Shipshape at last

Architect Namita Singh spent two decades on her biggest project, the Indian Naval Academy in Kerala. She tells Aabhas Sharma all about it.

We all know how obsessions can be dangerous and can drive you up the wall. But in the case of Namita Singh, her obsession has turned into something absolutely stunning. The 60-year-old architect from Chandigarh, in her own words, “had no idea what she was getting into” when she won a competition which landed her the task of designing the Indian Naval Academy almost two decades ago.

The Academy is a township covering three million square feet at Ezhimala, Kerala, and was inaugurated by the Prime Minister last week. Singh tells us that she is extremely proud of how the whole project has shaped up, even though there were times when she thought it may not work out because of the magnitude. Since the project was one of the biggest in the country, there were quite a few delays in its execution. Singh bagged the project in 1989, but the actual construction began only in 2000. In those intervening 11 years, she kept travelling back and forth between Kerala and Chandigarh.

“I studied a lot of vernacular architecture, and I wanted to keep the natural beauty of the place intact,” she says. The Academy stands on a hilly terrain and has a seven-km strip of beach as well. She designed a clay model of the entire project and studied the areas nearby to make sure that everything was perfect when construction began. “The first thing that I think of before starting any project is that it has to be site-specific, and in this case it had to be people-specific as well.”

Singh says that she doesn’t like the idea of creating facades of glass first and then designing the rest — a practice, she strongly objects to in modern-day architecture. For the Academy, she used a lot of porous materials apart from wood, granite and laterite. She says she only used local materials for the entire project.

Back in the early 1970s, when Singh started out, she says the first thing she learnt was how to work with the climate. “We had to think about natural cooling and cross-ventilation,” she says. That’s something she has put to great effect in the Academy. So, you will find a covered corridor which links together the entire building since monsoon is the predominant season in this part of the country. There are courtyards after every building block to give a natural sense of space.

One can see a lot of slanted roofs, the use of wooden textures, and a little bit of glass in some of the areas at the Academy. There are many windows too (the cross-ventilation factor) and skylights.

Undertaking such a mammoth project certainly took its toll on Singh, but she continued to do other projects as well, to take her mind off this one. She designed the Welhams Girls’ School in Dehradun; INS Ashwini, a naval hospital in Mumbai; the Congress Bhawan in Chandigarh; and a medical college. When I observe that she seems to have a knack for handling institutional projects, she refutes that, but does say that doing institutions gives her more satisfaction than designing homes or “routine” buildings.

We talk about modern architecture, and Singh isn’t pleased by what is being developed around the country — malls and tall glass structures don’t appeal to her at all. “There is this whole blind aping of Western architecture and people seem to forget what they are creating and for whom they are creating,” she says ruefully.

Inevitably, conversation returns to the Academy. The sprawling project includes a host of building complexes, roads and other trunk services like a water-pipe network, streetlights, hospitals and an Olympic-standard swimming pool. Although each and every part of the Academy is close to her heart, she says that designing the 900-seater dining hall was special. Since the use of air-conditioners is minimal in the entire township, imagine a room full of fans covering a large area! But Singh created a wooden false ceiling to cover the fans in the room. “I didn’t want the dining hall to resemble a 1960 cafeteria,” she says.

The Naval Academy will be manned by a mix of uniformed and civilian personnel for conducting training and other administrative support functions. Together with the families of staff-members, the campus will have a total population of about 4,000. Designing accommodation areas for the seniormost officers as well as ordinary sailors was also satisfying for Singh.

The beach is visible from every house, from the smallest to the commodore’s own accommodation, and there are courtyards in each and every house in the township. None of the buildings in the Academy stands over four storeys tall. Singh still goes and stays at the Academy for a month every year, as work continues on one wing of the building. Though it has been inaugurated, full operations will commence in June 2009.

So, what’s next for Singh? She has just started work on the Punjab Engineering College near Patiala, and a few other projects. But it’s the engineering college which she is most looking forward to. “It is a landmark institution and I have to do some restoration work.” And it will take considerably less two decades!