Auroville is difficult to describe as a township. There are no obvious streets, few addresses, and for long stretches you navigate by beacons such as water towers, old banyan trees and directions from people you meet along the way. What you find, instead, is a collection of alternative buildings, communities and experiments spread through a forest.
Townhall
Auroville and its secret appeal
I first came to Auroville in south-east India as a student, more than a decade ago, for a workshop at the Bamboo Centre. I remember the red, earthy pathways, the forest and the strange feeling that I had entered a place that was trying to operate by a different set of rules or, rather, making its own set of rules. That feeling has stayed with me.
Solar Kitchen
What is Auroville?
The footprint of the settlement is quite small, but the density of ideas is huge. Most things seem to have a reason for being there. Earth construction, water recycling, bamboo structures and passive cooling have all been tested here, often at full scale and over many years. Some have become useful technologies. Others remain experiments. Auroville has always allowed both.
The numbers tell us that its population sits at around 3,500 people at most. It is located in the south of the Indian subcontinent, in the Villupuram district, straddling the states of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry.
At the visitor centre
A brief history of Auroville
The city was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfassa, known as the Mother, a French-Indian spiritual leader and close collaborator of Sri Aurobindo, the Indian philosopher and freedom fighter who had a vision to have a new way of individual and collective life. French architect Roger Anger translated that idea into a master plan: a huge spiral with the Matrimandir at its centre and four zones spreading outwards. Much of the forest around it was planted by residents after the settlement began.
For most of Auroville's history, the tension was between the city Anger drew and the slower settlement that actually grew in the forest. That gap is now becoming harder to ignore. The argument over what Auroville should be has become very physical.
Water tank
Tour Auroville's architecture in a day
Exploring Auroville's landscape of buildings and forest can be like entering a complex ecosystem. I would spend a day moving through it with that in mind.
Matrimandir
The first building to see is, inevitably, the Matrimandir. Its golden sphere rises above the trees, surrounded by 12 red sandstone petals. From a distance, it can look almost unreal. Up close, you see the individual discs of gold leaf and the sandstone holding the whole thing to the ground.
Inside, everything is much quieter: white marble, white carpet, four columns, a crystal globe and a single shaft of sunlight. There are no images, priests or elaborate rituals. The building is deliberately restrained. Designed by Roger Anger, construction began in 1971 and was completed in 2008, the year of his death.
Visitor Centre
The Auroville Visitors’ Centre is probably the easiest place to begin understanding the town. Built in 1998, it is where most visitors first arrive: there is an information desk, exhibition spaces, a video hall, café, bookshop, handicraft shops and an open-air theatre. It gets busy, but the building itself is worth slowing down for.
The centre was designed by Suhasini Ayer as a demonstration of Auroville's approach to construction. The Auroville Building Centre used the project to experiment with alternative building technologies, particularly Compressed Stabilised Earth Blocks, while making the most of natural light and cross-ventilation. The local climate, materials and building skills all shaped the design. Renewable energy was part of the brief from the beginning.
I like that it is not hidden away as a prototype or research building. It is a place that thousands of people pass through every day, so the experiment has to work as a real public building. In that sense, it is a good introduction to Auroville: the architecture is trying to do something, but it also has to get on with the business of receiving people.
The Townhall
The Town Hall is a better building to understand how Auroville actually functions. Completed in 2003, it brings administrative activities into a compact group of spaces connected by ramps, bridges and cantilevers. Reinforced concrete, brick and ferrocement give it a practical, slightly unfinished character. The whole complex sits within sight of the Matrimandir. This was part of Anger's idea: the people making decisions for Auroville should have its central building in view. The Town Hall was designed by Anupama Kundoo, who came to Auroville in 1990 and worked alongside Anger.
Nearby, the Multimedia Centre continues the same idea. Completed in 2005, it houses graphic services, an audio and video library and Cinema Paradiso. Between the centre and the nearby Centre for Urban Research, a series of deep steps leads down towards the City Centre Café. It is one of the few places in Auroville that feels like a conventional public square. The building also quietly does the practical work: roof water is collected, wastewater is treated and reused, and the concrete has been allowed to weather rather than being endlessly repaired to look new.
