Tag: Public Space GM

Multi-Model Transit Hub a Nexus for All

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Author: D’Souza Sean Alwyn Jennifer
Site Location: Panvel
Institute: Thakur School of Architecture & Planning
Advisor: Ar. Tushar Shetty

Description

The conception of the hub began with providing a nexus point for the ease of modal change and adhering to all the needs of commuters as well as locals. The site was chosen carefully due to the rapidly expanding transit infrastructure of Panvel and it’s close proximity to the Railway station and the State transport bus depot. The main programs classified for the hub were: ST bus depot, Local bus stops, Railways and Paratransit. Due to the overloading of the existing ST bus depot the need for a new and functional depot was a must. The newly designed bus depot held a large portion of the premium and base, inter and intra city buses as well as a fleet for airport shuttle buses due to the site’s close proximity to the newly established Navi Mumbai International Airport. The form of the hub sweeps and curves as per the direction of user travel and connects directly to the Railway platform to the north. The main feature of the form ‘The interlace’ which was designed parametrically, acts not only as a sculptural piece but also as a structural one, supporting the major load of the large span organic roof. The interlace was inspired by a Mobius strip and hence was designed in a self-twisting manner. The frontage of the site is designed as a multi lane drive way for various para transit services such as private cars, taxis and autorickshaws for pick up and drop off both. The local bus stop was shifted to the frontage due to its ease of access and better maneuvering. The site sheltered an existing public parking space which needed to be kept intact with minor changes to the layout proving better functionality for the overall parking area and site. Given its rapid growth and strong connectivity, the city of Panvel proves to be a true nexus for the future of multi-modality in transport.


Drawings

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Invisible Origins: Reconnecting Urban Identity with the Forgotten Systems that Shaped it

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Author: Anshika Agarwal
Site Location: Ahmedabad
Institute: Sri Venkateshwara College of Architecture
Advisor: Prof. Krishna Priya

Description

Cities are shaped not only by their visible architecture, but by the systems of labour, industry, craft, culture and technology that produce them. As these systems disappear from public memory, urban identity becomes increasingly disconnected from its origins. This thesis explores how architecture can make these invisible foundations legible again.

Ahmedabad provides a layered narrative of this transformation, evolving through Sultanate, Vernacular, Industrial, Modern and Contemporary eras. The former Calico Mills site, once central to the city’s industrial identity, now remains largely as fragments, with its chimney standing as a physical trace of its past.

However, remembering a city cannot be limited to preserving its past. If urban identity is collectively created, the spaces that represent it must also remain accessible to the communities that created it. The project therefore extends beyond the museum into a civic landscape of cultural spaces, markets, festivals, workshops and everyday gathering, creating a gradient of access between the institution and the surrounding neighbourhood.

The project asks how architecture can make forgotten systems visible while creating equitable spaces for collective life.


Drawings

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Parai, Magal-eer(+leisure)

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Author: P. Preeti
Site Location: Watrap Pudupatti, Tamil Nadu
Institute: R V College of Architecture
Advisor:Prof. Meera Vasudev Srinivasan

Description

The project explores how architecture can intervene within the caste-divided spatial landscape of Watrap Pudupatti, Tamil Nadu, through the everyday lives of Paraiyar women. Rather than attempting to erase caste difference, it creates layers of democratic space that allow different communities to coexist while gradually challenging who can occupy, access, and control space.
At its core, the project establishes ownership as a foundation for leisure and agency. Land, therefore, is not treated simply as a site for a building, but as a means of reclaiming spatial autonomy. The architecture creates a sequence of public, collective, semi-private, and intimate spaces, allowing women to move between gathering, learning, performing, producing, resting, and governing.
The five fundamental rhythms of the parai become the project’s architectural syntax. Their patterns of repetition, pause, acceleration, and release are translated into spatial operations—compression and expansion, thresholds, courtyards, movement paths, gathering grounds, and moments of pause.
Rather than a singular monument, the project becomes a porous network embedded within village life. Open grounds, shaded courts, landscape, and transitional spaces allow everyday movement to flow through the institution. Architecture thus becomes a framework for ownership, visibility, leisure, collective expression, and coexistence, creating spatial loopholes within an existing caste hierarchy.


