Sheltering Angle – Asha Baste and Prabhakar Baste

Description

Sheltering Angle’ is a book about the design of houses with angled roofs required in the Indian tropical region. The sloping roofs not only provide shelter from heavy rains, but also a sense of visual and emotional comfort which comes from the association of traditional homes with the familiar red-tiled roofs.The pattern was designed keeping in mind the change in building material from wood to reinforced cement concrete, as well as the change in the Indian family structure from joint to nuclear families. It is oriented towards creating a three-dimensional experience of an internal space as well a playful external form and the pattern is adaptable to any size of house desired within the given site and budget of the occupant. We hope that by building houses following the grammar suggested in this book will help create visually harmonious neighbourhoods like the earlier vernacular settlements did, with houses that are of a similar language without being identical. The book is unique as it is not about large luxury houses but about small and medium homes. It includes solutions for urban low cost, low-rise, high-density housing and layouts for future rural development. The grammar described in it should come to the aid of the upwardly mobile class in India who wish to build a climate-responsive house on their own or with the help of a professional. The blueprints of hand-drawn design and working drawings would surely be of interest to the students of architecture.