‘Learning From Jaisalmer’ and Professor Vinod Gupta in Talking Architecture 15

(Image Courtesy IIC)

Photo Credits: Vinod Gupta

‘Learning From Jaisalmer’ by Professor Vinod Gupta

Discussant: Professor Snehanshu Mukherjee 

28 March 2025

The data presented and analysed by Professor Gupta in his talk on Jaisalmer (based on his PhD study from IIT Delhi finished in 1984) explained how the architecture and planning of Jaisalmer respond to the constraints and contexts of its situation and location in the desert region— primarily from the point of view of thermal comfort but also from other, less tangible markers of comfort. It additionally busted certain ‘myths’ of urban development, and gave clear directions about how we can deal with the issues plaguing our cities — if we have the will to do so.

One of the key points (for me) that Professor Gupta underlined was that comfort is a state of mind, and it cannot be reduced to just thermal comfort. He related an anecdote about his student group in Jaisalmer working contentedly and energetically till they were informed what the temperature was — and then they suddenly started feeling listless and uncomfortable! Comfort is thus also related to whole-hearted engagement with what we are doing; to beauty, conviviality, the sense of being in tune with the rhythms of the natural world. In other words, an entire experience. 

From the point of view of thermal performance, Professor Gupta explained Jaisalmer’s architecture and planning in terms of :

1. Orientation: the siting and location of Jaisalmer fort, town, main streets 
2. Form: typology of dwellings
3. Scale: heights of buildings/ number of floors 
4. Material of construction: of walls, roofs 
5. Detail: chattris, chajjas, water-spouts, decoration.

The research methodology followed in his study was to survey representative samples of the commonly used typologies and dwelling forms in and immediately around the city of Jaisalmer. These were identified to be of four main types. Three of these were inside the city:

• the smallest/most basic version of a small single room with its courtyard and verandah; 
• a larger variation of this dwelling type with more rooms, more than one court and verandah; 
• the most elaborate version of this dwelling type with multiple courts, rooms, verandahs and with double/multiple storeys.

The fourth type was outside the city: the village dwelling (bunga). 

The data collected for all these types of dwellings, consisted of:

• measurement of dimensions of the dwelling, 
• measurement of temperatures and humidity during the day and night inside the dwelling (different rooms and courtyards), 
• measurement of temperatures and humidity levels during the day and night outside/adjacent to the dwelling; 
• water systems at the settlement and dwelling level. 

Temperature measurements were compared with the meteorological department’s temperatures, which are as a rule taken in the open area surrounding the city. In summer these ranged from 25 to 40 degrees centigrade, and in winters from 5 to 25 degrees centigrade.

According to the research findings:

1. The temperatures in the city of Jaisalmer were less than the meteorological department’s temperatures measured in the surrounding open area. 
2. Temperatures inside the dwellings and adjacent/immediately outside them were not very different and were mostly in sync — unlike houses today where the time lag is between 4 to 5 hours, so that peak heat inside our houses in our cities is felt 4 to 5 hours after the hottest temperature outside. This is why evenings and nights are very hot and unbearable today, and there is no respite from the heat even when the sun has gone down.
3. Temperatures in Jaisalmer even during the day were not too high. This was because of design elements such as: building orientation, width and location of streets; heights of buildings adjoining/flanking these streets; and the shade cast on the streets/on the buildings due to their placement and volume. 
4. There were planned provisions for air circulation at street, dwelling and city level through connected courtyards, ventilation-shafts and jalis, which helped to reduce temperatures.
5. The intricate jali-work and carving in traditional architecture of Jaisalmer was found to be not just decorative but to yield multiple benefits. It increased shadows on wall surfaces; reduced direct heat intake; allowed air passage and ventilation.
6. Thus, the two major principles followed in the architecture of Jaisalmer was to decrease heat-gain (by limiting exposure of buildings and streets to direct sunshine and by diffusing the sunlight, and thus reducing absorption/ radiation), and to facilitate heat-loss through evaporation, ventilation and increased reflection. Despite the fact that there was not too much greenery or shrubs in Jaisalmer, thermal comfort was achieved in an urban situation by adjusting and fine-tuning the density, detail, punctuation and placement of the urban mass. 

