Wall House Case Study: Plan, Vaults and Materials (Anupama Kundoo)

The Wall House is Anupama Kundoo's own house in Auroville, near Puducherry, built between 1997 and 2000. It is a long, narrow brick house of two storeys, roofed with vaults made of handmade terracotta tubes and floored with slabs that use clay pots in place of some of the concrete. Kundoo used it as a test bed for low-energy materials, and in 2012 a team that included masons from the original job rebuilt part of it at full size inside the Venice Architecture Biennale. This case study covers the brief, site, plan, structure, materials, climate, reception and what Indian designers can take from it.

Wall House: the facts

Architect: Anupama Kundoo. Design team as credited by Metalocus: Anupama Kundoo, Vinayagam and Sonali Phadnis. Structural engineer: Dr Ambalavanan. Integrated water management: Harald Kraft and Aurofilio Schiavina, Kraft Associates.

Client: Kundoo describes it as the architect's own residence; the Metalocus credits list the client as Auroville Housing Service.

Location: Auromodele, outside the planned city limits of Auroville, Tamil Nadu. Auroville is about 10 km north of Puducherry and about 150 km south of Chennai.

Designed and built: 1997 to 2000 on the architect's own site and in the Metalocus credits. Dezeen, ArchDaily and the 2012 Biennale curator's note give 2000, the year it was finished.

Type and size: private house, two storeys. No floor or site area is given in any source we read.

Status: a private home, not open to visitors. A partial 1:1 rebuild stood in the Arsenale at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012 as a temporary exhibit.

The house is private, so students will mostly work from published material; this post links to it. Our guide on how to document a building for a case study covers the rest.

The brief: an architect's house as a laboratory

Kundoo graduated from Sir J.J. College of Architecture in Mumbai in 1989 and started her practice in Auroville a year later, according to the biography with her 2014 essay in Tekton. Dezeen's 2020 survey of her work calls the Wall House the second house she built for herself, after an earlier hut at Petite Ferme, and says it became a prototype for many of her later projects.

That second role shaped the brief. The project page on Kundoo's own site says the house was planned to hold everyday needs compactly while expanding to take guests, and that it tested spatial and technical ideas meant to inform other projects. The same text describes "hybrid" construction: old local materials used in new ways, built by people with lower skills working with a few skilled craftsmen, alongside engineered systems. The client wanted a home; the architect wanted proof that a set of low-energy methods worked before using them for others.

Where is the Wall House in Auroville? Site and context

Auroville was inaugurated on 28 February 1968, and its own "Auroville in Brief" page places it mostly in Tamil Nadu, with some parts in Puducherry, about 10 km north of Puducherry town. The Wall House is not in the planned city area. Kundoo's site and the Metalocus feature on the house both place it in Auromodele, which they describe as an area designated for research and experimentation. Metalocus gives the address as Petite Ferme, Auroville 605101, and puts the area about 5 km from the coast.

This is the warm, humid Coromandel coast, with a monsoon heavy enough that Kundoo's essay mentions designing the windows to deal with it. Our guide to building materials for coastal Tamil Nadu covers the same conditions for a house you might build today.

Concept: build the research into the house

Kundoo's own account of the house, in her Tekton essay (2014), gives three ideas. Spatially, it redefined borders and in-between spaces in response to climate and contemporary life. Technically, it used traditional local materials in new ways, given what she calls the global resource crunch and rapid urbanisation. And the landscape was treated as part of the architecture, worked with the ground levels so that moving from inside to outside felt like one experience.

She also calls it "the culmination" of ongoing research into low-impact building. Read it that way: almost every element is a material trial.

None of the sources we read explains the name. Kundoo's essay refers to the house's "long wall façade", and the plan is a single long line of brickwork, which is the most likely reading; treat it as ours, not hers.

Wall House Auroville plan: one narrow vaulted spine

The published project description, carried by urbanNext and Metalocus, describes a linear plan oriented to the southeast "for optimum air circulation". At its core the house is a narrow vaulted space about 2.2 m wide that holds the activities of the house in a row. (Metalocus says 2.2 m wide; urbanNext's copy of the same text says "2.2m-long", clearly a slip.)

The two long edges behave differently:

• Northeast: each activity can spill out into alcoves and projections on this side.

• Southwest: the house extends under a 4 m overhang of the main vaulted roof, open to the landscape. The description says this facade is a transparent timber structure with mesh, giving a full view of the sunset, and that here the line between inside and outside dissolves.

The New York Times review of the 2012 Biennale, as reproduced by Parsons School of Constructed Environments, calls it her "two-story Wall House". Kundoo's essay, comparing the house with the Venice hall it was rebuilt in, lists a long plan, linear circulation and a double-height central space with mezzanines on either side as features the two shared.

