About Vanamu

As students of the vernacular for more than a decade, we, Varun Thautam and Namrata Toraskar have been traveling and learning from artisans while living and working in villages from around the world. We have built a humble studio space called “Vanamu” (forest in Telugu) in Bangalore to connect with like-minded enthusiasts. We conduct hands-on workshops and enable cross-learning for the revival of traditional ideas in the contemporary context, be it in-dwelling or the building of it. 

In every workshop, there is an open sharing of the mistakes each one has made and how they have learned. This is valuable because mistakes are very expensive in the process of building. When one can learn from each other’s mistakes, the cost of experimentation goes down, and the learning becomes multi-layered.

For us, it’s a great way to collate information about processes from diverse parts of the country. This enables us to see the parallels and the contrasts in dwelling patterns, and find meaning in the build processes and systems.  Our open-door studio has become that kind of a place where participants can come back and try out their experiments and continue their learning because we have the space, guidance, materials, and tools. We are furthering vernacular knowledge as a collective experience, just the way it has always been. And as we grow as an open sharing community, natural building and dwelling shall become easier to achieve, accessible, and cost-effective, enabling more people to adopt. 

We are growing as a community where resources are openly shared, be it materials and tools or the people who are being trained to use them. Artisans who work with natural materials and processes are often invited to the studio and are encouraged to teach and share their experiences. In this process, these craftspeople are slowly securing the continuity of their livelihoods while building for the community. We believe that only by investing in them can we build and live in better dwellings. After all, experience is the most valuable resource in our field of work.

To create a forest, we first start with seeds. This beautiful world is rich with cultural knowledge about the mind, body and how we interact with the world around us. Generations have passed on the local wisdom of building and living, like heirloom seeds from one generation to another. We have set out to provide a platform to unearth the seeds of wisdom and transfer them so that we can sow new seeds to build a forest.