Chapter One

TOWN HOUSES

D uring Anjalendran’s lifetime the population of Sri Lanka has almost tripled, rising from seven million at the time of independence in 1948to an estimated twenty million today. The excess population from the countryside has drifted into the towns, with the result that Colombo, the prime urban centre, has grown from a modest garden city with a population of less than half a million to a congested metropolis with something approaching four million people. It is difficult to give accurate figures because there has not been a reliable census since 1981, and the political boundaries of Colombo no longer correspond to the reality on the ground. Colombo is still officially defined as a municipality of 36 square kilometres with a population of about 700,000, and falls within the Colombo District and the Western Province. But the Colombo metropolitan area has long since burst beyond its official boundaries and has spread like an amoeba, swallowing up surrounding towns and villages.

A continuous built-up area now stretches some sixty kilometres from Negombo in the north to Kalutara in the south, with tentacles reaching inland along the major roads and lines of higher ground to cover an area of some 600 square kilometres.

During the decades of rapid growth the middle classes clung to their toeholds in the inner suburbs. The best schools, the best shops and the best doctors were all to be found in the central area, while overcrowded public transport and congested roads discouraged a move to the suburbs. Land prices rocketed and plot sizes shrank. Existing gardens were sub-divided and the subdivisions themselves sub-divided, to produce labyrinths of small lanes with unfathomable numbering systems.

The British had held the view that higher densities threatened health and increased the risk of fire. The municipal bye laws which they promulgated stipulated a minimum plot area of 14 perches (350 sq.m.) for a dwelling. Such was the pressure on land that this was reduced to 6 perches (150 sq.m.) in 1980, though it was only in the late 1990s that high-rise apartment blocks started to be built in any numbers.

Throughout his career Anjalendran has experimented with the problem of designing open-planned and naturally ventilated houses on ever smaller plots. He has wrapped houses within an enclosing wall to form perimeter courtyards with security pergolas, he has lifted living rooms to upper floors, he has incorporated generous balconies and roof terraces, he has used deep planter troughs to create vertical gardens or ‘green façades’, he has added overhanging eaves to prevent rain penetration and solar gain, he has developed shallow plans to encourage cross-ventilation or inserted lightwells in deeper plans to produce stack-ventilation. In all of this he saw himself simply as continuing the explorations which a previous generation of architects had initiated and he was much influenced by the pioneering work of Minnette de Silva, Ulrik Plesner and Geoffrey Bawa.

The dining balcony across the double-height living space, Longdon Place House

The twenty-five years since Anjalendran opened his office have witnessed a lifestyle revolution amongst Sri Lanka’s middle classes. Fewer and fewer people are now prepared to work for low wages as household servants, and the days of the live-in domestic are numbered. The new middle class family buys packaged food from supermarkets and owns deep freezes, electric cookers, electric washing machines and all manner of labour saving devices. More and more wives go out to work and it is common for households to own more than one car. To accommodate these new aspirations Anjalendran’s houses incorporate compact modern kitchens, light and airy bathrooms which are often partially open to the sky, and generous carports.

Anjalendran has adopted a simple palette of materials: he invariably employs clearly articulated concrete frames and walls of nine inch brickwork. Roofs consist of half-round tiles supported on corrugated cement sheeting, a trick invented by Geoffrey Bawa to exploit the advantages of both materials whilst eliminating their disadvantages. They are designed without gutters and project out from the walls to provide shade and rain screening. Windows are often boxed out to provide a shelf or a window seat and are protected by lattice screens as well as glazed casements. Doors and windows are designed without modern ironmongery because, inevitably, this corrodes and fails in the tropical climate; they are fitted instead with brass hinges and bolts. Sliding doors and windows employ wheel mechanisms which have been developed by Anjalendran and are made by local craftsmen.

His houses are architecturally neutral: they employ simple forms and white walls and eschew decorative features or strong architectural statements. But he delights in picking out doors, windows, beams and columns with strong colours and regularly consults his friend Barbara Sansoni about colour schemes. Space and light are the main commodities which he offers to his clients, and his houses are blank cheques on which they can write their own lifestyles. But he is always willing to help them choose furniture and fittings and encourages them to buy paintings and sculptures from his artist friends.

