Red Vessel / Laal Jahaaz
Set amidst a coastal landscape on the Arabian Sea, Red Vessel / laal jahaaz (Hindi) is a hotel annex about an hour's drive from Surat city in Gujarat, India. The context comprises sparse rural settlements, diverse flora marked with palms, and coconut trees with an omnipresent sea breeze. The design intervention is part of a larger resort master plan that caters to recreational and socio-cultural events. It has a small water park with swimming pools, a children's play garden, congregation lawns, and an existing hotel building housing 35 rooms.
The program brief was to expand the existing infrastructure with 40 rooms, three dormitories, and conference facilities to accommodate cultural events and social gatherings. The new extension is planned adjacent to the existing hotel on the southwestern edge of the resort masterplan, on a rectangular land parcel measuring 40 meters in length and 25 meters in width.
The existing hotel building is a generic typology commonly found in urban areas, with rooms flanked on either side of a closed internal passage. The site is close to a public beach, often flocked by people of the city for a getaway during holidays and weekends. Further North along the coastline lies the industrial port of Surat. A continuous trail of shipping vessels traversing the sea is a constant sight on the beach horizon. The analogy of a ship (jahaaz) originates from these large seafaring vessels. This metaphor inspired notions of protective shells, spatial efficiency, modular proportions, and long-term sustenance. In search of cohesion with the context, the old conventional hotel typology is deconstructed to reorganize as a vessel/ jahaaz that is extroverted.
The hotel typology has an aspect of temporality, an in-between, or a transitory dwelling condition. This idea of transition is adapted consciously, with the structure becoming a portal from land to sea. Three parallel linear structures are connected with semi-open corridors fostering connections with the surrounding landscape. The east-to-west spanning linear blocks create a self-shading morphology, with gaps between the blocks acting as wind shafts due to their narrow proportions. A four-story Southern block has 40 rooms that can host 160 guests. A room size of 3.65 meters X 6.35 meters forms the basis of the proportioning system. This block provides shade over the low-lying Eastern terrace, ensuring all-day comfort in the hot and humid climate. To the North is a two-storied dormitory block crowned with another terrace opening up to the lawn and distant surroundings.
One encounters tall red shafts and passes through the entrance, gradually shifting to a dark interior with diffused natural light, a space akin to a primitive cavern. Walking along the light trail of skylights, one discovers a hidden staircase and vertical circulation. A path begins from tall and narrow space proportion of site constraints that opens up to deep panoramic views of the coastal seascape, creating anticipation as one goes through diverse spatial qualities of changing light, depth, and compression; culminating in a final release on the open sky terrace, where the sky and the sea converge into a singular line. A mere parapet remains of the building as the sea takes center stage. The breeze and sounds of waves take over as the setting Sun paints the sky with its reddish-yellow hue; a moment of calm presides over the scene. The eyes gaze toward silhouettes of ships passing by, deep in the distant horizon. The experience offers a contemplative getaway to the guests in an architecture that attempts to converse with the serene natural elements.
