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Like everywhere else, the aristocratic families in ancient China had become large and unwieldy with many queens, kings, princesses and princes. The queens and kings often faced the problem of having to punish the mischievous princes and princesses The npunishment meted out to the rest of the people was found too harsh for their beloved. The artists of these ancient kingdoms made devices to punish their loved ones without physically harming them. Their bodies were subjected to these extremely uncomfortable devices, where the senses were challenged in awkward ways. At SEA first year students produced some such extreme spaces devices to punish the loved ones.
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The learning objective of this technology module is to understand concrete & RCC in its theory and construction on one hand and understand the codes, installations of some of the key services for complex buildings including high rise. In order to understand the fundamentals, the class worked closely with documenting and drawing basic configurations. The project brief was as follows: The client wishes to build a iconic Museum building on a part of the old Sea Rock hotel site. He is conscious of the fact that it is one of the most visible spots in the city today and is in the heart of an art district of North Mumbai. In addition to the iconic nature of the location of the building the client is keen to develop the museum through a series interesting spaces for which he wishes to use RCC as a primary composite for its plasticity, planar qualities and the possibility of textural richness besides its other qualities. The project will be fitted with lifts and escalators as needed for a museum space and its functioning. The building will have a fire alarm and a fire fighting systems and some spaces would need to be air-conditioned.
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The studio was an exploration in form and geometry that could be derived from naturally occurring specimens. The brief was made sharper with a focus on porous objects and the extraction of their geometry. The students visited Sanjay Gandhi National Park, in northern Mumbai, where the first step of the assignment was to collect as many porous natural objects as one could find and clean them up in the studio. This was followed by rigorous sketching, diagramming and photography of the specimen to decode its geometry and use that as a basis to make multiple models and diagrams. These conceptual models would then become units for further experimentation. By fixing some parameters, these units were multiplied to create new models, without the use of adhesive, with reliance on joinery systems to hold them together. A new sense of space emerges from this process and allows for new ideas to come from objects around us.
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Histories of cities are often written as singular causal narratives. However the city is a palimpsest of multiple geographies, actors and events. The multiplicity of these calls for multiple stories to be written. People in the city are themselves large repositories of knowledge. This exercise is part of a five year initiative at SEA to map nuanced neighbourhood histories, spatial types and contemporary accounts. As a pedagogic methodology it is intended to make students gain confidence in the research and writing of city histories and contemporary narratives. Geographically, the city of Mumbai is read as distinct areas - the Fort area in South Mumbai, the inner city, the mill lands, the Eastern Waterfront, the Western Suburbs, the Eastern Suburbs along with the extended Mira-Bhayander region. While the numerous neighbourhoods within a perpetually transforming Mumbai demand continuous study, several new areas still need to be mapped. The Mumbai Neighbourhood Studies project aims to generate an archive that shall give form to the layered city, perhaps enabling and facilitating further investigation, intervention and interest. It also aims to introduce students of architecture to the inter-relationships between the culture and built form of the megapolis they inhabit. The project also lends them a method to begin understanding and analysing the city. This semester focused on the Western Suburbs. Students looked at ten neighbourhoods between Bandra to Borivali - investigating a range of typologies from tribal villages to modern housing societies and commercial glass blocks. The places were chosen with an intent to studying different settlement forms, building typologies and practices indicating the manner in which they have remained or redefined a subculture within Mumbai. Students collected their research material primarily by sketching the various typologies, fabric of the place and conducting long interviews with identified resource persons and others they encountered on site. They used this information to piece together a nuanced account of the neighbourhood. This document thus probably portrays some of the first serious engagement of students with their city. The material presented here must therefore be understood as preliminary,–– celebrating the multidimensionality of perspectives that add to the existing knowledge of the city.
The focus of the second semester Architectural Representation studio has been to introduce hybrid drawing, i.e. blending hand-drawing and digital techniques of image-making. Rather than maintaining it as a passive skill-building studio, the attempt was to push students to find their own ways of creating an imagery for a given provocation. Two aspects were mobilized simultaneously: 1. Basic Introduction to key softwares (AutoCAD, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign and Google Sketchup) 2.A provocation, where each student was asked to select from a matrix of words, resulting in a phrase that would become their brief for representation. The matrix consisted of four columns with options for program, preposition, adjective and a context, as given alongside. Individual selections from the columns of the above table resulted in unexpected, but imaginative propositions like: "Room in Calm Geometries" or "Wall through Scented Desires" or "Factory around orderly trees. Through referencing artists, architects and graphic designers, the studio worked out possibilities of visually representing each of these phrases. Over three weeks of the representation studio, students worked towards creating evocative drawings of their respective provocations, that were compiled into small booklets. The project helped students find their own orientation to different softwares as well as engaging with them more meaningfully. In the process, they learnt inter-adaptability between softwares, identifying potentials of each and exploiting their features towards achieving desired results that their provocations demanded. The studio opened up image-making in architectural representation as an important tool towards argumentation, evocation and imagination.