Drawings

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Inclusive Retirement Habitat: An integrated Environment for Senior Living in Urban Fabric

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Author: Sraddha K
Site Location: Panampilly Nagar, Kochi, Kerala
Institute: TKM School of Architecture
Advisor: Prof. Dipu George

Description

As India’s ageing population continues to grow, conventional senior living communities often remain isolated from everyday urban life, limiting opportunities for social interaction and community engagement. This project proposes an alternative approach by integrating senior living within the urban fabric of Panampilly Nagar, Kochi, Kerala.

Developed on a 3.1-acre site, the proposal combines retirement housing, commercial spaces, community amenities, healthcare facilities, and a business hotel within a single mixed-use development. The project seeks to create an environment where older adults remain connected to the rhythms of city life while maintaining comfort, dignity, and independence.

The design is organized through a layered hierarchy of public and private spaces. Active commercial and community functions occupy the lower levels, while landscaped recreational terraces, healthcare facilities, and residential spaces create opportunities for interaction and active ageing. A business hotel integrated within the development enhances economic viability and introduces a diverse user group, encouraging intergenerational engagement.

By transforming an inward-looking institutional site into a socially connected urban destination, the project reimagines senior living as an active and inclusive part of the city.


Drawings

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Habitat Continuum

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Author: Aryan Paranjape
Site Location: Saswad
Institute:IES’s College of Architecture
Advisor: Prof. Sanket Mhatre

Description

A landscape is rarely inhabited by one life alone. At Saswad, seasonal vegetation, wildlife and agricultural communities depend upon the same territory, yet each experiences and responds to it differently.

The thesis began with a simple question: Who are we designing for? Studying how people move, how wildlife adapts, how the landscape changes, and where these patterns meet revealed that the challenge was not a lack of space, but a lack of understanding.

This shifted the approach from “What should be built here?” to “What can design heal here?”

The project proposes a capacity-building centre organised around dialogue, understanding and care, bringing together a Public Interface, Research Wing, Rescue Unit, Rapid Response Garage and Dormitory. Each addresses a different need; from community support and field research to emergency response and sustained engagement. An adaptable Info Cart extends this intent beyond the centre.

The architecture follows the site’s contours, seasonal rhythms and existing patterns through clustered, permeable and minimally grounded interventions. Water systems, vegetation and open spaces become active parts of the proposal rather than residual landscape.

Inspired by the Chabutara, the project asks how architecture can make room for different lives without allowing one to overshadow another.

Ultimately, Habitat Continuum seeks to create a shared territory where different needs can find space, support and belonging.


Drawings

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Rural Development: A Holistic Approach to Healing, Learning and Creating, at AKOLE, Maharashtra

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Author: Manvi Yogesh Jondhale
Site Location: Akole, Maharashtra
Institute: D Y Patil Deemed to be University School Of Architecture
Advisor: Prof. Anita Shyam

Description

The project addresses the uneven distribution of essential services across the rural landscape of Akole by creating a shared environment where healthcare, education, and livelihood opportunities are brought together within a single integrated framework. Located in Katlapur, the proposal responds to the needs of surrounding villages by improving access to social infrastructure that is often concentrated in larger urban centres.
The design is organized around the Healing Spine, a continuous public pathway that connects a Rural Hospital, a School for Classes 1–12, skill development centres, artisan workshops, and community spaces. More than a circulation route, the spine becomes a common ground where healing, learning, and creating intersect, encouraging interaction across age groups, occupations, and social backgrounds. The project views architecture as a catalyst for equitable development by ensuring that essential resources are accessible, connected, and shared. Through a network of inclusive spaces and community-oriented infrastructure, it seeks to strengthen social well-being, create Opportunities for growth, and support a more resilient rural future. Rather than functioning as isolated institutions, the various programs work together to build a holistic ecosystem that empowers both individuals and the wider community.


