Tag: Urbanism GM

Rethinking Urban Housing Density – Enhancing Community Integration in Hyderabad’s Housing

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Author: Sivani Dirisala
Site Location: Hyderabad, Telangana
Institute: Wadiyar Centre for Architecture
Advisor: Nelson Pais

Description

In contemporary urban environments, particularly in cities like Hyderabad, the adoption of standardized construction technologies, combined with bylaws such as an uncapped FSI, has fueled a surge in high-rise developments dominated by typical 3BHK and 4BHK layouts, regardless of actual demand. While these practices streamline construction and reduce timelines, they have also led to a homogenization of housing—prioritizing profit and maximizing returns. This market-driven approach creates a monopoly over centrally located land, making housing in the city center inaccessible to the working class and other family structures.

This project positions itself as a counterpoint to existing housing models in the city’s core. Instead of vertically repeating a single layout and multiplying it across the site, it introduces varied layouts that respond to diverse family structures. The design takes a different approach where the smallest parts also dictate how the overall project turns out. The relationships between these units are explored to create shared spaces and commonalities across multiple scales, reimagining density as a network of connected communities. The proposal aims for a context-sensitive density model—one that prioritizes livability and long-term community well-being over short-term commercial gain.

Drawings

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Revitalization of Benarasi Karigari

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Author: Priyal Patel
Site Location: Vishwanath Gaali, Varanasi
Institute: MIT School of Architecture, Pune
Advisor: Dr. Neeti Tirvedi

Description

The handloom industry of Benaras has served the livelihoods of over 75% of the population, predominantly comprised of Muslim weavers, for more than 400 years. The craft is developed as a legacy of their ancestors, continued by successive generations. However, the lackadaisical view towards the weavers in Benaras have forced them to live in a sub- human environment, creating an adverse impact on the craft of handloom weaving, leading to migration of weaver’s community to the periphery. The craft is facing the threat of extinction due to the exploitation of weavers by Gaddidars (traders), and growing usage of power looms, which enable faster and more cost-effective production.
Housing Conditions: Due to insufficient income, multi-weaver families live in overcrowded and uninhabitable conditions, sharing the same limited space for both domestic activities and weaving production. According to the research and documentation of existing dwelling units in Vishwanath Gaali, we observed the need for a space which would incorporate the weaving activity separately along with the domestic work.
The Aim of the Project: The aim of the project is to commercialize hand loom weaving by bridging the gap between the weavers and the local community in the old town of Varanasi. The intent is to create tangible spaces for intangible interactive experiences that engages both residents and weavers, bringing the craft into the public realm by showcasing it on the streets of the city. By integrating tangible aspects of urban design with the intangible cultural heritage of weaving, the initiative seeks to safeguard the weaver community within the old town, thereby preserving the essence of traditional hand loom craftsmanship.
The Site Plan: The design of the site plan is inspired from the process which is involved in pre and post weaving activities. The project aims at creating a weavers walk which would involve the experience of viewing the processes of weaving by the tourists. The weavers would also be provided with stalls at the end of the walk where they can display their art and sell their products together. The design of the site plan is done in a way to encourage the weavers to carry out activities such as washing of threads and dying work done together in the central area of the site. This would ultimately connect the local weavers to their potential clients simply without an interference of the traders. This also involves an additional source of income for the women to run food stalls along with their weaving studios. This would inculcate in them, a sense of inclusivity and security within the community of the old town of Varanasi and ultimately preserve the age-old craft of handloom weaving.

Drawings

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The Metamorphosis of Worli Koliwada

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Author: Srilekha Malladi
Site Location: Mumbai, Maharashtra
Institute: Dr. D.Y. Patil School of Architecture
Advisor: Amit Shirke

Description

The Metamorphosis of Worli Koliwada reimagines one of Mumbai’s oldest fishing villages as a resilient, community-driven waterfront. Caught between the pressures of redevelopment and the weight of heritage, the project proposes an alternative future, one that protects cultural memory while enabling growth.
The design unfolds through co-creation with the Koli community, embedding their lived routines, rituals, and occupations into spatial strategies. Instead of erasing the dense gullies, the project strengthens them through phased development: incremental housing upgrades, flexible public spaces, and resilient infrastructure. The seafront transforms into an amphitheatre and marketplace, where daily livelihood meets collective leisure. A folded plate roof inspired by fishing nets symbolises the dialogue between tradition and contemporary construction.
At its core, the thesis argues that urban design is not about replacing communities but amplifying them. By merging heritage, resilience, and equity, the project sets out a model for how Mumbai’s indigenous settlements can thrive amidst rapid urban change.

