Selected Works / 01
Sengupta Residence
The House of Framed Flows
The challenge was not construction, but extraction: how to take a zone of silence out of a densifying city.
Three mature trees on the north-eastern edge, a Gulmohar and two African Tulips, were treated as fixed. The upper mass retreats behind them so the morning sun reaches the front lawn, while a deep south-western court holds shade and privacy. No open space is residual; each one is framed from somewhere, and therefore inhabited.
Two orthogonal walls of Delhi Quartzite rubble, laid by local masons, organise a tripartite plan timed to the day. Bedrooms take the morning on the north-east; a double-height core stays luminous through midday and opens onto both gardens; study and entrance buffer the afternoon heat on the south-west.
Plans read north up. The two orthogonal rubble walls are the thick lines; everything else is arranged against them.
The street edge
The plot sits in a villa development that builds to its boundaries. The house gives the street a low, quiet face and keeps its height back.
The three trees
A Gulmohar and two African Tulips on the north-eastern edge were fixed before the plan was drawn. The upper mass steps back behind them.
The deep court
On the south-west, a court cut deep into the mass holds shade through the afternoon and buffers the rooms behind it.
Entrance
The entrance room is the buffer: it takes the afternoon heat on the south-west so the core behind it does not have to.
The double-height core
The centre of the plan is one luminous volume open to both gardens, crossed at the upper level by a teak bridge and lit from a clerestory above.
Living and kitchen
Bedrooms
The bedrooms take the north-east and therefore the morning. The ground-floor room opens straight onto the lawn.
Study
With the entrance, the study buffers the south-west. The two rooms that take the heat so the rest of the house does not.
Detail
“We used materials that age, rather than expire.”
Shrutiniwas Sharma
The first thought
Drawn over the model
A-101, marked DRAFT
Stone, judged on site
The last quarter inch
- Location
- Villa 33, IFS Villas, Greater Noida
- Date
- 2021 – 2023
- Typology
- Private residence
- Plot area
- 8,073 sq ft
- Built-up area
- 5,483 sq ft
- Structure
- RCC frame with Delhi Quartzite rubble masonry
- Masonry
- Local masons, Greater Noida
- Photography
- Ekansh Goel
- Architect
- STUDIO Shrutiniwas
- Principal architect
- Shrutiniwas Sharma