Reflecting pool in theCoomaraswamy House

HOUSE FOR SENAKE BANDARANAYAKE AND MANEL FONSEKA

Fairline Road, Dehiwala, Colombo 1979–80

Anjalendran embarked on his first house design in 1979 whilst he was still working in the office of Geoffrey Bawa. His clients were the archaeologist Senake Bandaranayake and his wife Manel Fonseka. He had met Senake and Manel briefly in London at the beginning of 1974 just as he was arriving to start his postgraduate studies and they were packing up to return to Sri Lanka. Senake had spent the previous sixteen years in Britain pursuing a successful academic career which had culminated in an Oxford PhD in 1972. His doctoral dissertation was published in 1974 under the title ‘Sinhalese Monastic Architecture’ and later became a key text.

Anjalendran renewed their acquaintance when he himself returned to Sri Lanka at the end of 1977 and used to borrow books from their extensive private library. In 1978 they invited him to join them on a Christmas holiday at the home of Minnette de Silva in Kandy. Minnette took him to see her Karunaratne House and invited him to dinner with various of her clients. Senake took him to see Andrew Boyd’s Pieris House in Kandy and conducted Anjalendran on a tour of the medieval temples in the Kandy hinterland.

Senake Bandaranayake House

It was during the Kandy holiday that Senake showed Anjalendran a sketch plan of the house he intended to build on a 10-perch plot in Dehiwala. Anjalendran recalls that, at the time, though he lacked the confidence to design a new house from scratch, he knew a weak design when he saw one. He immediately proposed an alternative which Senake and his wife accepted. Anjalendran did not have an office of his own and Senake arranged for L.K. Karunaratne, a seasoned building technician from the Archaeology Department, to help him with the site supervision.

The house was designed carefully to fit around three existing trees and focused on a central courtyard. Its front was set slightly back behind a perforated screen wall which defined a buffer zone between house and road. The entrance opened directly into a sitting room which in turn opened to the central courtyard. To the right of the entrance was a garage and to its left an office with its own walled garden court. The rear wing beyond the courtyard contained the kitchen, the main bedroom and a study. The space between the garage and the kitchen was occupied by a small dining space with its own tiny courtyard which together embraced an existing mango tree. From here a narrow staircase wound its way around the tree trunk to connect to a roof terrace and guest bedroom.

Anjalendran had succeeded in shoehorning a generous three-bedroomed house with garage and office onto what was considered at the time to be a very small site. The gross area was 170 sq.m., including the verandahs and roof terrace, and the project was completed in less than a year at a cost of Rs. 180,000 (about US$ 15,000 at the time).

The design bore a remarkable resemblance to the very first house which Anjalendran had designed as a student in 1971, and could be considered as a progeny of Bawa’s 1960 design for the house of Ena de Silva, albeit on a plot of one-third the area. It echoed the Sinhalese walaawe tradition which Bandaranayake had experienced as a child, and reflected his interest in roof geometry which had been sparked off by studies of classical Sinhalese architecture. It was a remarkably mature design for a newly qualified architect and admirably matched the needs and tastes of its owners.

The architect and his clients became close friends. Manel was working on a study of old Colombo which she later published as a pamphlet and Anjalendran accompanied her on many of her exploratory walks, walks which he still traces today with groups of students. He also ran errands between Senake and Geoffrey Bawa who consulted the archaeologist about designs for Sri Lanka’s new Parliament building and the University of Ruhunu.

In 1982 Senake became the archaeological director of the excavations of the palace and gardens at Sigiriya. He was a proponent of the ‘minimalist’ school of archaeology which emphasised the importance of careful conservation over elaborate restoration. Over a fifteen-year period he excavated and conserved a large part of the water gardens and enlisted Anjalendran’s help to design footpaths and signs, and to train his staff in surveying and drawing.

Anjalendran shared the Bandaranayakes’ interest in the painter Ivan Peries about whom they wrote a monograph in 1996, and in the photographer Lionel Wendt to whose centenary tribute Manel contributed a key essay in 2000. Under their influence Anjalendran acquired a considerable collection of the works of both artists. Later, after a distinguished academic career, Senake spent brief spells as Sri Lanka’s ambassador in Paris and high commissioner in Delhi, and invited Anjalendran to stay with him in both places.

