Architecture is, without doubt, a practise rooted in the rational. Can this rigorous focus on engineering, materiality, shape and form intersect with the spiritual, ritualistic and symbolic? It’s a question the conservation scientist Tara Lal has sought to answer in the form of an ambitious architectural pavilion unveiled earlier this month in New Delhi.
Located within UNESCO world heritage site the Sunder Nursery, the pavilion was conceptualised by Tara and built in collaboration with London-based architects Tanil Raif and Mario Serrano Puche of TM Space. Titled Sacred Nature, the spiral-shaped structure is an immersive walk-through installation, encouraging a discourse about ecology within an urban environment. India’s sacred groves, native forests cared for by indigenous communities and underscored by a deep spiritual connection to land, are fundamental to the pavilion, itself intended to be a contemporary iteration of these ancient landmarks.
‘We are living through a moment where the distance between people and the natural world has never been greater. So many of our ecological crises are rooted in colonial histories and systems that separated us from land, from Indigenous knowledge, and from one another,’ she says. ‘The Aranyani Pavilion is an invitation to repair that rupture, to experience ecology not as abstraction but as something we walk through, feel, and belong to.’
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It was during her PHD research, studying the effects of invasive fauna on New Zealand’s biodiversity, that Tara came to view ecology through the lens of colonisation.
‘I began to research and discover how invasives are prevalent in countries around the world,’ she says. ‘I looked at how they arrived in places, especially with island ecology which gets especially impacted.’
Back in India leading projects under the conservation initiative she founded, Aranyani Earth, she began to apply this knowledge to her homeland.
‘When I began working on restoration projects in India, the biggest problem we faced was invasive flora, how to get rid of them what to do with them once they have been chopped down,’ she says. ‘It is certainly a problem, but how can we work with this and make it into something, if not positive, at least useful.’
It was this reframing that resulted in lantana camara, a pervasive shrub introduced to India through Portuguese and British colonial trade in the 18th century, becoming integral to the pavilion. It clads the exterior of the bamboo structure, which is topped with a canopy of 40 plant species which are native or otherwise considered culturally significant to the land.
‘The plants were integral from the very beginning,’ says TM Space co-founder Mario Serrano Puche of the collaborative process behind the build. ‘When we presented the very conceptual schematic version of this it was like lifting a piece of the earth and applying the plants. It even became more apparent to us this was the right decision when we decided to place the invasive species below and native species above.’
‘We are using lantana, so how can we not talk about natives? The juxtaposition is what brings it to life,’ Tara adds. ‘I wanted to include what we’re calling ‘naturalised’ plants because it’s an interesting space in the middle.’
She cites varieties like potato, spinach and chilli that aren’t native to India but have become so integral to culture and cuisine that ‘now we can’t imagine life without them. So, it’s not as simple to say that things that are out of context are somehow bad or wrong,’ she says.
At the heart of the pavilion is gallery containing a monolithic shrine inspired by the sacred grove at Mawphlang, in north-east India, to intended to be a ‘portal between the material and the sacred’.
After hosting a programme of events in Sunder Nursery the pavilion will be dismantled and housed permanently at Rajkumari Ratnavati Girls’ School in Jaisalmer, the innovative sandstone school designed by New York-based Diana Kellogg Architects, and become a ‘living classroom’ for students and researchers. The plant canopy will be donated to various community-led environmental projects in Delhi.
Having raised crucial ideas that seek to bridge India’s colonial past with a sustainable future, this inaugural pavilion promises to become an essential annual event in India’s innovative design calendar. aranyanilife.com
Sophie was a guest of the Taj Mahal Hotel New Delhi