The plan idea in one picture: a single 2.2 m vaulted spine, alcoves on the northeast, a 4 m overhang on the southwest. Schematic, not to scale; MOA diagram from published descriptions. Diagram: MOA

Our diagram shows zoning only. For the real plan, elevation and section, see the drawings credited to Anupama Kundoo on the urbanNext project page and the Metalocus feature, which publish them alongside photographs by Javier Callejas.

Wall House section and structure: four clay systems

The structure is where the house earns its place in case-study lists. The project description names four systems, each using fired clay to do work that concrete and steel usually do:

1. Catenary vaults of hollow clay tubes. The description says these were used "for climatic insulation" and to reduce the unnecessary use of steel in pucca roofs. Kundoo's essay describes the central roof vault as self-supporting, made of interlocked, handmade terracotta tubes arranged along a catenary curve. A catenary is the curve of a hanging chain; turned upside down as a vault, it works almost entirely in compression.

2. Brick vaults on the ground floor. Metalocus and urbanNext say the ground-floor vaults use achakal bricks structurally.

3. A filler slab for the intermediate floor. Terracotta pots were used as fillers "to increase the effective depth of concrete" while reducing the volume of concrete and steel in the slab.

4. A jack-arch terrace over the guest room. The flat roof there was built from hollow, burnt-clay, extruded trapezoidal modules on partly precast beams, made locally.

The four clay-based roof and floor systems the project descriptions name, drawn as generic principles, not the house's own details. MOA diagram from published descriptions. Diagram: MOA

No source we read publishes spans, vault rises, tube sizes or slab depths, so we have not put numbers on the diagram. Dr Ambalavanan is credited as structural engineer; the sources do not describe his calculations.

Wall House materials: achakal brick, lime and terracotta

The walls are exposed brick in local achakal bricks of traditional proportions, 18 × 10 × 2.5 cm, set in lime mortar with raked joints. Adding 10% cement to the lime mortar gave it early setting strength. The walls are 30, 20 or 10 cm thick and use special bonds, since a brick of these proportions does not follow the usual 1:2 ratio (all from the project description on urbanNext). Dezeen notes that achakal bricks take less energy to produce than factory-made bricks. In her essay Kundoo compares them with old Roman bricks in proportion and says the house involved intense research on brick.

The terracotta came from local hands. Dezeen says Kundoo developed the vaulted terracotta roofing systems drawing on the skills of Auroville's potters, and her essay credits the ceramist Ray Meeker with supervising the reproduction of these materials in Tamil Nadu for the Venice rebuild. The same essay lists stabilised rammed earth walls among the original elements of the house. For how rammed earth and compressed earth blocks are used in Indian houses today, see our mud and earth houses guide.

Light, climate and services

The climate strategy is simple and stated plainly in the description:

• Air: the double-height volume "enhances the air stack movement and increases the draft of ventilation", and the narrow, one-room-deep plan lets air move across it.

• Sun: the large southwest overhang keeps direct sun and glare off the cool interiors on the side that takes the afternoon heat.

• Rain: Kundoo writes that the house "translated Venetian blinds in glass" to deal with the monsoon while still letting air through.

• Roof insulation: the hollow cores of the clay tubes, as above.

• Energy: urbanNext says the reduced energy needs are met entirely by solar photovoltaics, with a solar water heater and a solar pump.

We found no published measurements of indoor temperature, energy use or water use for the house. The comfort claims above are the design team's, not monitored results. Our guide to roofing materials by climate covers clay and filler-slab roofs for other parts of India.

The 2012 Venice Biennale rebuild: Wall House One to One

David Chipperfield directed the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012 under the theme "Common Ground". Kundoo proposed a full-scale facsimile of the Wall House inside the Corderie, the old rope factory of the Arsenale, and writes that Chipperfield described the idea as "fascinating and spectacular". The exhibit was titled "Feel the Ground. Wall House: One to One" (Kundoo's project page; Dezeen, 30 August 2012). ArchDaily and the NYT review both describe it as a rebuild of part of the house, not the whole.

Kundoo's essay gives the numbers:

• built in 8 weeks, inside a heritage structure with low load-bearing limits, using timber spreaders to spread the weight on the floor

• 6 Tamil craftsmen, none of whom had passports before; 3 had worked on the original house

• 20 students and staff from the University of Queensland and 10 students of IUAV Venice

• material shipped from Tamil Nadu in three containers, including boulders and red earth

The rebuild was left partly unfinished on purpose, Kundoo writes, to show how it was made, with the timber frame that held up the brickwork visible along the long wall. It also built one idea the original never did: a vault of recycled wine bottles, with the base of each bottle cut so the neck of the next could slot in. Dezeen reported terracotta pots in the ceilings of both storeys, and the University of Queensland's announcement (5 June 2012) mentions interlocking terracotta tubes, filler slabs and recycled materials.

One small inconsistency: the essay's text says three craftsmen had worked on the original "16 years ago", while a caption in the same essay says the team re-enacted the construction "after 13 years". The first fits a start around 1996, the second the 2000 completion.

