Golconde, the Ashram That Brought Modernism to India

Images are credited where they are not from the Rugberry house.

Somewhere on a building site in Pondicherry, in the years before the building was finished in 1942, a small foundry was burning. Into it went brass: cups, bowls, plates and other vessels given up by the members of a spiritual community. Out of it came bolts, hinges and door handles, cast for a building that the war had made impossible to supply from abroad. The hardware on the doors of Golconde was, quite literally, made from the kitchens of the people who built it.

Golconde is a dormitory of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and it is still used by the ashram today. It is also one of the most remarkable modern buildings in Asia, a concrete structure finished in 1942 that is often described as the first reinforced, cast-in-place concrete building in India. It came before Chandigarh, before the generation of Indian modernists who would later make concrete a national language. And it was built not by a contractor but by devotees.

A commission from Pondicherry to Tokyo

The commission went to the Tokyo office of the architect Antonin Raymond in 1935, and the schematic design was complete in early 1936. The building takes its name from the Golconda diamond mines, in gratitude to Sir Akbar Hydari, the Prime Minister of Hyderabad, who funded it. It stands on a threshold of the town, between what was the French enclave and the Tamil town beyond.

To supervise construction, Raymond's office sent a young architect named George Nakashima. He is remembered today as an American woodworker, but in Pondicherry he was something else. He became a devotee of the ashram and took the name Sunderananda, one who delights in beauty. He shared that supervision with Francois Sammer, a Czech architect who had worked for Le Corbusier in Russia before joining Raymond's staff, and with no skilled contractors to be found in Pondicherry, the building had to be made by the people around them. Nakashima stayed on the site until October 1939. After he left, the work was carried forward by Udar Pinto, an Indian aeronautical engineer, who saw the building through to completion and also designed its furniture.

A building that breathes

What makes Golconde extraordinary is not that it is modern. It is that its modernism is so precisely fitted to its climate and its people. The facades are covered in operable louvres, set in custom brass hardware, that can be turned to admit the sea breeze or block the sun. Inside, sliding teak lattice screens separate the rooms from long, single-loaded corridors, so that air moves through the whole depth of the building. Above it all sits a bowed concrete shell roof.

The rooms look out over the south garden, and they are reached by a gallery that overlooks the north garden. One architectural history describes the interior as a threshold, always close to the exterior. You are never far from a garden, never sealed off from the weather, never quite indoors in the way a modern air conditioned building insists on.

The surfaces are as considered as the structure. The main floors are polished Cuddapah stone, a local slate. Each room has floors of black stone. The walls are finished in plaster made with crushed seashell, a material that carries the coast into the building and softens the light inside it. Concrete, teak, stone and shell: four materials, each doing exactly what it is best at.

Concrete, teak, stone and shell. Four materials, each doing exactly what it is best at.

Modernism as devotion

The usual story of modern architecture is a story of industry. The new buildings of the twentieth century were supposed to be made by machines, from standard parts, by a workforce that did not need to understand what it was making. Golconde tells the opposite story. Its workforce was made up exclusively of ashram devotees. Its hardware came from their own brass. Its finish came from their hands.

That does not make it less modern. If anything it makes it more so, because it shows what the new vocabulary of concrete and louvre could do when it was placed in the care of people who were building for reasons other than profit. The precision of Golconde was not imposed by a factory. It was offered, piece by piece, as a form of work that was also a form of practice.

A caution belongs here. Golconde is a working residence for a spiritual community, not a museum, and it is not for outsiders to romanticise. The ashram's own reasons for building it belong to the ashram. What an outsider can say is simply what the building shows: that care is a material, and that it can be seen in a hinge as clearly as in a carving.

There is a lesson for any maker in the brass hinges, too. The most memorable details in a quiet building are rarely the decorative ones. They are the functional ones made with unusual care: a door handle that feels right in the hand, a screen that slides without a sound, a floor that is cool underfoot in May. Golconde is full of them.

Before Chandigarh

When the history of Indian modernism is told, it usually begins with Le Corbusier and the planning of Chandigarh in the 1950s, and then moves to the great Indian architects who followed. Golconde complicates that story in a useful way. It shows that the modern idea arrived earlier, through a Czech American architect working from Tokyo, a young American architect who became a devotee and later a woodworker, an Indian engineer who finished the job, and a community that melted its own brass to make it possible.

The building is still there, still used, still turning its louvres to the sea. Its lesson has outlasted every argument about style: that the most modern thing a building can do is fit its place and its people exactly, and that the hands that make it are part of the design.

Rugberry notes

From the Rugberry house

Golconde is a story about restraint, stone and careful surfaces, and the rugs here follow the same brief. Rooms of stone floors, lattice and plain plaster ask very little of a floor, and anything loud breaks the spell. A carved surface in a single colour, where the pattern is made by depth and light rather than by dye, is one quiet answer. If that idea appeals, Lamina is our set of five hand tufted wool rugs, each carved in layers from one colour. Plainer still, a handloom wool rug in a single soft tone gives a room a ground and then gets out of the way. Its best quality is often the one nobody notices until they take their shoes off.

In the Rugberry house

• LaminaFive hand tufted wool rugs, each carved from one colour.
• Handloom rugsQuiet woven grounds for rooms that ask little.
• Ivory Wool RugHandloom woven in New Zealand wool, soft ivory.

Rugberry has no affiliation with the studios featured. Images are from the Rugberry house unless credited.