Architecture shaped by India’s making culture
Site
A 21.8 km expressway, India’s longest sea bridge, called the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link, or Atal Setu, now connects Mumbai with its satellite city, Navi Mumbai, shortening the commute from 2 hours to 20 minutes. By 2025, the new international airport at Navi Mumbai will become operational, opening up new opportunities for planned urban development. The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) plans accordingly to transform the outer reaches of the MMR area.
Background about ‘Making Matters’
Architecture is the result of building processes. Not only the product of architecture, but the process of architecture, is of the essence as a living, dynamic and intelligent force that embraces the past, present and future all at once. And the process of architecture is about synthesis. It responds to a diversity of concerns through holistic design definitions. Materiality and consumption of finite natural resources must be seen alongside their impact on human wellbeing and human resourcefulness, given the need to radically rethink the consequences of contemporary building habits that are now recognized as unsustainable.
To turn things around, human ingenuity and sensitivity must again be the central driving force of all that we make. The knowledge of first principles are at the heart of innovation, and discrimination that is required to either adhere to norms and codes or supersede them.
Making matters! It empowers, gives agency. Thinking with the hands provides ample opportunity for holistic learning and unblocks creativity. The act of building produces knowledge just as the resulting knowledge produces buildings. Also, what we make makes us. We need to experiment to evolve.
Project:
The studio will investigate new urban co-housing and co-working prototypes in the high-density context. It will focus on redefinition of private and shared spaces in the context of community living and sharing. Alongside new ideas of mobility, circular economy, and green infrastructure, the development of collective living models that are not restricted by existing models of ownership vs. rentals but imagine other scenarios of co-existence and participation. Given the growing population on the given available land in India, the studio will explore new models for compact cities with a greater sense of community, where self-reliant urban communities can live together responsibly and intelligently in a relatively small area and yet find the diversity and all the useful services that can be accessed by foot. The new built environment will be resource conscious (natural and human) and enable coexistence among humans as well as with the larger natural environment. It can be imagined that such settlements would engage novel approaches to construction, generate water and energy, include urban farming and manage mobility through noiseless non-polluting means. The site will address the waterfront ecology and provoke climate responsive thinking keeping the monsoon in mind.
Excursion:
A six-day trip to Mumbai will include visits to Mumbai’s various neighbourhoods, material sources, and craft cultures that define Mumbai’s constant evolution. A two-day workshop organized in collaboration with KRVIA (Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture) will allow students to get direct experience with building crafts and masons with full scale materials on their campus.