Architectural Syntax
Petit Infrastructures

Syntax, Grammar and Language of Space

Anshu Choudhri, Anuj Daga, Milind Mahale, Teja Gavankar

31st July to 15th September 2023 / Monsoon 2023 / Sem 3

Background

This course introduces participants to the ways of reading and deploying elements of architecture towards synthesising functionality with meaning in the act of producing built form. The varied natures of practicing space by people inscribes spatio-material forms into new configurations that enable a renewed politics of living for emerging contexts. Here functions and meanings of stable, conventional architectural elements are revisited, their properties and arrangements are challenged and the resultant folding of space suggests new ways of experience. Students will learn to develop a language of architecture by setting the “rules” of putting together space and form – which in essence, is the grammar of space, in other words, syntax or code which disposes the form in its material, behavioural and political dimensions.

Moving beyond the optimizations of the plan layout that has been the primary fixation of analytical apparatus of Bill Hillier’s space syntax theory, this course will delve into architectural language that may emerge in the elementary orchestration of volumetric configurations, material tectonics and behavioural cultural forms within a small setting. Thereby, the studio asks: How do forms come together and what meanings do they produce within a given context? What kind of spaces may be invented through the considered collusion of available space-forms and material-experiences? From the arrangement of forms to the manipulation of light and materials, students will develop a nuanced perspective on spatial composition and its impact on human experience.

Exercise 2023 / Petit Infrastructures

While megacities like Mumbai continue to undergo large scale infrastructural transformations that bring about a new scale and order to the experience of urban space, the slowly transforming neighbourhoods still offer their residents soft ways of claiming and making their own spaces. Mostly put together through incremental logics, layered negotiations (between the interests of city, neighbours and self), these environments are put together through unassuming materials and resources, often in small ways. Here, conventional ideas of putting together forms (as learnt in the academy) get challenged and reinvented. These small accumulations enable a range of activities within a neighbourhood to sustain its social life. We may think of them as “petit infrastructures” that constitute the everyday eventfulness of a place. Such small infrastructures go through their own challenges and constraints, yet allow us to read multifarious possibilities that people charge their everyday spaces with. For example, shop fronts get extended into weather-refuge spaces during summer or rains, roadside temples accommodate the social life of the aged, bus stops extend as shelters for the homeless during night time, boundary walls become transient shops, and so on. Although minor, such interventions create opportunities for varied programmes to come together, and establish unique dialogues between their respective forms. These dialogues hold conditions for new ways of imagining form, in other words, they hint at, and demand for a new language of inhabitation. How can architecture push the potential of these petit yet poignant infrastructures with increased dignity, safety and playfulness? What syntax of space and form can we invent to value urban neighborhoods that accommodate these everyday microcosms against the spate of massive erasures? 

Objectives / Abilities

• Introduction to elements of Architectural Language: arrivals and departures of forms

• Reading architecture and thinking about meaning in forms.

• Principles of Spatial and Formal Composition and Organization: Proportions, Grids and Scale (essentials of syntax and grammar)

• Analyzing spatial hierarchies and sequences

• Materiality and Tactility: Exploring the expressive potential of different materials

• Context and Site Integration: Integrating architecture with the site and its surroundings

Methodology

In order to observe, record and study the landscape of petit infrastructure, we will select the neighbourhood of Eksar C.K.P. colony street. This street demonstrates the transition of an urban village into an upgrading city which creates opportunities for petit infrastructures to happen. Individuals will identify practices of social infrastructures along the street using three lenses:

1. Context: It is the social, physical and environmental context that frames a spatial practice, and its syntax. If the context changes, their syntax will change.

2. Transacting bodies: Who is using the space and how? How many people use the space and at what times? How does gender, age and orientation play a role in the imagination of space?

3. Materials: What materials are deployed to make the environment possible? How do they come together and what are the potentials and problems with such an assembly?

Through a compilation of the above observations, students will prepare a programmatic brief for their syntactical experiments in the studio. Here,

observation of practice+body will offer the programme

study of material will direct form and structure

context will drive the language and spatial enclosure

Subsequently, they will make iterations in order to arrive at an architectural response within the studied site. The response shall be directed towards a holistic, dignified and playful environment that rescripts the site meaningfully.