Reinterpreting Channapatna: Modernity Meets Heritage at Shiv Sagar

At Shiv Sagar, lighting becomes a meeting point between regional craft and contemporary digital fabrication. The project explores how a deeply rooted Indian craft tradition can be reinterpreted through technology without losing the character, tactility, and visual language that make it distinctive.

The starting point was Channapatna craft, Karnataka’s celebrated tradition of lacquered, turned wooden objects. Known for its smooth geometric forms, vibrant colours, and tactile finishes, Channapatna has a visual vocabulary that is instantly recognisable. Rather than reproducing these forms literally, the lighting design extracts their essential qualities—stacking, turning, proportion, colour, and materiality—and translates them into a contemporary architectural language.

From Toy-Making to Architectural Scale

Traditionally associated with toys and small-scale objects, Channapatna relies on the precision of the lathe and the skill of the artisan. For Shiv Sagar, these familiar forms were enlarged and reconfigured into a family of architectural lighting elements.

Turned wooden components form the visual anchors of the fixtures, finished in deep indigo, crimson, natural wood, and other characteristic lacquer tones. These are paired with custom 3D-printed elements that create the larger structural bodies of the lights.

The result is neither purely handcrafted nor purely digitally fabricated. Instead, the two processes are deliberately interwoven.

Craft Meets Additive Manufacturing

3D printing allowed the design to move beyond the limitations of conventional manufacturing while retaining the visual language of the craft. Complex structural elements could be produced with controlled geometry, repeatability, and relatively low tooling requirements.

The printed components were developed to work alongside hand-turned wooden pieces, creating a hybrid system in which each material performs a different role. The wood provides warmth, tactility, and a direct connection to the craft tradition, while additive manufacturing allows the fixtures to achieve scale, consistency, and forms that would be difficult to produce through traditional methods alone.

This approach also extends the idea of Channapatna beyond its conventional context. The craft is not treated as a decorative surface applied to a contemporary object; its underlying principles become part of the design system itself.

Building a Visual Rhythm

Suspended beneath the timber grid ceiling, the lights are arranged at varying heights and positions, creating a layered rhythm across the restaurant. Their proportions and repeated vertical elements echo the stacked geometry of turned wooden objects.

The pendants begin to read less as individual fixtures and more as a collective architectural language. Against the expansive mural and warm interior palette, they create a visual connection between the ceiling, walls, furniture, and surrounding artwork.

The lighting therefore operates at two scales: up close, the fixtures reveal their material and crafted details; from a distance, they contribute to the larger rhythm and identity of the space.

A Dialogue Between Past and Future

The project is ultimately an exploration of how technology can participate in the continuation of craft rather than its replacement.

By combining the hand of the artisan with the precision of code and additive manufacturing, the lighting creates a dialogue between two seemingly different modes of making. The turned wooden elements carry the irregularities and warmth of human fabrication, while the 3D-printed components introduce a contemporary precision and scalability.

At Shiv Sagar, Channapatna is therefore not treated as a reference to the past. It becomes a starting point for imagining what the craft could become when translated into a new material system, a new scale, and a new architectural context.

The result is a lighting language that is rooted in heritage, but made for the present.