Yahi Hai Sab Hamara...

ENVIRONMENTAL FLOWS | SEM3 - M1 | SITE 4

DAHISAR MANGROVE PARK

The studio started with understanding what one means by Environmental Flows or just Environment in general. Different eco-systems existing together? A relationship that one forms with its surroundings? While also being simultaneously being creative and destructive; all of these can be ones idea of Environment and understanding the different flows of the eco-systems that exist in one was what this studio dealt with. It was a process that made one realize that the colonial belief of nature and culture being different entities somewhere or the other explained the existence of the bigger problems and hence it was also important to understand that there is NO DISTINCTION.

Asking questions was a important part of the process.

What kind of relationships do we want to build? These relationships have a spatial form; an architectural form.

What builds the environment? Transforming of materials, transforms a built space.

How flows intersect one another?

What is flowing into other? CRUX OF THE STUDIO

How you as an architect would make change and what change would that be?

What experiments do these flows produce?

FIELD WORK PROCESS

The field we were observing was the north-eastern part of the Dahisar Mangrove Park where a feasible amount of concrete jungle had developed with two bridges running between two parallel road and the mangroves starting just after the second bridge there. It is a commercial space that housed a number of different occupations and other smaller occupations supporting those like for example the slight isolation of this particular area to the main street made it possible for a rickshaw parking space to develop over the period of time and then so did the rickshaw repairing workshops eventually developed as well. Similarly there were a lot of these garages and automobile shops that had been established and continue to with the latest one being opened back in 2018.

With a group of 14 forming pairs of 2, we then divided these sites in 7 sections trying to understand the built conditions, topography and climate in general of the field we were venturing in.

CHOOSING THE FLOW

The flow that we chose to observe, understand and hence intervene our site with was the FLOW OF BUSES. Along with the rickshaw parkings and the garages, the one prominent entity that existed there was buses. To the left of the road was a big parking spaces which these school buses that would provide their service to the nearby schools in the areas or Dahisar, Borivali used for parking the buses after a working day. Some of the schools that these buses were from were VIBGYOR, Swami Vivekanand School, etc. While on other hand there also existed these travel buses that would be parked on the road until they had leave on commission. In these commercial buses too, there were 2 types- One being the ones that went in the day on everyday travels and came back and others being the ones that worked through the commissions. We went around trying to talk to these bus drivers on how all of the above mentioned things happened and its logistics and that was when one of them said "YAHI HAI SAB HAMARA..." When we inquired more they told us that they as drivers did not own the business of the bus, they were working for someone. So because their income wasn't much they would live on the bus itself. They would sleep in the cramped up space of the bus, eat at the nearby lunch home there, if they wanted to do laundry and their other basic chores they would have to go find the nearest public washrooms and use them in whatsoever conditions they were in.

DESIGN INTERVENTION

Upon observing the above flow, we thought of intervening our site through this idea of an utilitarian space for the bus drivers which would provide them with spaces to do their daily chores like having 'Mohris' for the laundry, cleaner washrooms, seating spaces, sleeping pods, Barber shops, etc. We then further developed the idea with the view that what if the space was then not something that was exclusive for the drivers but something that anyone could access then how would the above mention commodities exist in that space with it the drivers with their needed sense of privacy.

Out of all our iterations, this one was kind of the anchor point that eventually helped us develop and arrive at our final intervention. The two main concepts this iteration held was one of the Mobius Strip and the other being the idea of Hinge, Mobius strip with how the structure was formed with just one surface developing itself to create the spaces and the hinge where there was a strong idea of what was ahead and what was behind.