DESIGNED TO PAUSE

Amid the growing discourse around slow architecture, Sangha Bhavan in Kolkata emerges as a disciplined counterpoint to speed and spectacle. Designed by Pooja Bihani of Spaces and Design, the Jain community centre calibrates light, proportion, and material to regulate pace at the level of the body-using spatial sequencing and restraint to turn slowness into a quietly radical architectural stance

- Ankita Rathod

Designed by Spaces and Design, the 18,000 sq ft Jain community centre does not rely on monumentality or visual dominance to establish presence. There is no grand gesture to decode at arrival, no hierarchy of spaces competing for attention. Instead, the building operates through calibration—of proportion, movement, light, and behaviour—allowing pause to emerge not as an idea, but as an experience. Walking into Sangha Bhawan, the noise of the city falls away sooner than expected. The transition is not abrupt, but measured. As someone who grew up within the rhythms and values of Jain philosophy, that quiet feels familiar—not symbolic, not performative, but lived. Conceived for the Acharya Mahapragya Mahashraman Education & Research Foundation (AMMERF), the centre brings together a lobby, banquet hall, restaurant, and cafeteria—programmes typically associated with scale and assertion. Here, they are held in balance.

THE BRIEF WAS NEVER ABOUT FUNCTIONS

Rather than approaching the project as a conventional institutional or hospitality exercise, architect Pooja Bihani began elsewhere—with values. “The brief wasn’t about functions,” explains Bihani. “It was about peace, harmony, learning, and community.” And, that distinction shaped the building fundamentally. Instead of representing Jain philosophy through overt symbolism, principles such as Ahimsa (nonviolence), Aparigraha (non-attachment), and Syadvad (the coexistence of multiple truths) informed decisions around planning, materiality, and movement—subtly but consistently. The aim was not to instruct users on meaning, but to let meaning surface through use.

AN ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT HIERARCHY