Author: Aditya Mahajan
Site Location: Kolhapur, Maharashtra
Institute: School of Environment and Architecture (SEA)
Advisor: Prasad Shetty

Description

Complexities of land, caste-based segregation, people’s agency, agriculture, and industries give rise to a distinct urban and house form within city extents. These forces led to questions about life and space, intervening through diverse socio-political and environmental logics. The architectural inquiry is therefore about thinking of inhabitation forms where space emerges through fragmentation, accretion, and the ideas of permanence and impermanence.
Based on a thorough analysis of the biographies of resident families, the design imagines a housing and landscape urbanisation project driven by the community. It intervenes through planning, rethinking builtforms, and inserting infrastructural landscapes. By understanding ways of homemaking, it derives a proportioning system and stratifies the terrain into habitations.
Analysing land conditions, affordances, transformations, and intensification of homes, the project suggests a strategy for planning and rebuilding, estimated over the next 15 years, to improve living conditions. The proportioning system is developed into household modules, which can be permutated, appropriated, and grown over time by arranging them in various ways. Made with steel, reinforced fiber panels, and patra, they are meticulously designed with proportional sizes, proper ventilation, play of spatial syntax and volumes, ensuring costeffectiveness. Furthermore, the site systems can be configured to create varying degrees of publicness.

Drawings

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