Thickening the Edge

by Shravani Hongadu and Prutha Talekar

About the site

The span of the road leading upto the Zen garden measures about 300m in length. The beginning 150m of which has buildings and smaller bungalows on the right and the mangrove edge on the left. The later 150m is not accessible to the vehicles, and has playground, yoga center and the Zen garden on the right and the mangroves on the left.

The road acts as the bund wall with a steeper slope on the mangrove edge than on the right. This stringent edge stops humans from accessing the mangroves and hence the entire ecosystem embedded within this region goes unnoticed.

Identifying the flows

While trying to observe different flows operating on the site near the Zen garden, we stumbled upon the prominent ecosystem that the crabs in this area form. The crabs of Sesarmidae species form the majority of this area. With further research, we tried to identify their basic necessities in order to understand their daily cycles better.

/Habitation

crabs require dark and warm spaces, near water bodies for breeding.

/Nutrition

mangrove crabs feed upon the mangrove litter and the dead materials of trees.

/Protection

mangrove crabs seek protection by climbing on the barks of trees to an height of about 4feet, from a bird called the Crab Plover that dwells around this region.

PROCESS DRAWINGS AND ITERATIONS

We begin the process by thinking of ways to divide the edge in parts where different things happen at different levels.

At the first level is the road, then comes a depression with vegetative growth that has ramps connecting the first level to the third level. This is human walkway with crab colonies underneath it and it has smaller crab corridors cutting the path. These corridors further go onto the next level and gradually enter the mangroves.

Here we tried to resolve the form of habitation for crabs. A porous structure made of mixture of clay and mud etc. It is a stiff structure with holes nd interconnected tunnels like cavities. The crab can build their own mud structures inside the cavities.

In this way they have their own free space to move around without any barriers.

Three tunnels extend from the road into the habitat, these are a set of interconnecting pathways with fully covered ferocement pathways and glass fibre tunnels at certain points through which you can see the crab openings. Some of these enter into a large circular gathering sapce with a skylight.

We experimented with different materials to help us resolve the form of the crab habitat and the human pathways.

This model tries to explore in sections how the crab habitat actually gets interconnected taking the tunnels into consideration as well.

Experimenting with different forms of the pathway, here certain parts are underground and they give a view of the crab dwellings on sides as well.

The pathways bulge in certain areas as well which acts as gathering spaces.

FINAL ITERATION

Our proposal is to built a semi permanent crab habitat that also blurs the edge and slows it down and rethinks this idea of the edge.

A porous structure like that of an sponge is accessible to the crabs such that they build mud houses inside, in the cavities of the structure. It has multiple entry and exit points and is a dark interconnected system spread across the edge of the mangroves.

It is roofed upon by a trellis that slows down the force of water during rains to prevent from their habitats being washed away. Litter from the creepers falls directly onto the crab holes and becomes their nutrition.

So u enter the area which is like a tunnel with crab openings all around you and then you become a tiny part of the crab colony.

So this basically flips the roles with u being almost like the other in this habitat.

This area also might or might not be accessible at times if like it is taken over by a lot of crabs or sometimes during heavy rains and high tide. This to an extent restricts the human movement while the crabs are free to take up one of the few spaces in the city that they habitat and rightfully own.

There are two pathways extending from the road, each offering a different experience all the way down into the mangroves.

One of them has tall large scale concrete walls that block your view of the outside but at certain points exposing the crab habitats for a small interval of time at the places where the pathway bulges , and these bulges also act as gathering spaces.

The other one has creepers that grown down from the trellis and act as guiding walls partially blocking the crab shelters.

Both these paths intersect at a point where the creeper path takes up the bridge where you are completely at the top of the trellis such that the landscape for you over there is only the trellis. They both open up into the same channel that is completely over taken by the crab habitats.

INTERVENTION DRAWINGS

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