CASE STUDY – LAXMI VILAS PALACE

Aditya Saharia

The Laxmi Vilas Palace, Baroda was built as the town residence of Gaekwar Siyaji Rao – III in 1890. It was designed by Charks Mant. It was conceptualized as a combination of native details with ordinary requirement of a modern palace and arrangement of the room. It is a perfect example of British eclecticism of Indo-Saracenic style. The Indian character of the building is very much superficial. Though a variety of façade treatment is Indian but they have been composed in an alien manner without knowing its symbolism and significance.

Vilas Palace was completed in 1890. It had taken twelve years to build and had cost around £180,000. It was designed by Major Mant, who also designed palaces at Kolhapur and Darbhanga, but completed by Robert Fellowes Chisholm. As Chisholm told the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1896:'It must be kept in view that the native Rajas and chiefs of India are passing through a transitional period; that an old palace like that at Ambur would be about as useless to the present Gaekwar of Baroda as to an ordinary English gentleman.

The planning of the building is totally on western patterns. The various palaces like Amber and Bikaner have only one entry with the public use areas being provided at the entry and the semi public and private areas coming after that. In Laxmi Vilas palace, Baroda separate entries have been provided to the Durbar kings residence and Zenana. It also contains a new breed of rooms like state dining billiards rooms etc. The building which covers an area of 100,000 sq. feet is laid out in a garden like a British country house.

PLAN LAYOUT

Mant's design aimed to 'combine native detail with the ordinary requirements of a modern palace and arrangement of rooms'. Reputed to have been the largest private dwelling built till date and four times the size of Buckingham Palace, this beauteous structure features an Indo Saracenic style of architecture.

Thus Mant stuck more or less to the traditional arrangement of an Indian palace - with three distinct and separate parts for the public rooms, Maharaja's private apartments, and the ladies' quarters respectively but incorporated many new rooms to suit the Baroda family's increasingly western life-style  stately dining rooms, billiard rooms, and great apartments for distinguished European visitors.

Similarly, he attempted to incorporate the best elements of many periods of Indian architecture with some of the functional touches and decorative flourishes of different European schools. The sheer size of the palace (the frontage was over five hundred feet long) made it possible to include all these elements without creating stylistic havoc.

The façade of the building has a great variety of treatment, the Durbar hall on the left having Mughalized domes and chatris, the Maharaja’s residence having the Bharatpur influence and the Zenana having local Gujrat influence with more florid art. The parapet details are Rajput form chittor. The sikharas that have been used are a Hindu influence. The tower is a British influence and was originally conceived as a clock tower. The circular ventilators have their roots in the church architecture. Mughal cusped arches have been used. There is a full of various arches. Mughal chajjas have also been used.

ELEVATION - FACADE

The arch as such gives the feeling of a venelian arch. It is just a modified form of a ventiar arch.

The sikharas that have been used in the façade without knowing its significance in Zenana are totally irrelevant as a Sikhara is never used in secular buildings.

ARCHITECTURAL FEATURES

Mant rejected from the start any idea of a dry symmetrical pattern, and allowed the styles to melt into one another. The exterior of the Maharaja's apartments were dressed up in the garb of Hindu martial architecture, with most of the detail borrowed from the fortress of Bharatpur. The public apartments, however, moved more into a Moghul style, while the ladies' quarters ended in a forest of domes and canopies copied from the Jain temples of Gujarat. Likewise the materials used were a blend of east and west. The basic construction was brick faced with red sandstone from the quarries of Agra, with some blue trap stone from Poona and marble from the quarries of Rajasthan. Workmen from Madras came to apply the ‘chunam’ plaster to many of the interior walls. Then twelve workmen from the Murano Company of Venice spent eighteen months in Baroda laying the floor of Venetian mosaic in the Durbar hall.

Carara marble was imported for the doorways of the hall, the pillars and the ornamental staircase. Mr. Tree from London made the molding and gilding on the walls and ceilings. Period furniture, Old Masters and Venetian chandeliers completed the effect.