Asian Games Village Case Study: Site Plan, Clusters and Streets (Raj Rewal)

The Asian Games Village in New Delhi is the housing Raj Rewal designed for athletes at the 1982 Asian Games: low-rise blocks of two to four storeys, grouped in clusters round courts and joined by narrow, shaded pedestrian streets, with cars kept to parking squares at the edges. It was commissioned by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) after a 1980 competition and sold as homes after the Games. Below: the brief, plan, section, materials, reception, life there now and lessons for designers.

Who designed the Asian Games Village? The brief and the client

The client was the DDA, Delhi's housing and land agency. The M+ museum in Hong Kong, which holds Rewal's drawings for the project, records that the DDA commissioned Rewal after a competition in 1980 and calls it his first built housing project. His practice lists Sheikh Sarai Housing in Delhi as 1970 to 1982, so the two schemes overlapped.

The brief, as Raj Rewal Associates' project page sets it out:

• 500 units on a 35-acre plot, to house athletes first and to be sold to the public afterwards.
• A mix of 200 individual town houses and 300 apartments, in buildings of two to four storeys.
• Three variations of each unit type, differing in area.

The deadline was fixed by the Games, which opened on 19 November 1982 according to the Olympic Council of Asia.

Rewal, born in 1934, studied in Delhi and London and worked in Michel Ecochard's office in Paris before starting his New Delhi practice in the 1960s, according to his practice's biography.

Site and context: Siri Fort, South Delhi

The village sits in the Siri Fort area of South Delhi. Giles Tillotson, in an excerpt from his book Delhi Darshan republished by Architexturez from India Today (12 May 2019), places it "inside Siri Fort".

Asian Games Village area: how big is it?

The numbers do not line up:

• Rewal's brief: 500 units on 35 acres (Raj Rewal Associates).
• M+ (project record): 200 town houses and 300 apartments on a fourteen-hectare site, which is about the same as 35 acres.
• M+ (archive overview): 700 units, including 500 flats, on the page describing the whole Rewal archive.
• Centre Pompidou: "around 500 lodgings", in its record of Rewal's axonometric site plan.
• Delhi High Court, 2011: the residents' society said "about 853 houses were offered" for sale under a DDA brochure, and the DDA told the court the whole complex covers 135 acres, of which 62 acres is housing zone; the rest is central facilities, practice areas and green (Asiad Village Society v. Union of India).

We could not find a source that reconciles 500 units on 35 acres with 853 houses in a 62-acre housing zone. For a thesis sheet, quote Rewal's brief for the design and the court record for the complex as sold, and say which you are using.

Asian Games Village concept: the mohalla and the "theatre of the street"

Rewal's project text starts from the Indian mohalla, the close-knit urban neighbourhood: a pattern of low-rise, high-density development, arranged in clusters suited to the climate. The concept, in his words, is "based on arrangement of narrow shaded pedestrian streets sequentially linking clusters, open spaces and commercial and recreational areas". Streets and squares, with points of rest and changing views, were meant to make a "theatre of the street" where neighbours become a community.

He also set the scheme against what the DDA usually built. The plan, his page says, "deliberately deviated" from the repetitive units and disjointed open spaces of DDA housing, and was conceived as "a prototype of a segment of a new city".

The references Rewal named

• Jaisalmer. At the 2014 launch of his retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Rewal said that "the narrow winding streets, cool and shady courtyards which diffuse light" influenced his design for the village, in a passage about Jaisalmer and Venice (World Architecture Community, reporting The Economic Times, April 2014).
• Jaisalmer and Jaipur together. The historian William J R Curtis, in his 1986 monograph on Rewal (quoted on Rewal's site), wrote that Rewal sought the qualities of "great urban complexes of the past such as Jaisalmer and Jaipur", taking tradition "for its underlying order, not for its superficial effects".
• Traditional city elements. The Centre Pompidou's record says Rewal enriched the domestic vocabulary with "external staircases, accessible terraces and private gardens inspired by traditional cities", with the whole linked by pedestrian streets broken up by porches and small squares.

Two other readings are the curators' and critics', not Rewal's. M+ says the layout recalls 1960s megastructures such as Moshe Safdie's Habitat '67 in Montreal as well as the fabric of traditional Indian bazaars. Tillotson writes that the cladding, the rectilinear geometry and the "closeknit, pedestrianized planning" consciously evoke towns like Jaisalmer.

