About
Heritage Architecture Foundation.
A public charitable trust that surveys, documents and safeguards India's historic built environment and heritage. Based in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. Founded 2026.
A public charitable trust that surveys, documents and safeguards India's historic built environment and heritage. Based in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. Founded 2026.
India holds one of the great accumulations of built heritage anywhere on earth. Most of these buildings have never been measured. Many have never been properly photographed. Fewer still have had their construction traditions recorded while the people who hold that knowledge are still here to share it.
This is not a crisis in the dramatic sense - no single fire, no single act of destruction. It is a slow erosion, building by building, year by year, conducted in the ordinary course of cities growing and families changing. It is the more dangerous for being undramatic.
The documentation that does exist is scattered. Survey departments hold records that are difficult to access. Academic institutions produce research that rarely reaches the public. Architects who care about this work keep their drawings in personal collections. Communities hold oral memory that is never written down.
Heritage Architecture Foundation exists to build that place, and to do the fieldwork that fills it.
Heritage Architecture Foundation was founded in 2026 by Jabendra Raja, in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.
The trust was established as a deliberate institutional choice: permanent, irrevocable, and public. Not a company, not a society, not an informal collective - but a trust, registered under the applicable laws of India, with a structure designed to outlast any individual involved in its founding.
The first surveys were conducted in Karaikudi and Chettinad, in the Sivaganga district of Tamil Nadu - a region of extraordinary merchant mansions, many of them unoccupied, some already in partial collapse, and almost none of them measured or drawn to professional standard.
An individual can begin this work. An institution can sustain it.
It does not claim to save buildings. It records them - which is the precondition of everything else.
A permanent record of India's historic built environment - built survey by survey, generation by generation.
We picture a future in which any student in Chennai can find a measured drawing of a Chettinad mansion that no longer exists. In which a conservator in Bangalore can study the construction details of a laterite house in Kerala before undertaking a repair.
We are building for that future. We expect it to take longer than our lifetimes, and we have designed the institution to outlast us.
We measure and draw to scale. We photograph for information rather than effect, and we always cite our sources while noting what we do not know.
The record is kept as a public good. Our aim is to make it available for study and research on fair terms - not locked away for a privileged few.
We are building an institution intended to outlast its founders. The trust form is irrevocable by design. Records are retained for a minimum of thirty years and wherever possible permanently.
Buildings are not just architectural objects. They are places where people have lived. We do not extract. We document in relationship.
We distinguish between what we measured and what we infer. We credit individual surveyors and oral history contributors. We acknowledge uncertainty.
We do not chase trends. We invest in methodology, in staff development, in institutional infrastructure. We think in decades.
The foundation is governed by a Board of Trustees of two members. The Board meets at least once per financial year.
Heritage Architecture Foundation is registered as a public charitable trust in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, under the applicable laws of India.
80G registration under the Income-tax Act, 1961 is in process. CSR contributions under the Companies Act, 2013 are authorised. FCRA registration is intended.
27 A, Appachi Garden, Cheran Ma Nagar,
Vilankurichi Road, Coimbatore,
Tamil Nadu - 641035