2023-24

DESIGN, DETAIL & LOCALISATION

Architectural Design Studio
Semester 6 / 02 Jan - 26 Jan / 01 Apr - 05 Apr 2024
School of Environment & Architecture

Studio Mentors

Anuj Daga, Dipti Bhaindarkar, Anshu Choudhri, Vinit Nikumbh

Pedagogical Background

If space is not only the configuration of material but also that of the life which happens within it, then architecture naturally concerns itself with more than merely the tectonic resolutions of matter/materials. Bringing attention to this, we can revisit the idea of architectural detail (and ‘detailing’ as an act/verb). Architectural ‘detail’ expands to suggest a spatial detail which responds to the specificities of lived spatial and material practices from and for which it is designed. ‘Specificity’ is seen here in opposition/contrast to the generic/genericity, in that it responds to the unique instance of socio-spatial practices characteristic of the setting/site. While material and tectonic responses are part of this specificity, detailing here isn’t limited to the manipulations thereof. It deals instead with the specificity of spatial articulations as responsive to the forces of the context(social and spatial) and the program. In conceiving of institutions and their architecture this approach helps move away from the assumptions of homogeneity of the public; instead the emergent socio-spatial and material patterns are seen as generators of detail.

Spaces within public institutions and urban contexts are designed through standardised logics of such “public” but are produced and lived through several subjective contestations which often blur, defy, subvert, disregard or occupy them in awkward ways. In institutions that emerge locally over time, such as the langars, local libraries, reading rooms, khanwals, aanganwadis, community halls, such logics of unexpected occupations are often visible. What is an architecture which is localized (detail-ed) through the act of responding to and allowing for such unanticipated multiplicities?

In order to open up this idea of the institution, the studio will observe local programmes that have emerged for public activities in neighbourhoods within peri urban areas and their specific socio-spatial encrustations. Institutional spaces in smaller towns find themselves in unique programmatic conditions that occur between new kinds of transitions and aspirations tending towards development. Observations of the specific socio-spatial practices on the site will be undertaken to get a nuanced description of its lived spatial detail. These observations and propositions formulate the context for architecture of the institution, programmatically as well as typologically. Questions of material systems and services, contextual relevance, environmental and ground processes, societal issues will critically craft and imagine spaces and built form.

While addressing the above social formulations as physical design manifestations, the course will explore and expand the notion of “detail” in architecture. Detail here is understood as a structural thought that may be conceptualised at different scales and levels of abstraction that hold together the architectural idea. The exploration of “detail” may operate in the processual or material aspect of a project, it may exist in ways of representation or resolution. The focus of this studio is thus three fold - first to assimilate and understand the logic of space making in the realm of the public. Second, to be able to generate field specific programmatic responses and third, to craft the built form through social- cultural- environmental considerations including the aspects of structure, material, constructability and service systems while opening up the notion of detail in architecture.

Bimbisar Nagar Transit Camp / 2024

In this cycle, the studio will look closely at the transit accommodation site of Bimbisar Nagar in the Mumbai suburb of Goregaon East. While dubbed into the MHADA Affordable Housing Scheme during the 2000s, Bimbisar Nagar was set up around the late 1970s as a transit camp to make space for the people displaced to create space for the expanding city of Mumbai. The area consisted of baithi chawls before which were stacked up into seventeen G+4 buildings when the remaining land was reallocated for MHADA housing for low-, middle and high-income groups. People in transit housing projects often wait way longer to be allocated a formal property. In the present site of Bimbisar, transit residents have waited far too long to create a community infrastructure of their own. Soft appropriations, alterations and expansions take place in the adjacent areas towards the need to find space for everyday interaction, recreation and community life. This need is felt due to the lack of any consideration for such space of release in the original scheme. People make space in order to become social. They mobilize available resources and materials to accrue spatial resources incrementally for various reasons. In the looming un-surity of relocation that has lingered for more than four decades, what would it mean to infuse a recreational infrastructure for the transit camp residents of Bimbisar Nagar to strengthen their sense of belonging? Can architecture devise infrastructure for localisation of everyday life in the transient space of the camp? These questions shall form the basis for our intervention into the precinct of Bimisar Nagar.