After living happily in their house for nearly two decades the Bandaranayakes moved to an apartment in 1996 and finally sold the house in 2001. Ironically it is now owned by a Tamil family and the courtyard has taken on a distinctive Jaffna accent.

Upper floor plan

Lower floor plan

Central courtyard from the upper terrace

THE HOUSE ROUND THE MANGO TREE

Kynsey Road, Colombo 1984–85

Romesh Bandaranayake was a contemporary and school friend of Anjalendran’s elder brother Harendran. The Bandaranayakes lived down a lane off Kynsey Road in a house which backed onto the Chelvadurai house. It had been built in 1956 by the architects Selveratnam and Monk, though Romesh’s mother altered the design to create a totally open two-storey house around a central courtyard. When it was finished the young Romesh planted a mango tree in the garden.

Years later in the early 1970s, after Harendran had left to study in London, the age difference between Romesh and Anjalendran had seemingly shrunk and they became good friends. Later, Mrs Bandaranayake was keen for her adult son to stay close to the family home so she gifted him a small slice of her garden on which to build a house. Romesh then turned to Anjalendran who was now practising from the verandah of his mother’s home on the other side of the boundary wall. The mango tree was now twenty-seven years old and dominated the tiny plot so that it became literally and figuratively the centre of the design.

The three-storey house caresses the tree as it rises up, and the tree’s branches provide an umbrella of foliage over its various terraces. The mighty trunk bursts out of the living room floor and crashes through the roof terrace above. After twenty-five years of imprisonment it still produces several hundred mangoes in good season.

The house is entered via a carport which doubles up as a dance floor when parties are thrown. On the ground floor is a sitting and dining room with a modern kitchen, and each upper floor contains a single bedroom and a bathroom as well as an open terrace. The finishes are robust and simple, the only touches of luxury being the polished brass handrail of the staircase and the kumbuk boarding on the ground floor.

This was the first of Anjalendran’s tower houses and the first of several designs which developed an intimate relationship with a tree.

The mango tree seen from the terrace above the carport

Section

The mango tree in the sitting room

Floor plans

Through view from the garden

KEERTHI AND NEWARI WICKRAMASURIYA HOUSE

Kanatta, Colombo 1988–92

Keerthi Wickramasuriya was one of the first batch of students to study architecture at Katubedde during the early 1960s. However, he gave up his studies in 1966 when he married, having been discouraged by Geoffrey Bawa who, as his design tutor, made intractable problems disappear with the flick of a pencil. He then became a tea taster and started his own tea export business.

In 1978 he and his second wife, Thea, bought a shareholding in Ena de Silva’s batik business. Ena had recently lost her husband and her son had been badly injured in a car accident. She accepted an invitation to teach embroidery and dyeing in the British Virgin Islands under a British Commonwealth programme, and left her business in the hands of the Wickramasuriyas. Unfortunately their marriage foundered and in the ensuing hiatus the business fell apart, ending in a nasty, long-drawn-out court case.

In 1988, now married for a third time, Keerthi asked Anjalendran to design a house on a piece of land which backed on to the Kanatta Cemetery. The site covered an area of 14 perches and was almost square with a street frontage of 18 metres. It lay beyond the Baseline Road, for many years the psychological ‘edge’ of the city, in what was considered to be a ‘rough’ neighbourhood. Anjalendran enclosed the house within high protective walls in the manner of a small urban fortress and the Wickramasuriyas christened it ‘Hammenhiel’ after the small island fort which lies off Jaffna.

Section showing the encroachment of existing tree

View from the sitting room towards the garden court

The site was only large enough to accommodate a small planted area at ground level. To compensate for this Anjalendran created a vertical garden by adding planting troughs on the two upper floors and by exploiting fully the existing mango tree. The entrance space borders the carport and contains the staircase. The main living area runs through from the rear garden to a small enclosed courtyard inside the street wall and includes a sitting area, a dining space and a study corner. The ‘front kitchen’ opens to a small breakfast terrace beside a raised reflecting pool, and the staff quarters and ‘back kitchen’ are tucked behind the carport. On the first floor the branches of the mango tree seem to grow into the main bedroom which looks out across its own reflecting pool, while the bathroom incorporates an al fresco plunge bath. Two children’s bedrooms share a small study. A guest bedroom on the second floor repeats the layout of the main bedroom.

