Author:Prasanna Avat Vyas
Site Location: Jamnagar
Institute: Arvindbhai Patel Institute Of Environmental Design
Advisor: Prof. Sandeep Pant

Description

Another One Bites the Dust began with a simple discomfort: Who is site responsive architecture really responding to? If architecture is built for people, what happens to everything else already living there?

The project explores an alternative way of building on a 9-acre landscape near Jamnagar, where decades of vegetation, water systems and ecological relationships already existed. Instead of beginning with buildings, the process began with observing the land, understanding its water, identifying what should remain untouched, and asking where architecture was actually needed.

This led to a landscape and an Institute of Dravyaguna where cultivation, learning, research and preservation become one continuous system. The architecture is shaped by the site through retaining walls, water networks, existing trees, stone and timber, balancing seclusion and coherence.

But the process kept opening deeper questions. Where does architecture stop and the landscape begin? What actually happens at that edge? Who decides where one ends and the other starts? If a wall can grow moss, if water can cross a boundary, if trees can outlive a building, then what makes a building separate from the landscape at all? And if the land already knew how to grow, hold water and support life without us, was architecture needed here at all?

Perhaps there is no final answer. Perhaps that is the point. Another One Bites the Dust is simply another attempt to ask better questions.

Drawings

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Author:Aaron Desa
Site Location: Mumbai
Institute:Balwant Sheth School of Architecture, NMIMS University
Advisor:Jagdish Jani

Description

The city depends on what it simultaneously destabilizes. While our attention is Forced towards centers, infrastructure and planned development, the urban fringe quietly absorbs the pressures the formal city cannot accommodate. Rather than treating these landscapes as incomplete territories awaiting transformation, the project works with these Loose Ends to understand the fringe as an urban structure that simultaneously absorbs, produces and adapts. It argues that the fringe is not waiting to become the city – it is already a functional part of it. Its intelligence lies not in its buildings, but in the relationships that have evolved through continual negotiation between memory, ecology, economy, users and the city.

From this emerges an Architecture of Force – a design methodology that begins by understanding the systems that already sustain the city before attempting to transform them. Through a relational reading of force imbalances and urban linkages, the project identifies where existing systems become disconnected and where architectural intervention can most effectively recalibrate them. Rather than replacing urban systems, it strengthens existing relationships, balances competing forces and enables incremental adaptation, allowing the city to evolve through what already exists. Equitability emerges not from designing the same solution for everyone, but from enabling different people to participate in & benefit from the relationships that sustain one another.

Tested through Antop Hill in Mumbai, the project argues that architecture must move from designing objects to designing relationships. Instead of measuring architecture by the size of its footprint, it measures it by the reach of the relationships it enables. Each intervention begins with a local condition – work, social, religious, leisure – and recalibrates the networks through which people, places and systems depend upon one another. The architecture remains in Antop Hill, but what it enables extends far beyond it: a piece of cloth woven on the hill appears on a runway in Milan; a flower grown beside a chapel, blooms on a stranger’s balcony; a song performed in a neighborhood Khao Gully inspires a filmmaker; a seed planted in a ruined bungalow becomes part of another city’s landscape. The project asks not how large architecture is, but how far its consequences can travel.

Drawings

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Author:Asmi Mehrotra
Site Location: Bhimbetka
Institute: Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)
Advisor:Prof. Manavvi Suneja

Description

The thesis proposal for Rock Art Eco Park & Museum, Bhimbetka is envisioned as an inclusive cultural institution that seeks to make heritage accessible and meaningful to a wider public audience while simultaneously responding to the sensitive ecological and archaeological context of the site. Located within the UNESCO World Heritage landscape of Bhimbetka, the project addresses the complex relationship between conservation and public engagement through architecture.
The project responds to the idea of cultural accessibility by rethinking the manner in which heritage is experienced in India. The design of the museum aims to bridge the gap of perspectives between daily visitors, local communities and skilled professionals through interpretation.
The design adopts a conservation-oriented approach that minimizes intervention within the landscape while enhancing the visitor’s understanding of the site. Built forms remain low-rise and earth-responsive, carefully integrated into the natural terrain to preserve its archeological and ecological integrity. The proposal functions not only as a museum, but as a public space of cultural commons. Thus, the project uses architecture as a tool for cultural equity by demonstrating how heritage conservation can coexist with public accessibility and ecological custodianship.

Drawings

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