Community and Institutions
Semester 6 / 11 Nov - 24 Dec 2024

Background

Benedict Anderson (1983,15) famously wrote, “Communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity /genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.” A community is held together by interests and practices whereas institutions have organizational structures that evolve over time.Therefore,, when we look closely at communities and their institutions, we observe that they are produced and lived through several subjective contestations which often blur, defy, subvert,disregard or occupy space in awkward ways. In institutions that emerge locally over time, such as the langars, local libraries, reading rooms, khanawals, aanganwadis, community halls, such logics of unexpected occupations are often visible. How do community spaces offer new paradigms of publicness, and inversely, how can the informed design of public space, learnt from such localised practices,hold the varied, often contesting practices and interests of a community? 

The studio will observe the nature of public activities in neighbourhoods within specific socio-spatial encrustations and identify architectures of public space to weave the community together. 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. 

The focus of this studio is thus three fold - first to assimilate and understand the logic of communities and their institutions. Second,to be able to generate field specific programmatic responses and third, to identify the architectonics of public space that is able to hold diversities and contestations of a given community. Here,students engage in diagramming the forces of a chosen site through social-cultural-environmental considerations that shall serve as key ingredients to inform the architecture of the institution. The building could then become the medium to build communities that share practices and places, thereby forming a distinct localized culture.

Objectives

• Understanding community practices and structuring of institutional organisations 

•  Translating site forces into architectural strategies and built form

• Devising public space as a strategy to hold community practices 

• Identifying community and institutional structures

• Articulating architectonic language for social design by observing localised spatial practices

Brief

This cycle of the ‘Communities and Institutions’ programme looks into the Vasai-Virar region in the extended metropolitan area of Mumbai. The Vasai Virar region used to be a fertile agrarian landscape with a lot of natural resources like rivers, ponds and local water reservoirs called bavkhals. It is flanked by numerous villages inhabited by the natives of the region.  Vasai & Sopara also acted as important Harbors along the Northern Konkan shoreline. Administered by gram panchayats earlier, then by smaller municipal councils, the region received their Municipal Corporation merely a decade ago - the civic body that now governs the villages and areas in Vasai-Virar taluka. Therefore, the imprint of local institutions and communities can be observed alongside the new development being undertaken in the region. Bavkhals and talavs that dot the landscape of this region, are also nodes of religious, social and commercial activities. The studio looks at ways of sensitively transforming one such node of Papdy talao junction to imagine an urbanscape that is socially and environmentally sensitive for the larger community.

Specific Abilities/ Capacities developed in students

• Devising public space as a strategy to hold community practices 

• Identifying community and institutional structures 

• Articulating architectonic language for social design by observing localised spatial practices

Exercises 

• Surveying the community and mapping spatial imprints. 

• Documentation of social activities in a chosen site 

• Mapping socio-spatial forces that dominate a locality 

• Material translation of identified forces into spatial solutions 

• Devising specific material and spatial details drawn from the above studies into formal articulations.

Outputs

• Analytical Observations, Design Portfolio, Model 

• Presentation of work to the community

Evaluation

• The ability to observe social processes and their spatial imprint. 

• Maturity of spatial ways of intervening architecturally within social / community processes and institutional structures 

• Detailing and resolution of micro-processes into contextually localised built environment 

• Innovative weaving of public space into community space.