Drawings

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Urban Scar to Social Common

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Author: Manu Viswam E
Site Location: Kollam
Institute: College of Architecture, Trivandrum
Advisor: Prof. Sreeram Ramesh

Description

The collapse of Kollam’s global cashew trade left behind more than derelict infrastructure. It fractured the socio-economic identity of a city built on this industry. This proposal transforms a historic industrial zone,  the historic Harrisons & Crosfield factory, along the Kollam waterfront into a civic bridge: reclaiming land once closed off by industry and returning it to the public as democratic, shared ground.

Rather than a static repository of artifacts, the museum operates as an active urban threshold honouring the working-class legacy of cashew labourers while rehabilitating the ecological edge and anchoring Kollam’s future to its maritime heritage. The strategy of “selective preservation and radical insertion” retains the memory of the industrial grid while breaking it open for pedestrian permeability, sinking and elevating programs to free the ground plane for public movement, planting, and gathering.

Equitability drives the design: livelihood training for women workers, a shaded civic edge for fishermen, learning spaces for students and youth, and heritage made accessible to visitors — without displacing local life. Heritage here becomes working infrastructure, not an object for viewing.

Drawings

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Loco Iron Cultural Park, Parel

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Author: Sanskar Khatri
Site Location: Parel, South Mumbai
Institute: Rachana Sansad’s Academy of Architecture
Advisor: Prof. Neha Panchal

Description

A jewel of Railway’s industrial heritage, the future of historic structures, the ecology, and the active industrial economy of the Parel Locomotive Workshop appears uncertain because of the Central Railway’s Parel Terminus proposal. This thesis critically analyses the idea of a terminus in an infrastructurally-exhausted locality, and attempts to make a counter-proposal: A cultural and ecological park for the people, open to all.

When the grounds of the Parel Loco Workshop become available for the public as the Loco Iron Cultural Park, they make quality recreation and cultural spaces accessible for all. This thesis sees equitability not just as designing for access and utility. Rather, it imagines equitability as designing for experience – experiences that can be garnered by the wealthy and the underprivileged; by children, adults as well as the elderly; by able-bodied and the differently-abled alike. True equity does not simply reflect through design decisions, it is lived in small everyday experiences through design thought. This project attempts to manufacture such subtle experiences, giving to each one what they demand at different scales – a space to rest, or a building to perform, or a job to sustain family.

Drawings

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A Silent Dialogue: An Experiential Journey of Life and Death Through Architecture

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Author: Jainishkumar Bapodariya
Site Location: Jamalpur, Calico Mill, Ahmedabad
Institute: Indubhai Parekh School of Architecture
Advisor: Ar. Yatin Pandya

Description

In contemporary Indian cities, the urban crematorium has been exiled to the fringes, reduced to an industrial shed of cold mechanical disposal and cut off from the public realm by high walls of taboo. This is not merely a spatial failure; it is a profound cultural and civic crisis that denies urban equitability at our most vulnerable hour.

Our design project, “A Silent Dialogue,” addresses this crisis by reclaiming the crematorium as an inclusive civic commons along the riverfront. We reject the notion that a space of death must be a closed, intimidating compound. Instead, through a phenomenological framework guided by the Pancha Maha Bhuta (Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Sky), the architecture choreographs a seamless transition between religious-specific rites and shared public life.

The project carefully layers public accessibility without compromising ritual sanctity. As visitors approach, they enter a continuous civic landscape a place to walk, sit, and find shelter under open skies welcoming both the grieving family and the everyday citizen. By utilizing micro-climatic shifts, raw tactile materials, water reflections, and deep silences, the architecture shifts human emotion from trauma to contemplation.

Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates that true equitability in architecture means designing spaces that honours all dimensions of human existence. By transforming an avoided urban void into an empathetic sanctuary, we return dignity to the departed, solace to the living, and an essential piece of nature back to the city.