These findings refute standard notions of thermal comfort in urban dense areas, and standard methods and conceptions of city-and dwelling-form current today. The urban heat island effect that we experience in our cities at present, as enumerated by Professor Gupta, is primarily due to two reasons: automobiles and air-conditioners. Apart from the heat generated by automobiles and air-conditioners, in the case of individual dwellings there is a huge increase in radiant heat intake - as brought out in the discussions following the presentation - primarily caused by the materials and methods of construction: such as thin walls and roof slabs of industrially processed brick and concrete, large expanses of glass windows, etc. 

As opposed to the modernist notion of bare,’clean’, unadorned walls that we have adopted as the progressive way to build, the function of decoration in providing both places of beauty and reduced heat intake, is amply clear in the havelis of Jaisalmer. This aspect is very significant; it provides yet another instance of a lakshana or distinguishing characteristic of the tradition of Indian design where the functional, structural and the decorative aspects are integrated seamlessly in any artefact or piece of architecture. I have written about this at length in my blogposts (https://anishashekhar.blogspot.com/2013/06/national-and-regional-identity-in.html) as well as in the book on Attributing Design Identity; Identifying Design Attributes (https://ambiknowledgeresources.wordpress.com/2017/01/06/forthcoming-attributing-design-identities-identifying-design-attributes/)

Professor Gupta also dwelt at length on the role of courtyards. Courtyards give light/sun/air to individual homes; at the same time, their effectiveness in cooling at an urban level is due to the continuous wind-flow and movement possible because the multiple courtyards in the dwellings and in the city work in tandem. Their benefits span six broad categories: granting light, ventilation, social space, varying levels of privacy, spillover area from built rooms, connections to circadian rhythms.

This is a feature of other traditional cities of the subcontinent. The proliferation of courtyards can be seen as a group of perforations in the urban mass; singly they would not be able to achieve the wind movement, evaporative cooling or level of thermal comfort that they do as a connected series of perforations. This is visible in urban large complexes such as the Red Fort too; the provision of multiple courtyards and verandahs in the original design of the Fort does not just work at the level of providing social space, maximising efficiency, and granting flexibility of functions. It also works to ensure ventilation and comfort throughout the Fort — working like a lattice at a plan level, what I call the ‘jali effect’. 

As I write in a blogpost ‘The City as a Place of Learning and Healing’ describing the design of Shahjahanabad and the Red Fort: (https://anishashekhar.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-city-as-place-of-learning-and.html) 

‘Like an Escher painting, as you zoom in and out of the city and Fort, different variations and scales of this interlinked pattern reveal themselves, simultaneously simple and complex. Tried and tested in the Indian subcontinent from Harappan times, this pattern was composed of sequences of walled courtyards-verandahs-halls-pavilions: a fluid building typology with some of its finest examples visible within the Fort, as analysed and described at length in The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad. 

Professor Gupta’s point about the perception of the experience of comfort — and therefore, the formulation of architecture to foster such an experience — is, I believe, an intrinsic part of the Indian world-view. In ‘The Concept of Beauty in Indian Tradition’, Rajendra Chettiarthodi’s notes that: ‘[w]hile western aestheticians equated beauty with symmetry and similar mathematical properties, Indian thinkers did not try to locate it in such clearly defined objective factors. Their concept of beauty had always some reference to the experience generated by the beautiful’. 

I found it extremely interesting that the principles of the architecture of Jaisalmer, as revealed in the talk, seemed to reinforce some observations made in a paper I presented on the theme on ‘Beauty in Architecture -- and Design’ at the Kurula Varkey Design Forum 2023 at CEPT, Ahmedabad. I’ll quote briefly from it:

‘Thus, the concept of beauty in the Indian tradition centres on experience. What sort of experience? That which grants us a sense of knowledge and blissful discovery. In architecture, such experience ought to be determined by function. Fundamentally, there is no contradiction between pragmatic needs and aesthetic concerns of creating space. Architecture needs to do both. It did so in the main, before the artificial split between function and beauty, which is the outcome of compartmentalising life into separate categories of work vs leisure, quantity vs quality, mundane vs spiritual. If we consider function in its complete sense: social, technical, ecological; and empathetic and satisfying all the senses, we would automatically provide for aesthetic qualities of light, texture, proportion, detail and spatial comfort.’

Unfortunately, habitable space is now designed as sealed containers in a thoughtless imitation of western ideas, without any provision for correct orientation and ventilation at the dwelling and city level. Wide tarred roads and extensive stretches of concrete /hard infra-structure absorb and radiate back heat during the day and night, adding to a ‘man-made’ increase in temperatures, and decreasing the ability of built-mass to quickly lose heat through evaporative cooling. 

