At Sunder Nursery in Delhi, Ecological Art, Conservation Science and Politics of Belonging, Meet Inside the Aranyani Pavilion

Nestled within Delhi's Sunder Nursery, where Mughal-era monuments stand sentinel amongst meticulously restored gardens, the Aranyani Pavilion emerges as something far more radical than contemporary public art. This is architecture as activism, a 200-square-metre structure that transforms colonial ecological violence into a meditation on regeneration. Created by Tara Lal's Aranyani Earth in collaboration with T__M Architects, the pavilion operates as what Lal calls a 'contemporary sacred grove', drawing from India's ancient tradition of forest sanctuaries whilst addressing urgent questions about nativity, invasion, and belonging.

The choice of Sunder Nursery as a site feels deliberate and poetic. As Lal explains to us, 'This is one of the really important green centres of Delhi, and there is something really wonderful about having what we are talking about here, nature and architecture, in a place that brings together nature and architecture anyway. Because I am from Delhi, I wanted this to be in a place from my homeland.' The nursery itself, with its layers of horticultural history and architectural heritage, becomes the perfect context for exploring what architect Mario Serrano Puche describes as an 'ideal canvas for our craft.'

From Invader to Redemption of Lantana Camara

The pavilion's conceptual power lies in its material choices. The outer shell is constructed entirely from lantana camara, the invasive species that now suffocates 13 million hectares across India, a living legacy of British and Portuguese colonialism. Lal is forthright about this provocation, 'The whole reason we built this out of lantana is that I want to start a conversation about what is native and what is invasive and what do we actually mean by invasive species. Invasives are what choke our natural ecology, and natives are what belong on the land.'

But the pavilion refuses simplistic binaries. Above the lantana structure, the roof blooms with native species, jasmine, neem, tulsi, and bakul, alongside naturalised plants like tomatoes and chillies that, whilst not indigenous, have become integral to India's cultural and nutritional landscape. 'When you look around here, do we know which one is actually from here or not? We don't know, because now it's all become part of our landscape. We wanted to have a little awareness: when you look into your garden or you look into the city, where has something come from?' Lal's question extends beyond botany into the political realm of belonging itself.

Form Following Philosophy

For T__M Architects, the Colombian and Cypriot practice chosen precisely for their ability to navigate cultural translation, the project represented a rare convergence of concept and execution. Tanil Raif reflects on the collaborative process, 'Our goal was to really understand the local context and culture, the material culture of the local context. It was truly a collaboration of minds when it came to big decisions like using the lantana and the bamboo. Obviously, there's a lot of knowledge that we took away from India and applied to this pavilion.'

The architectural language speaks of journeys and thresholds. The pavilion guides visitors through a deliberate spatial sequence into what Raif describes as a 'sacred centre', echoing the processional quality of traditional sacred groves. The structure itself, with its bamboo framework, jute elements, and mild steel base, represents what the architects call 'lifting up the landscape,' a gesture that elevates indigenous species whilst literally building upon the remnants of colonial botanical intervention. As Serrano Puche notes, 'The idea that the pavilion is almost like peeling off from the ground and then lifting it up and elevating the natural species that are local to this area' creates a powerful visual metaphor for regeneration.

The Politics of Belonging

Perhaps the pavilion's most provocative aspect is how it extends ecological questions into the realm of human migration and identity. When asked if the ideas of native and invasive flow beyond nature into society, Lal's response is unflinching, 'Today you can see there's such a debate on who belongs to a land and who doesn't. That's a question to ask: who belongs to a land and who doesn't? Where did this start from? If you look at human history, eventually, how far back do we go? We all came from Africa. But even then, we moved over millennia to different places, and everybody wants to claim a land. We don't really know who belongs to where.'

This philosophical expansion transforms the pavilion from environmental art into something closer to political commentary. The architects acknowledge this dimension, with Raif observing how the project exemplifies a broader architectural turn, 'Now we're in the era of post-post-modernism in architecture, where we're realising some of these materials are not good for the environment, that we're realising the earth comes with its own built-in technologies. Our duty as architects now is to take this past knowledge and combine it with current technological achievements.'

The Aranyani Pavilion stands not as a finished statement but as an ongoing proposition, that repair is possible, that invasions can be transformed, that the knowledge we need exists in the roots of our past. As visitors walk through its lantana-clad passages into the canopy of indigenous species above, they're invited to reconsider their own relationship to place, belonging, and the political ecologies we inherit. 

In Sunder Nursery's juxtaposition of the natural and the man-made, colonial and contemporary, the pavilion asks us to imagine what restoration might look like when it refuses to separate ecological repair from social and philosophical reckoning.