Conserving Sabha: Walking the heritage talk
'
', a
, opened recently after a
decided to renovate a 160-year-old heritage building that stopped functioning as a school a decade ago. The initiative bears an important message: restoring privately held heritage structures adds a rich layer of cultural depth and urban memory to the ever-evolving tapestry of Bengaluru's identity
When he set out to renovate a 160-year-old building on Kamaraj Road, Ravichandar V, the man who gave Bengaluru its own international centre BIC, knew well what he was up against. A heritage structure that had fallen into disuse, construction technologies that were at least a few centuries old and walls baring their bricks!
Driven by a deep love for managing public spaces, Ravichandar searched for nearly five years to find a sponsor who could help him restore the building that once hosted the Chaturveda Siddhanta Sabha (CVS) School.
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With little help coming forth, he decided to bet on it on his own. "I told my wife Hema 'let's do this as art philanthropy, our own contribution to the city'. So we set up a family trust called Ammini Trust," says Ravichandar, who has been working on various city issues since 2000.
"I normally raise money from others for projects that I undertake. This one is our personal philanthropy, and a first," he says.
The hard work of over two years has paid off now — from just a relic, the restorers have brought back a past that continues to breathe, an elegant edifice of earthy tones, the Sabha.
The space, right on Kamaraj Road and a 15-minute walk from the MG Road metro station, has already begun hosting public events and is seeing record footfalls. The project area is 7,500 square feet, including another 130-year-old building.
The property belongs to RBANM's Educational Charities, founded by Rai Bahadur Arcot Narrainswamy Mudaliar (1827-1910), a prominent philanthropist and a businessman who has created his own legacy in the city's history.
Mudaliar was also the contractor for Attara Kacheri, an important heritage structure in the city that now houses the High Court of Karnataka.
The Trust has leased out Sabha for 15 years as a public space.
Assembling a team
The first thing Ravichandar did after taking up the project was to assemble his team. He roped in renowned Ahmedabad-based architect Prof Rabindra Vasavada, BIC architect Bijoy Ramachandran, of Hundredhands, BIC colleague Raghu Tenkayala, and specialist teams from Kerala and Mumbai to handle woodwork and lime-mortar masonry.
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"Professor Vasavada advised us on how to go about this conservation project because we were just babes in the woods.
I'm not even an architect. We wanted to be true to the principles of conservation. So we really worked hard to retain every detail as original as possible, including the Madras Terrace roof," says Ravichandar.
The three reasons
Ravichandar says he had three reasons to commit himself to the project. "One was to create a public space, because that interests me significantly."
The second motivation was to set a unique example in a city where "so many people have been pulling down old buildings". (Three people have already got in touch with him saying they were planning to bring down an old building, but are having second thoughts after visiting Sabha).
His third and last reason is to inspire other philanthropists to say 'why don't we do it?'.
The conservation
An architect with a Masters degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and practice of 20 years, Sabha was Bijoy's first conservation work.
So, naturally, he planned extensively for the project. "Conservation work has its own set of protocols and methodologies by which one does the work. In fact, different countries have different protocols for how heritage structures are handled. While we (in India) are a little more relaxed in terms of how we engage with our heritage structures, in the UK, for instance, the heritage conservation agencies are quite fastidious about how one goes about every detail.
In India, a lot of it is your own personal responsibility …in how far you want to go with changing what you had encountered when you first got there," says Bijoy. He researched extensively, and looked up past projects and protocols before taking up the project.
"We were fortunate to have had Professor Vasavada as adviser, who had come down from Ahmedabad for four days early on in the process. He told us about these methods of seeing," says Bijoy.
"What kind of drawings you make, categorise everything that you're seeing in terms of structural damage or surface damage, water seepage etc. Like good students, we just made sure that we remembered everything that he told us. The first step in the process – observation and internalising the existing condition – is really important.
" This helped the team understand the challenges, the opportunities, the qualities of the existing building that need to be retained and elements that have been added over time, which are easy to spot and remove.
"We were lucky to have found Nilesh Thakkar, a Mumbai-based restorer who has already been doing projects in Bengaluru. We also got the reference for S C Shaju, a very specialised roofing and carpentry expert from Kozhikode, Kerala," says Bijoy.
One of the most challenging and incredibly satisfying episodes, according to Bijoy, was how the team managed to retain the 160-year-old Madras Terrace roofing while changing the timber support structure underneath.
A Madras Terrace roof is made out of brick, laid at an angle and spanning over secondary wooden beams. What holds them together is a very rich, sticky mortar (made out of a mix of lime, jaggery and an organic additive called kadukkai). This entire brick system then rests on a set of primary wooden beams.
"The problem with the Madras Terrace roof here was that the primary wooden beams were sagging beyond the permissible extent.
It was resting on 16 such beams, and the challenge was to replace them without disturbing the original brick roof because redoing this would've made the project really unviable," says Bijoy. "Our brilliant restorers managed to replace all of the primary beams without disturbing the original Madras Terrace roof.
" The removed beams were repurposed to make new windows and other woodwork for the two buildings.
Bijoy added a few new elements too — a cafe, restrooms, and a service block, which he says is "responding appropriately to an existing context".
"The old buildings have a very strong character in terms of the architecture and scale, and we had to be very sensitive that the new additions met the old elegantly."
'Let's incentivise conservation'
Ravichandar laments the fact that Bengaluru as a city lacks a law to preserve its privately-held heritage buildings. Mumbai was the first city in India to bring in something to that effect with a heritage listing. "That's perhaps why a lot of old buildings are coming down. There is no incentive for people to maintain heritage structures they own," he says. "I would have liked a policy where you get some tax waiver, for example, a 50% tax off when you're doing conservation work.
Now we pay 18% GST of the total cost, making restoration an expensive affair." The Sabha project, Ravichandar says, cost him 40% more than what it would have if it were a greenfield project of the same scale.
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