PADMABHUSHA

N
Dr. V.GANAPATI
STHAPATI

.
  Sthapati was born in 1927 to sculptor Vaidyanatha Sthapati
and Velammal in Pillayarpatti, a village near Karaikudi,
Tamil Nadu, India
 Sthapati attended Dr. Alagappa Chettiar College, Karaikudi,
ABOUT THE ARCHITECT

and graduated with a degree in mathematics.

 He succeeded his father as the Principal of the Government
College of Architecture and Sculpture, TN, India.
 From the 1980s, Sthapati campaigned to restore and
elevate the status of traditional Hindu architecture in
modern Indian society, by affiliating courses to the 
University of Madras and offering degree courses, bringing
about a revival of Vastu Shastra.
 After retirement from government service, he established
the Vaastu Vedic Trust and the Vaastu Vedic Research
Foundation, aimed at research, development, and
globalization of Vaastu Shastra.
 He was also the head of the professional guild named "V.
Ganapati Sthapati & Associates.
 He also began a small University – American University of
Mayonic Science and Technology to teach the authentic 
Vaastu Shastras. 
 Sthapati served as architect for several buildings and
sculptures, including the following:

Sculpture of Tamil poet and saint Thiruvalluvar—

Thiruvalluvar Statue at the southern tip of India at 
Kanyakumari, TN, India (measuring 133 feet (40.5 m)

SOME OF in elevation and weighing 4000 tons

Design and Construction of University buildings

MAJOR including the Administrative block and library for 
Tamil University in Tanjore.

WORKS Design and Construction of Valluvar Kottam in 

Chennai, TN, India.

BY THE Granite sculpture of the Kannagi—heroine of the

Tamil epic Silappathikaram, erected in an Art Gallery

ARCHITEC in Poompuhar, Chennai, TN, India.

The Rajagopuram of Sri Rama Temple and Sri Ganesh

T Shiva Durga Temple at 
The Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago complex 
Lemont, Illinois, United States.

The Murugan Temple, Nadi-Fiji islands.

