Ontologies and Genealogy
Rupali Gupte, Shreyank Khemalpure, Rajeev Thakkar, Samir Raut
School of Environment & Architecture
17th January 2022 to 4th March 2022
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This studio chose to look closely at the museum, its genealogy and its ontology. Through a careful analysis it seeks to ask what might a contemporary museum be? It asks ontological questions around modern institutions and their programmes that have come to principally shape the nature of our lived experiences in the last two centuries. It takes up one contemporary institutional programme that has emerged historically over the years and traces its genealogy and speculate on the societal structures for each spatial configuration, establishing the relationship between societal structure, programme of the particular institution and its spatial configuration. Through this we learnt to
ask the question ‘What is?’ What is the genesis of the programme? What is the deep structure of space? Was this configuration produced by the society? Did it produce the particular society?
Hence, instead of starting from a given programme through precedent studies, and standards, the studio through its What is? provocation asked one to critically understand the programme and its relationship to the institution’s deep spatial structure in order to be able to rethink the configuration for a new institution towards a more egalitarian spatial structure.
DESIGN QUESTION
What is the contemporary Museum?
How does a contemporary museum draw on genealogical studies of historically produced spaces? How can it respond to the existing natural features of the site and landscape in a public thoroughfare? How can the interconnected built and unbuilt affect the experience of a museum? How can it act as a buffer space in a busy locality and reimagine a hard-edged boundary as a porous space? What does it mean to intervene in the heterotopia of a garden?
DESIGN INTENTION
The museum intends to rethink the boundary of a public space from a hard polarised edge to a porous public edge. It intends to draw from experiences of various historical references of pavilions and gardens.
Program - Garden Museum
This is a Museum that brings together ideas of how different cultures have historically reimagined gardens. It creates an ensemble of gardens with a variety of plants and other features.
SITE ANALYSIS
Site : Oval Maidan, Churchgate
Site Plan
Public Thoroughfare
Esplanade under British rule
Espalnade Today
Esplanades were a military strategy in colonial cities which were huge spans of open spaces around a fort for control over the city. They were meant to separate the ‘white city’ and the ‘black city’ from one another to create a buffer. Now these no longer hold any purpose from a defense point of view so it was reused to setup social institutions. A publicness is introduced by appropriation of social spaces.
MUSEUM OF?
Museum of gardens ; The Museum is imagined as a series of pavilions holding landscape within them in the Esplanade. These are series of gardens asking ontological questions about what a garden is and how gardens signify the relationship between humans and the world through exemplifying and embodying it in a salient way (Cooper 2006). Here the fragmented pavilions, landscape, open spaces, built and unbuilt spaces, scattered across the landscape also respond to the existing natural features and the prevalent activity on the site.
Program Diagram
MUSEUM AS
The strategy is to build these pavilions in a manner to diffuse the edge of the ground and appropriate the publicness of the Maidan and make it a microcosm for gardens. The esplanade was a symbol of power of the colonizers and after that a public space, a buffer in the busy city. Today it is used by mainly by people belonging to a certain social group that is men who play cricket there. The aim is to introduce smaller environments along the edge to appropriate the publicness and make it neutral for all.
Exquisite Corpse of gardens across different cultures
DESIGN DEVELOPMENT
Pavilions holding landscape
Built Area
Design Plan
Types of gardens inside Pavilions
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