Solar Kitchen
The Solar Kitchen is where some of Auroville's biggest ideas become very ordinary. Completed in 1997, it is the communal dining hall, serving around a thousand meals a day. The Pour Tous distribution centre occupies the same complex, while the roof also has a café, guest service office and internet room. The building was also designed by Suhasini Ayer, who first came to Auroville in 1985 as an architecture student and stayed on.
One of the things worth checking out here is the roof. A 15m-wide spherical solar concentrator is placed above the building, made from prefabricated ferrocement segments and around 11,000 hand-cut mirror facets. The mirrors focus the sun onto a receiver, producing steam for the kitchen below. A diesel boiler helps with the morning cooking, before the solar system takes over once the sun is high enough.
The Crown
The Crown is the ring road at the centre of Auroville's original master plan. For decades it existed mostly as a line on a drawing. Today a lot of it is built. Along parts of it, mature trees have been cleared and replaced by lawns and ornamental planting. The road has become the most visible point of disagreement over Auroville's future.
For the Auroville Foundation, the Crown is the original master plan finally taking shape. For many residents, the problem is the way it happened: houses were demolished and trees felled without the consent of the Residents' Assembly, which they believe should have had a say. Both positions have been argued in court. Meanwhile, the road got built.
The Water Tower
The water tower between Prayatna and Vikas is one of my favourite landmarks in Auroville. Built in 1996, it rises 26m above the ground in a stabilised earth block. Four cylindrical columns support a 130,000-litre ferrocement tank, with another 200,000 litres stored underground. It is infrastructure, but it also works as civic architecture. In a place like Auroville – without conventional addresses, a building like this becomes a landmark. People use it to navigate. The tower was designed by Helmut Schmid, who came to Auroville from Stuttgart in 1979.
Savitri Bhavan
Savitri Bhavan is a centre for the study of Savitri, Sri Aurobindo's long epic poem. The building sits on an artificial plateau, with a pond in the central plaza collecting rainwater from the roofs. The curved wall connects its different volumes, while concrete fins shade the long façade from the western sun.
Inside is a gallery with around 600 paintings made by Huta under the Mother's guidance between 1961 and 1970. Completed in 2004, it was also designed by Helmut Schmid. In the same complex, there is also a rammed-earth wall made using 96 soil samples from 27 countries – for the 50th anniversary of Auroville in 2018.
The Peace Table
Next to Savitri Bhavan, in the Unity Pavilion, is a very different kind of object. The Peace Table consists of two slabs of black walnut made from a 300-year-old tree. They were created by George Nakashima as part of his Altars for Peace project. Nakashima first came to Pondicherry in 1936 as a project architect before returning to the US. His daughter Mira completed the second altar after his death, and the two pieces were brought together and rededicated in Auroville in 2014. There is very little around them. The timber does most of the talking.
The Tibetan Pavilion
The Tibetan Pavilion is one of the most distinctive projects in Auroville's international zone. Its plan follows the Kalachakra mandala, with a courtyard and a water feature carved from local granite. White walls rise into a red roof mass, with deeply recessed windows giving the building the feeling of a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas. At the same time, the construction is very much Auroville: an RCC frame, ferrocement roofing and stabilised earth blocks. It was designed by André Hababou and Satprem Maïni, with the Dalai Lama laying the foundation stone in 1993 and donating some seed money.
Udavi School
Udavi School is one of the quieter buildings adjacent to Edayanchavadi village. It was designed by Poppo Pingle, who was involved with Auroville from its early years and was one of the people who trained young architects through practical work rather than in a conventional office.
The school grows around shaded and open spaces and caters to the children from the local villages. The classrooms feel connected to the landscape, with simple materials and plenty of air moving through the building. It has the directness of many of the early Auroville projects: make what you need, use what is around you, and use the climate in the best way possible.