Asian Games Village site plan: streets, squares and parking

The site plan separates people from cars without banishing cars. Rewal's description gives the order of movement:

1. Peripheral roads run round the housing.
2. Cul-de-sac parking squares branch off them.
3. Garages or car porches open off the parking squares, attached to the houses or apartment blocks.
4. The central spine of the layout is kept for pedestrian courts and streets serving the clusters.

The key number is his: "nearly 80 per cent of the units have access from both pedestrian enclosures as well as parking squares". Most homes have a car side and a foot side.

Our diagram shows the principle only, not the real layout. For the master plan itself, use Rewal's axonometric site plan held by the Centre Pompidou, not a redrawn version.

Clusters and unit types (the "floor plan" question)

Rewal designed the housing as a kit of unit types that could be "organically linked together to form streets, squares and clusters". Each type came in three variations by area. The Centre Pompidou holds separate drawings titled "Cluster type E", "Cluster type F" and "Cluster type G" (gift of Raj Rewal Associates, 2012), which suggests the clusters were themselves typed and repeated in different combinations.

None of the sources we opened gives floor areas, room layouts or the number of each cluster type. For unit plans, go to the archives listed under Visiting below.

Section and structure: two to four storeys, terraces on top

In section, the village works as a low, varied skyline of two- to four-storey blocks. Four ideas from the sources explain it:

• Two sides to each home. A parking square on one side and a pedestrian street or court on the other, as in the plan.
• Narrow streets. Streets are kept narrow so that the buildings on each side shade them (Rewal: "narrow shaded pedestrian streets").
• Roofs as rooms. Patwant Singh, editor of Design magazine, praised its "rooftop terraces for sleeping in summer" (quoted on Rewal's project page). M+ describes private balconies and open-air terraces above, and yards carved out of the space between buildings below.
• Links at upper levels. M+ also records walkways on the ground and "bridge-like connections linking upper levels".

On structure, M+ describes "concrete-and-brick structures". We found no source naming the structural engineer or describing the frame, foundations or construction sequence, so we have not drawn any.

Asian Games Village materials and construction

The sources agree on the look and disagree on the stone:

• M+ says the concrete-and-brick buildings are faced in "cost-effective Jaisalmer stone" from Rajasthan, with different patterns distinguishing each unit type.
• Tillotson describes "yellow reconstituted stone cladding".

Both may be partly right in different places, but we could not confirm either from Rewal's own text, which does not name the facing material. On a thesis sheet, give both and cite them. For what Jaisalmer and other Rajasthan stones are like to build with today, see our guide to building materials in Jaipur, Jodhpur and Rajasthan and our comparison of natural stones for houses.

The programme was short: a competition in 1980, and housing ready for athletes at Games that opened in November 1982. Rewal's page says the village was "constructed in 1982".

Light, climate and services

The village answers Delhi's summer heat with form rather than devices:

• Shade. Narrow streets and enclosed courts keep the ground in shadow; M+ notes the project's attention to shade and airflow.
• Soft light. Rewal speaks of courtyards "which diffuse light".
• Outdoor sleeping. Roof terraces give families somewhere to sleep on summer nights, as Patwant Singh noted.
• Cars on the surface, at the edge. Parking squares sit on the ground off the peripheral roads, so the pedestrian core is free of traffic.

One service became a landmark. The Delhi High Court's 2011 judgment notes that an overhead water tank in the complex was camouflaged by a structure built round it, known as the "Tower Restaurant". The sources we opened do not say who designed it.

Reception, and how the Asian Games Village is lived in now

What critics said

The scheme was published quickly: Rewal's bibliography lists Design (New Delhi, January 1982), Architecture and Urbanism (Tokyo, January 1983), the RIBA Journal (July 1983) and Abitare (Milan, November 1983). Patwant Singh called it "a compelling new equation between tradition and modernity". M+ calls it the project that "arguably brought Rewal the most international recognition".

What residents said

Tillotson records a less reverent view. A decade after completion, residents asked about its traditional Indian planning replied, "Nonsense... it's not Indian, it's modern. For one thing, it's tidy." He adds that historians and critics were persuaded it marked an Indian revival.

After the Games: sale, disputes and reconstruction plans

The court record gives the dated facts:

• 1983: after the Games, the units were offered to Non-Resident Indians.
• Next: response was poor, so the remaining units went to public sector corporations and companies.
• 1986: the units were offered to the general public, on 99-year leases.
• 1993: the Asiad Village Society, representing residents and allottees, filed a writ petition seeking control of common areas, parks, roads and the Tower, among other relief.
• 8 February 2011: the Delhi High Court dismissed the petition, holding that the society had no exclusive right over land outside the dwelling units.

