Working from the ground up, Jateen Lad designs and constructs large community buildings across the world uplifting chronically underdeveloped communities. His multi-disciplinary practice is guided by a belief that thoughtful and dignified design and construction practices can be transformative and a force for social change.
In real world project scenarios rife with degraded environments, poverty and exploitative construction industries, ethical processes of making become more important than design. New material components and techniques are developed using local resources. Contractors are deliberately not engaged. Instead, buildings are entirely constructed by local people employed and trained by the architect in precision skills using simple hand tools. Collective learning and building provide much needed employment strengthening livelihoods and nurture confidence and care in workmanship.
After completion, modelmaking becomes important to share built ideas with new audiences in alternative contexts and continents far from the remote sites. Working with Chung Tyson Workshop, analytical models are designed and fabricated not as replicas but as tools of critical reflection and learning. They connect observers to distant contexts and communicate the ideals of unique working practices hard to replicate in the UK. The accuracy of workshop tools offer new opportunities for critical interpretation of the built work. Thus, this new group of makers follow the many local people who carefully assemble the buildings by hand thousands of miles away.
This ethos is embedded in modelmaking the Sharanam Centre for Rural Development, in south India, 5000 miles from Manchester. The building is an internationally recognised exemplar of holistic sustainable development, low carbon materiality, social value and community participation. It was awarded the Royal Institute of British Architects International Award for Excellence 2024.
Following displays in the United States, Venice, Germany, India and London, these models are exhibited in the architect’s and modelmakers’ home city for the first time.