The Vérité Meditation Hall
The Vérité Meditation Hall is a circular room made from compressed earth blocks, with heavy piers supporting a ferrocement dome. A single opening in the roof brings a sharp beam of light onto the red oxide floor. Long, low windows keep the garden close to the interior. There is no air conditioning and very little fuss. It was designed by AK Raman in 1994.
The Integral Learning Centre at Vérité
This structure uses rammed-earth walls with an RCC frame. From outside, the concrete columns and suspended roof create a series of white boxes, floating above the heavier earth walls. The entrance is narrow but opens into a much larger courtyard, with a pond and granite acoustic instruments at its centre. David Nightingale and Ganesh Bala designed the building in 2006.
The Bamboo Centre
Bamboo is grown here, then cured, split, steamed and bent, and the structures are not demonstrations behind glass. They are a working campus, with apprentices from nearby Tamil villages working alongside architecture students and visiting designers. They organise constant workshops similar to the Auroville Earth Institute.
About eight minutes away on foot is Swaram, a sound experience and healing centre started by Aurelio, a sound artist and instrument maker. It is another side of Auroville's tendency to turn everyday activities such as listening, making, eating, learning into experiments in their own right.
Fired houses
Some of Auroville's most interesting experiments began with ideas that sounded slightly impossible. Ray Meeker spent years developing houses that could be fired like kilns. His idea was to build a house from raw mud brick, fill it with bricks and other ceramic products, and then fire the whole structure and bake the house. The building acts like the kiln, and the products inside help pay for the process. One of the early houses, Agni Jata, has four vaults around a central dome. At another house, Meeker angled a wall to absorb the expansion caused by firing, and decided he liked the way it looked.
The experiment eventually stopped because the energy required made it difficult to call the process sustainable. That seems important to remember. Auroville is full of successful experiments, but it is also full of things that were tried, questioned and abandoned. Meeker developed the technique with Deborah Smith through Golden Bridge Pottery in Pondicherry, and around 20 buildings were eventually produced.
Dustudio’s courtyard
This is one of the spaces I like most in Auroville. It reminds me of a traditional Indian stepwell, with the levels gradually stepping down towards the centre. The rammed-earth walls, with their original colour of local red soil and impressions of moss in places, become a canvas for Dharmesh Jadeja’s Devanagari calligraphy, bringing together the many sides of his practice. Founded by Jadeja in 1992, Dustudio treats indigenous building techniques as contemporary processes. You can see that idea in the courtyard quite clearly – the materials are simple, but the space feels rich because of the way they are made, placed and lived with.
EcoService
EcoService is another place worth visiting. Situated in Kottakarai, it is probably the least photogenic stop and, in its own way, one of the most honest. Waste from homes, communities, guest houses, restaurants and other units is brought here for sorting. The system depends on residents separating their waste at source, which sounds simple until you stand on the sorting floor and open the bags. Things marked as plastic routinely contain metal, cloth and food.
There are also attempts to bring some of that waste back into the building process. Thermocol is shredded, mixed with cement and made into non-load-bearing partition blocks for buildings elsewhere in Auroville. The waste stream becomes part of the construction stream. This is the less glamorous side of Auroville's experiment – but an important one. It is also run by people and volunteers who have been figuring it out, sorting it and doing the work for decades.
Centerfield
Centerfield is a completely different kind of stop. I end up there at night almost every time I am in Auroville. It is a good place to sit and look at the stars. After a day spent looking at buildings, roads, infrastructure and arguments about the future of the city, I like the fact that there is nothing much to do there. You just sit, look up and let the forest take over.
The takeaway?
Auroville remains unfinished, and that is still its attraction. But the terms have shifted. For 50 years, the argument was about what the place should become, while much of the original plan existed only on paper. Now the ring road exists, mostly, and the argument is being played out on the ground. The forest, the water towers, the schools, the houses, the sorting sheds and the cafés still tell different versions of what this place could be. You are not touring a finished architectural idea. You are walking through one that is still being worked out. For some, the utopia is already lost. For others, it is yet to begin.
For more about Auroville, visit auroville.org/