A studio for Delhi, a space for reinvention: Satish Gujral’s iconic home opens to the public | Delhi News
Veteran architect Raj Rewal still recalls the long conversations he had with Satish Gujral in the late 1960s, when the artist was building his home on Feroze Gandhi Road in Lajpat Nagar.
“It was designed for them (Satish and his wife Kiran Gujral) to both live there and to display their work. The living room was almost like an art gallery and the studio had good natural light,” Rewal, now 91, who was very close friends with the Gujrals, said.
The red-brick structure into which the Gujrals moved in the mid-1970s, became, at the same time, a family home where the couple raised their children, a Delhi landmark, and a constantly evolving space in which the artist experimented with brick and mortar.
Five years after the Padma Vibhushan awardee passed away in 2020, the house has been opened to the public as a cultural hub that will be home to The Gujral Foundation, a nonprofit established in 2008 by his son Mohit and daughter-in-law Feroze to nurture talent across disciplines, including art, design, culture and architecture.
The opening on December 25, Satish Gujral’s birthday, coincided with the late artist’s centenary year. “It will be an adda of sorts – a place where people can come, sit, talk, argue, discuss, just like they did with Satish,” Feroze told The Indian Express.
“Delhi”, she said, “no longer has such a space. We want to find new ways of welcoming people back and starting some of those open conversations again.”
The formal opening is scheduled for mid-January, with a retrospective curated by Reha Sodhi focused on Satish Gujral’s architectural practice, including the award-winning Belgian Embassy building in New Delhi. To mark the centenary, a retrospective exhibition will open at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) on January 15.
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When he turned to architecture as a medium, Satish was already an artist who had produced some of post-Independence India’s most recognised artworks, including paintings depicting the trauma of Partition, which he had experienced first-hand as a young man.
Art became Satish’s refuge after an accident impacted his hearing terminally at the age of eight. Over the decades that followed, his art bore the influences of Indian traditions as well as those of his interactions with the Mexican masters Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros whom he met while on scholarship to Mexico in the early 1950s. By the 1960s and ’70s, Satish was also producing bronze and welded metal sculptures.
The Lajpat Nagar home became the site of his artistic experimentation. “It was never a fixed house and it wasn’t easy living like that, but the fluidity taught me more about living than anything else,” Feroze said.
So Satish dug up the front garden and rebuilt it five feet higher for “a different rhythm of arrival”, and constantly moved both rooms and furniture around. “For instance, every few years Satish would change where the dining room was. At one point the basement was his studio, then the dining room, then a library, then my living room, then my son Armaan’s nursery. There was also a time when we had no dining table at all. Everyone ate at different times, so he thought ‘Why bother with a table?’” Feroze said.
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After Feroze and Mohit were married, Satish told his daughter-in-law that the home had been lucky for everyone, and would be especially so for her, since the street itself carried her name. Feroze recalled visits by prominent artists, poets, industrialists and authors, to the home, including international dignitaries such as the former United States First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and the former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.
Over the past two years, Mohit, also an architect, has led a meticulous project to restore the home to its original materiality. “In some ways, Mohit has resurrected the first imprint of Raj Rewal’s early houses, which included [Satish’s brother and former PM] Inder Gujral’s house. For instance, the kota stone is back, and so are the arches,” Feroze said.
Rewal agreed that Mohit had given due respect to the original design and the spatial arrangements of fluid spaces at different levels. “The exposed brickwork, which we had in the interior as well as the exterior, has stood the test of time and the quality of light will enhance the paintings,” he said.
The restoration has rediscovered forgotten ceramic works by Kiran, which will now adorn the corridors, alongside Satish’s works. “Satish always said everything is a studio. Now the house will be a studio for the city,” Feroze said.
