A22_16_Shravani Hongadu.

About the festival:  

The largest of the Kumbh mela is held in Prayagraj, UP.  The mela happens in the winter season from January to March. Around 1.5 million of people are said to visit the mela during these three months. The main attraction of the mela is taking a holy dip in the sanagam- confluence of ganga and yamuna rivers. Hierarchy of tents is observed at site from organized government and tourist tents to temporal poorly organized tents of sadhus.

Site Context: 

Situated at one of the major entries into the Kumbh Mela, the site experiences an influx of masses with extremely high energies and excitement. These entry roads, although wide enough are devoid of any kind of resting spaces like benches or plinths etc; for long stretches. The entire plot of the Kumbh mela after this is just bare open land with no shaded spaces other than the tents. The energy levels at the mela are all time high and one finds themselves amongst the crowd often overpowered by the spiritual environment. The crowd is always in the hurry to reach the river bank and tends to ignore their own experience of the space.

Site analysis

Intervention Site

Design Intent: 

The intent of the design is slow down the journey of the masses, by creating a resting space that provides for the comfort and coziness required to wait and experience the surroundings. The design aims to create a pause point for the people to slightly deviate from the mela and focus on the trasition and experience of the surroundings while entering or during exit. A cafe that provides for seatings, food, washrooms, changing rooms etc caters to the immediate needs of the people passing the site. The design emerges from the need of a cozy, comforting enclosed space that acts as a place of respite while giving a feeling a safety within the structure. Thus the cafe becomes a pavilion under which one can rest, enjoy and interact with the landscape. With the entire Kumbh mela happening on bare land, the design also aims to interact with the vegetation on site. The cafe happens at two levels, one at ground level- under the roof of the pavilion and second over the roof. The roof is designed to be used by people for sitting, eating, or even just taking a stroll. The canopy of the trees acts as another layer of shed providing a cozy space. 

Concept sketches

Process models

Design intervention

Elevation profiles