The society's petition also said that the dining hall area had been handed to Doordarshan, which set up a studio there. M+ says the dining hall at the centre of the complex became a commercial and community space. We have not checked its current use.

On 19 September 2025, HUDCO told the stock exchanges it had signed a non-binding MoU with NBCC (India) covering, among other projects, "reconstruction of residential flats at Asian Games Village Complex, New Delhi on turnkey basis as Deposit work". The filing does not say which blocks, how many flats, or whether they are part of Rewal's scheme.

What designers in India can take from it today

These are our reading, not claims from the sources.

1. Give every home a car side and a foot side. Rewal's parking squares gave nearly 80 per cent of units both. On a group housing layout, try putting parking in small courts at the edge of each cluster instead of a basement under the whole site, and check the result against setback, FAR and height rules early.
2. Design a few types and combine them. Variety at the village comes from combining a small set of unit and cluster types, each with three sizes, not from designing every house. It is also a useful way to structure a housing thesis.
3. Keep streets narrow on purpose. In a hot city, a street only as wide as it needs to be for walking is shade you do not have to build. Test widths against building heights in section before you fix them in plan.
4. Decide who owns and maintains the common ground. The court case we found, which ran from 1993 to 2011, was not about the architecture but about who controls the land between the houses. Write the management of courts, parks and parking into the scheme from day one.

Visiting the Asian Games Village and finding the drawings

The village is a residential colony of private homes, not a museum, and we found no official visitor programme or visitor page. Keep to public streets, and ask before entering a shared court or photographing residents or their homes. Our field checklist for an architecture case study covers what to record on the day.

Where to see Rewal's own material:

• M+, Hong Kong: six items, series CA32/4, including site plans, perspectives and an axonometric (record).
• Centre Pompidou, Paris: the axonometric site plan (AM 2013-2-37) and cluster type drawings, given by Raj Rewal Associates in 2012 (Cluster type G).
• Raj Rewal Associates: the project page, with a photo gallery and the bibliography above.

Looking for an architect who designs group housing or plotted layouts? Find an architect on MOA.

FAQ

Who designed the Asian Games Village in Delhi?

Raj Rewal, of Raj Rewal Associates, for the Delhi Development Authority, after a competition in 1980. It was his first built housing project, according to M+.

When was the Asian Games Village built?

Between 1980 and 1982, for the Asian Games held in New Delhi from 19 November to 4 December 1982. After the Games the homes were sold, to the general public from 1986.

How many houses are in the Asian Games Village?

Rewal's brief was 500 units: 200 town houses and 300 apartments on 35 acres. M+ also gives 700 units, and a 2011 court judgment records that about 853 houses were offered for sale by the DDA. The sources do not explain the difference.

What is the concept of the Asian Games Village?

A low-rise, high-density pattern based on the Indian mohalla: clusters of houses and apartments round courts, linked by narrow shaded pedestrian streets, with cars kept to parking squares off the peripheral roads. Rewal named the streets and courtyards of Jaisalmer as an influence.

Where is the Asian Games Village in Delhi?

In the Siri Fort area of South Delhi. The DDA told the Delhi High Court that the whole complex covers 135 acres, of which 62 acres is the housing zone; the rest is central facilities, practice areas and green buffers.

Sources

• Raj Rewal Associates: Asian Games Village, New Delhi, 1980-1982, project text, bibliography and Patwant Singh quotation (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
• Raj Rewal Associates: Housing projects list (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
• Raj Rewal Associates: About Raj Rewal (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
• Raj Rewal Associates: Extract from essays by critics, including William J R Curtis, 1986 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
• M+, Hong Kong: Drawings, Asian Games Village (1980-1982), New Delhi, India, CA32/4 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
• M+, Hong Kong: Raj Rewal Drawings, CA32 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
• Centre Pompidou: Raj Rewal, Plan masse axonométrique, AM 2013-2-37 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
• Centre Pompidou: Raj Rewal, Cluster type G, AM 2013-2-42 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
• Architexturez, republishing India Today: Architect and the city, Giles Tillotson excerpt from Delhi Darshan and interview by Antara Raghavan, 12 May 2019 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
• World Architecture Community, reporting The Economic Times: Building design must undergo paradigm shift: Raj Rewal, Architect, 19 April 2014 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
• High Court of Delhi, via Indian Kanoon: Asiad Village Society v. Union of India and Ors, W.P.(C) 1657/1993, judgment of 8 February 2011 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
• HUDCO: Signing of Memorandum of Understanding between HUDCO and NBCC (India) Limited, stock exchange filing, 19 September 2025 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
• Olympic Council of Asia: 9th Asian Games, New Delhi 1982 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)