TAKING THE HEAT

In Nagpur’s punishing climate, SJK Architects built a six-storey home for three generations of the Jain family, drawing on the lattice screens and courtyard houses of northern India

- Jennifer Choo

In Nagpur, a landlocked city in Maharashtra where summer temperatures routinely exceed 40° Celsius, the Jain family embarked on a long-term effort to build a house designed to last for generations. Completed in six years after construction began, the Light House rises six storeys on a 125 by 76 sq ft plot in a dense urban neighbourhood, and is home to three generations: a grandmother, her two sons Deepak and Girish Jain with their respective families, and a grandson whose suite occupies a floor held in reserve for a family he does not yet have.

The commission went to Mumbai-based SJK Architects, led by Shimul Javeri Kadri, whose team of seven designers spent years resolving a specific set of conditions: a tight urban site, a multigenerational programme, a climate that punishes unshaded glass, and a client family with roots in north India that carried strong associations with the residential architecture of that region.

CLOSE CONTEXT

Those associations were direct. The Jains held particular attachment to the haveli, the large courtyard house vernacular to much of western and northern India, characterised by communal gathering spaces, projecting balconies called jharokhe, and intricately worked stone or brick screens, known as jaaliyan, that filter harsh sunlight while permitting airflow. The timber-framed wada houses of Maharashtra offered a secondary reference point. Both traditions had evolved partly in response to the same problem the architects now faced: how to admit light without admitting the heat.