Environmental Flows

Project Brief 

This course aims to capacitate students to experience the environment as a set of interconnected networks which balance each other to constantly generate rhythmic flows of resources. These networks include the negotiations between the human, non human, socio economic, socio cultural and socio political flows that are dynamic in nature. This course seeks  to ask  how does architecture participate in the interconnections that alter, interrupt, break, prolong, hinder, stunt certain cycles that privilege or suppress life forms? What are its subsequent repercussions for the interspecies? How do they alter the existence of different life forms? This course will investigate and explore design possibilities that negotiate these relationships. The interventions will focus on ecologically sensitive terrain and intervene by asking ‘how can architecture be an instrument for ecologically equity?’ .

The agendas of this module are as follows: 

1. Understanding Ecology:

   1. Observing environmental flows and interdependencies: We refer here the following as environmental features: land (and soil), water, air, heat (and light), sound, smell and biodiversity (including flora and fauna). Environment gets constituted through the flows and interaction between these elements as they make and dismantle each other. One of the prime agendas of this module is to equip students to observe and understand these features, flows, interactions (and interdependencies) through experience and secondary data sets. 

1. 2. Quantification of flows: This module will further enable students to quantify these features and empirically analyse them. 

1. 3. Observing incongruences in practices through experience:  Short term and long term exposure of human activities on the landscape produce distinct effects that alter several geological, vegetal, thermodynamic or interspecies behaviours and patterns. The changing characteristics of different elements that constitute the overall landscape of the place evidences these changes across time.  How does landscape communicate its biography, and what language can we devise to listen to our environment?

   4. Identification of specific physicalities that causes incongruences: The module will equip students to understand specific physical interventions that have been made earlier that have produced incongruencies in flows.
       

2. Developing new physicalities to engage with the environment: In this section of the module, students shall explore spatial design strategies for making habitations of different kinds where the flows are altered in a manner that they provide for the flows to continue.

Site: Daman

The course ‘Environmental Flows’ at SEA has been placed pedagogically to interrogate the dichotomies of nature/culture, inside/outside, human/non-human and place design as a catalytic event within such other binaries that have landed architecture in the narrow practices of ‘greening’, ‘sustainability’, ‘green building codes’, ‘energy efficiency’ and such other forms which tend to get subsumed to the forces of the market. While understanding of the term ‘environment’ for this exercise is expanded to include material/immaterial, living/non-living aspects that shape the condition we live in – a ‘maahaul’ that comes to inform our consciousness, the notion of ‘flows’ emphasizes on the interconnectedness, networks and interdependencies between these systems. The course attempts a holistic engagement with the environment acknowledging its contemporary spatial politics.

In order to experiment ways in which spatial practitioners can place architecture within a nuanced understanding of the environment, the studio chose to engage with the fast transforming coastline of the union territory of Daman on the Arabian Sea. The 12-km sea-facing ecological stretch of Daman is currently being transformed into a promenade under the supervision of the State in order to give an economic boost to the place through tourism. Being two hours away from several cities of Maharashtra and Gujarat, Daman is set to become the next leisure destination on the northern Arabian coast. The Portuguese town embedded in the alcohol-ridden dry state of Gujarat offers a perfect release to a large population in its scenic and silent setting. Such an internal geopolitics implies the hardening of the entire shoreline to incentivise vehicular traffic, which may be eventually abutted by a strip of restaurants, hotels, lodges, parking, and such service-programmes that cater to the tourist industry. Not only the introduction of the coastal road disengages with the existing ecology of the marine and estuarine life of the edge, but the above real estate developments have also begun to erase, evict and push out the existing socio-economic dependencies on the coast. The land acquisition and rampant construction have inevitably caused the pushing back of fishing activities, food-stalls along the beach and several other forms of livelihood and leisure that once enlivened the coast of Daman, in favour of foregrounding a face that speaks to a certain gentry. The architectural interface between the land and sea is aspirationally visualized in the image of those in Western countries, or their Gulf-derivatives. All in all, these transformations miss out in addressing the concerns of the sensitive ecology of the shore and its specificities linked to socio-economic dependencies that are of key importance to the inhabitants of the city. The studio project is placed in such a context to devise architectural strategies that are able to reimagine new programmes and forms towards inhabiting the coast more sensitively and responsibly. 