This was one of Anjalendran’s most assured and innovative early designs. It was built without a single pane of glass and demonstrated that a house with well-ventilated rooms and overhanging eaves did not need air-conditioning. The house was illustrated in the second of Robert Powell’s ‘Asian House’ series volumes and was widely admired. It was sold in the late 1990s and is now used as an office and warehouse.

Transitions between inside and out

View from the upper bedroom

Floor plans

Carport entrance

The view from one of the children’s bedrooms

Master bedroom

LILANI DE SILVA HOUSE

Ward Place, Colombo 1992–95

Lilani de Silva is an almost exact contemporary of Anjalendran. They first met at a George Keyt exhibition in 1986 when she asked him if he would design her house on a sliver of land at the back of her parents’ property. He had recently started teaching at the new Colombo School of Architecture and suggested that, before she built a house, she might like to study architecture for a while. Astonishingly she followed his advice, joined the course in 1987 and followed it for eighteen months. The project eventually got underway in 1992 and was completed in 1995.

Central lightwell and reflecting pool

Street elevation

The site was long and thin, tapering to a frontage of less than 6 metres. The design created a narrow garden strip at the end of the plot and introduced two intermediate lightwells. On the ground floor the front half of the plan is occupied by the maid’s room and kitchen which are lit from the front lightwell. A long passage skirts a carport and connects to the main living area which encircles a top-lit reflecting pool. On the first floor the main bedroom with its attendant sitting room and bathroom are planned around the rear lightwell, while a second bedroom occupies the front of the house. The third floor is taken up by a large covered terrace which can serve as a second sitting room or a guest suite and a small open roof garden. The terrace and roof garden are edged with deep planting troughs which support a vibrant backdrop of greenery, creating the illusion that is in fact a single-storey garden pavilion. The architecture is white and minimalist and the only hint of decoration is represented by carved wooden screens which filter the light into the stairwell.

This is an example of a house which is tailored both to its site and to the needs of its client, a woman who enjoys a busy social life. It combines cosy intimacy with a spaciousness which is surprising on such a small site and can accommodate large parties and intimate gatherings, formal dinners and candlelit suppers under the stars.

Like a number of Anjalendran’s clients Lilani has become a close friend. Having got to know her when she was his student he built the house without charging a fee, though she later gifted him three original photographs by Lionel Wendt as a token of her appreciation. Lilani’s house became a bolt-hole in the city where Anjalendran could drop in for a quiet lunch and a snooze. When he needed advice or help or a shoulder to cry on, Lilani was there for him. They also became travelling companions and embarked together on ambitious tours to Turkey, Burma, China and Central India.

View across reflecting pool and living room

Section and floor plans

Sitting room

First-floor link

First-floor landing

Second-floor sitting room

Stair detail

HOUSE FOR RADHIKA COOMARASWAMY

Pedris Road, Colombo 2000–03

Radhika Coomaraswamy’s family belonged to the same Nallur clan as Anjalendran’s. Both are descended from a matriarchal great-great-grandmother whose daughters, Manickam and Sinnamah, married two brothers, each an employee of the Jaffna Customs. Sinnamah was the mother of Kanagambikai, the wife of Suntharalingam and grandmother to Anjalendran. Manickam’s daughter married C. Coomaraswamy and adopted his name. C. Coomaraswamy was a civil servant who rose to be Sri Lankan High Commissioner to India. His son, Rajendra Coomaraswamy, who was Radikha’s father, became a UN Commissioner in 1961 when she was 8 years old and she grew up in the States. She attended an international school in New York and went on to gain a BA at Yale, a doctorate at Columbia and a Master of Law at Harvard. In 1977 she returned to Sri Lanka and worked at the Marga Institute until 1982 when she became the founder director of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (I.C.E.S). In 1994 she took up a special part-time appointment as the UN’s rapporteur on Violence Against Women, and in 2006 moved to New York to become the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict.

The rear façade

Street elevation

In 2000 she asked Anjalendran to design a house on a 9-perch strip of land at the back of her mother’s house in Colombo’s Pedris Road. For her there was no other choice. She had known him since childhood and describes him as her ‘cultural window’, having been treated to his guided tours of London in the 1970s. They also shared a close friendship with Ena de Silva, and she recalls having spent a palliative week with her after the 1983 riots.

