Article: Initiating a dialogue for heritage conservation

Celebration of built heritage alone is not enough to conserve it. Taking forward the heritage festival of Puducherry, People for Pondicherry Heritage (PPH) has now ventured to spread knowledge and ideas about heritage by debating.

For their first event held this week, PPH in collaboration with Palais de Mahe invited architect Suhasini Ayer, who heads Auroville Design Consultants, a planning and architectural design unit under Auroville Centre for Scientific Research (CSR), to talk about ‘Humanscapes: an experiment in sustainable settlement design in Auroville.’

“In the first two heritage festivals held in Puducherry, we invited experts from different parts of the country to share their experience with people. However, we realised that we were preaching the converted and felt the need to change this,” said Sunaina Mandeen of PPH. She added in Puducherry and Auroville, there were different people working in different fields of conservation.

“We have such a rich natural history and resource persons that we felt it was important to carry forward the conservation efforts through dialogues. The PPH Dialogue will be held once or twice a month. This will feature architects, planners, conservationists from all fields and designers and others. Conservation of heritage in all its aspects, and sustainability and innovation would be the premise on which this would be based. We hope this inspires the architects, builders and others in Pondicherry and opens up a space for dialogue along these lines,” said Ms.Mandeen.

Humanscapes

Suhasini Ayer spoke about the project humanscapes that is designed to respond to natural and human geography, local climate and culture to evolve minimal and elegant built forms. The underlying theme in all the projects is the integration of functions with building systems including water, energy, waste, building materials, and technology to create passive sustainable network.

Originally posted in The Hindu, April 23td 2018