Spaces Vol 1 Is 6
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Traditionally, hotels and resorts have tried<br />
to locate themselves along the lakeside,<br />
around Phewa taal, the main tourist area<br />
in Pokhara. This placement guarantees<br />
easy access to the tourist area around<br />
the lake, as well as automatically<br />
enhancing the architectural appeal of<br />
buildings, by virtue of being located<br />
beside an idyllic lake. Not so with the<br />
Shangri-La Resort. It is located nowhere<br />
near the lake, and in fact, is closer to the<br />
much less idyllic western end of the<br />
Pokhara airport runway. The architects<br />
themselves describe the original site,<br />
before they completed landscaping and<br />
construction, as “flat and boring”. So, in<br />
terms of creating a successful resort, the<br />
architects and clients had to come up<br />
with a design that could somehow<br />
compensate for not being beside, or even<br />
close, to Phewa taal – which is for many,<br />
the definition of a Pokhara experience.<br />
As well as being flat and boring..!<br />
DESIGN CONSORTIUM<br />
The firm that executed this feat and help<br />
build the Shangri La Village resort was<br />
Design Consortium. It was this firm’s first<br />
major project. In fact, this ‘consortium’<br />
consisted of just four young architects<br />
fresh out of architecture school, limited<br />
in experience, but plenty on drive. Clearly<br />
they did something right when they<br />
presented their case because Shangri-La,<br />
a well-established and successful hotel<br />
looking to invest what eventually came<br />
to around five million USD in this<br />
venture project, chose the Design<br />
Consortium team to do the work.<br />
So back in 1994, the design team set to<br />
work and it took them around six months<br />
to finalize a design. The actual<br />
construction, however, was completed in<br />
a blistering eighteen months, a record<br />
pace of sorts - given the normally staid<br />
pace of construction that is more<br />
common here. In 1996 the resort was<br />
complete and started actual operations.<br />
Its management, and its designers,<br />
attribute a significant part of this feat to<br />
Uttpal Sengupta, a legendary taskmaster<br />
and perfectionist who for around two<br />
decades had been general manager at<br />
SPACES SEP-OCT 2005 41
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