Her needs were clear though unorthodox. As a single woman with a high national and international profile, she wanted a large space in which she could entertain sizeable social gatherings and an office with space for her considerable library. In between these she wanted a more intimate bed-sitter with a large walk-in closet to accommodate her not insignificant collection of shoes and saris.

Looking toward the entry across the sitting room

The sitting room seen from the entry

Sections and plans

Anjalendran responded with a design that places the garage and kitchens down one side of the site, leaving a 15-metre-long space to serve as a large sitting and dining room. A straight flight of stairs runs relentlessly from the entrance up to the bed-sitting room on the first floor, and the library on the second. Both upper floors reduce and step back to create generous roof terraces which are framed by deep planter troughs and protected by delicate concrete pergolas and perforated screens. The upper terrace is particularly successful and is used for intimate moonlit dinner parties. The house is cool but filled with light, and during monsoon showers is transformed into a spectacular cascade as water pours from one terrace to another.

Radhika confesses that the house did not turn out quite as she expected, but she insists that Anjalendran gave her exactly what she had wanted even though she had not been able to articulate it at the time. House and client seem to be perfectly matched, and she has enough storage space for all of her shoes.

The first-floor terrace

View down to first-floor terrace

Second-floor terrace

First-floor terrace

THE HOUSE BENEATH THE BANYAN TREE FOR CAPTAIN AND MRS WAHAB

Nawala, Colombo 2002

In 2002 Anjalendran was asked to design a house in the Colombo suburb of Nawala for Captain Wahab, a pilot with Sri Lankan Airlines. He had already designed a house for the Wahabs in Thimbirigasaya back in 1991 as well as a house for their daughter, Shamila Gafoor, and an apartment for Mrs Wahab’s brother, Nihar Nalar. The Nawala site was one of those awkward left-over plots at the end of the last cul-de-sac off the furthermost lane on the border between two neighbourhoods: an awkwardly shaped plot with a fall of about 8 metres. It was dominated by three trees including an immense banyan.

Anjalendran’s engineer, Deepal, constructed a huge retaining wall across the western boundary of the site to create a terrace at more or less the same level as the point of entry. Anjalendran then carefully designed the house to fit around the banyan tree in such a way that the branches would almost touch its walls and the tendrils would caress its windows. Great care was taken to isolate the roots of the tree from the foundations of the house, for their mutual protection.

Garden elevation

View down on first-floor terrace

Ground floor terrace

The sitting room from the first-floor terrace

Second-floor roof terrace

Second-floor roof terrace

View towards the entry

Floor plans

The house consists of two pavilions which set up a long, narrow trapezoidal courtyard between them, marking the axis of the entrance. The first pavilion runs along the eastern boundary of the site and contains a twin garage and staff quarters at ground level and a bedroom on the first floor. The second pavilion is on three floors, though each is cut back to create an increasing area of open terrace. At ground level this contains the kitchens and the main areas for public entertaining, as well as a guest room. The main bedroom is located on the first floor along with a private sitting room and library and a large balcony. The second floor contains a further sitting room which opens to a generous roof terrace. This is partially covered by a long loggia as well as by the upper branches of the banyan tree.

This is the latest in a series of houses which have been designed by Anjalendran around a single tree and it symbolises his determination to destroy as few trees as possible when he builds. Its architecture adopts a neutral modernist idiom which plays second fiddle to the superb sculptural qualities of the tree and has enabled the Wahabs, with Anjalendran’s guidance, to impose their own style on the interiors.

The ground floor terrace with its retaining wall

Under the banyan tree

The dining room with chairs by Rico Tarawella

The first-floor sitting room

THE LONGDON PLACE HOUSE

40/15 Longdon Place, Thimbirigasaya 2003–06

Anjalendran was experimenting with designs for ever smaller sites. In 1991 he had designed a town house for a lawyer called Alagaratnam on a narrow lane in Bambalapitiya. His client wanted a four-bedroomed house with an office and parking for two cars on a site with a frontage of 9 metres and an area of 6 perches (150 sq.m.). Anjalendran achieved this by creating a four-storey house with an area of 300 sq.m. (plot ratio 2:1) wrapped around a central dog-leg staircase, and managed to provide a double-height living space and a generous roof terrace.

