The Gujarati Jamatkhana Research Project 6

Waaay back in 1992, the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London offered me a Travel Grant to document Jamatkhanas in Gujarat, India. It was an exciting period for me, I was newly attached (to Joys, my partner) and newly detached (from my then previous employment).
The project was ambitious for me.  I set out to photograph, analyze and categorize the Jamatkhanas of Gujarat.  Little did i know that there would be more than 300 such buildings in India, more than half of which are in Gujarat.

My stay in India was a brief four months, one of which was spent photographing examples of Jamatkhanas all over Gujarat.  Still today I have wonderful memories about the trip.  They are fading, however, and much has to be done to achieve my goal of producing an architectural book on Gujarati Jamatkhanas.

What I produced for the IIS was an extensive library of slides with descriptions of what had been photographed.  The analysis became a part of the slide descriptions and was never formalized into a cohesive document.  I still have the manuscripts and basis of the complete documentation, but my ambitions have grown.

At that time, technology had developed enough to allow me to digitally reproduce 3 dimensional models of the buildings.  In 1992 I had intended to produce well crafted Plans, Sections, Elevations and Details of each building by hand and create a the first comprehensive architectural documentation of the buildings I had photographed.  My interest in Historic/Heritage documentation developed while I was studying Jamatkhanas for my design thesis at UBC’s School of Architecture.  My love for architectural drafting led me to take a summer job as one of four architecture students hired to document one of the last complete blocks of heritage buildings in Vancouver’s downtown.  The experience I gathered there drove me to believe that I would be able to do the same for the Jamatkhanas.  I bit off much more than I could chew at the time.

By the time I returned to Vancouver, Joys and I decided to wed and work and marriage began to take much more of my time than i had ever imagined.  Still, i remained hopeful.  I the early 1990’s, with a lot of help from Joys, I began to draw the buildings from the very out-of-scale drawings I had retrieved from the Aga Khan Estate office in Mumbai.  Together, we were able to make significant headway in both drawing and writing.  But there was much yet to be done.  My interest in technology got the better of me eventually and I decided that a more current mode of documentation should be used.  I intended to convert all the drawings we had done into CADD format and then convert those into 3D models that could then be experienced by web-surfing researchers.  Unfortunately the software programs available to me at the time were much too cumbersome to tackle the sort of detailed documentation that I hoped to achieve.

There was no funding.  The IIS had long since categorized the slides and added them to their library of images.  I was not sure i could rely on them for further Grants.  Add to this that RFAS was taking off as an entity and the demands on our time were increasing.  So my pet research project would have to wait.

And wait it did.  Until I was introduced to the ease of working with SketchUp! software by Reza Davani.  Having used it extensively in the next 5 years of practice, I had developed an expertise in the software.  I could finally achieve the 3D goal i had set many years ago.  But still I could not carve out enough time.

But life has its way of moving things along.  Into our little office came a young architect wanting to gain experience in a Canadian office.  Poupak Safaie had recently married Reza and was newly arrived in Vancouver.  She was excited at the prospect of learning the software, improve her English and get immersed in heritage documentation, all while gaining some experience with RFAS.  Last year, she developed three 3D models.

I’m excited at the prospect that we could finally get the documentation done the way I would like to!

But I have to find some funding.

Here’s a taste of the drawings: