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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Lounge Loves | Tara Books Book Building
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Lounge Loves | Tara Books Book Building

Lounge Loves | Tara Books Book Building

The gallery: Book art is on display. Nathan G/MintPremium

The gallery: Book art is on display. Nathan G/Mint

Pop-up books

In the alley behind a seventh century Shiva temple in south Chennai, amid a cacophonous stream of cycles, cars, trucks and bullock carts squeezing past banana vendors and jasmine garland sellers, Tara Books has culled its own plot.

The gallery: Book art is on display. Nathan G/Mint

The Tara Books Book Building—a three-storeyed, ecologically friendly architectural masterpiece inaugurated on 25 February—is a labour of love of Tara Books’ founder Gita Wolf and her team, which outgrew several rented office spaces, pining for a dedicated display for their books and artist sketches.

“It was getting harder to display our books in book stores, and so when we were on the lookout for our own office space, we planned to make it multifunctional," says 55-year-old Wolf, a former academic who used to teach comparative literature at the University of Erlangen in Germany. Wolf launched Tara Books in 1994.

The airy, sunlit, minimalist building which will soon be 80% solar-powered currently houses a book store and a gallery of its book art. Work is on on the ground floor to create a children’s reading nook and a small refreshments area, where visitors can make their own coffee or tea. These are expected to be completed by the end of the month.

The non-committal nature of the ground-floor space, which can play numerous roles for people to converge, is similar to the peepul tree in a village, which becomes the focal point for meetings and conversations.

The Book Building’s gallery area doesn’t have the conventional heavy frames. The artwork of tribal artists, who have illustrated the publisher’s books, dangle from clips on a wire line.

Currently, two walls of a pillar on the ground-floor public space host bright-coloured murals by patua artists from West Bengal, interpreting the story of the Italian wooden puppet Pinocchio and that of African-American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. The remaining two walls of the four-sided pillar are a staid white, an invitation for visiting artists to leave their mark.

“Tara Books works with artists and art forms, and so the building itself will be an evolving canvass," says Mahesh Radhakrishnan, the principal architect of the Book Building. “New work will be laid on top of old work, and each space will take a different meaning at a different time."

The pièce de résistance, revealed only when one steps away from the wall display of Tara Books into the open gallery, is Gond artist Bhajju Shyam’s approximately 25x15ft tree. The grey-coloured tree winding up to the first floor, and dotted with imaginary birds, insects and animals in yellow, green, red and blue, is simply spectacular.

Shyam, who authored Tara Books’ The London Jungle Book (2005)—a pictorial travelogue of the artist’s first trip to a Western metropolis—took seven days to finish the mural.

While wandering through the Book Building, it is easy to forget the absence of air conditioning—generally a must in the blistering Chennai summer. But any memory of the rising mercury levels outside is forgotten amid the cross-currents of the sea breeze flowing through the doors, coupled with the coolness of the floor. So slip off your shoes and walk in—visitors are expected to remove their footwear before entering.

Tara Books Book Building, Plot No. 9, CGE Colony, Kuppam Beach Road, Thiruvanmiyur, Chennai. Open from 10am-7.30pm (Sundays closed).

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Published: 13 Apr 2012, 05:54 PM IST
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