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| T.M.Cyriac, architect |
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In the era of mobility, when even office chairs have wheels under them, can the traditional homes of Kerala be far behind. Well, in the hands of T.M.Cyriac, architect and former faculty at the College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram, at least a few of them are being uprooted and planted anew at tourist resorts coming up in God’s Own Country.
His first and perhaps the most noted resort is at the Coconut Lagoon, Kumarakom, Kerala. 40 transplanted traditional houses form the villas at the resort. The success of the first transplantation made the owners resort to his proven talent and experience to design further tourist attractions. Thus 3 years back he created Travancore Heritage atop a hill at Kovalam using 25 knocked down and reassembled heritage homes. Later he created another heaven for 30 old homes at Poovar Island and still another resort at Bangalore. He is now planning to construct one in Sri Lanka.
Cyriac, who is a post graduate in landscape engineering, considers the transplanted villas as a boon to the craftsmen and the environment. “By reusing the wood at a new place, the cutting down of trees can be avoided besides making use of traditional skills and knowledge,” he says. “Our traditional architecture is at once lucid and complex. The highly mathematical formulae and 3-dimentional geometry lend itself to a module by module reassembly. Thus old villas can be assembled at half the cost of new ones,” he justifies.
Courtesy: Radhakrishnan.M.G (text), Gireesh.G.V (photo), India Today, October 6, 2004
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