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This article looks at Dhammada Collective, a Bhopal-based architecture practice founded in 2021, which redefines sustainability through indigenous design, material reuse, and community collaboration. Rooted in fieldwork and traditional craft, the collective integrates local stone, bamboo, mud plasters, and earthen construction techniques with contemporary innovation to create buildings that are both ecological and socially grounded.
Sustainability in architecture often begins with a stubborn question: how can buildings function more like ecosystems — cyclical, reparable, and made from what was already at hand? Recent years have nudged that question out of theory and into craft, prompting designers to re-learn old techniques (like wattle-and-daub, stone masonry, bamboo weaving) and to invent new ones that honour local ecologies. The result is architecture that thinks in seasons, material lifespans and labour alongside form.
Dhammada Collective, founded in Bhopal in 2021, practices based on the same philosophy. They start every project with fieldwork — cataloguing indigenous houses, mapping local stone and timber, learning from masons and potters, and this becomes the raw material for design decisions. The collective pairs participatory design with cultural preservation: every project is a collaboration with homeowners, craftsmen and local NGOs, not a top-down imposition. This method yields buildings that are both of a place and useful to the people who live there.
Technically, Dhammada’s repertoire blends traditional earthen methods with contemporary problem-solving. They use locally quarried basalt and red sandstone for communal elements, weave bamboo and apply mud plasters for cooling, and explore corbelled/earth techniques for sculptural roofs and domes. These choices lower embodied carbon, reduce transport energy, and revive craft lines that otherwise disappear under concrete’s hegemony. Their documentation of local techniques is as much design brief as it is a preservation project.
Yet their approach to sustainability is practical, sometimes even playful. To tackle everyday waste, the collective created a simple paper-tube chair made from discarded cardboard cores, rope ties, a few 3D-printed parts and basic washers. It’s an object that captures their ethos: materials are used as they are, marks and printer codes left visible, every part easy to repair or replace. The design is open-source, practical, and built on the belief that value can be recovered from what most people throw away.
Dhammada’s projects also show ecological imagination at scale: rural homestays co-created across villages, bird-friendly installations with conservation partners, and low-cost prototype houses that test circular construction ideas. The collective’s work reads as a modest manifesto that underlines that architecture can be deeply local, materially honest, and socially invested. Their work shows us that when design listens to the places its situated within, sustainability becomes a practice, not a slogan.
Dhammada Collective demonstrates how contemporary practice can be remedial: repairing not only buildings but the social and material relationships that make them possible. Their work is a reminder that ecological intelligence is learned in the field — with hands, stories and a willingness to build differently.
Follow Dhammada Collective here.
