Tara Apartments
Tara Apartments is a row housing by Charles Correa, designed with the intent to provide community spaces for its residents. Correa designed spaces like balconies, bridges and courtyards with sufficient shading and design elements to maintain comfortable temperatures. Tara Apartments commissioned in 1970, if compared to the original intent today will show marked differences in its physical infrastructure, owing to user interventions, which are discussed ahead.
Tara apartments is designed as two rows of staggered apartment blocks with a central axis separating them. Quite often, a similar brief would result in a medium rise building requiring expensive elevators and structure. In order to avoid such a solution for middle income housing, it consists of 160 narrow four-story units, stepped back in section so that the roof of the lower ones form terraces for those on upper level. Stacked as interlocking rows, the apartments protect each other against the hot dry climate of Northern India.
The apartment has an introverted character, whose life takes place mainly in the central space. The central space is divided in two levels in response to the natural terrain. These two levels act as two very different courts. At the lower level, apartments move away from each other, inviting in the sun and creating a large open space with an open air theatre and a semi-open community hall beside it. It is ideal for cold winter afternoons. Conversely, at the higher level, the two apartment blocks come close together blocking the sun with a cluster of trees and overarching bridges. This creates an intimate, cosy environment, suited for hot evenings. The user demographic of the apartments have changed over the years. Tara apartments which was originally designed for lower middle-income groups, now houses affluent families of Delhi. They had been built by Tara Co-operative Society to tackle the then growing population of Delhi,but now with lesser space available and increased urban densities, these apartments have become increasingly expensive and scarce, pushing them to a posh status. The apartments here are rented, bought and sold at a premium rate, higher than the neighbouring apartments. The new buyers cite the community spaces and the overall aesthetics as the justification for higher prices.
The interplay of light and shadow has also modified from what it was designed for. The building has a staggered layout where each apartment block was designed to shade the block adjacent to it. This characteristic offset created a setup of mutual shading, where for a few critical hours during the day, most of the mass was protected from the harsh sun. Today, balconies of most apartments have been enclosed by residents owing to scarcity of space, essentially trading off light and shade for an extra room. These changes to the exterior have also affected the façade.
The green yards on the south-east side of the site have also been encroached by users. Accessible from the ground floor apartments, the green yards were a feature for the entire community to utilize. But, with the passage of time these green patches have been claimed by the apartments abutting them, who have divided them and barred them from general use. Hence, they now act as a backyard for the ground floor apartments. This encroachment was made easier because the green yards edged the ground floor apartments’ rear with no barrier or buffer between the two. Conversely, an unrestricted use of this space by other residents would limit the privacy of the ground floor residents, whose apartments edged these yards.
These instances raise the concern of conflict between an architect’s intent and design, as against the requirements and diversity of users in any housing scenario. The high monetary value fetched by the property continue to justify Correa’s design choices and philosophy, meanwhile the modifications and changes made by the buyers diminish the same design features to add a completely different character. This distinctly outlines the problems faced in the design of Images housing even today, it raises questions like, “What is the relevance of a ground floor commons, in an era of increasing vertical solutions?”, or “How can one effectively design to adapt for changes to come in the future?”.
