What a dome tells us about the interwar economy

The entrance of the BBMP building, featuring a clock tower.

The entrance of the BBMP building, featuring a clock tower.

Ninety years ago, on March 15, Krishnaraja Wadiyar, the Maharaja of Mysore, laid the foundation stone for a new building to house the City Municipal Offices in Bengaluru. The building was completed and was inaugurated three years later by S P Rajagopalachari, then the Dewan in charge. This building, on J C Road, is what we now call the Corporation building.

Calling Bengaluru as a ‘great city’, the Maharaja, in his speech, spoke about the long wait for municipal offices. He was referring to the fact that the city government had made plans for municipal offices as far back as 1915.

The site then chosen for the offices was between the Bangalore Fort and Victoria Hospital. Bombay-based E W Fritchley, who was already working on projects elsewhere in the state, was commissioned to design the building.

Fritchley prepared plans and drawings, and everything seemed to be moving along smoothly. If a funds crunch had not scuttled the idea, we would have had the Corporation building near the KR Market.

When the project to build new municipal offices was revived in the early 1930s, the world and the kingdom of Mysore along with it was once again in an economic slump. The Maharaja’s speech in 1933 alluded to this too when he noted that despite the depression, there had been “no abatement in the expansion of the city.” However, as he said, the new buildings that had come up were not only necessary, they had also “added to the beauty of the city.”

It fell to S H Lakshminarasappa, Consulting Architect to the Government of Mysore, to draw up suitable plans for the new building. At the time, he was also working on the Town Hall and Vani Vilas Hospital. For the former, Lakshminarasappa adopted the neoclassical style that was almost obligatory for town halls around the country. For the Corporation building though, like for the Vani Vilas Hospital, he came up with a design that melded the vernacular with the European classical. The contractor for the Corporation project was S Venkatappa and the building was built at a cost of Rs 1.5 lakh.

As correspondence from the time shows, Lakshminarasappa was under considerable pressure to prune the construction costs. Perhaps this was why the original tender excluded the construction of domes.

Architectural historian Vandana Baweja draws our attention to precisely this feature. In her paper titled Messy Modernisms, Baweja compares the Silver Jubilee clock tower in Mysore, built in 1927, with the Corporation building’s clock tower.

The former has an ornamental parapet, stone brackets, mouldings, pilasters and a dome that resembles a Rajasthani chhatri. On the other hand, the Corporation building’s clock tower and dome lacks most of these ornamental flourishes. As Baweja points out, it has only a plain, unadorned flat RCC slab serving as a chajja at the base of the dome.

Walking through the two-storeyed stone building today, one cannot but help appreciate how despite working within a constrained budget Lakshminarasappa designed something both functional and elegant. The entrance is through a large stone porch with simple, tapering square pillars. Rooms are arranged around a square courtyard. The greenery in the quadrangle with the semicircular arcades on the ground floor opening out onto it reminded me of medieval cloisters.

The rectangular openings on the first floor have been closed with reflective glass. This has the advantage of keeping out the sun’s glare but the disadvantage of looking rather garish from the outside.

The building has a diversity of domes. Apart from the dome on the clock tower, there are two small, square domes flanking the entrance. Each corner of the building has a square tower topped with a small round dome. Finally, the front corridors on both sides lead to two large circular rooms which are both topped with prominent, stepped domes.

In his survey of buildings of architectural and historical interest in Bengaluru, the late professor of architecture K N Iengar highlighted how the building’s four different types of domes, the square clock tower and the circular rooms all come together to make it “an interesting composition.”

(Meera Iyer is the author of ‘Discovering Bengaluru’ and the Convenor of INTACH Bengaluru Chapter.)