Detailed Method for field visit 

1. Observations through Ground, Terrain and Vegetation Conditions  

Vegetation mapping  on site and layering it on google maps, water, air and ground profile 

Step 1 : Understand the region with its terrain and ground - Contours, watersheds, ridges, valleys. [Conducted in Class on 6th June 2022] Mark the sample sites on this map groupwise. 

The contours of the study area will be used to generate a 3D model of the terrain using Sketchup / Rhino. This will give a broad overview of the existing ridges, valleys, natural drainage lines and gradients. These learnings will also be used in the next step which is ‘transect study’.

Step 2 : Carry the map on site, identify vegetation tree / shrub / grass / climber species, mark them on plan, click photos (Zoomed in of leaf/flower, overall photo - Take help of botanist / google lens to identify the species). Generate a table with following attributes - Location, Species type, Native/ Non Native, Soil condition (Moist, Moderately Drained, Dry), Water Requirements (High/ Moderate/ Low), Rainfall (High/ Moderate/ Low), Air Quality, The following will be demonstrated as Transect Drawing. 

Transect Study

Transects will be given at the beginning of the studio which will be about 500 mts long or more depending upon the context. The transect, which will be represented as a sectional perspective, will show the type of ground cover diagrammatically. Photographs will be taken at places and placed in conjunction with the sectional perspective to understand how the vegetation or ground cover is changing as the proximity to the coast changes. Inland water bodies will also be captured in these transects with the type of ground cover in its immediate vicinity and as one moves away from them.

2. Drawing environmental flows:

Based on the site, the students will work with four elements of their choice to study their environmental interdependencies, their rhythms and their socio temporal entanglements through processes of layering to formulate an experiential argumentative drawing of the site.

3. Quantification of flows:  (Abhijit, Sabaa and Dushyant) 

Quantifying  flows alongwith qualitative senorial experience of flows to understand how thermal, visual, hearing, and smell adds to the shape the spatiality and its experience.

The factors to be mapped are Air Temperature, surface temperature, Humidity, Wind velocity,Clothing insulation, Metabolic rate,Sound, Smell,Vegetation 

Step1: To record the data (questions here) for yourself ( hourly noting eg 9am, 10am etc)

Step 2: To record the data (questions here) for 3 or more people on the site

Step 3: To make typological analysis by drawing and interviewing people (questions here)

All the steps shall also include

1. Making an archive of images to support your observation 

2. Drawing sensorial experiences of atmospheric flows, objects or elements of the context that shape this experience (the key is to observe the complex overlaps of flows)

3. In each drawing identify the dominant or non dominant layers of flows, objects or elements that shape by making a legend for it.

4. Color code, draw over the data to read the emerging patterns 

4. Interviews and built form mapping:

Questions to ask native residents / stakeholders of different landscapes::

1. How long have you been living in this place? What is your occupation?

2. What is your oldest memory of this landscape?

3. How well do you know about the landscape around?

4. Have you noticed any change in the last decades?

5. What kind of building activity or transformation has taken place during the last few years?

6. How much is your everyday life dependent on the natural landscape?

7. Where do you go for recreational activities? 

8. How does the landscape around you change in different seasons?

9. Environmentally, which is the most crucial / critical / difficult season for you?

10. What and how does your lifestyle change/respond to different seasons?

11. Are there any special changes / adjustments / adaptations you (have to) make in different seasons in your built environment?

12. What kind of biodiversity exists in your region?

13. Do you identify / recognize the different species of animals in your surroundings?

14. Any special memories of extreme weather events in your region?

15. Special trees that are worshipped in your community, preserved, protected, grown in your region?

16. Myths, legends, stories of the environment you know?

All of above will include walking, photo documentation, writing notes, drawing, interviews, phone tools/apps (for qualitative and quantitative data)