In the middle of Bhubaneswar stands a government office that doesn't look like one. Krushi Bhawan, home to Odisha's Department of Agriculture and Farmers' Empowerment, is wrapped in patterned brick, carved stone and cast-metal screens. Much of that work was done by artisans brought together by Collective Craft, a Bhubaneswar-based group led by Sibanand Bhol.
The project relied almost entirely on local materials and brought together around 100 skilled artisans under Collective Craft to tell the story of Odia agriculture and folklore through traditional craft, at a scale these crafts had rarely been attempted before. Collective Craft works with architects and designers to design, produce and integrate handcrafted components into contemporary buildings, and Krushi Bhawan, designed by Studio Lotus, was its largest test of that idea.
The craft shows up everywhere you look. Dhokra, the tribal lost-wax metal craft, was adapted into light fixtures wrapped around the ground-floor columns and screens along the corridors. The plaza carries bas-relief carvings in laterite showing ripe paddy in the Pattachitra style, while hand-carved khondalite lattices enclose the central court. In that court, a crop calendar laid in stone inlay marks the harvesting cycles of Odisha's main crops. Even the brick façade of the upper floors, patterned after Odisha Ikat weaving using three colours of locally sourced clay, treats the building as a piece of cloth.
What is easy to miss is how much of a stretch this was for the people making it. The artisans, working in groups skilled in stone, wrought iron, handicrafts and painting, were used to pieces of three to five feet, occasionally eight to ten. Here they faced walls twenty feet high and up to a hundred feet long. The answer was to break each surface into smaller parts, so that twenty people on a single wall could each understand and detail their own portion. Much of the carving happened directly on the wall while construction was still going on, which meant there was no second chance to get it right.
The artisans were mostly young and open to experimenting with new techniques and motifs, which helped the collaboration work. By the end, many described a shift in how they saw their own craft: having worked at this scale, they no longer felt bound by the fixed sizes and forms passed down to them.
That may be the quieter legacy of the project. Krushi Bhawan is often held up as an example of how government can act as a patron of regional crafts and sustain the communities and economies built around them. Sibanand Bhol has called it a project of courage: courage from the architects to imagine something at this scale, and courage from the artisans to come together and build it.
It is a public building, open to farmers and city residents alike. Anyone passing through can run a hand over the laterite carvings and know they were made by people from nearby, a few years ago, learning as they went.