Ar. Neelam Manjunath is a multifaceted architect in activism, and sustainable innovation after graduating with dual degrees—an academic foundation in Science from REI Degree College, Dayalbagh, Agra, and an architectural mastery from the esteemed Govt. College of Architecture, Lucknow in 1987. She has honed her skills in sustainable architecture, Media Architecture, and Charrette Training at the prestigious Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. Further diversifying her knowledge, she pursued a PG Diploma in Theology from Dayalbagh University, Agra.
Since 1991, Ar. Neelam Manjunath has been a prominent practitioner in the field, with her base currently rooted in Bangalore. Her projects are characterised by the adept utilisation of low-energy materials and cutting-edge technologies, emphasising the potential of bamboo. Most notably she is a C40 Women4climate program cohort in Bangalore, runs an NGO for eco education works and is a part of several organisations trying to drive sustainability and bamboo practices.
Nature at the Forefront
As a nature lover, Neelam always felt a disconnect between education and how nature was being incorporated into projects in real time. Trying to understand architecture from different points of view, she worked for a year with architect Ravindra Paan, who was the first landscape architect in Asia. Here she regained her connection to nature and was inspired to start her own practice in 1991.
India is now the most populated country in the world with a rapidly growing economy. Considering urbanisation, Neelam recognised that housing is a fundamental need for humans as people build their own little portion of the world by building homes. In architecture college, she delved into various aspects such as climatology, urbanisation, and housing, but her teacher disapproved of this approach. Her experience emphasised designing projects in isolation from their surroundings like islands detached and distanced from everything else. Therefore, when she began her practice, she focused on utilising diverse materials and technologies to integrate her buildings with nature.
Whether it was burning forests, typhoons or other natural calamities, not many people seemed to be bothered until there was a global pandemic. There was a radical switch inside everyone's houses as we lost friends and family members. It was during this time that Neelam pondered the kind of radical switch required for a different kind of architecture. After struggling with mainstream sustainability for a long time, she entered a niche market - bamboo for sustainable building, which then became her area of expertise. This marked her transition from working with steel and glass to focusing on bamboo.
Core Values
At 30, after almost five years of working in the profession, Neelam decided to get married that very year. It was a now-or-never decision she had to make to focus on her profession further. After her marriage and living in Jamalpur, Delhi, and Nagpur she moved from North India to South India to settle down in Bangalore.
Through all of this her architecture, principles and way of working and approach to designing a building never changed. Her design statement that she wrote in her first year of architecture in 1982 still holds good. “An architect is a catalyst providing social and cultural stage sets for all human activities. Hence the magnitude of responsibility on our shoulders is of staggering proportions! Hence a mix of RESPONSIBLE Creativity and CREATIVE Responsibility should determine the Architectural Character of any building.”
She says “Sustainability is not man technology and nature. It is ‘Man’ encompassed in building and nature which is the true definition of sustainability for me. It is not man and nature, it is man within nature.”
Simple facts that she also professes to include - problems with processing. Everything comes from nature but when you start processing it buildings are very difficult to biodegrade and that is where the problem lies she believes.
Cultural Influence
As the Native American saying goes, ‘Every part of this earth is sacred and we are all part of it. Man is not different.’ Human beings have three faculties: psychological, spiritual, and physical. Therefore, if you are only providing for the physical needs of a person in terms of space, you are not truly creating a holistic environment where one can function well, stay healthy, and be happy within buildings. In India, they call this concept "building with Panch Mahabhutas", encompassing earth, fire, air, space, and water as we are made of these five elements. Constructing buildings that contain and reflect these elements harmoniously provides balance essential to our existence while inside those structures; thus making the building an extension of ourselves.
How does Neelam enhance the five elements in her design? Most simply, air corresponds to ventilation and so does light. Water is found in building materials, which come from the earth and so does the space in which we build. Every aspect of a building contains the five elements and their combinations, including man.
“We are all just energy fields, which when distanced or removed from nature, get disturbed. This is the reason one feels relaxed in a park and suffocated in small closed spaces”
Promoting Bamboo Around the World
Keeping future generations in mind she started an NGO called the Center for Green Building Materials and Technology, where eco-education is taught in a way where balance between development education and environmental education is explored. Although development is much needed, we can achieve it without stepping into environmental issues.
“If everyone lives a simple life, we would be sustainable by default. And when you are sustainable by default, you also are spiritual.” How Neelam designs spaces is by designing to fulfil the basic needs of a shelter, to perform various activities and not trying to make concepts complex. She continues “Although people think complexity means challenging work, It is very difficult to simplify design unless you have completely understood it. When you are making something complex, you are simply putting things together.” Her mission statement of spirituality, sustainability and simplicity also encourages human beings to acquire knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to shape a sustainable future
In 2016, Neelam was invited to the Venice Biennale to the Time-Space Existence Exhibition where she launched her first book Symphony of the Bamboos and also conducted a workshop. She has conducted workshops across the world in places like Tokyo in 2005, Mulhouse in France in 2014 and Harvard University. Through this, she has been emphasising in her practice about working with artisans as bamboo and materials like mud are local materials. She proudly speaks of a time when a tribal artisan presented a gift made of local materials to a professor from the Aarhus School of Architecture in Denmark.
She considers these artisans gurus which also carries through in her firm where everyone is considered equal. Whether it is a tribal person, an artisan, a mason, a carpenter or an architect, all work together in an office that is built with no walls and promotes working together as a team. Many women who have been traditionally using these materials are also employed and have been the custodians of several projects.
