On a five hectare private family farm, this project comprises a family house, working studios for visual and performing artists, visitors’ accommodation, a school, swimming pool, staff quarters and utility services, including a sewage treatment plant. The clients’ central concerns were low cost, energy efficiency, and water conservation. In response, the architect experimented with local, traditional building materials, and the project ended up being a testing ground and training workshop for the revival of historic and socially relevant techniques: fired clay bricks and lime mortar was used for foundations, bearing walls, arches and roofs, and flat and ribbed domes and muqarnas were built without the use of Portland cement, reinforcing steel, or shuttering.

Source: Aga Khan Trust for Culture