An architecture studio in Chennai, drawing buildings for the South Indian climate since 2009.
Two partners, eleven people, one drawing board each.
Groundwork was started in 2009 by Aruna Venkatesan and S. Karthik Raman, who had spent seven years together at a large Chennai practice detailing other people’s buildings. They wanted to make fewer buildings and to draw all of them.
The studio is on the first floor of a 1968 house in Kasturba Nagar. Everything is drawn by hand first, at 1:100, on the same trace paper, and only then modelled. A partner sits with every project from the first site walk to the last defect, and the person who drew the wall is the person who checks it on site.
Most of the work is in Tamil Nadu: schools, houses, workplaces, a few public buildings. The buildings share a way of dealing with heat and rain rather than a look. Thick walls, deep verandahs, roofs that overhang, courtyards where the plan allows one, and materials from within two hundred kilometres.
- Founded
- 2009, Chennai
- Partners
- Aruna Venkatesan and S. Karthik Raman
- Studio
- 11 architects, one model maker
- Buildings completed
- 38, all in South India
- Registration
- Council of Architecture COA/2009/47212
Three of the ten.
A school, a workplace and a house. Each drawn the way it was drawn for the builder.
Thirty weeks before anyone digs.
The fee is a percentage of the built cost, agreed at concept and not revised: 7 per cent for houses, 5 to 6 for everything else, site visits included. The programme goes out with the fee letter, drawn, so you can see where the float is before you sign it.
Solid is committed, hatched is float. The last two bars run past week 36: approvals can take five months, and building takes twelve to thirty.
The setback is the building.
Fifty feet by eighty, on Third Main Road: the standard Chennai plot, 371 square metres. The by-law asks for 1 500 at the sides and 3 000 in front, and almost every house on the street takes exactly that.
We drew the house 9 000 wide instead of 12 240 and pushed it back to 6 200 from the road. That cost the client about forty square metres of floor. It bought cross ventilation on all four sides, a neem that did not have to come down, and 240 square metres of ground the monsoon can still soak into.
Footprint 130 sq m, coverage 35 per cent against the 65 allowed. Built area 312 sq m over three floors, FSI 0.84 against 1.5. The unused floor area is the point, not an oversight.
Scroll the sheet sideways to read the rest of the plot.
All ten, at register size.
Five have been given something. It is noted under the drawing.