Drawings

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Agni-Skandha

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Author: Kishan P. Lakhatariya
Site Location: Triveni Sangam, Chandod, Gujarat
Institute: Acharya’s NRV School of Architecture
Advisor: Asso. Prof. Pallavi Thushar Abhale

Description

Executive Summary
Agni-Skandha reimagines the Hindu crematorium from a neglected, utilitarian disposal unit into a
dignified “Sacred Infrastructure.” Situated at the confluence of the Narmada, Orsang, and Saraswati
rivers, the project addresses current spatial fragmentation, sensory chaos, and environmental
contamination caused by traditional open-pyre rites.
Design & Spatial Strategy
 High-Ground Resilience: Positioned on an 8-acre elevated site on the outskirts of Chandod to
ensure complete immunity from seasonal Narmada flood surges while de-congesting the
historical village core.
 Ritual & Bereavement Axis: Chronologically programmed around the Antyesti (last rites)
sequence, featuring sequential thresholds, dedicated Pujari zones, private mourning pavilions,
and administrative areas.
 Sensory Solace: Utilizes local stone, rammed earth, and controlled vistas toward the Triveni
Sangam to foster psychological transition from grief to acceptance.
Ecological & Technical Integration
 Integrates advanced exhaust filtration and bio-remediating ash management pools to prevent air
pollution and protect river health (Zero-Discharge).
 Blends ancient Vedic spatial philosophy with modern green technologies to create a floodresilient,
sustainable civic landmark.
The final outcome of the Agni-Skandha project will be a sustainable, flood-resilient sacred
campus situated on an 8-acre high-ground plateau that transforms traditional open-pyre rites
into a dignified civic experience. By integrating chronological ritual zoning, local stone and
rammed earth construction, and advanced zero-discharge exhaust and ash filtration systems,
the project prevents Narmada river pollution, eliminates smoke emissions, relieves spatial
congestion in historical Chandod, and provides a serene, emotionally comforting landscape
overlooking the Triveni Sangam for grieving families.


जहाँ नर्मदा, ओरसांग और सरस्वती का पावन संगम होता है,
जहाँ तीन नदियों का शांत और पवित्र मिलन होता है।
वर्षों से देखा अपनों को तड़पते, धुएँ और अव्यवस्था के बीच,
तभी जगा एक सपना, बनाने का एक पावन और शांत सुकून का मंच।
जहाँ अंतिम विदाई में दर्द तो हो, पर मन को मिले थोड़ा करार,
जहाँ प्रियजन को अलविदा कहें, शांति से भरकर अपना प्यार।
वेद-पुराणों की उस प्राचीन सीख से मिली मुझे यह प्रेरणा,
जहाँ प्रकृति स्वयं बनती है अंतिम संस्कारों की पावन चेतना।
अग्नि-स्कंध खड़ा होगा, मिट्टी और पत्थरों का आधार,
जहाँ हर विधि जुड़ी होगी प्रकृति से, बिना किसी विकार ।
बाढ़ की लहरों से टूर, एक सुरक्षित और भव्य धाम बनेगा,

Drawings

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Ainmane: Where Architecture Narrates the Story of Kodagu’s Living Heritage

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Author: Punyashree P. M.
Site Location: Madikeri, Kodagu
Institute: Acharya’s NRV School of Architecture
Advisor: Prof. Fathima Samana S

Description

Ainmane is a cultural heritage and experience centre in Madikeri, Kodagu, conceived as a living platform for preserving and celebrating the region’s diverse cultural heritage. Located on an 11.3-acre commercial site near Abbey Falls Road, the project responds to Kodagu’s changing landscape and the gradual loss of traditional knowledge, livelihoods and community spaces. Rather than treating heritage as a static museum exhibit, the project brings together the people, practices and products that sustain it. The programme includes a Heritage Experience Centre, Flavours of Kodagu Experience Centre, processing and recycling units, retail spaces and worker housing. More than twenty communities of Kodagu are represented through food, crafts, beliefs, stories, festivals and everyday practices, creating opportunities for participation, learning and economic empowerment. Local agro-products such as coffee and spices are connected to processing, value addition and retail, while waste such as coffee husk and coconut residue is reused through a circular production system. Inspired by the Ainmane typology and Kodagu’s vernacular character, the architecture uses sloping roofs, Mangalore tiles, lattice stone and red-oxide finishes to create a contemporary yet rooted cultural landscape.

Drawings

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Echel Sanaleibak: A Women Led Centre for Meitei Revival in Leitanpokpi, Manipur

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Author:Umapati Tonjam
Site Location: Leitanpokpi, Manipur
Institute:Piloo Mody College of Architecture
Advisor: Ar. Maitreyee Mishra

Description

In May 2023, ethnic conflict tore through Manipur, displacing over 60,000 people and destroying more than 11,000 homes — along with the courtyards, markets, and festival grounds that once held the Meitei community’s memory together.