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The second semester Building Sciences and Technology module is an exploration on material strength and property. The students started with experiments on light materials like paper, fiber and cards to increase the strength of a member, through methods of accumulation, interlocking, folding etc. The resultant structure was optimised to hold a load of 1 Kg weight exactly. With that as a base, the goal was to design a pavilion using suitable materials and dimensions such that the full potential of the material is explored. The models of the same were accompanied by scale drawings in plan, section and details. The final part of the module included the development of construction details and identification of materials that would be used in its actual construction. The module also included a supplementary course on environmental studies through climate zones, embodied energy and the analysis of resources and their consumption.
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The second semester design module focused on the poetics of experience via text and its translations into space and form. The module started with an exercise where students wrote about their emotions related to their personal space. With those learnings, students expressed what they experience everyday on the journey to college from their home and back. Those write-ups were further developed and the next part of the module was to make a spatial model to express the emotions or experiences related to the journey. The last part of the module involved the students designing a studio on an assigned site, one that was right in front of the college across the road. Students then derived a basis for their studio by selecting certain activities which they would perform there along with the environment which would shape that experience.
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As South Asian countries undergo an urban transition during the early 21 st century, their existing city centers, and near and far peripheries have emerged as the new frontiers of urbanization. Today, there exists a widespread recognition that much of this change will be centered beyond metro-cities. In this backdrop, design practices are largely called upon to envision the spatial forms associated with the ‘urban transition’ narrative and attendant aspirations to make globally connected cities. Beneath the skein of such a metanarrative, however, South Asian cities present multiple forms of mixing, innovation and promiscuity, both old and new. Such multiplicities of the ‘becoming urban’ prod the design fields to ask new questions, and present new challenges as well as opportunities to consider. How can architectural research engage with society’s multiplicities and their spatial manifestations in South Asia? Our premise is that if society’s multiplicity is at stake in the becoming urban, then architectural research needs to build capacities to engage with its multiple dimensions in ways that could constitute a critical and creative terrain for design explorations. Provisionally, we have in mind, the associational dimensions of count and category, type and image, resource and organization, language and sound, smell and taste, fear and desire, property and law, event and everyday, memory and belonging, and so on. For instance, the construction of a category forms the basis for the organization of a count in speculating urban futures; multiple organizational forms engender diverse avenues of urban participation to stake claim to (un) built resources; objects and space acquire the character of property in the grammar of law; or, underlying the desires to project certain futures rest hidden urban fears. We, therefore, ask: What new fields and debates could architectural research open out in thinking about the multiplicities of the becoming urban in South Asia? How can research methodologically engage innovatively into the happening of the social?
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Objectives: To acquaint with concepts of sustainability and green buildings; long spans, folded plates, shells, space frames, portals, pre- stressed system; and services of specialised buildings. This is done through Site Visits, Expert Lectures and Case Studies. of the Metro Infrastructure across the city.
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The studio was conducted through 4 focus areas which were: Repair and Retrofitting, Emerging Technologies, Contextual Technologies and Urban studies and Design. The Link below showcases the work of one such focus group.
In this studio, four transforming sites in the inner city of Pune were studied closely towards understanding their typological evolution. These included: Tulsi Baug, Rastewada, Pataleshwar caves and Mahatma Phule Mandai. Tulsi Baug: Tulsi Baug is a temple complex that came up in Pune in the 18th century that has come to be enclosed in a ring of shopline and stores that have historically served the temple. The intervention aimed to work out an appropriate typology for transition from the "outside" into the "inside" of this temple precinct. Mahatma Phule Mandai: This market is the biggest vegetable market in the city of Pune originally built by the British. The large warehouse type market has eight arm-sheds that meet into an octagonal core. Students were expected to develop an appropriate response to the public nature of activities and the scale of historical structure while accommodating the existing shops within their proposal. Pataleshwar Caves: Carved out of a single rock, the Pataleshwar caves in Pune date back to the 8th Century ACE. While it was originally located outside the town, the growing city brought the complex within the city limit. Dedicated to Lord Pataleshwar (God of the Underground), the caves are below ground level. The large patch of garden in the foreground was considered for a careful re-negotiation between the busy road and the archaeological monument while sensitively creating spaces for ASI office, public activities in the poorly-planned garden and introducing an informative program for orienting the city to the cave's history. Raste wada: Raste wada is the traditional courtyard house for the family of Rastes who have been one of the key land lords of Pune. The building is situated within a large complex that consisted of agricultural patches of land, horse-stables, houses and temples - owned by the Rastes. The project was situated on the plot next to the wada and looked at bringing together a few housing units while affording space for the school, and the government agencies that otherwise occupy the wada.