Working with an unconventional material
Along her journey, in 1999 she came across bamboo as a building material. “I found the material very versatile and very interesting. It changed my life forever,” she says. After her continued tryst with trying new materials, she was awarded a national award for the design of the Navodaya School in Assam. Eventually, her bamboo-based project won her a second national award.
After five years of practice, architects usually start acquiring large-scale projects which was also the case with Neelam. But almost six years later when she realised she was losing large-scale projects and was working on projects spanning a mere 1,500 square feet, the cause of it dawned on her - she was branded a bamboo architect by then. People kept putting her in a silo as a bamboo architect which she eventually tired of hearing. At this point she ended up with no finances in her bank account, no projects other than small pavilions and no profits making her unable to run her office.
When she was going from office to office, college to college, educating students and architects about bamboo as a construction material, not many people listened. Her peers in particular also paid her no heed and she often wonders if this was due to gender bias. Although she never let the fact that she was a woman be a deterrent to her work, teaming with developers and contractors was a hard line to walk.
She recalls “When you go to a client and you talk about it they think that if I’m only working on small projects because I must not be good enough. But nobody understood the actual struggle of working with an unconventional material.”
She prefers to be called an architect as opposed to a bamboo architect because “bamboo is just one material. I have to be mainstream myself, as an architect, because if I’m not mainstream, then I cannot help bamboo at all.” She decided to then shift her focus towards this goal and took up diverse typologies of projects. Even though the materials - bamboo, mud and stone- remained the same the vocabulary of design kept changing and adapting to the specific requirements of the projects
Nature is the key to her work which is reflected in her design of residences, mass housing, and Institutions all with a pallet of different materials. She also designed a prefab building which was sent to Rome for construction. An interim shelter designed with Bamboo in a very far-flung area of Andaman, Nicobar Islands hit by a tsunami started her community engagement journey. She then went on to work with relief centres of the Odisha Cyclone.
A bamboo museum, State Level Energy Park in Bangalore, and the Housing Project in Channapattana encompass her portfolio. A 15-metre bridge was constructed with Bamboo at Yamuna Biodiversity Park in New Delhi. In one case, tribals, custodians of forests who were denied access to resources of the forest were approached to save their traditional building with bamboo in collaboration with Neelam.
During this time she started working with Bamboo Shells. In 2008, she started the construction of her house and called it the House of Five Elements. Using mud, stabilised mud blocks, bamboo, stone and other waste materials like soil dug up from below the ground a 10,000 square feet home was conceived. Mud and bamboo had a completely different vocabulary for the scale of work in this project. A single shell roof of concrete supported on bamboo spanned 4,000 square feet. Made from very humble materials a contemporary house was built.
Using the same concept, with bamboo reinforcement and bamboo fibre, her office The Bamboo Symphony was also built receiving the most number of awards out of all her projects. In 2021 it was featured on the 10 Best Architecture Projects list, and nominated for the Aga Khan Awards and the Terra Fibra Awards. The cocoon, another one of her projects conceptualised in 2014 with Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark and Care College, Trichy was nominated for the RIBA students president's award and the FIBRA awards and went on a travelling exhibition across Europe.
The amount of work that goes into a project, even one that is small in size needs clarity and planning. After much experimentation, these projects received the recognition they deserved through not just awards but also publications. At Dayalbagh Educational Institute in Dayalbagh University in Agra, where Neelam is a consultant, she teaches several courses on bamboo and sustainability. She works with simplicity and has continued to work on many projects for the university which has now made it mandatory for all their buildings to be built in a similar fashion. In 2018 she conducted a global survey and presented it at the World Bamboo Congress, the reports of which have been used by her and also several government authorities to work through policy issues. These efforts promote bamboo because she believes this is the future, especially for a place like India and also as the material may not be feasible in other geographical and climatic conditions
Efforts in Education
The CGBMT School of Simple Living is an initiative that focuses on the connection between infrastructure, our habits and the ecological demands. Its 5 faculties engage participants in workshops, discussions, and projects. Neelam works on various fronts by promoting interdisciplinary learning from labourers, artisans and designers through an informal curriculum at CGBMT. She has been promoting her work here through webinars and advocacy for simple living. Although challenging, she also works with government agencies which led to the G20 in Bangalore, where she presented materials like bamboo, fibre and natural materials as art sets. In addition to this, her second book, Let’s Build with Bamboo dives into construction practices and guidelines for bamboo.
Neelam's journey in pioneering sustainable and innovative architecture has been truly remarkable. From the conception of the House of Five Elements to her groundbreaking work with the Bamboo Symphony, she has consistently pushed the boundaries of what is possible with natural materials like bamboo, mud, and stone. Her dedication to showcasing the potential of these materials through hundreds of experiments and diverse projects has not only earned her recognition but has also paved the way for the future of architecture. Her collaborations with global organisations and her efforts to integrate traditional building practices, such as the partnership with tribals to preserve their traditional bamboo building techniques, have further solidified her impact in the field.
Her dedication to empowering communities and advocating for a simpler, more sustainable way of life serves as an inspiration to architects, activists, and environmentalists worldwide. As we navigate the challenges of urbanisation and environmental degradation, Neelam Manjunath's visionary approach reminds us of the pivotal role architects play in shaping a more sustainable and harmonious future. With nature at the forefront of her designs and a profound respect for cultural and ecological diversity, Neelam continues to spearhead a movement towards a more balanced and resilient built environment.