Amidst this, Meitei women have emerged as the strongest anchors of resilience — preserving culture through craft, sustaining livelihoods, and quietly leading efforts toward healing and revival.

Echel Sanaleibak is a 5.3-acre women-led center in Leitanpokpi, Imphal East, conceived as a village rather than an institution. Inspired by the traditional Yumjao house, it unfolds as a cluster of structures in bamboo, timber, mud, and brick, engineered for Seismic Zone V. A handloom and bamboo-craft workshop, a Thang-Ta martial arts hall, a community hall for Lai Haraouba, a local market, and a prayer hall gather around a central pond, anchoring daily life the way a village tank once did. Community-based and visitor-based movement stay deliberately separate, so healing doesn’t have to happen under watch.

Where conflict broke trust, this ground offers a shared one — held, again, by the women who never stopped holding it.

Drawings

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Stree Yuga – The Age of Feminine

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Author:Chethana M Jangid
Site Location: Ranisar Talab, Phalodi, Rajasthan
Institute:School of Architecture, Reva University
Advisor: Prof. Pradipta Roy Choudhury

Description

Stree Yuga: The Age of the Feminine proposes Aarani, a new architectural typology conceived as a Mytho-Spatial Archive—a space where mythology, memory, culture, and landscape are collectively preserved and experienced. Located in Phalodi, Rajasthan, the thesis explores how architecture can move beyond conventional museums and archives to become an active medium for remembering, learning, healing, performing, and gathering.
Rooted in the feminine narratives of Indian mythology and the cultural landscape of Phalodi, the project translates intangible stories, collective memories, rituals, emotions, and local traditions into spatial experiences. Rather than treating heritage as something static to be displayed, Aarani transforms memory into a participatory journey, allowing users to encounter, interpret, and contribute to cultural narratives.
The architectural language emerges through mandala-based spatial organization, circular and spiral movement, courtyards, thresholds, voids, emotional zoning, and connections to the landscape, creating a progression from individual reflection to collective expression. The project therefore becomes an architectural experiment in creating a new typology where archive, cultural landscape, learning space, performance, healing, and community coexist—positioning architecture as an evolving repository of feminine knowledge, resilience, and memory.

lic life coexist, creating a future-ready maritime hub while safeguarding the identity and livelihoods of its fishing communities.

Drawings

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Macchi: Redevelopment of Sassoon Dock as Smart Maritime Hub

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Author: Umesh Santosh Lad
Site Location: Mumbai
Institute: School of Planning and Architecture, SPAV
Advisor: Dr. Prashanti Rao

Description

Mumbai’s ports and docks have played a vital role in shaping the city as India’s major maritime and commercial gateway. Among them, Sassoon Dock has historically supported fishing, trade, employment, and the livelihoods of the traditional Koli community. However, despite its economic and cultural significance, the dock today faces challenges of outdated infrastructure, poor hygiene, overlapping circulation, limited cold-chain facilities, inefficient waste management, environmental degradation, and vulnerability to climate change and rising sea levels.

While airports are modernized, metro corridors are digitized, and business districts are reimagined, traditional maritime infrastructures like Sassoon Dock remain spatially inefficient, environmentally stressed, and technologically outdated. Fish handling lacks hygienic zoning; circulation of goods and people overlaps chaotically; cold-chain integration is limited; waste disposal affects the harbour ecology. Despite being economically and culturally significant, the dock has not evolved with contemporary standards of resilience, logistics, or smart governance.

The Redevelopment of Sassoon Dock as a Smart Maritime Hub proposes a resilient, inclusive, and technologically integrated waterfront while preserving its cultural identity and traditional fishing economy. The proposal is organized into four interconnected zones: Heritage Core, Fish Market Zone, Community Spine, and Public Plaza. Adaptive reuse of cold storage building strengthens the heritage character, while upgraded fish markets, auction spaces, sorting, storage, and cold-chain facilities improve operational efficiency and hygiene.

