Anil Laul was not merely an architect; he was a subversive force in a profession increasingly shackled by superficiality and star architecture. At a time when the Indian built environment was being moulded by Western modernist dogma—those cold geometries of concrete and glass—Laul charted a resolutely indigenous course, rooted in climatic prudence, cultural continuity, and social equity. He refused to reduce architecture to an aesthetic exercise or a technocratic fetish.
For Laul, architecture was a deeply ethical undertaking, an instrument of empowerment and ecological stewardship. He did not design for magazine spreads; he created for masons, villagers, displaced communities, and the earth itself. With the Anangpur Building Centre as his living manifesto, he stitched together tradition and innovation, waste and wisdom, people and place, showing us that true sustainability is not a buzzword—it is a worldview.
Laul’s philosophical blueprint was as intricate as the rat-trap bond walls he espoused. He rejected the one-size-fits-all paradigm of modernist design and railed against the sterile hegemony of Western templates imposed indiscriminately upon Indian soil. “Context is everything,” he insisted—not merely climatic context, but cultural, economic, and social. While the architectural vision peddled imported aesthetics with no regard for the Indian condition, Laul reclaimed indigenous wisdom with a reverence that bordered on the spiritual. His work was a disapproval of the tyranny of concrete, a celebration of mud, lime, and brick, of jaalis and courtyards, of shaded verandahs and self-shading forms. His buildings were not merely structures; they were breathable beings attuned to the rhythms of sun and monsoon.
Central to Laul’s praxis was the conviction that shelter was a right, not a privilege. This belief found corporeal expression in the Anangpur Building Centre—his magnum opus, located in Haryana—a living laboratory where the marginalised were not merely beneficiaries but collaborators. Here, Laul melded ancient building technologies with modern efficiencies to produce housing solutions that were simultaneously cost-effective, climate-responsive, and community-driven. One could witness the alchemy of waste turned into wealth: fly ash bricks, debris reuse, and wastewater recycling—all testaments to his ecological ingenuity. Not content with mere prototypes, he deployed these models in rural villages, urban slums, and even in parts of Africa, proving that sustainability, when untethered from elitism, could be profoundly democratic.
But Laul was not merely a mason of walls—he was a mason of minds. Through his writings, especially the seminal Green Is Red. (2013), he articulated a blistering critique of what he termed “cosmetic modernism”—buildings that performed poorly but looked impressive, designed more for magazine covers than for monsoonal realities. He lamented the obliteration of traditional knowledge systems by a pedagogy that privileged form over function, and he called upon his fellow practitioners to unlearn as much as to learn. “Architecture must return to the village,” he urged, “for the village never forgot how to live with the earth.”
It would be reductive, however, to slot Laul as a nostalgic revivalist. He was as much a futurist as he was a traditionalist. His work intersected with questions of policy, urban governance, decentralised planning, and rural employment. His interdisciplinary lens drew from anthropology, ecology, urban planning, and sociology. He advocated for training local masons, empowering women in construction, and decentralising architectural knowledge, prefiguring what is today lauded as participatory design. Indeed, in an age obsessed with smart cities, Laul dreamed of wise villages—self-reliant, inclusive, and in harmony with their ecosystems.
Perhaps most audacious was his assertion that aesthetics must arise from ethics. Beauty, for Laul, was not in the flourish of a cantilever but in the resonance between form and function, place and purpose. He believed in an architecture of integrity—not merely structural integrity, but also moral integrity. His buildings may not have won Pritzker Prizes, but they won the gratitude of those who lived in them, not the urban elite, but the labourer, the widow, the farmer, the displaced.
Today, as we teeter on the precipice of climate catastrophe, Laul’s philosophy rings with prophetic clarity. In him, we find a precursor to the movements for regenerative design, circular economies, and climate justice. His legacy challenges us to ask: What is architecture for, and whom does it serve? Is it to dazzle or to dwell? To alienate or to include? To dominate or to dialogue?
Anil Laul’s life was a sustained rebuttal to the architectural establishment—a reminder that buildings must do more than stand tall; they must stand right. He taught us that sustainability is not a style, but a stance. And in these times of ecological amnesia and aesthetic excess, his vision is not merely relevant—it is imperative.
References:
- Laul, Anil. Green is Red, 2013.
- Anangpur Building Centre (UNESCO Asia-Pacific Recognition)
https://bangkok.unesco.org/theme/culture/awards - Interview with Anil Laul (Gita Balakrishnan for Ethos)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugmHd_1usCo - Malhotra, A. (2017). Remembering Anil Laul: A Rebel Architect. ArchiTimes.
https://architimes.org/anil-laul-rebel-architect - Jha, P. (2011). Housing for the Masses: The Anangpur Model. Centre for Science and Environment.
https://www.cseindia.org/housing-for-the-masses-4112
