2. • Romi khosla is an architect and urban development planner.
• Educated at cambridge university and the architectural association
london.
• He has written four books including buddhist monasteries in the
western himalayas and has built new and restored buildings in
himachal for three decades.
• Apart from having designed some award winning buildings, he has
also worked in the conflict zones of kosovo, bulgaria, romania, cyprus
and tibet.
• Romi khosla is well known for his research and writing on
architecture and urbanism, and also for his professional work for more
than three decades.
• His architectural commissions include large educational and
recreational complexes.
• He has served on the aga khan award jury as well as the izmir city
revitalisation competition jury in turkey.
• He has participated in extensive urban planning, revitalisation and
tourism planning missions to the balkans, cyprus, central asia and tibet
• More recently, he has been asked to carry out an appraisal for the
delhi master plan 2020 by the confederation of indian industry.
4. • The first custom-design school for physically challenged children was
initiated by funds made available from the British government which
supported a local NGO.
• The school is designed for 500 handicapped children and provides not
only specialized facilities and training. But also courses for the
parents of handicapped children
• Romi Khosla’s design of the School for Spastic Children with its use
of abstract forms is regarded as a classic example of post-modern
architecture in India.
• The architect’s concern was to create a secure world for children with
special needs.
• The structure is well secured and almost fort like, a building which
has often been compared to a mother’s womb.
• While developing his design,Khosla also visualised a ship with many
decks; the numerous balconies in the building came out of this idea.
• He deliberately did not set aside any spaces for a specific function and
sought a building where movement was easy and space expansive.
• Attention was also paid to the students’conveniences with every two
classrooms having an adjacent toilet.
• With specially designed ramps and natural light penetrating into the
building, the architect not only provided for a comfort zone for the
children but also expressed his love of iconography in a poetic
manner.
9. CONCEPT
• There is something special about teaching hospitals that make them different
from other institutions. The Dental College of Jamia had these characteristics. It
serves to provide dental care to the people in surrounding areas and is also one
of the primary teaching centres of Dentistry in India. So at one end the users are
the common public and at the other end the users are the medical students.
• The College was therefore a place where three users interacted with each other.
The common public, the doctors who treated and taught and thirdly the students
who learned and practiced.
• The building was conceived by the architects Romi Khosla and Martand Khosla
to be a contemporary building without references to the historical burden of
architecture from which much of the Jamia buildings suffer. Like their Castro
Cafeteria and M.F. Hussain Art Gallery on the Jamia University Campus, the
architects have sought to provide the image of Jamia with a modern state of the
Art Campus
• The programme was therefore conceived as a series of capsules which were
designed to act as nodes for the three users.
10. SITE
• The site given for the building was a neglected and
overgrown part of the campus. It had two levels and
both the levels were used to access the building for the
public and students.
To fulfill the requirements of its varied users the
building was to house a substantial reference library,
staff facilities, seminar facilities, wards, operation
theatres, pathology laboratories, a mortuary as well as
X-Ray rooms and a Museum.
REQUIREMENTS
•The facilities have been arranged in a rectilinear plan form
that encloses two large courtyards and has a certain
formality to it.
• It was a design judgement to simplify the formal layout of
the building in order to contain the enormous volumes of
spaces in a simple form that would be easily readable by all
three categories of users.
• A dental college is a very complex institution in which the
users have to keep moving from one part to another.
Combine this with the special use requirements of the
students, their canteen, the teaching staff, the reference
library etc; it was imperative to simplify the plan form of
the building to make it readable to the constant stream of
new first users who would keep flowing into the building.
•In order to further reduce energy consumption, the
treatment clinics have been provided with full 80% north
side glazing that allows ample daylight to flood the
clinics. This helps the treatment during power cuts and
natural light spaces ensure a higher level of cleanliness.
PLANNING
11. ELEVATION
• Each façade of the building is treated as a canvas for
artistic composition. The fenestration has been designed
to have twin functions. On the north faces of the
building, where the clinics have been located, the
structural curtain wall glazing provides enormous
daylight for dental treatment. So instead of the dentist
twisting and turning angle poise lamps into the patient
face and dreading a power cut, the doctor can rely on
daylight to illuminate the patient’s condition. On the
south side, the glazing has been confined to narrow slits
which run horizontally and protect the south of the
building in the clinic areas from heat gain. These
staggered fenestrations also break the scale and the thin
strips of windows help in exaggerating the horizontality
of the structure
Walls:
Brick walls with ACP & Stone Cladding. Curtain wall glazing on
the North façade & Glass brick in filled in steel frame for
corridors
Floor:
Kota stone is the hardest locally available stone. Its slabs have
been used for flooring, skirting, dado, risers of steps etc. keeping
in view the high expected usability of the building.
Structure:
Steel & RCC composite structure
MATERIALS
13. BUILDING BLOCK
• The building block has a kitchen block to the
east, which is a fully enclosed space to cook and serve
in. As One walks along the length of the building
westwards, initially the eating enclosure is defined by
two walls and a roof, further still the sense of interior is
defined by one wall and the roof, further still the space
is articulated by only one wall, and yet further
still, there is only the floor, and then that too stops
continuing.
• Throughout this changing sense of interior and
exterior, the eating surface and the seating surfaces
continue, almost acting like stitches that tie this entire
space together.
• The idea was to try and blur the boundaries between
inside and outside, where these undefined boundaries
act as a negotiator between the user and the climate of
Delhi.
• All the elements of the building are defined distinctly
and independent from each other. The walls don’t
touch the floor and the roof does not touch the walls.
• This was the first steel building built at the university
campus.
• The roof is made of perforated aluminium sheets, and
the walls are cladded with waste marble strips.
14. CONCEPT
• A Cafeteria in a University Campus located near
Auditorium, Cultural Center, Mass communication, was
expected to become hub of all social activities of the
Campus.
• Due to the extreme climatic conditions of New Delhi,
where the summer sees temperatures of above 45
degrees centigrade, and the winters often see
temperatures below 5 degree centigrade..
• Most student canteens in India are not air-conditioned,
and are often poorly ventilated, making them very hot
and oppressive in the summer and very cold in the
winters.
• The design is truly unique and contemporary and we
feel, will herald a new age of Architecture for the
University.
• This canteen was proposed as a ‘Semi open air
Café’. This allowed to have an ambient temperature for
most of the year along with good ventilation, and a
variety of degrees of shade from the climate
16. • Jamia University is popularly regarded as a progressive avant
garde campus. In 2008, the vice chancellor proposed a new
cultural hub for the university that would have as its core a
contemporary students’canteen, a unique art gallery and
landscaped lawns.
• The architects chose white marble in the canteen and white metal
louvers in the art gallery to express this contemporary
identity. The art gallery has become a community space for
gathering alternative expressions of culture and identity. This role
signaled the canteen and the art gallery as iconic models of
architectural expression in contemporary Indian academic
institutions.
• The art gallery has three main parts to it. The front gallery that is
naturally lit is primarily designed for the display of popular art
and student exhibitions. The second space is the main internal
gallery which is lit by controlled light and can be divided into 2
smaller galleries with the help of the central pivoting wall. This
gallery is designed for the great university art collection, as well
as for external artists who want to exhibit their work here. The
third exhibition space is the open air sculpture court at the rear of
the building.
• Other than this, the art gallery also has two artist studios adjacent
to the sculpture court which are designed for short term stay of
visiting artists