In 2003 Anjalendran was approached by the Wijethilake family to design a similar house for a slightly larger plot on reclaimed land next to a canal behind the Bandaranaike Conference Hall. The Wijethilakes are typical members of a new professional middle class. They are working parents with two small children and share a passion for classic cars.

Looking down on the sitting room

The double-skin wall

Anjalendran’s design followed the precedent of the earlier Alagaratnam House, but he took advantage of the larger site to reduce the number of floors to three and used a Buddhist temple on the far side of the canal as a focus for views.

The ground floor on the street side is given over to a twin carport and accommodation for a driver, but the rear half of the house has been raised about 1.2 metres above datum to reduce the risk of flooding. This contains a guest bedroom and a double-height living room which look into a small garden with a swimming pool. The elegant dog-leg staircase occupies the core of the plan and leads up to the first floor with the dining space, the kitchen, the maid’s accommodation and the master bedroom. On the second floor are two more bedrooms and a small library which share a secluded roof terrace.

First-floor balcony and staircase

View from the dining balcony

Floor plans

The street elevation faces due west and is protected by an elaborate double wall: the openings in the outer wall are screened by a lattice of timber which admits air and controlled amounts of sunlight, while the inner wall is glazed and acts as a rain screen. The east elevations are shaded by deep overhanging eaves and cantilevered planting troughs.

In these designs Anjalendran demonstrated the space-planning skills which he had developed with his early paper-folding experiments and had later honed at the Bartlett in London. They represent stages in Anjalendran’s attempts to develop new prototypes to meet the needs of young urban families. They offer an attractive alternative: a house on a pocket handkerchief, of simple construction with rugged finishes. Both houses would easily lend themselves to aggregation in the form of row-houses, and would achieve densities of about forty dwellings per hectare. Both houses hold out a promise of low energy consumption: external walls are screened by double skins, rooms have excellent ventilation and the need for air-conditioning is minimalised. Furthermore, their central locations place their owners close to facilities such as shops and schools and reduce their reliance on car transport.

MIR HOUSE IN KARACHI

For Imran and Nighat Mir 2000–02

In 2007 Anjalendran was commissioned to design a substantial house in Singapore for an Indian businessman. The project, developed to pre-tender stage in collaboration with a local architect called Ng Kheng Lau, was abandoned after disagreement with the client.

In the same year he designed a house for the Saluja family in the Indian city of Hyderabad. The Salujas required him to consult a local vaastu expert (building astrologist) who gridded the site into its astrological fields and gave precise instructions about the location of courtyards and the orientation and positioning of furniture. The structural design was delegated to a local Hyderabadi engineer who acted as the local agent and site supervisor. Completion is expected in 2009.

To date Anjalendran’s only completed overseas project has been the extension to a house in Karachi for Imran and Nighat Mir. This arose as the result of his involvement with the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture and was executed in collaboration with a local architect and friend of the Mirs called Shahid Abdulla.

Anjalendran’s introduction to Pakistan happened as the result of a chance meeting with the architect Akeel Bilgrami and his designer wife Noorjehan who, with Abdulla and the Mirs, had helped to found the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi. In 1993 the Bilgramis visited Sri Lanka and met Anjalendran in his new home in Battaramulla just hours before they returned to Karachi. The house had been occupied for only two weeks but it convinced them to invite him to come and teach at the Indus Valley School.

View from the front gate

Door to the entry court

Anjalendran’s first visit to Karachi took place in February 1994 when he was invited to run a student workshop. He stayed for a few days at the august Sindh Club where his customary wardrobe of jeans, sarongs and sandals failed to conform to the club’s dress code and resulted in his being asked to take his meals in his room.

The Indus Valley School is a private institution which. was founded in 1989 and offers courses in fine and applied arts and architecture. It is housed in purpose-made buildings which were designed by architects Arshad and Shahid Abdulla and completed in 1994.

