Varma Rashmi Rajendra Usha

HR4000

Frampton in the Field

This essay examines how Ram Sharma’s design for the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya (IGRMS) in Bhopal engages with and extends Kenneth Frampton’s framework of Critical Regionalism. Using a bottom-up methodology involving drawing, material analysis, and spatial sequencing, it explores the museum’s integration with the landscape, tectonic articulation, and civic porosity. Analysing elements such as sandstone cladding, structural modules, and passive lighting, the essay finds that Sharma’s architecture reinterprets modernist principles through regional materials and embodied inhabitation. IGRMS emerges as a site-specific, epistemic practice—an architecture of quiet resistance where construction, context, and culture are deeply interwoven.

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Frampton in the Field: Reading Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya through the lens of Critical Regionalism

A bottom-up methodology combining drawing, material analysis, and spatial sequencing to uncover how architecture embodies place.

Architecture as an epistemic artifact: a vessel through which knowledge, culture, and context are spatially embedded and expressed.

Reading IGRMS through Frampton’s Six Point

Topography: Architecture as an extension of the land—embedded, responsive, and shaped by the contours of the terrain.

Tectonic Form: Structure as expression, where construction techniques, material joints, and spatial rhythm reveal the poetics of making.

Proposed Plan vs Implemented Plan: A comparison of the original design and its evolved version

Light and Climate: Design strategies that harness natural light and climate conditions to create sustainable, responsive spaces.

Material and Tactility: The use of local materials and textures to create a sensory, grounded connection between architecture and its environment.

IGRMS redefines Critical Regionalism through modernist principles, regional materiality, and cultural context.