Saloni Shitalkumar Shah

HR4000

The essay examines Anant Raje’s Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM), Bhopal, built between 1984-89, as a site of negotiation between geometry and terrain, material and structure, and concept and reality. The campus presents how architectural ambition, spatial expression, and tectonic craft come together onsite. 
This research project locates strangeness (3 details) in IIFM, not in its deviation from typology and typical architectural details. It pulls out unrecognized efforts of makers, negotiation of design intent, and resolution at various scales, and complexity in making simple, similar-looking forms in the complex. This methodology and research extend the discourse on architecture by revealing the small, intense moments of friction and asking what a structure wrestles with conceptually, materially, structurally, and spatially.