Between Walls, Beyond Walls

Located in Papdi Talao, Vasai, Mumbai, the site is a public space centered around a lake and surrounded by a set of institutions including the Ram Mandir, a market, a garage, ISKCON, and a Montessori school.

Through our site observations, we identified three primary actors on the site — the vendors, local residents, and the broader public. These actors informed how we restructured the site, focusing on the spatial relationships and adjacencies between them.

Our intent was to reactivate the lake’s edge and make it more inviting to the public while making it accessible to the current actors on the site as well  through a layered system of movement, public interaction, and institutional engagement.

This involved opening up to the existing rigid boundary walls and rethinking some of the current programs.

Our design approach adopted a vocabulary of cascading volumes within a  open space, enclosed by linear walls that frame the site’s periphery within which our volumes and activities took place. By strategically corroding these volumes, we generated a series of interplay of walls, plinths, terraces, and courtyards—elements that collectively shape the spatial experience.