Aranyani's pavilion brings together architecture, conservation and design

A spiral structure comes into view in the middle of Sunder Nursery. The chaos of the traffic leading up to this heritage neighbourhood in Delhi gets left behind as you approach the pavilion. Sacred Nature, designed to invoke the essence of ancient sacred groves, lies at the intersection of architecture and conservation. A canopy of indigenous plants such as jasmine, neem, tulsi and bakul rests on a textured outer shell of repurposed lantana wood. Roughly covering a bounding box area of 600 sq. metres, with an inner built area of around 250 sq. metres, Sacred Nature is the inaugural pavilion by Aranyani, a conservation and creative arts initiative by environmental conservationist Tara Lal. It has been conceptualised in collaboration with T__M.space, an international architectural studio led by Tanil Raif and Mario Serrano Puche, known for creating lightweight structures led by an ecological ethos.

For Lal, Sacred Nature is an attempt to bridge the gap between the urban and natural worlds. In her view, city life trains us to think of forests as destinations and not as relationships. By placing this forest-like intervention in the heart of the city, she is trying to reverse that notion. “The pavilion isn’t just a representation of nature or a didactic display about ecology. It’s a living, sensory environment. You step out of the city’s linear pace into a slower, cyclical one,” she adds.

The use of lantana in the structure works both on a material and a metaphorical level. An aggressive invasive species, the plant was introduced by the British to add aesthetic value to the landscape. However, this mindless intervention didn’t take into account the complexities of the ecology that the plant was made to enter. Lantana spread rapidly across forests and grasslands, choking out native species and altering soil chemistry. Today it has emerged as a persistent ecological problem, requiring effort and labour to remove it. Its lingering presence is also a stark reminder of the violence that the colonial powers wrought on the land.

“Rather than extracting fresh resources to build the pavilion, we chose to work with lantana that has already been cleared. In that sense, the structure is made from the by-products of ecological damage. This approach to conservation is about repair and reuse rather than extraction,” says Lal. “By transforming lantana into something contemplative and sacred, the pavilion doesn’t erase that history. It asks us to sit with it.”

In ancient times, forests were sites of meditation, home to gurukuls, and spaces for exploration of the self and knowledge. Aranyani tries to echo this through a programming of talks and its experiential architecture. The pavilion has been designed to influence the way people move and pause, with its spiral form gradually altering orientation and pace. “At the centre sits a shrine that functions as a spatial anchor, a place where movement slows and attention gathers. This pause is intentional. It creates a moment of inward focus before conversation begins. The public programme also extends this approach. Talks are shaped as conversations rather than lectures, bringing together artists, conservationists, historians, and architects whose work engages with land and culture,” says Lal. Some of the programming includes lectures by environmental activist Vandana Shiva on biodiversity and food sovereignty, historian Sathnam Sanghera, whose work examines the legacies of empire, and architects like Martand Khosla and Shonan Purie Trehan, whose practices lies at the intersection of ecology and design.

Sacred Nature is modular by design, meant to be dismantled and reassembled, allowing it to move across landscapes. After Sunder Nursery, the pavilion will move to Rajkumari Ratnavati Girls’ School in Jaisalmer, where it will be adapted to an educational landscape. There, it will function as a learning space for students and support the training of young naturalists. “In this way, Aranyani is an evolving ecosystem, one that adapts and gives back while remaining responsive to climate, context, and community,” adds Lal.