Facilitating A Community Through Architectural Practice

The humble, self-designed, self-built and organically planned home built by the majority of the world population rarely gets appreciated and critiqued as a viable lesson in architectural design.

- Shardul Patil

Amidst the perfectly planned, diligently detailed, carefully aligned, elegantly proportioned and aesthetically beautified “designed” buildings, this abode of the masses camouflages silently within the spacio-temporal context that it gets built in. These self-built structures, developed over centuries of trial and error, are built without any technical guidance. They are a reflection of the surrounding geographies and ecologies. They tell elaborate stories of the society that builds them. They emerge as a response to the social and cultural issues of the place that they are rooted in. Hidden within the simplicity of these structures, are lessons of climate responsive building, of sustainable architecture, of technological innovation using local materials, social entrepreneurship, community participation and an architectonic solution to majority of the issues of the region.