was also paid to the students’ conveniences with every two classrooms having an adjacent toilet.

• With specially designed ramps and natural light penetrating into the building, the architect not only provided for a comfort zone for the children but also expressed his love of iconography in a poetic manner.

SITE PLAN

BUILDING BLOCK

FRONT ELEVATION

DENTAL COLLEGE, JAMIA MILIA ISLAMIA,

NEW DELHI

CONCEPT

• There is something special about teaching hospitals that make them different from other institutions. The Dental College of Jamia had these characteristics. It serves to provide dental care to the people in surrounding areas and is also one of the primary teaching centres of Dentistry in India. So at one end the users are the common public and at the other end the users are the medical students.

• The College was therefore a place where three users interacted with each other. The common public, the doctors who treated and taught and thirdly the students who learned and practiced.

• The building was conceived by the architects Romi Khosla and Martand Khosla to be a contemporary building without references to the historical burden of architecture from which much of the Jamia buildings suffer.  Like their Castro Cafeteria and M.F. Hussain Art Gallery on the Jamia University Campus, the architects have sought to provide the image of Jamia with a modern state of the Art Campus

• The programme was therefore conceived as a series of capsules which were designed to act as nodes for the three users.

SITE• The site given for the building was a

neglected and overgrown part of the campus. It had two levels and both the levels were used to access the building for the public and students.

To fulfill the requirements of its varied users the building was to house a substantial reference library, staff facilities, seminar facilities, wards, operation theatres, pathology laboratories, a mortuary as well as X-Ray rooms and a Museum.

REQUIREMENTS

•The facilities have been arranged in a rectilinear plan form that encloses two large courtyards and has a certain formality to it.• It was a design judgement to simplify the formal layout of the building in order to contain the enormous volumes of spaces in a simple form that would be easily readable by all three categories of users.• A dental college is a very complex institution in which the users have to keep moving from one part to another. Combine this with the special use requirements of the students, their canteen, the teaching staff, the reference library etc; it was imperative to simplify the plan form of the building to make it readable to the constant stream of new first users who would keep flowing into the building.•In order to further reduce energy consumption, the treatment clinics have been provided with full 80% north side glazing that allows ample daylight to flood the clinics.  This helps the treatment during power cuts and natural light

spaces ensure a higher level of cleanliness. 

PLANNING

ELEVATION• Each façade of the building is treated as a

canvas for artistic composition. The fenestration has been designed to have twin functions. On the north faces of the building, where the clinics have been located, the structural curtain wall glazing provides enormous daylight for dental treatment. So instead of the dentist twisting and turning angle poise lamps into the patient face and dreading a power cut, the doctor can rely on daylight to illuminate the patient’s condition. On the south side, the glazing has been confined to narrow slits which run horizontally and protect the south of the building in the clinic areas from heat gain. These staggered fenestrations also break the scale and the thin strips of windows help in exaggerating the horizontality of the structure

Walls:Brick walls with ACP & Stone Cladding. Curtain wall glazing on the North façade & Glass brick in filled in steel frame for corridorsFloor:Kota stone is the hardest locally available stone. Its slabs have been used for flooring, skirting, dado, risers of steps etc. keeping in view the high expected usability of the building.Structure:Steel & RCC composite structure

MATERIALS

CASTRO CAFÉ,JAMIA MILIA ISLAMIA,

NEW DELHI

BUILDING BLOCK

• The building block has a kitchen block to the east, which is a fully enclosed space to cook and serve in.  As One walks along the length of the building westwards, initially the eating enclosure is defined by two walls and a roof, further still the sense of interior is defined by one wall and the roof, further still the space is articulated by only one wall, and yet further still, there is only the floor, and then that too stops continuing.

• Throughout this changing sense of interior and exterior, the eating surface and the seating surfaces continue, almost acting like stitches that tie this entire space together.

• The idea was to try and blur the boundaries between inside and outside, where these undefined boundaries act as a negotiator between the user and the climate of Delhi.

• All the elements of the building are defined distinctly and independent from each other.  The walls don’t touch the floor and the roof does not touch the walls.

• This was the first steel building built at the university campus.

• The roof is made of perforated aluminium sheets, and the walls are cladded with waste marble strips.

CONCEPT

• A Cafeteria in a University Campus located near Auditorium, Cultural Center, Mass communication, was expected to become hub of all social activities of the Campus.

• Due to the extreme climatic conditions of New Delhi, where the summer sees temperatures of above 45 degrees centigrade, and the winters often see temperatures below 5 degree centigrade..

• Most student canteens in India are not air-conditioned, and are often poorly ventilated, making them very hot and oppressive in the summer and very cold in the winters.

• The design is truly unique and contemporary and we feel, will herald a new age of Architecture for the University.

• This canteen was proposed as a ‘Semi open air Café’.   This allowed to have an ambient temperature for most of the year along with good ventilation, and a variety of degrees of shade from the climate

M.F HUSSAIN ART GALLERY,

JAMIA MILIA ISLAMIA,NEW DELHI

• Jamia University is popularly regarded as a progressive avant garde campus.  In 2008, the vice chancellor proposed a new cultural hub for the university that would have as its core a contemporary students’ canteen, a unique art gallery and landscaped lawns.

• The architects chose white marble in the canteen and white metal louvers in the art gallery to express this contemporary identity.  The art gallery has become a community space for gathering alternative expressions of culture and identity.  This role signaled the canteen and the art gallery as iconic models of architectural expression in contemporary Indian academic institutions.

• The art gallery has three main parts to it. The front gallery that is naturally lit is primarily designed for the display of popular art and student exhibitions.  The second space is the main internal gallery which is lit by controlled light and can be divided into 2 smaller galleries with the help of the central pivoting wall.  This gallery is designed for the great university art collection, as well as for external artists who want to exhibit their work here. The third exhibition space is the open air sculpture court at the rear of the building.

• Other than this, the art gallery also has two artist studios adjacent to the sculpture court which are designed for short term stay of visiting artists

THANK YOU

PRESENTATION BY-SHAHZEB RAHMANNAAZMA HASANZISHAN ALISABEEHA HAQDIVYANSH MANGAL