‘Basa’ in Garhwali language is an expression to invite guests to your house for a night halt.

Initially designed as a competition entry, the Basa tourism center in Khirsu developed as a result of research and deliberations which generally follow the involvement of locals and Govt. bodies in a region. The building’s first proposal was as an earthquake resistant structure for the Resilient Homes Design Challenge competition.

Presenting the premise, concept and design development for Basa by Compartment S4, addressing a multitude of local concerns with this project.

Text description for project by Compartment S4.

The Design:

The Tourism Center has a community kitchen and a space to display their local produces, on the lower level. The upper floor houses an exhibition portraying the local heritage and culture of Khirsu along with essential information for tourists. This space can also function as a recreational space for the tourists who are staying at the BASA homestay.

Graphics: concept and drawings

The main challenge in the Himalayan mountains with cold temperate climates is to design a house that is not only earthquake and landslide resilient but also takes into account the increasing remoteness and difficulty in transport as altitude rises. The tourism center is designed with a heavy stone filled retaining wall at the bottom and a light wooden structure on the top. Materials used are easily available in the local context and can be easily transported via small pickup. A balance between local knowledge and modern construction techniques is incorporated in order to encourage community participation and ownership.  Earthquake resilient features are integrated into the traditional building practices with minor changes to the available skill set so that its construction does not require expert or non-local craftsmen.

pictures: basa

Undressed stone in gabion walls is preferred because it can be picked up from waste of old buildings and hills. Wood is preferred over other light materials because it is a natural resource that can be replenished over time. Mud, which is dug out from cutting and filling the site, can be used in plastering reducing the use of cement. Minimum amount of steel is used only for joinery details and even that can be resold or recycled.

Pictures: basa’s construction phase

The Context:

Khirsu like most other Indian villages is also going through a transformation influenced by urbanisation. Many of the local residents have migrated to major cities in India like Dehradun, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore etc for better employment opportunities. Most of the youngsters here are pursuing careers in hotel management or are involved in government jobs. Khirsu has a block office and the district office is about an hour away hence it supports a lot of government jobs.

Khirsu is a treasure of oak,and deodar forests with a variety of forest produces like kafal, rhododendron, hissor etc and a rich flora including leopards, bears, tigers etc. It was supposedly very rich in agricultural produces as well like mandwa, turmeric, potato, rice etc. But due to migration, agriculture has taken a big hit. The majority of the population is elderly. They depend mainly on the money from their children earning in the cities. As this money is sufficient for a simple village life, men in the village are hardly seen working. They are largely involved in drinking and gambling problems. Women of Garhwal as they say, are ones running the mountains. They are the hard workers taking care of the cattle, going to the forests to get firewood, house errands and practising agriculture.

pictures: khirsu

The freedom fighter and a visionary, M.K. Gandhi strongly believed that India’s true heritage and richness lies in its rural and in order to maintain a just socio-economic order, villages of India will have to become self-reliant. Overtime with negligence, these villages have seen a very unorganized and a non-sustainable picture of rural development. The neglect towards traditional and vernacular systems and practices, seems to have forced the locals to give up on their practices to pursue an urban goal. The imitation of the urban model and the neglect of the traditional practices has had some grave consequences on the ecology as well as the socio-cultural order in the villages.

Hence while working in rural, professionals need to be very mindful of the context and the villagers. Any intervention has to feed in the society and not be enforced on. This is something we strictly follow in all our projects as a practise. Our main motive through this project was to facilitate tourism which benefits the locals and does not deteriorate the local cultural landscape.Multiple workshops were conducted with the locals to identify and document the cultural landscape of Khirsu and villages around before the intervention was thought of. The intent was to capture and give importance to the local traditions and heritage getting lost with people migrating from rural areas. Community participation was  a key tool throughout the process.

We set up an exhibition on the upper level of BASA. The exhibition documents demographic information of Khirsu, about BASA, a map of Khirsu, the traditional house form and household activities, local festivals, biodiversity and folk narratives, a guide for local bird spotting, everyday objects used by women signifying their role in the village, the local produce map with information on the various crops grown, places to visit around Khirsu, local dishes and maps of two nearby treks. Some parts of the exhibition are also made interactive to engage the visitors in the experience.

The Experience:

As professionals, our real duty is towards the marginalised section of our society. In most cases it is not monetarily beneficial but it is highly satisfactory. An idea from an incubation to execution through a very conscious process involving the locals and respecting the local is a very satisfying journey to be a part of. This project was a journey in itself. The idea was to promote tourism in Khirsu which is driven by the locals hence raising the economy of the village.

