This Courtyard Home in Punjab Brings Architecture, Craft & Community Come Together (House Tour)

I belong to Punjab and I have in my DNA, if not an understanding, I would say my responses to cultural context would not be jarring. Nawab pin means a new village and you'll find several of them in Punjab because they would be the new villages that got created in the 20th century when Punjab became part of the British empire. Hello, I'm Gurmeet Rai. I'm a conservation architect. This is my home. It's the Peepal Haveli and today I'm going to take you on a tour of this house. To get access to a detailed documentation of my home, visit the case study undertaken by Buildify and on the platform buildify.com. So the British had started making canals. So in this part in this Bari, which is the land between Beas and Ravi, this Gurdaspur-Amritsar-Lahore area, the upper Bari-Dwap canal was built and this is right where our village is located. So at least this part of the land, which my grandfather's grandfather, God Sadanarayan, said would be about 500 acres. So he came and established this village and this would be around late 19th century. And the first structure that he built was the Haveli. Now Haveli in Punjab means a land where they would build precinct with large gates and the scale of the gate is your interface with the people outside and the gate represented their social status. So I've grown up in Punjab in the summer vacation and I started looking at the community of the village as well, you know, that how can they get livelihood while they run this place and that's the time when Punjab government had started a rural tourism program. So the form of this house started developing in my head that okay it's going to be a courtyard house. The Haveli gate was very important for the people. Then in terms of planning this building, solar passive architecture, which is the term used, is something which is very important in my, you know, way of building. If you look at the gate, it's actually brick with mud mortar and a bit of cement, Portland cement had been used originally. So we did introduce some concealed beams above openings and, you know, did a tie beam at the top to hold the thing together. You'll also see little carved motifs. You'll see a Victorian crown above and below you'll see the family emblem with the crown. So you can literally, you know, you can see the politics of the time. You know, the building that I attach to the gate is also brick building, lime mortar pointed. This house has two parts and the first part is this historic gate that you see here and a central axis like this. The village is in this direction towards the southeast side. So what was very important for me is to have a veranda in this direction where when people come to meet you, they should have a place, you know, which is kind of giving them dignity. They don't stand by the door and somebody's standing there talking to them. There is the village road on the northeastern side and there's this, our prized people tree, the ficus, which is associated with Lord Brahma and Lord Vishnu in this direction. So what we really introduced into this house is the central courtyard. A courtyard is a very important part of all buildings, whether it is from the perspective of defense or whether it is from the perspective of including people into their homes, like during the bhakti-sufi tradition or the caravanserais. You'll find courtyards in all types of buildings. So what you see here is, of course, the central axis flanked by these two arches on both the sides. So you have a continuous corridor and the house is accessible from all different directions. These arches are like pointed arches, which is a pre-colonial form. You would find segmental arches, which is a more colonial intervention. You'll get to see it above windows and doors. In order to avoid using reinforced cement concrete as lintels, I've used stone and on that I've made a segmental arch above all these openings. All decorations here is all my local artisans working with the brick, you know, how do you make an arch, but in a cobbled fashion. This is inspired from what already exists in the gate itself. So the water from this courtyard goes into this particular star here, you know, provided with this ceramic tiles and this channel goes through the gate and then turns to the western side and we have a rainwater harvesting chamber there. So the bedrooms are at this end, the two bedrooms, you know, symmetrically placed along the central axis. External wall is kind of opaque and this is kind of informed by the traditional design, medieval design across the world, that you had a fairly opaque wall of the private rooms towards exterior side and but you had the courtyard offered us the opportunity that if you put a fenestration here and a fenestration on the inner side, this would allow for circulation, air circulation. So that's how the bedrooms are placed. So they're very well lit rooms with a skylight. This gets the rising sun, this bedroom and this bedroom with its skylight gets the setting sun. So both these rooms have a very distinct lighting, natural lighting and it's got a very warm flooring. The southwestern side on this side is where I have the staircase which leads you to the upper floor and then we have a living room here, the family room here. This is inspired by the Baradari. Now Baradari is, you know, it's a very typical architectural feature in Mughal gardens. Even if the glazing hadn't happened, the fireplace would have been there because winters in Punjab is great fun. As far as these tiles are concerned, so I'd gone to Jaipur and then I went to the Blue Pottery there and bought, instead of buying one type of tiles, I actually asked them if I can, you know, get a mix. So they said, look, we have a lot of seconds lying. So I said that works even better. So we just picked up the seconds from there and made some semblance of some order with a little breakaway as well. We've been collecting doors for a long time. Now this door, I was restoring a building in Amritsar in the border in a village called Atari. So somebody was selling two doors, two old doors. There's a certain energy about these old pieces which kind of resonates with me. So on the upper floor, there's a veranda here which overlooks the courtyard. There's this particular veranda at the landing level which overlooks this particular garden. I strongly feel that modern architecture, the way we have our construction industry, the workers are treated as lesser human beings and there are no conversations with them. Working in Punjab, working with artisans, I take the opportunity to even continue conversations, give them more than they actually ask for when it comes to the information on significance and how important the monument is. Few skills one has to bring from the other parts of the country. For instance, the tiles that you see here. Now pigment, whether it is terrazzo or the cement base, you know, pigmented floors like this. This you will find in the colonial period buildings in Punjab. But to do these tiles, now I had to purchase these tiles. The closest I could get them was from Bikaner. I tend to work a lot with sizes of openings. So you'll find that there are a lot of jallies in the house. So there is jallies, brick masonry jallies, fenestrations which are in the parapet walls. But you also get to see it in the way we've used in timber as well. It's actually imitating the pinjakari work, which is the lattice work that they do in Kashmir. And you find a lot of that in our houses in Amritsar wall city as well, because a lot of these artisans came from Kashmir. Actually, when the house was still under construction, my daughters and I, we were in conversation with the women as well. Let's look at what the skills the women have here. And we were surprised to find that Gurdaspur belt, because of its relationship with Kashmir and Amritsar, the women know how to embroider very well, and a range of things. So then we started working with them in producing some work and we called that brand as the Bari Collective. And during the course of the construction, they were using the rooms of the old gates. And they used to come and produce here and all of that. We were able to do some fundraising and get them to produce some more products. And interestingly, when we did our first summer school, when the building was still under construction, one of the students from SEPT was a product designer. So she worked with the girls and she developed, you know, products like handbags and very interesting, you know, fabric. She was using a very stiff kind of mat and she taught them how to produce these different kinds of products. And then I took those products to the deputy commissioner here and I said, look, this is what the girls are producing. So then from the National Rural Livelihood Mission, he sent people from his office and the girls in our village got organized into five self-help groups. So there were about 60 girls who were organized in five different groups. I feel Punjab's getting very, very insulated, you know, with the farmers and with a whole lot of other things, agriculture. Even when I look at the development here, I don't know, because, you know, our country's development is so urban, metropolitan centric. It's not really recognizing human beings for their knowledge and attributing sensibilities to the rural hinterland in a way that you feel, okay, you're going there as a learning center, not to get cheap labor. So even the fact that I come here, my sister comes here, mother, you know, we've all studied and we've come back. I see this as a vibrant, pulsating nerve center. I'm not going to say a heart, but a nerve center that people come.