The waterfront integrates blue-green infrastructure, including mangrove restoration, tidal wetlands, sponge landscapes, ecological buffers, and a public promenade. Smart systems for environmental monitoring, waste management, and building operations further enhance resilience.

The project envisions Sassoon Dock as a living waterfront where livelihood, heritage, ecology, and public life coexist, creating a future-ready maritime hub while safeguarding the identity and livelihoods of its fishing communities.

Drawings

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The Rising Gully: A Multipurpose School & Wellness Centre

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Author: Drashti Nandu
Site Location: Dharavi, Mumbai
Institute: Aditya College of Art, Architecture & Design
Advisor:Ar. Veena Takale,
Ar. Rita Nayak

Description

In Dharavi, the street is more than a path, it is a place to work, play, gather, trade, celebrate, and
connect. Yet, within an intensely dense urban fabric, these everyday actvites compete for limited
space, open leaving the narrow gullies overcrowded and open spaces scarce. This project asks whether
can a school become more than a school, and can architecture bring the life of the street into a shared
community space?
The proposal reimagines the primary school as a multpurpose community infrastructure, designed to
remain active beyond school hours. Learning spaces transform into workshops, exhibition spaces,
markets, and gathering areas, allowing the building to respond to the changing needs of the
community. Inspired by Dharavi’s interconnected gullies, the project extends the idea of the street
vertically through a continuous green ramp, connecting ground-level actvites to accessible rooftop
spaces for play, recreation, and social interaction.
Rather than replacing the character of Dharavi, the project seeks to translate its existing social and
spatial qualities into architecture, creating a place where education, livelihood, recreation, and culture
coexist, and where community life can continue throughout the day

Drawings

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Tea Experience Hub Munnar, Kerala

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Author:Muhammad Sadath
Site Location: Munnar
Institute: Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Dubai
Advisor: Prof. Gopika Balakrishnan Nair

Description

TeaEla Tales of Munnar is an immersive tea experience hub in the Nallathanni/Nullathanni Estate, Munnar, conceived as a journey through the landscape, culture, and people behind every cup of tea.

Munnar, whose identity is deeply rooted in its tea plantations, yet the experience of tea tourism often remains limited to viewing plantations, visiting factories, and tasting tea.

At the heart of the project is equitable participation. Rather than treating the local community as an attraction, TeaEla positions plantation workers and residents as active stakeholders. Workers can share their skills, conduct workshops and participate in cultural storytelling, while local makers gain opportunities through markets and craft sales. Visitors become participants rather than passive observers, creating an exchange of knowledge, culture and experience.

The architecture responds to Munnar’s terrain and climate through green roofs, passive ventilation, filtered daylight and rainwater harvesting, creating a sustainable relationship between built form, landscape and community.

TeaEla ultimately aims to create a shared ground where visitors, workers and residents benefit equally, strengthening Munnar’s identity while creating a more sustainable and community-centered model of tea tourism.

Drawings

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Sangam_An urban social Interface for industrial workers

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Author:Het Radheshyam Thakkar
Site Location: Panoli, Gujarat
Institute: School of Environmental Design and Architecture, Navrachana University
Advisor: Prof. Milind Mistry

Description

The design thesis looks into the social need for the industrial workers and their families. Gujarat is leading manufacturing state and has various GIDC estate with small and medium scale industries. It provides economic growth but lacks in social need and infrastructure. Can architecture be the bridge between the social need and community wellbeing for the industrial workers as well as for the nearby villagers. Can it help in changing or evolving their community wellbeing? Can it act as a catalyst between workers, their families and missing social infrastructure near the industrial belt?

The project deploys a set of programs that intent to change or upgrade the lifestyle of the industrial worker and their families. The design is created with an integrated approach towards addressing problems of the worker and their families along with the socio-cultural practices, creating employment for women while empowering communities. It balances industrial productivity with essential social support, creating a resilient, equitable environment where the working community can thrive.

Drawings

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Another One Bites the Dust: Approaches Of Building With and For Land

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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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Meanwhile at Loose Ends. Recoding The City (Fringe Force)

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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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Rock Art Park and Museum, Blimbeth

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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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