Traditional Techniques in Contemporary Cultures: Rammed Earth and Vaults Recalibrate GIFT City

Glass towers are the default language of the planned business district, and in a semi-arid climate that default is expensive. It costs energy, comfort and cultural memory. Traditional techniques in contemporary cultures starts from a blunt premise: the generic office park is the wrong model for western India. The project argues that the region's own building knowledge, including rammed earth, shaded thresholds, recessed openings and managed water, can carry a twenty-first-century financial hub better than imported curtain walls.

Developed as a thesis by Darshik Parejiya and shortlisted in UnIATA '19, the project is set in GIFT City, Gandhinagar, Gujarat. It reworks part of the planned district so that local tradition shapes it. Parejiya does not reject the towers already rising on the skyline. He works beneath and between them, breaking large developments into smaller blocks organised around airflow, accessibility and thermal comfort. The masterplan sorts the ground into three functional zones: a road edge, a band of interior buildings and a water edge. Each zone gets its own character and climatic job.

Internal Streets and Vaulted Halls Cut Through the Masterplan

The long sections show the scale shift most clearly. An internal street threads past exhibition halls and up to a sky plaza, while the glass towers stay in the background as a reference point rather than a template. A second set of cuts through the convention centre stacks arched vaults, a central courtyard block and an exhibition hall. The structure stays low and porous, with trees drawn into the section as working elements.

These drawings make the case for the masterplan's main move. Dividing a large programme into human-scaled blocks is a social gesture, and it is also a ventilation strategy. Parejiya orients the buildings to pull breezes through gaps and courtyards, which reduces dependence on mechanical cooling. The sections read less like a single megastructure and more like a sequence of shaded rooms open to the sky.

Rammed Earth Walls Wrapped in Living Screens

At street level the material palette changes completely. A rammed earth corner sits inside a trellis of hanging vines, and a nearby composition of layered earth blocks carries a green wall panel. Stabilized rammed earth, porous rubble and green walls are the project's core materials. They were chosen to lower embodied carbon and to give the walls thermal mass that softens daytime heat.

What stands out is how ordinary the renderings let these surfaces feel. Cyclists and walkers move past in full sun, and the vegetation works as shading infrastructure rather than decoration. Recessed windows and vegetated slabs complete the strategy, so the facade is a layered climatic filter, not a sealed skin.

Pergolas and Lawns as Climatic Thresholds

A rammed earth and brick block opens onto a vine pergola, with people resting on the lawn beyond. This is the project's transitional space at work: semi-shaded ground between buildings where the climate is tempered enough to linger. In a city designed around cars and lobbies, these in-between zones carry the social programme. They give workers and visitors somewhere to gather that is neither fully indoors nor exposed to the sun.

Concrete Vaults on Earthen Piers, Filtered by Jali

The structural language comes together in the vaults. A concrete vaulted roof spans across rammed earth piers above a lawn bed, and the accompanying section shows ribbed vaults, timber jali screens and a stabilized rammed earth wall working together. Figures walk and play beneath, which shows that the covered ground is meant for active public use and is not leftover space.

The pairing is a sensible one. Concrete takes the spanning work, earth provides mass and enclosure, and the jali, like the bamboo screens elsewhere in the scheme, filters light and air instead of blocking them. The section acts as a compact summary of the thesis: contemporary structure where it earns its place, traditional technique where it performs better.

Why This Project Matters

GIFT City is a test case for how Indian cities might grow. Parejiya's thesis takes on that ambition directly instead of retreating to a village-scale demonstration. Terraced water bodies and cultivated edges handle stormwater while creating public space. Rammed earth and green walls cut carbon. Building orientation does the cooling that glass towers hand over to machines. Taken together, these choices form a credible alternative framework for a planned district.

Its broader value lies in transferability. The strategies are drawn from a regional tradition but organised as a system of zones, block sizes, materials and thresholds that could adapt to other semi-arid and arid regions. The project suggests that cultural identity and environmental performance come from the same source: building with the climate rather than against it.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Darshik Parejiya

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Project credits: Traditional techniques in contemporary cultures" by Darshik Parejiya UnIATA '19 (uni.xyz).