KRVIA MASTERS: LOCAL AREA PLAN: 2018

SEMESTER III STUDIO 

(URBAN DESIGN + URBAN CONSERVATION)

The new paradigm called for planning practice to be “bottom up” and “people centred”, and not relies on economists, engineers and statisticians alone. The significance of anthropologists, sociologists, scholars of cultural studies and grassroots activists who were closer to people were brought within the folds of this new planning discourse. Institutionally, it called for a shift from state to non - state actors like community based organizations (CBOs) private voluntary organizations that were efficient, equitable, flexible and accountable.

The semester III studio organizes around the background knowledge and expertise gained through the previous studio works on mapping, representing, urban history, urban housing, urban landscaping and urban transportation

The studio intends to explore the concept of Communicative Action and what it would mean in the context of creating local area plans within local governments in consultation with local agencies. The idea of Communicative Action, as Jurgen Habermas describes it, is an important type of social action, in which the actors in society seek to reach common understanding and take coordinated actions by reasoned argument, consensus and cooperation rather than strategic action, strictly in pursuit of their own goals (Habermas, 1984, p.86).

The studio sites for the LAP studio were Mumbai GAOTHANS (Indigenous Urban Villages) within Municipal Corporations located within the city. The context of the city opens up the possibility of engaging with a different set of community groups who have unique set of relationship with the history of the city, its evolution and transformation. 

The studio working has been extremely challenging due to the diverse stake holders and aging focused group coupled with real estate pressure. The studio worked on the different scenarios and strategies to revive, restore and rejuvenate the majority of Gaothans within the flexible parameter of augmentation of infrastructure and amenities, heritage guidelines, re-adaptive framework. The policy guidelines and TDR structure makes the studio project in the most complex decision structure. The operative intervention models are limited but the studio enabled the learning process of such complex dynamics of heritage and real estate.

KRVIA BRIDGE STUDIO IX: HALL OF NATION | NEW DELHI

QUESTION OF BRIDGE STUDIO

The bridge studio is a space where the intellectual formalisation of practice begins to configure with the academic space or academic space begins to interact with practice domain. The practice domain is generally perceived as other side of academics with handful information of practical imperatives & awareness towards making of architecture that resonates its purpose & market that sterilises academics.  However practice in the context of bridge studio is imagine to be an act of design & construction of building that is deemed to be an academic exercise. 

If one looks other way around, only if, practice that reaches out to academics to experiment with the particular aspects of architecture that resonates the act of conflict, deemed unresolved. It is that precise conflict and unresolved condition finds academic space as laboratory for experimentation, where unresolved conflict can emerge in all tones of fresh imaginations, complex reality engages with comprehensible manifestation, architecture that traverse beyond time and tragic views.

QUESTION OF MODERN

The modern word is often limited in its definition when we talk within academics or general conversation as being departure from or repudiation of accepted norms. However the modern also brings about the question on philosophy on which shatters the boundary of orthodoxy and making the modern phenomena more transient and fleeting (continuously & simultaneously emerging). Even though the word modern & heritage are contradictory in terms, it brings about values that shaped thought and philosophy. Architecture of any given time is a product of thought to context. The knowledge reacting to the situation within which the encapsulated boundary of modern transverses and becomes history of ideas. It is this precise conflict that studio attempted to address, to deconstruct the implicit meaning of word modern and seek various possible reaction and manifestation.