Home / Sunday-mid-day / / Article /
How these women are building The Hobbit House with earth-friendly techniques
Updated On: 02 July, 2023 08:15 AM IST | Mumbai | Sucheta Chakraborty
An author and canine behaviourist’s women-driven project is emphasising the need for slow building, natural construction and vernacular architecture
Listen to this article :
The pole at the centre is a compass used to measure radius to get a circular building. Pangal says the team had to figure all this out on their own
"A lot of beauty in the world is rooted in a lot of pain,” author, canine behaviour and myotherapist Sindhoor Pangal, who lost her husband about two-and-a-half years ago just before the second lockdown, tells us. “We were very close and I was completely heartbroken. He and I were college sweethearts and after his loss, I could not handle the city at all. We had memories that we had built in every part of it. I wanted to leave. I was looking for a place to heal.” It was around this time that Pangal bought a farmland outside Bengaluru with the intent of building a mud house. While the idea of a mud construction aligned with her eco-conscious lifestyle, there was also something restorative about the process of working with mud. “A mud structure combined my philosophy with my need of the hour. I had to do something creative because grief is so all-consuming that you have to do creative things to learn to carry that grief,” she says. The architects at design firm Masons Ink, who laid out the initial design, too understood this need. “This was not just a house; this was a journey into a new life for me.”
The early reliance on architects stemmed from the fact that there are few contractors who can build with natural materials, shares Pangal. This is because there is little knowledge and information available on vernacular architecture. Starting out with the objective to hire a group of women and teach them how to build with natural materials for this project titled The Hobbit House, Pangal says she was fortunate to find passionate participants like Oviya, co-founder of Da India, a design initiative that harmonises the mastery of native crafts with an artistic vision.
Trending Stories
Latest Photos
Latest Videos
Latest Web Stories
ADVERTISEMENT
Mid-Day Fast
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT