Learning in New Delhi: this is the first major addition to New Delhi's symbolic capitol since Independence. It resonates with the past at many levels, and suggests new approaches to monumentality.

New Delhi was declared capital of India in 1911, and was designed as a demonstration of imperial power, with the great parade route, the Rajpath, running east to west some two kilometres from India Gate, Edwin Lutyens's national war memorial, then up the ramp between Herbert Baker's two Secretariats, to culminate in the presidential palace, the Rashtrapati Bhavan, Lutyens's Viceroy's House. (1) Architecture was intended to reinforce the message, with Lutyens's work in particular achieving a blend of Classicism (the European expression of empire from ancient times) with Mughal and other indigenous forms taken from traditional buildings of the powerful in the subcontinent. To the north of the Rajpath, is the drum of Baker's Parliament, more conventionally Classical than the Rashtrapati Bhavan, and very much an inward-turned building on which a giant order rises from a plinth to support a huge entablature and attic. The circular plan is a symbol of the desire to make the nation one.

However much the whole complex may carry unhappy memories of empire, it remains the symbolic and monumental focus of the Indian nation, so adding to it poses extreme difficulties. By the late twentieth century, the parliamentary library had long outgrown its quarters in Baker's building. A competition was held for a new library in a wooded site just north-west of the drum. Raj Rewal won in 199l,and was given a great deal of freedom, but was required by the Speaker of the Lok Sabah (the legislature -- lower house of parliament) to relate harmoniously to Baker and Lutyens.

Rewal decided that the library should be subservient to its parent building in the way, he says, 'a guru relates to a king'. Its honorific entrance reflects one of the three main approaches to the parliament building; only the library's roofscape rises above Baker's plinth and the body of the building is clad in red and buff sandstones similar to those of the capitol complex. But for all these deferential gestures to the surrounding neo-Classical buildings, Rewal draws deeply on Indian precedent. The basic plan form has much in common with that of buildings like the Adinatha temple in Ranakpur and the Datia Palace, at Madhya Pradesh, in both of which a central core is set among courtyards, themselves surrounded by a perimeter. Here are echoes of the ancient Mandala, the cosmological diagram that inspired ancient Hindu temples.

Laid over this powerfully iconic basis is the notion that a building with a very varied programme should be a network of foci, like Lutyens's surrounding city, but without its defensive connotations. A third layer of complexity was generated by Rewal's decision to make the foci into domed columnless spaces. In resolving the differences between the orthogonal basic plan and the circular forms of the domes, perimeter walls become serrated in plan. So at close range, scale is reduced, and little verandahs are created round the edge. But, from a distance, coherence is retained by a continuous abstracted entablature that ties all the smaller forms together and prepares for the shallow domes above.

Overall the layers of planning geometry is vegetation. Lutyens's New Delhi was (and near the capitol still is) very green. The library has been built on one of the forested parkland areas surrounding the capitol. Partly as a mark of respect to context, the north-west corner of the square plan has been omitted, leading the existing wood into the middle of the composition. Its greenery is echoed by planting on the roofs between the domes and in the courts round the nucleus. Here are conflated British turn-of-the-century ideal of the garden city and the south Asian archetypal strategy of drawing the sky into the heart of a building.

Functionally, the two floors you see are on top of a couple of underground ones which contain the main stacks. On the ground floor, the main axis runs south-north from the VIP entrance opposite Parliament to the auditorium. The east-west axis is from the digital library to the scholars' library, the largest study space in the complex. At the crossing of the two axes is a powerful volume, the honorific and mythic centre, where daylight from a great glass dome pours down to the ground floor, then beyond that down to the lower floors, which would otherwise be largely Stygian. So the building is metaphorically pinned to its place with a shaft of light from the sky that illuminates the whole labyrinth of knowledge.

In fact, most people will probably not use the ceremonial entrance. There are three other main ground floor points of entry: MPs have a special entrance in the south-east corner of the plan; the public comes in at the north-east corner; scholars enter next to the south-west corner. In the present climate, security precautions at each entrance are elaborate, but once past them, you can wander in the cloister-like shaded corridor that runs round the inner courtyards. (2) Each of these has symbolic democratic significance: the south-west, with its open air theatre, tells of free expression; the south-east has a specimen tree denoting social justice, which one day will dominate the whole space; the north-east court has a pool symbolic of equality.

Inside, every one of the main foci is different and has its own atmosphere. Many of their spaces are double-height, ranging from the intimate MPs' reading room with its cosy galleries to the much bigger scholars' library that becomes a quadruple volume, with its generous stairwell descending to the two stack levels below. This space, like the other large ones, is spanned by what at first seems an unlikely combination of steel trusses supporting lightweight fibre cement shells, perhaps a modern descendant of Viollet-le-Duc's dramatic (but never executed) nineteenth-century drawings that suggested the potential of relating metal tension members to the compressive qualities of masonry domes. Throughout Rewal has pursued the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century tradition, coming from Sidney Smirke at the British Museum Library and Hans Asplund in Stockholm, of introducing light from clerestories high up in each volume, which is filtered by the space until it arrives gently on the readers' desks.

Many of the domes let in light from the sky too: a move that, particularly in the case of the central space with its big glass lantern, was initially decried by the environmental engineers of the CPWD (Central Public Works Department) as being likely to put excessive cooling loads on the air-conditioning system. (3) But Rewal was determined to get the sky into his building and, after much experiment with the CPWD, it was found that two layers of reflective glass could reduce heat gain to acceptable levels, even in Delhi's sweltering summer. The insulative properties of the earth in the roof gardens further increase the building's resistance to harsh external conditions. Round the nucleus, the courts (intermediate spaces environmentally), are expected to be largely dust-free, remarkable for open spaces in north India in summer, and reminiscent of the internal open spaces of the grand palaces.

In his library, Rewal has pulled off a remarkable feat: he has not only related the building to its immediate very difficult physical and historical context, but to deeper strains of Indian culture and history. And he has married these to modern technology and functional analysis. Could the synthesis be the foundation of a democratic monumentality for modern India? (4)

(1.) New Delhi was laid out by Lutyens as a network of gridded and diagonal roads, focusing on nodes from which artillery can shoot down the straight streets to control the mob. It was modelled on the similar strategies of L'Enfant's Washington and Haussmann's Paris.

(2.) In this respect, the building is the reverse of Bakers, where main internal circulation is on the outer perimeter.

(3.) Like all libraries, this one has to have a very carefully controlled environment; Rewal has experimented elsewhere in making use of ambient energy to reduce the need for air conditioning.

(4.) Much factual information in this article has been taken from Library for the Indian Parliament by Raj Rewal and others, Architecture Research Cell, Delhi, in press.

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Architect

Raj Rewal

Project team

Raj Rewal, Arvind Mathur, H. s. Sandhu, Ankur Mathur, Anshu Mahajan, Sumit Maity, Raoul Rewal, Geetika Nayar, Vipin Thakur, Renu Peshin, Rana Ram, Savita Khanna, Sanjeet Bose, Pratap Talwar, Arun Rewal, Suresh Verma, Maneesh Gupta, Shalini Bhatia, Ram Avtar

Engineers and project managers

CPWD

Contractors

ECC division Larsen and Toubro

Landscape

Satish Khanna

Photographs

Courtesy of the architect