Even in Jaisalmer so many years ago, as Professor Snehanshu Mukherjee recollected in the discussion following Professor Gupta’s presentation, when he along with the other students accompanying Professor Gupta on the field-study stayed at the ‘modern’ RTDC Tourist Hostel, it was so unbearably hot that all of them dragged out their mattresses every night and slept over the roof of the portico, rather than inside their rooms! The fact that such unsuitable architecture was made in Jaisalmer despite the evidence of the exemplary traditional architecture all around, is a testimony to the extent of brain-washing perpetuated in the name of being progressive and modern.

Professor Gupta's study and analysis of Jaisalmer is as relevant today as it was forty years ago. Perhaps even more so, given the extreme challenges of climate change that face us today, exacerbated by our architectural and urban responses which cause such acute discomfort and danger that reverses the very notion and meaning of shelter. We must realise that if the planning and architecture of cities can cause such unsustainable and severe implications on health, society and environment, the solutions must also lie in tackling it at these levels. In other words, at the interlinked macro and micro scales; at overall planning and regulations as also architectural forms, materials and detail.

By learning from Jaislamer, we can extract the principles at macro and micro scales, for tackling the unsustainable and miserable conditions we have created in our cities today. And instead generate places of comfort and beauty for all our citizens, while sharing our learnings with the people of Jaisalmer. This was clearly brought out in the discussions following the talk, with Professor Snehanshu Mukherjee and members of the distinguished audience that included the architects Professor Ujan Ghosh, Professor Basavi Dasgupta, Professor Kawas Kapadia, Peeyush Sekhsaria, Rohit Gulati and many others from different professions as well.

The first principle is that of correct orientation of buildings to reduce heat gain: something we were taught in college, but regrettably do not practice. The other principle that we are not taught sufficiently in college, is correct orientation of the town itself, including its main streets as well as its main buildings. Thus, as Professor Gupta noted, the Jaislamer Fort performs a protective function for the town, not just in terms of security but also in terms of climate, by protecting the rest of the town from hot dusty winds. This is an important principle to learn from and incorporate when we build monumental buildings and large institutional complexes in our cities and towns. Such planning would certainly reduce to some extent the necessity of artificially cooling our buildings through air-conditioners — which themselves add to heat-emission.

The second principle is the importance of sufficient open spaces of the correct scale and dimensions. Very large open spaces exacerbate climate problems apart from leading to social problems. In Jaislamer, it is the frequency, placement and size of the courtyards that helps to create overall air movement, while providing shared spaces for outdoor living that reduce the amount of built-up area and lead to healthier, convivial ways of living.

The third principle is to reduce the autocracy of the automobile — at an urban level as well as at an individual dwelling. By locating neighbourhood services that are walkable; by planning and providing for pedestrians; by encouraging non-heat emitting transport such as cycles and cycle-rickshaws; and by ensuring sufficient environment friendly public-transport. North Calcutta is a good example of this. It was devised with shaded internal walking and rickshaw routes that went past house fronts and public parks in the residential areas. These routes tied up with wider public roads and market-streets where trams, buses and taxis were easily available. While greatly reducing the need for automobile transport, this design promoted healthy and pleasant ways to navigate the neighbourhood and also caused less urban heating.

The fourth principle is to be mindful of the materials we use in construction, as well as the way in which we use these materials. Industrial materials are convenient and easily available but they are not the miracle materials they are touted to be. Natural and local materials when used with skill and knowledge, can prove long-lasting and more appropriate for our climate. It is the responsibility of the building profession, of which architects are a vital component, to disseminate information about how to do so.

And finally, the fifth principle is to understand the value, place and function of decoration. We need to analyse the validity of the anti-decoration modernist aesthetic which advocates bare, unadorned surfaces. Decoration has many aspects, from rendering beauty to expressing identity to communicating the characteristics of materials — and as we saw in Jaisalmer — to also reducing heat absorption.

Link to the recording of the talk:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mMbP1i6OH_rdMepdBZJbb5tPgTF_-BU5/view?usp=sharing

Link to all the sessions of Talking Architecture:

https://anishashekhar.blogspot.com/p/talking-architecture-at-iic.html