This course aims to capacitate students to experience the environment as a set of interconnected networks which balance each other to constantly generate rhythmic flows of resources. These networks include the negotiations between the human, non human, socio economic, socio cultural and socio political flows that are dynamic in nature. This course seeks to ask how does architecture participate in the interconnections that alter, interrupt, break, prolong, hinder, stunt certain cycles that privilege or suppress life forms? What are its subsequent repercussions for the interspecies? How do they alter the existence of different life forms? This course will investigate and explore design possibilities that negotiate these relationships. The interventions will focus on ecologically sensitive terrain and intervene by asking ‘how can architecture be an instrument for ecologically equity?’ .

The agendas of this module are as follows:

1. Understanding Ecology:

   1. Observing environmental flows and interdependencies: We refer here the following as environmental features: land (and soil), water, air, heat (and light), sound, smell and biodiversity (including flora and fauna). Environment gets constituted through the flows and interaction between these elements as they make and dismantle each other. One of the prime agendas of this module is to equip students to observe and understand these features, flows, interactions (and interdependencies) through experience and secondary data sets.

   2. Quantification of flows: This module will further enable students to quantify these features and empirically analyse them.

   3. Observing incongruences in practices through experience: Short term and long term exposure of human activities on the landscape produce distinct effects that alter several geological, vegetal, thermodynamic or interspecies behaviours and patterns. The changing characteristics of different elements that constitute the overall landscape of the place evidences these changes across time. How does landscape communicate its biography, and what language can we devise to listen to our environment?

   4. Identification of specific physicalities that causes incongruences: The module will equip students to understand specific physical interventions that have been made earlier that have produced incongruencies in flows.

2. Developing new physicalities to engage with the environment: In this section of the module, students shall explore spatial design strategies for making habitations of different kinds where the flows are altered in a manner that they provide for the flows to continue.