Township for Jindal Steel at Angul Odisha

Conceived as a complete residential township for Jindal Steel & Power's industrial community at Angul, the project was an exercise in designing a piece of city from the ground up: its landscape and infrastructure, its institutions and public spaces, and the varied places in which people would live. S. Ghosh & Associates developed the masterplan, street and drainage networks, landscape structure and public realm, while also designing most of the principal building types within the township. These included residential walk-up apartments, villas, hostels, the O.P. Jindal School, a hotel, sports complex, temple complex and associated community and recreational buildings, together with parks, gardens and neighbourhood open spaces. This breadth of involvement allowed architecture, infrastructure and landscape to be conceived as parts of a single inhabited environment rather than as a collection of independent projects. Housing of different densities and types is distributed alongside education, recreation, hospitality, worship and community facilities, connected through a hierarchy of avenues, neighbourhood streets and landscaped pedestrian routes. The road network itself forms an important part of the public realm. Broad tree-lined avenues establish the larger structure of the township, while planted verges, shaded pedestrian edges, gardens and smaller streets give individual neighbourhoods a more intimate scale. Buildings are positioned within this landscape rather than simply occupying plots within a road grid. The architecture consequently operates as a family rather than through a single monumental language. The school, hotel, sports complex, hostels, apartment buildings, individual villas and temple complex respond to very different programmes and scales, but share an approach to climate, shade, landscape and robust construction appropriate to a large residential township. Over time, the landscape has become one of the project's defining architectural elements. Rows of mature palms mark the avenues; existing and planted trees create deep shade around buildings; gardens and parks have grown into the spaces originally established by the masterplan. Architecture and landscape increasingly recede into one another. Jindal Township is therefore not a single architectural project, but the design of an entire lived environment: from drainage and streets to parks and public institutions; from the individual house to the school, hotel, sports complex and temple; from the scale of a room to the scale of a town.