Build free concept is a way of building with zero investment. It was initiated by Manu Goplan, the principal architect of Sacred Groves trying to address the grass root level problems that are causing housing crisis. The way we build today has become an industrialized and complex process that is delegated and paid with hefty loans that take up a lifetime to be repaid! A house has become a mundane product that is looked at as a measure of social status rather than being a facility that provides for a meaningful and comfortable place where the needs of the spirit and the care for progress would get precedence.
The way we want to build is by bringing the community aspect not just in design but into the process of construction. To make the construction process a warm and hearty gesture… a celebration! The concept sounds very utopian but it is rather practiced all around the rural parts of our world. It seldom goes unnoticed because it happens very naturally in the village communities.Requirement of a shelter for a new family that arrives to the village or a newly wedded couple of the village is addressed to very spontaneously by the intimately connected way of life.It is so simple that it sounds unreal!
It all starts with placing a simple request in front of the village head, a small informal announcement and a small initiation ceremony and the construction is started! Few experienced lot gather and come up with the design that the family loves and the rest of the fellow villagers offer their masonry skills, wood work skills or artistic skills. The whole community pools in their free time after the field work likea family that comes together and celebrates a get together! The creative ones start singing songs, play the drums, some play flute and passing the bricks or ramming the earth becomes become a part of the rhythm and the construction process becomes music! The careful, elegant hands of the ladies do the beautification and painting of the house and the men take care of building the walls, passing heavy materials and laying the roof. All the investment that goes into the house is an unfortunate chicken that is sacrificed in the name of god and some tea and biscuits to refresh the mood. And voila!alovely, beautiful house is ready!