Entry court with sculpture by Imran Mir

Entertainment pavilion on first-floor terrace

Pool

Anjalendran’s first workshop was a great success and his public lectures were given to large and enthusiastic audiences. He enjoyed teaching in a school which placed architecture alongside other visual arts, and made a number of friends amongst the younger artists of Pakistan, including Imran Mir. Mir was a painter and sculptor who also ran a successful advertising agency. He and his wife Nighat lived in a house that had been built by Nighat’s father in the 1960s, and Imran had a studio on the first floor. Its large roof terrace was used for parties and exhibitions and it was there that Anjalendran gave three of his presentations.

Anjalendran returned on further teaching assignments in 1996 and 2000. It was during the latter visit that the Mirs took him to see the shell of the new house which Shahid Abdulla was building for them. They had bought an old art deco bungalow and had asked Abdulla to remodel and extend it to include a much larger studio which could double up as a gallery. The house occupied the corner of a generous triangular site which, rare for Karachi, was covered in trees, including two mature frangipanis.

Shahid is an experienced architect with one of Karachi’s biggest and most successful practices. As well as having built a number of major public buildings he has an impressive number of private houses to his name. Shahid, who was already familiar with the methods of Geoffrey Bawa, was trying to incorporate elements of local vernacular architecture into his work, and when Anjalendran suggested changes to the design, he took these on board.

Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, experiences high levels of humidity and is plagued by dust and mosquitoes. Many of Pakistan’s architects fail to take all of this into consideration: they have drawn their inspiration from European and American models and turned their backs on their own traditions. A drive round any Karachi suburb reveals serried ranks of monotonous two-storey boxes sitting on standard four- or eight-hundred-square-metre plots, each one set back a statutory three metres from both the street and its neighbours, each set behind token lawns with ornate entrances, double car garages and large and unused first-floor balconies.

Anjalendran invited the Mirs to visit him in Sri Lanka to see his work for themselves. Like the Bilgramis before them they were impressed and their visit changed their outlook. At their invitation Anjalendran returned to Karachi in May and spent two weeks working on site with Shahid and the contractor, moving walls and breaking slabs and preparing a set of plans and details. At his instigation the main bathroom on the ground floor was shifted to create a small courtyard at the centre of the plan, while the studio was repositioned above the original bungalow so as to create a large courtyard terrace at first-floor level. The bedrooms and bathrooms were re-assigned and linked by a generous loggia which was lit by clerestory windows so that Nighat could ‘see the sky whenever she passed by’.

Old windows

Anjalendran admits that, working in a strange environment, it was much easier for him to correct an ongoing project than to design a new house entirely from scratch. He had already made several lengthy visits to Karachi and knew something about Pakistan’s architectural traditions but the project was only possible because he and Shahid had developed an understanding and respect for each other’s work. The detailed supervision was carried out by Shahid during 2000 and Anjalendran made only one further site visit in March 2001. The landscape was designed by Imran who went to great lengths to obtain tropical plants from Sri Lanka and Thailand.

In its final form the Mir House does not incorporate a fully enclosed, inhabited courtyard, or a true verandah to compare with those which featured regularly in Bawa’s or Anjalendran’s houses. It also adopts a fairly neutral language of modernist forms and materials. However, it does go a long way towards breaking down the barriers between inside and outside space, and sets up functional ambiguities which call into question the conventional room labels of western modernism. It also surrounds the core of the house with a number of implied courtyard spaces which invite excursions from interior to exterior and it is a house which is totally hidden from the eyes of neighbours and passers-by. Although hardly revolutionary when viewed in the canon of Anjalendran’s Sri Lankan work, it clearly represented a radical departure from what had become the norm for suburban Karachi.

The plan

View from the frangipani court into the reception hall

The existing house occupied the western corner of the triangular site and had a triangular plan aligned with the road and the rear boundary, while the new wing, in contrast, was built parallel to the eastern boundary. The centre of the house and the boundary between its public and private zones occur precisely where the two geometries collide and this is marked by a small enclosed fountain court and a trapezoidally shaped library. This simple strategy of block alignment sets the Mir House apart from its peers: the modern urban house is an object which is imposed upon its site like a yolk sitting in the white of an egg while the plans of traditional urban houses responded to site boundaries, often to such an extent that the external spaces seem to have been scooped out of a piece of cheese. The Mir House recalls the havelis of old Lahore which were often aligned to different streets in such a way as to create interesting ‘left-over’ spaces where the geometries met.

