Towards a Sustainable Future

Functioning professionally as ‘House of Consultants’, ESDC has been working all over South India, and has centres in Calicut, Bangalore and Mumbai. In search of an appropriate organisational structure, the group has been experimenting with various management structures. They are presently working in small, decentralised groups, which handle different projects individually. The identity of their work lies not with the individuals in the group, but with the entire team. As Ar Jeeth Iype puts it, “ESDC should continue even after this generation of architects and engineers have moved on, and be known by the work it represents”. Stanley George, engineer and one of the pioneers of the group, stresses on the importance of a team,” lf the engineers and artisans are also involved in the design from the onset, it contributes to efficiency and economy of design and in managing the project.” In the initial days, after the preliminary sketch design was finalised, there would be no further drawings, but the details would evolve on site, with the mason, architect and client working together. “This allowed us far greater spontaneity in design and also co-related the microclimate of the site to the spaces beautifully. But as the projects got larger, and more in number, this became difficult,” says architect Vinod Cyriac. To its credit, ESDC has designed a number of buildings ranging from small houses to institutions, in various locales in Kerala, rural and urban, to coastal Karnataka and Bangalore, Auroville in Tamil Nadu, to Mumbai in Maharashtra, for a cross section of economical, cultural and geographical groups, and each work is unique in these respects.