The San Marga Iraivan Temple, Kauai, Hawaii.
Sri Shiva Vishnu Temple – Maryland
 STILLPOINT CLINIC AND
DOJO
 Architects-PIERS
TAYLOR
 Location-Bath, Bath
and North East
Somerset, UK
 Project Team-Piers
Taylor, Tinyue Liu, Kris
Eley
 Structural Engineer-
Structures 1
 Contractor-Pollards
 Client-Riverpoint Ltd
 Area-600.0 m2
 The project is a 600m2 mixed use scheme in the
heart of the Wold Heritage site of Bath,
comprising an alternative health clinic, martial
arts dojo and 2 houses. The project has been
extremely complicated to realise, and has taken 5
years to negotiate through neighbour
consultations, part wall agreements, listed
building and planning consents, cost reductions,
section106 agreements, and complex access
arrangements. However, it has been the most
fulfilling project i've ever worked on. It was
referral from Peter Clegg of FCB Studios at a time
when they had too much work, and a project I
invested a huge amount of energy in - working
and overworking every detail.
ROOM 13
 Architects-Mitchell
Taylor Workshop
 Location-Bristol,
City of Bristol BS13
0HP, United
Kingdom
 Project Year-2008
 Photographs-Piers
Taylor
 Room 13 is a very direct response to the very gritty urban
context in which it sat, and the social program that gave
rise to it – which is ‘Room 13’ – a charity where resident
artists work alongside excluded children in the sanctuary
of a purpose built art studio. Nicholas Serota called this
‘the most important model for art education we have
today’.
 It shows that low grade, everyday materials can be
beautiful. The building uses raw concrete block externally,
and internally is finished with bare plywood, OSB and a
varnished concrete screed. The finishes ultimately are the
life that is played out in the building, and the ensuing
patina. The studio is heated and cooled by a ground
source heat pump, and the ‘snouts’ act as ventilation and
light shafts. It won a RIBA Award in 2007, and a regional
sustainability award. The head of the RIBA Jury Panel
remarked ‘It shows me that more than anything,
architecture is about people’.
MOONSHINE
 Architects-Mitchell
Taylor Workshop
 Location-
Bath, United
Kingdom
 Structural
Engineer-
Structures 1
 Main Contractor-
Piers Taylor
 Project Year-2008
 Moonshine is Piers taylor house, and was a self build. In some
ways it is a direct homage to his mentor, Glenn Murcutt, but
in other ways it is also a very personal manifesto. It’s a naive
building in some ways, but naive like your first record – some
things work well when when they’re naive because there’s a
youthful optimism. The use of ordinary materials, and the
poetic sense of dwelling in a woodland.
 When they built it, we had no car access, and everything had
to be carried down a woodland track for 500 yards. It
was incredibly cheap and raw, and the building is designed to
translate the site conditions into a building – with areas of
transparency/solidity fitting around sunlight and shade, eaves
designed to shelter parts of the building from the prevailing
wind, clerestory designed to capture first rays of morning
light and a foundation system designed to leave the water
table and highly shrinkable clay intact. It won the AJ Small
Projects Award in 2009, and was featured in the Architectural
Review, AJ, Dwell, Independent, Guardian, Sunday Times,
Grand Designs, CASA, and numerous books internationally.
VISIBLE STUDIO
 Architects-Invisible Studio
 Location-Bath, Bath and
North East
Somerset, United Kingdom
 Area-55.0 sqm
 Project Year-2014
 Photographs-Andy
Matthews, Piers Taylor
 Project Team-Piers Taylor,
Alan Matthews, Bernard
Twist, Simon Schofield, Alfie
Dring, Cuffer Matthews,
Luke Desborough
 Budget-£15,000
 A new studio that was built by the practice with the help of neighbours and friends
(who were all paid an equal rate) using untreated and unseasoned timber grown in the
woodland that surrounds the studio, designed and constructed as a manifesto so
demonstrate the possibilities of low grade home grown timber and amateur labour.
 The studio is on 2 floors – there is a 55m2 enclosed space accessed via a bridge from
the slope, which is above an open workshop for the practice to make full scale models.
 No one who worked on the project had constructed a building before. The project was
an exercise in establishing a system of building that could be constructed by unskilled
labour, with minimal drawings, allowing ad hoc discoveries and improvisation to be
embraced, and the tyranny of predetermined design to be escaped. The ‘mistakes’ of
the unskilled team remain evident in the building, and no attempt was made to
conceal them.
 All of the timber was milled over the 2 days that a mobile saw was booked, and the kit
of parts was the trees that stood on the site of the studio. No other timber was used.
This informed the building design, and the constraint of minimal cost and minimal
design was embraced – for example, the cladding that was milled at the end of this
period was just enough to partially clad the studio.
 The footings were mixed by hand, and designed to be the most minimal possible. The
project was self-scaffolded by timber that was ultimately used for the bridge, and the
floor, negating the need for expensive scaffold hire. The windows were scavenged from
a skip, and the floor paint was left over from another project of the practice’s. All of the
boarding used is the cheapest possible grade, and the insulation is carefully pieced
together from off-cuts of insulation. The project is heated by waste wood from the
woodland, and water from the roof feeds into an attenuation pond that forms a natural
habitat.
 TRALIER(EQUIVALENT
#2)
 Architects-Invisible
Studio
 Location-
Bath, United Kingdom
 Project Team-Piers
Taylor, Alan Matthews,
Bernard Twist, Simon
Schofield, Julian
Taylor, Jimmy Symon
 Manufacturers-
VELUX, Fibreglass,
Rockwell, Accord Steel
 A self built prototype relocatable £20K house, constructed from materials sourced from
construction waste and locally grown unseasoned timber. This building is designed to
be able to be legally transported on a public highway and used as permanent or
temporary accommodation. It has a removable wheeled ‘bogey’ that slides out from
under the steel chassis when not being moved. The trailer was driven to site, the
bogey removed, and then the bogey used to transport all of the timber frames (which
were prefabricated in a workshop) to site.
 Externally, the trailer is clad in corrugated fibreglass and steel, and internally lined in
used but cleaned shuttering ply. All of the joinery is from plywood offcuts, including the
2 staircases. Handrails are made from offcuts of blue rope, left over from Studio in the
Woods. High levels of natural light are provided by both gable ends which are ‘glazed’
with high performance interlocking polycarbonate. The building is insulated with
scavenged insulation, the doors were sourced from a skip, and the roof lights were
‘damaged’ and thus trade ‘seconds’.
 The timber used is all ‘same section’ 125 x 50mm that made the milling much more
economical, and is laminated up into structural sections for the cross frames as
required. It is the first ‘same section’ building we have completed (the first being Ghost
Barn (Equivalent #1).This method of using timber also ties in with the forest
management plan for the effective use of timber in the woodland that Invisible Studio
manage as a resource around their studio, and from which our own Studio (Visible
Studio) was also built.
 The project aims to provide a super low cost, versatile, useable space that could act as
a kit of parts for any self builder to improvise around or easily adapt. While conceived
as a domestic space, it could easily function as a workspace or something else.
 Story of indusvalley
civilization
 sto