The house has been conceived as a scenographic promenade which proceeds via a series of thresholds through an ascending hierarchy of privacy. A set of old godown doors, situated at the eastern corner of the site, serve as the first threshold, and open to a parking court which is dominated by a large cubic building, now almost hidden from view by a mass of tropical plants. This contains a traditional reception hall or garden room on its ground floor and an open-sided pavilion on its first.

A pathway leads along the side of the pavilion to an old wooden doorway, the second threshold, which opens into a walled entrance court. Like a courtyard in an ancient haveli this is both a space of transition and of repose. Indeed ambiguity is a constant theme in the Mir House: spaces merge with one another and take on different functions according to the time of day or the season. The prominent staircase which rises around the reflecting pool at the far end of the court offers the promise of another world, while the diminutive antique door in the side wall covers the entrance to a more private realm. Four figures, one male and three female, sculpted out of flat steel by Imran Mir, stand in silent conversation on a plinth in the pool, an abstract memory of Cannova’s ‘Three Graces’, and invite one to linger awhile. This memorable piece is one of several sculptures which have been placed at key points around the house to act as beacons and signposts, and can be seen, framed in doorways and windows, from a number of viewpoints. The antique door is, in fact, the third threshold of the house and opens into a small entry space which serves as the link between the reception hall and the main family room. Here the visitor is confronted with an astonishing panoramic view into an overgrown, boulder-strewn frangipani court.

The family room occupies an expansive ‘L’ shape which is anchored along its south-eastern side by a long straight wall running from the entrance link through the dining area and open kitchen to a distant breakfast court, while its western wall steps back to accommodate the central fountain court and the music room. Almost every position within the family room offers its own unique combination of framed perspectives through doors and shuttered windows, in a manner reminiscent of the Dutch interior painter Pieter de Hooch.

The main sitting room with sculpture by Imran Mir

View from the frangipani court into the reception hall

The studio with paintings by Imran Mir

A further linking corridor leaves the toe of the ‘L’, skirts the music room and crosses the fourth and final threshold to enter the enclosed loggia of the private family domain. This gives access to the three principal bedrooms and opens to the swimming pool court. Unconventionally, the bedrooms are connected to the loggia by large sliding-folding screens which are left open throughout most of the day so that the whole cluster acts as one extended family space.

The large terraced court on the first floor echoes the plan of the main family room and connects to an open square pavilion and the suite of enclosed studio and gallery spaces. These latter step down in height to allow clerestory windows to flood the spaces with light. This whole ensemble functions as a vast space for performances and exhibitions and is one of the largest places of its kind to be found in Karachi.

At first sight the Mirs could hardly be considered as run-of-the-mill Karachi-ites, and yet they place great emphasis on traditional family values. Abdulla and Anjalendran have created for them a house which functions as a highly public place with an ever open door to a wide cross-section of people, as a living gallery in which to show Imran’s paintings and sculptures and, at the same time, as an intimate family home. This in itself is a remarkable achievement in a city of a million private places which lacks any formalised public realm. The design exploits the municipal boundary regulations to wrap the house in a cocoon of tropical greenery and then indulges in a game of ‘inside out’, pushing rooms out into garden spaces and sucking garden spaces into rooms. It is a seemingly conventional modern house of plain, undecorated walls, albeit punctuated by a collection of beautiful old doors and windows, functioning like an empty book which waits for the messages of occupation. Yet it speaks to us in subtle tones of lost traditions and possible futures.

Although far from revolutionary, the Mir House stands out as a milestone in the evolution of Karachi architecture and has helped to transform perceptions of what a contemporary house might be. Above all else it is imbued with a unique sense of ‘place’ which is unequivocally of Pakistan. In this respect the writer Hasan Uddin Khan has written: ‘Pakistanis have looked at architecture from other cultures and learned to design modern architecture, but the making of place has eluded us. [The Mir House] ranks amongst the finest that I have seen in Pakistan. It does not break new ground but borrows creatively…to produce a new vernacular. It is a place that can be inhabited as elegantly and as easily as a woman’s sari, a place that can be worn and lived in. There are no dramatic architectural tricks.... just the careful attention to place.’ (Khan 2003)