A community tourism model based on an idea of homestay. A center was to be designed which facilitates tourism inspired by the local heritage, landscape and culture of Khirsu by engaging the local women of Khirsu. The approach was community driven. Multiple meetings were held with the villagers to spread awareness about homestays and the benefits attached to it. A lot of discussions were also around preserving their local heritage and culture. A lot of interviews and conversations were done with the villagers, door to door to know more about their lifestyle, local flora fauna, local architecture, festivals, agriculture etc. The group of local women were also trained to manage and run this community tourism initiative through meetings and multiple presentations.

Together the programme presented a model of community tourism, which helped small-scale livelihood generation, in managing the tourism centre and large-scale livelihood generation in providing a direct network for local agricultural produce. Basa was also envisioned as a centre to manage and support other homestays dispersed across the village in people’s houses. Thus, the model aimed to instigate a value for local resources and traditions by weaving activities around them which would attract tourists. While, the building promoted sensitive construction practices using local materials and effective strategies for structural stability.

Through the process we realised how the village is lacking traditional skills and crafts as the younger generation is hesitant is adopting the traditional crafts. It was hard to find good stone craftsmen and carpenters. The local materials have started to deplete for the villagers as heavy commercialisation of stone and wood have made them expensive and no longer easily available. Vernacular practises are facing multiple issues which will need support at policy level from the government.

Basa’s institutional model incorporates participatory models to encourage a long-lasting sense of ownership and livelihood generation within the locals not just for the building, but their resources. It activated a group of local leaders, a women self help group named UNNATI, who could spread the spirit of value in local practices, promoted through the tourism center. In Khirsu and its neighbouring villages a number of households were found to be working on small scale production of haldi (turmeric), mushroom, mandva, buransh (rhododendron) juice, other seasonal crops and multiple other forest produces. Basa provided a platform to encourage these households to continue their engagement with agriculture and horticulture activities. Alongside locals were encouraged and oriented to become local guides of their culture to tourists. Villagers were trained as guides for nearby treks, bird spotting, village agriculture practices and nearby historical destinations. BASA cottage establishes an example for locals. As a model of homestay, it has inspired locals to open up their spare house spaces as homestays. Such initiatives done and managed by locals have helped revitalise the local economy and allow authentic tourism which can help preserve the natural and cultural landscape of Khirsu.

All these processes germinated seeds for the locals to take forward. Multiple people’s participatory processes for enkindling a sense of pride and unity towards local preservation and growth is the only long-term remedy for sustainable development and equal distribution.

The government and professionals have to take up these villages seriously and adopt participatory methods for any sort of intervention or so called “development”. Actual sense of development is only when the receivers are satisfied. India as a country, needs many such projects all across. And for a young firm like us actively working in such sectors, would demand much more co-operation, recognition and support from the government.

About Compartment S4:

Compartment S4 is a collaborative of eight architects, graduated from Centre of Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) University. Our firm was conceived as a multi-disciplinary practice in May 2017 with the intent to provide sophisticated design solutions from user-driven perspectives in both the formal and informal sectors of rural and urban India. As a design collective we cover a plethora of initiatives ranging from private and government projects to publications, furniture design, construction workshops and even curating design discussions.

We have developed a set of ideologies which define the way we work:

- Designing interventions which have a large resultant impact on the context, irrespective of the scale of the project.

- Exploring local materials and techniques in the process of construction.

- Committed to the betterment of a given environment not restricted to only the built expressions but also extending to other interventions in the form of workshops, activities on site etc : essentially finding and providing what is essential to the context.

- Activating spaces in an attempt to make them more usable. Contributing as problem solvers through systemic approaches in design.

- Thus creating efficient systems and processes which can be repeated from place to place.

We have also been actively doing various competitions out of which we have won Resilient Homes Design Challenge, which was an international competition hosted by World Bank, UN Habitat, GFDRR, Build Academy and AirBnb. Later we went on building a similar design for our BASA project at Khirsu, Uttarakhand. We have also been shortlisted in the top 3 for the Mumbai Street Labs competition hosted by MCGM and WRI for redesigning the Napeansea road in Mumbai. We have been shortlisted in the top 15 for the Serendipity barefoot competition for designing a crafts pavilion in Goa.