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Built as a stepping stone to the materialisation of today’s “Utopia” Auroville, today more than ever there is a much-needed urge to know more than meets the naked eye about the conception of Auromodellè.

 

“Utopian town in India built on a dream” declared the New York Times in 19711. With every search on Aurovillian architecture, Google floods your screen with a common prefix to the titles, ranging from an “Utopian paradox” to an “evolving Utopia”. Even though one is familiar with the famous notion of “architecture having to look effortless”, a lot is lost in this linear primordial “utopian” lens through which we tend to perceive Roger Anger’s work in Auroville. Not restricting himself to one set of beliefs dictating his process, it’s as though all the parallels based on which Roger executed design, reached out to meet at one common point, now known as Auroville.

Auroville is located in the southern part of India, between the borders of Chennai and Pondicherry(Puducherry), a city which was ruled until 1962 by the French even though India gained its independence from the British in 1947. Serving as an escape from the realities of the cold war and entry to an independent India, Auroville was one of the two cities chosen to be designed to signify the new wave of urbanisation1. This new face of a post-colonial India, founded by Sri Aurobindo Ghose and his spiritual heir a Parisian-born, MirraAlfassa (commonly known as the Mother) wanted Auroville to be built on the spirit of human unity. However, the then newly appointed chief architect of Auroville, Roger Anger thought the only way to keep the concept of unity relevant in the coming years was to make Auroville, a dynamic city. He envisioned Auroville to be a constantly evolving architectural experiment, “that is why the most plastic formula would be the best from the most urbanistic viewpoint”,2 he said.

 

“It is important that Auroville is constructed on the level of individual experience. You could say Auroville is at the opposite end of the tradition of contemporary urbanization where you create a city on paper…and then ask people to live there. Here the way ahead is just in the opposite direction. People are living the experience, and out of this experience they will create their personal circumstances, their surroundings, their way of life.”2 said Anger in 1972

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The aspect of existence by negation is best exemplified in Indian traditional architecture through the symbiosis of the built and the unbuilt. Each entity is complete in itself and yet a vital part of the larger picture. This phenomenon ensures individual freedom yet within the collective consensus3. And this was the very ideal on which Anger’s concrete experiment, Auromodelè, a settlement designed to be flexible and open in nature serving as a model for the city, was based on. Not only did the emphasized opposites such as the play of light and darkness, dramatic differences between the highs and lows reinforce each other’s existence, but they also displayed the possibility of varying personalities inhabiting Auroville and the idea of tolerance for these differences within the fabric of the city. 

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Built between 1971 and 1974, this city was conceived on degraded land that had lost its topsoil to the sea, the houses were built as the extension of this very land, adding to the beauty of the red earth instead of distracting the eye from the barrenness surrounding it. The walls smoothly arising from the ground, with windows deeply sculpted to protect one from glare and rain, breaks its continuity only to accommodate the floating double curved ferrocement roofs which spans upto 13m with a material thickness of only 25mm.2 This playfulness in his design, is explained by Anupama Kundoo, an Indian architect by summarising Anger’s architecture as “simplicity of composition and complexity of treatment” achieving continuity of space and spatial experience and integration as opposed to the separation of the various elements constituting a unit.

 

Anger’s expression of continuity and the language of the forms executed in this project originates from his will to draw inspiration from nature. With such varying forms within a single cluster of intimately spaced houses, what unified his expression as an architect corresponded to the unity of patterns from macro-organisms to the micro-level of the cell and further small. “In nature, crystals represent discontinuity while all forms of life seem to have a monopoly on continuity”, said Paul Jaqcues Grillo, a famous French architect and Anger’s first teacher, in his book Form, Function and design declaring that architectural forms can be divided into two categories, continuity, and discontinuity2. While this could be where Anger drew his inspiration to derive forms from nature, the patterns, and art developed in his studio through sketches were equally materialised at scales varying in the form of window screens to landscape and planning.

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“Form follows function” being today’s most well taught academic dogma, one could easily question the influences at play through the forms constituting Auromodelè, and with it the formulation of his design thinking. Owing to his architectural education from the original École des Beaux-Arts system, which believed that the great painting is the guarantee of a good building for the artist-architect4, Anger chose sculpture as his path to emancipation from the oversimplification of urban existence. According to Nelingburg; formalism was the “art for the sake of art”. Coming from a long history of functionalism, formalism demanded artistic freedom, freedom from meaning and intent, freedom from the demands of the society. The movement made it essential to grant artistic freedom and demanded to perceive forms, for the forms itself without any relative connotations.4 This movement had a major influence on Anger’s architectural expression which later extended itself to the planning of Auroville.

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Auromodellè, resembling a symphony paused in time, enabled Anger with a possibility to materialise some of his radical ideas which was a distant reality during his former years of architectural practice. A place where emotions perceived were given a higher place then the count of the functional requirements of a built space. The architecture, for once built, opens itself to the judgment of every eye, but for the seeker, the beauty lies in the observation of the present and the past that led to it. And “Beauty has the power of uplifting the consciousness, spontaneously…” said Anger.

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