Selected Works / 03
Gaya Residence
The Baithak, in Section
The second house the studio drew, and the one that taught it the most.
A joint-family household in a mason's town in eastern Bihar, mapped honestly: six bedrooms, a meditation room, a kitchenette wing with its own toilet for extended family, two service spirals reaching the terraces, and a veranda that works as both climatic and social threshold.
At the centre of it, a 604 sq ft double-height baithak, the traditional Bihari male gathering room and the interface between household and town, sunk to basement level with its own stair and entry. Not pasted onto a floor plan but translated into section, where it borrows the earth's coolness the way a tahkhana does, and gives the house a civic room.
The structure is exposed RCC frame with brick infill: not an aesthetic import, but what the local trades build well and what the climate forgives. The shell they cast is on this page. What the interior became after handover is not, and this record stops where the architecture did.
The set the house was built from. Four plans, the east elevation, four sections, and the details that carried the frame. Titleblocks removed; each sheet carries its own graphic scale.
The intent
What was drawn: a folded canopy at the entrance, the mango tree retained, the frame reading as the architecture.
The shell, as cast
What the local trades built. From here on this page is a construction record, not a photograph of a finished interior.
The canopy
The baithak
Sunk to basement level with its own stair and entry. A 604 sq ft double-height room that borrows the earth's coolness the way a tahkhana does.
Frame, veranda and terraces
- Location
- Lakhibag, Manpur, Gaya, Bihar
- Date
- 2020 – 2022
- Typology
- Private residence, joint family
- Built-up area
- c. 5,200 sq ft, derived from layouts, not yet measured off the model
- Baithak
- 604 sq ft, double height, at basement level
- Structure
- Exposed RCC frame with brick infill
- Note
- The interior was altered after handover. This record stops at the shell.
- Architect
- STUDIO Shrutiniwas
- Principal architect
- Shrutiniwas Sharma