Ladakh Dental Clinic: The Local-Imported Modulars Negotiating Contradictory Material Practices in Remote Cities

This paper outlines the design and construction of the Ladakh Dental Clinic project as a case study for hybrid local imported material building practices. Referencing local vernacular types as well as comparable rapid assembly systems deployed in India and beyond for other development projects, the paper discusses opportunities and shortcomings of such building strategies. In admirably positivistic modernist spirit, modular construction is often praised as the harbinger or exporter of progress and, at times, architectural advancement. Regularly choking on its own ambitions, successful modular construction largely remains an architectural fantasy as it often struggles to overcome its totalitarian spatial tendencies and inherent inflexibility. Compared to local techniques and perhaps contradictory to its intent, modular construction has a tendency to operate top-down instead of bottom-up. The Ladakh Dental Clinic project can be characterized as a result of its contradictory constraints and multi-client requirements. Necessitating both local construction and imported modular systems due to financial limitations, sponsorship opportunities, future expandability, and a tight schedule, the clinic emerges as a strange hybrid oscillating between local (de-facto imported) Indian cast-in-place concrete construction and (imported) German prefabrication.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Intl.2018.25

Volume Editors
Ángela García de Paredes, Iñaqui Carnicero & Julio Salcedo-Fernandez

ISBN
978-1-944214-18-0