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DESIGN STATEMENT

ISOLATION AS RESILIENCE?

The global COVD-19 pandemic has confronted us with many vulnerabilities of human life. As the virus spreads via people, we are asked to maintain social distances in public spaces. Such instructions conflict with established narratives around designing successful public spaces that invite people to gather and interact. This situation is calling for attention toward new design vocabularies for public spaces to build spatial resilience against future pandemics. However, the way we define, perceive, develop, and practice "resilience" in design, often marginalize many human emotions, contextual comforts, cultural traditions, and social performances. Moreover, when different parameters of resilience are developed in the Global North and travel to the Global South and get translated into spatial designs without critical analysis, we may lose many socio-cultural aspects of public places that make our spaces different from that of the North. This project provides a critical lens toward such a notion around resilience by designing an extreme "resilient" public place that ensures the highest social distance and by juxtaposing it with an already existing, abandoned prison complex in Sylhet, Bangladesh. The objective of this project was not to design a "successful" public space but to create discomfort, uncertainty, detachments, through which we can revisit the concept of resilience from a new perspective.

So, this new narrative of resilient public space is proposed in a site, which resembles the stories of imprisonment, isolation & confinement for more than 200 years. The old Heritage structure, Sylhet central jail, was never been exposed to the public as it was serving for prisoners where their lives were confined within a massive boundary wall. In 2019, the central jail was shifted from the Sylhet city to a newly constructed place. So, the design approach initiates with a proposal of portraying this heritage realm as a public space & providing a new dimension of experiencing the old one.

The new installation adjacent to the heritage conservation complex, demonstrates to the public the freedom of movement rather it depicts the story of prisoners through spatial experience. Many confined cells are proposed & aligned with the existing complex, which provide social distancing, isolation & a new definition of architectural vocabulary of gallery space breaking the traditional one.

Each cell functions as a unit gallery space for an individual, which convey the story through uncomfortable, excruciating, confining spatial dimension. Documentary on the story of the heritage will be displayed on the interior surface of the cell through a motion sensor technological system. When the cell reaches the highest peak, it pauses for some time & provides a different visual angle of the heritage & the horizon of Sylhet city through a small window. To control the vertical motion of the cells a mechanical system is also incorporated with every cell. Green electricity from living plants is generated to supply the power source for the mechanical system.

As the site is located in one of the most important zones of Sylhet city, the new public space appears visually as a landmark which provide an unconventional way of experiencing the Old Heritage.