Guidelines for the repair of traditional houses in the foothills and upper mountains of Jammu

Abstract

Traditional buildings display features from which certain deductions may be made throughout the design process, from the whole to the details or from the details to the whole. When traditional architecture is referred to, houses, which are the most commonly used buildings and which make up the living spaces of the people come to mind. A defining feature of indigenous rural houses around the world is that they are nonengineered structures, product of the traditional knowledge systems. These indigenous and traditional construction practices evolved in the context of local culture, environmental constraints and empirical knowledge. Over several centuries of human settlement in the Himalayas, indigenous housing throughout the region has a variety of adaptations and reinforcements. The landscape and topography of the region of Jammu, J&K, in the western Himalayas has resulted in settlement, house forms and construction techniques that are of an isolated kind. A particular way of life and building develops from this isolation and maximizes the use of local resources. Along with various benefits of traditional construction practices and styles, traditional houses have some crucial issues and concerns like, need for regular maintenance, low strength of materials and/or building components, unavailability of skilled craftsmen who can work with traditional materials, shortage of traditional materials. Therefore, the repair of these buildings becomes an immensely difficult job. The focus of the thesis is to identify the traditional construction systems in the region in an effort to understand and compare the different construction techniques used in the region in terms of available local materials and to give repair guidelines for the same. The process involves systematic research and analysis to prepare a database of the traditional construction systems found in Jammu region which further helps in developing region based guidelines for the repair of the traditional houses of Jammu.