Revathi Kamath (1955-2020, India)

Building Relationships From Clay

Revathi Kamath is wearing an orange traditional Indian dress, leaning against a mud wall. Behind the wall in the centre of the photograph are four women chatting with Kamath and standing close together. The scene takes place at the Desert Resort, Mandawa, which Kamath designed in 1984.

For Kamath, mud architecture symbolises total assimilation of human activity with nature: ‘It only uses small amounts of mechanical energy and huge amounts of human energy. It sustains human beings.’ [1] Growing up in a tribal area along the Mahandi River in eastern India, she was shaped by the landscape, which influenced her holistic understanding of nature. Her grandfather, an engineer working on a dam, [2] introduced her early to the impact of human labour on the environment.

Kamath studied architecture and regional planning at SPA in Delhi. In 1983, two years after graduating, she and her life partner, Vasant Kamath, founded their architectural office, Kamath Design Studio, where each worked mostly on their own projects. [3] When Kamath was later invited to continue her studies in Oxford, she refused to go, in favour of staying in Delhi. [4]

During her studies in her hometown of Delhi, she had already started the Anandgram Project. The project was established to aid the redevelopment and rehabilitation of slum dwellers, which she pursued in close relationship with its inhabitants, who were mostly artists and craftspeople. Visiting the settlement over the years and engaging with its inhabitants, Kamath got a sense of how complex and sophisticated their homes were. Through drawings of the slum’s cluster, she tried to understand and decode the settlement, discovering that it was ordered by social relationships and work situations, rather than being an organic mass without order. [5]

With the help of a woman living in the settlement, Kamath drew the houses using the human hand as a measurement. She drew from the woman’s memory, as she believed the hand and memory are closely related. [6] Through her practice in Anandgram, she thought of space not as a building exercise, but as a response to people and their activities, receiving and sheltering them. [7]

Kamath designed the Desert Resort, Mandawa, to receive human movement, providing creative work for women involved in the building process, having realised that women have the lowest standing in the building industry. [8] When constructing Mandawa, the women were engaged in many ways, laying bricks and carrying out the decoration and mirrorwork, skills they already knew from building their own homes. For Kamath, the creativity and understanding of the building should not be possessed by the architect but by all the people involved, to improve the quality of working conditions and enhance local crafts. [9]

In the Anandgram project, Kamath studied rural Indian knowledge with the help of the inhabitants’ artistry, which she could then use for building the Mandawa, enabling local craftspeople – including women – to be creative and have a direct impact on the design. Visiting the building sites regularly, accompanied by her two children, Kamath created the built environment of the place, manifested in mud architecture.

Image Credit: Filmstill; Lall, Ein. DHARA. (Accessed 02.05.2022) Link.

1. Meghna, Mehta. “Revisiting the life of Revathi Kamath, the torchbearer of vernacular architecture.” STIRworld, 24 July 2020. Web. (Accessed 2 May 2022) Link.

2. Madiha, Khanam. “Remembering Ar. Revathi Kamath.” Rethinking the Future, n.d. (Accessed 2 May 2022) Link.

3. Madhavi, Desai. Women Architects and Modernism in India. Routledge, 2017.

4. Ibid.

5. Lall, Ein. Dhara (Extract). YouTube. (Accessed 2 May 2022) Link.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. “Revathi Kamath”. Architects and Interiors of India, 28 July 2017. Web. (Accessed 2 May 2022) Link.

9. Lall, Ein. Dhara (Extract).