Reception: what critics and the curator said

The curator's note for the exhibit, reprinted in Kundoo's essay, called her work "a lyrical modernism at ease with the demands of its climate". The New York Times review of the Biennale (12 September 2012), as quoted by Parsons, called the rebuild "a welcome mirage in the middle of the Arsenale". In an interview with Justine Harvey for Architecture New Zealand (republished by ArchitectureAU in April 2013), Kundoo says the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both responded generously.

We found no published account of problems with the original house, such as leaks, cracks in the vaults or upkeep of the lime work, and none of later alterations. That does not mean there were none; no source we could read records them. Kundoo is now based in Berlin, Dezeen reported in 2020; who lives in the house now is not stated in any source we read.

What designers in India can take from the Wall House

These are our reading, not claims made by the architect.

1. Test on your own project first. Kundoo tried tube vaults, filler slabs and clay jack arches on a house where she carried the risk, then used them for others. A small studio can do the same with a garden room or a site office.

2. Put clay where concrete does no work. Pot fillers and hollow clay modules sit in the part of a slab that adds weight but little strength. In any town with a working kiln or potters, these are buildable now; have a structural engineer design them, as the Wall House did.

3. Plan one room deep and shade the hot side. A 2.2 m spine with a 4 m overhang to the southwest is an extreme version of a simple rule for the warm, humid coast: thin plans for cross ventilation, deep shade where the afternoon sun lands, height where warm air can rise.

4. Design for the hands you have. The Venice rebuild needed three of the original masons to reproduce the house. Knowledge of achakal brickwork and tube vaults sits with craftspeople; detail so that a few skilled hands can lead many less skilled ones, and keep them on the team.

Visiting the Wall House

The Wall House is a private home and is not open to visitors. Please do not try to enter private houses or residential areas in Auroville uninvited. For Auroville in general, the official "Visit and Stay" page points first-time visitors to the Visitors Centre as the place to start. To study the house, use the published drawings and photographs linked above, and Kundoo's own essay, which is free to read in Tekton.

Planning a low-energy house of your own? Find an architect on MOA.

FAQ

Who designed the Wall House in Auroville?

Anupama Kundoo designed it as her own house. Metalocus credits a design team of Anupama Kundoo, Vinayagam and Sonali Phadnis, with Dr Ambalavanan as structural engineer and Kraft Associates (Harald Kraft and Aurofilio Schiavina) for integrated water management.

When was the Wall House built?

Kundoo's own site and Metalocus give 1997 to 2000. Most press, and the 2012 Biennale curator's note, give 2000, the year it was completed.

Where is the Wall House located?

In Auromodele, outside the planned city limits of Auroville, Tamil Nadu, about 10 km north of Puducherry. It is a private home.

What materials were used in the Wall House?

Thin handmade achakal bricks (18 × 10 × 2.5 cm) in lime mortar, catenary vaults of hollow terracotta tubes, a filler slab with terracotta pots, a jack-arch roof of hollow clay modules on partly precast beams, stabilised rammed earth walls, and a timber and mesh facade to the southwest.

What was the Wall House at the Venice Biennale?

"Wall House: One to One" was a full-scale rebuild of part of the house in the Arsenale at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, built in 8 weeks by 6 Tamil craftsmen with students and staff from the University of Queensland and IUAV Venice.

Sources

• Anupama Kundoo: Wall House (accessed 4 Nov 2026)

• Anupama Kundoo: Wall House One to One (accessed 4 Nov 2026)

• Tekton, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (September 2014), pp. 96 to 105: Anupama Kundoo, "Exhibiting Architecture in Full-Scale: Wall House, One to One at the 13th Architecture Biennale, Venice 2012" (accessed 4 Nov 2026)

• Tekton: Abstract and author note, Anupama Kundoo (accessed 4 Nov 2026)

• Metalocus: Wall House by Anupama Kundoo (project feature and credits), 19 August 2021 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)

• urbanNext: Wall House (accessed 4 Nov 2026)

• Dezeen: Ten key projects by Indian architect Anupama Kundoo, Amy Frearson, 20 November 2020 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)

• Dezeen: Wall House by Anupama Kundoo at Venice Architecture Biennale 2012, Amy Frearson, 30 August 2012 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)

• ArchDaily: Venice Biennale 2012: Wall House / Anupama Kundoo, University of Queensland, 30 July 2012 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)

• ArchitectureAU: Anupama Kundoo: Wall to wall, Justine Harvey, 29 April 2013 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)

• The University of Queensland: news release on UQ Architecture at the 2012 Venice Biennale, 5 June 2012 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)

• Parsons School of Constructed Environments: news item on Anupama Kundoo's Wall House, quoting the New York Times review of the Biennale, 12 September 2012 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)

• Auroville: Auroville in Brief

• Auroville: Visit and Stay