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Over the last three cycles of Mumbai Neighbourhood Studies, the focus of our studio has been largely to introduce architecture students, in their second year, to the city and its various neighbourhoods through field studies. Our approach has been largely to engage with the physical fabric of the neighbourhood. The studies documented the physical character of the built environment by studying neighbourhood settings and building typologies as a historical process. The intent of these studies has been multi-fold: to create a repository of neighbourhood morphologies within the city; to record the history of urban transformation within Mumbai; to study suburban growth patterns which are often left out in city studies; to familiarize ourselves with distinct building typologies. Students became research collaborators in the process, and created a rich, growing archive of neighbourhoods that remains available for further research, pedagogy as well as serving as an entry point for soft interventions, architectural or otherwise. Methodologically, the documentation is conducted within a week by student groups and involves orientation lectures, field study, drawing and writing sessions. On one hand, participants introduce themselves to the diversity of living forms in the city, on the other, they also learn tools and techniques of spatial mapping. As a practice intrinsically tied to urban processes, the question of architecture cannot remain removed from its immediate surroundings. The study aims to locate the practice of architecture within the field by recognizing urban neighbourhoods not just as sediments of insular processes, but rather as living organisms. The sites chosen are thus seen from a contemporary standpoint. The first cycle focused on the Western Suburbs of Mumbai, the second looked at Eastern suburbs while the third focused on the inner city. In this semester, we attempted to undertake the Mumbai Neighbourhood studies through a community approach. In order to do so, SEA collaborated with Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA) – an organization that works towards empowering marginalized groups within the city. An architect’s responsibility towards the marginalized and vulnerable groups within the city must be to prioritize their own needs and concerns, towards the making of an inclusive city. While YUVA informs this dimension through their sustained engagements with the communities, SEA supports the process through its knowledge of spatial mapping. The study involved documentation of seven sites spread across the city: Ambojwadi, Vashi Naka, Bhim Nagar, Homeless groups in Dadar, Coal Bunder, Baba Nagar and Ambedkar Nagar. A preliminary mapping of access to education, health and sanitation infrastructure, and public spaces within these communities led study groups to suggest immediate action plans that could strengthen their presence within the neighbourhoods studied. This compilation reminds us that architects can contribute to an empathetic process of social transformation through their agency of spatial understanding. Architecture can play an integral role in negotiating urban interests, in turn, shaping a city that is resilient and generous to everyone.
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The semester 5 design aim was to develop an enquiry into space and built form for any given context and programme emerging from an architecture which is based on low resource consumption and is also productive. The goal was to design a co-living space by centralizing the dwelling units in which the inhabitants have their common community spaces and social interaction spaces. The idea of Coliving is a shared housing with common facilities and hence shared resources.It allows possibilities for like minded individuals to come together from different socio-cultural backgrounds and different professions. Co-living concept focuses on social sustainability through user centric design in terms of functionality, comfort and accessibility. With a splurge of youngsters moving to new cities for job and education opportunities, the coliving concept is on the rise. They often take up rented apartments, accommodation as paying guests or look for hostel accommodations. The students were encouraged to develop their own user profiles and area configurations. The aim was to address the concerns of resource and energy consumption within the built form along with the spatial logistics. Building on the analytical thinking and derivations, this studio helped the students to develop inquiries around the questions of resources and also qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate their built forms.
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This semester 5 technology studio explores the complexities of the process of building construction of large span structures through architectural detailing, digital validation, engineering, and various processes of construction & documentation. The studio began with discussions on air, various aspects of air quality and its measurements, acoustics and management of sound, and ventilation and heating & air conditioning systems. The studio entailed designing an exhibition space in any context of the world (internationally) to explore the idea of a long span structure. It involved setting parameters to test the design for its success, and appropriateness, to alter the envelope and to test results for the specific climatic and regional zone. The construction process requires substantial post design work. This semester also looked at understanding Building Specifications, Bill of Quantities and Contract Conditions as some of the aspects of construction.
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Given the strained contemporary political equations of India with its neighbouring countries, the purpose of developing architectural scholarship on South Asia is a move towards comprehending the contiguous geography of this region as a whole. Limiting, however, because traditional scholarship often relies on methods of comparison and distance that work into the representation of the “other”. The project on attempting a contemporary history of South Asia is thus, a history of a split self - or learning the self within the other. This archive adds to the first and second stock of projects in South Asia taken over the last two years that have resulted in an architecture blog and a poster documenting specific architectural works within this region over the last century. Meanwhile for this cycle, alongside the descriptions, students also thickened the developmental timelines of the respective countries from 1900 to present to include cultural and social markers, alongside the political events in the neighbouring countries. These events and forces, we propose, must have worked into the built environment of the respective countries. The timelines thus serve as an intellectual and cultural landscape - a field within which physical transformations map out within South Asia. One particular edit in the present study is the exclusion of Myanmar from the ambit of South Asia, as compared to the earlier two cycles. While India shares a long border with Myanmar, the country has remained an observer within the SAARC constitution over the years. Moreso, Myanmar’s decision to join ASEAN group rather than SAARC suggests its identification with South East Asia, rather than South Asia.
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