Drawings

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Parivartan: Re-imagining Slum Living of Bandra

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Author: Adburrab Ansari
Site Location: Mumbai, Maharashtra
Institute: Faculty of Architecture, Planning and Design, Integral University
Advisor: Zeba Nisar

Description

Parivartan: Re-imagining Slum Living is a people-centric redevelopment proposal for the dense informal settlements of Bandra West, Mumbai. Rooted in the philosophy of People-Centric Urbanism and guided by the framework of Regenerative Urbanism, the project envisions a future where slum redevelopment is not merely about housing provision but about enhancing quality of life, preserving community identity, and fostering socio-economic growth.

Through inclusive planning, the design integrates mixed-use vertical housing, accessible public amenities, and vibrant green spaces at both ground and podium levels, ensuring a balance between private comfort and shared community life. Cultural values and lifestyle patterns of residents are retained through flexible housing layouts and active open spaces that encourage interaction.

Sustainability is embedded through modular construction, climate-responsive design, and integrated landscape planning. By addressing housing, livelihood, and ecology together, Parivartan becomes a replicable model for equitable and resilient urban transformation—demonstrating how architecture can be a tool for social upliftment while shaping a more inclusive urban future.

Drawings

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Housing and Landscape Urbanisation: A Case in Kolhapur’s Extents

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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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Siddi: Preserve, Empower, Thrive – Community-driven Architecture in Ahmedabad

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Author: Habib Rehman Akhtar Khan
Site Location: Ahmedabad, Gujarat
Institute: Lokmanya Tilak Institute of Architecture and Design
Advisor: Harish Shetty

Description

The Siddi Community Centre is envisioned as a place of dignity, belonging, and opportunity for a people often pushed to the margins. The Siddis -Africans by origin, Indians by nationality have lived in Gujarat for over four centuries. They built forts, carved Ahmedabad’s iconic Siddi Saiyyed Jali, and enriched India’s cultural fabric. Yet today, many struggle with poverty, exclusion, and invisibility, with little access to education, healthcare, or secure livelihoods.
Many remain unaware of their Scheduled Tribe rights, while issues like gambling and exploitation weaken unity. Hope lies in the younger generation, eager for education and change.
This project responds by asking: who are we designing for? The answer lies in co-creating with the community. Set on a 29,000 sqm site along the Ahmedabad riverfront, the design steps with contours and draws from idea of Correa’s incremental grid, Kéré’s ventilation strategies, and Fathy’s brick vaults. Each 12 × 20 m module, supported by RCC beams and brick piers, integrates services, harvests rainwater, and anticipates growth.
Programs emerge from lived realities – a healthcare block for women and children, a community kitchen inspired by Hirabai Lobi’s struggle, schools woven with skill centers, and courtyards for Dhamal dance, weddings, and festivals. Sunken exhibition spaces become hubs for dialogue and livelihood, while sports and women’s training centers unlock future potential.
This is not charity. It is architecture as equity, preserving heritage, empowering livelihoods, and nurturing cultural pride for generations to come.

Drawings

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Architecture of the Sacred Commons: Water Landscape of Pamban Island

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Author: Kshitij Churi
Site Location: Pamban Island, Tamil Nadu
Institute: Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies (KRVIA)
Advisor: Aishwarya Padmanabhan

Description

Pamban Island’s sacred landscape is woven around its 64 teerthams- holy water bodies that once sustained both spiritual practice and ecological balance. These stepped tanks and wells are more than ritual sites; they are decentralized water systems capable of recharging aquifers, resisting seawater ingress in groundwater, and ensuring equitable access to water. Their neglect has led to cultural erosion, ecological vulnerability, and restricted access for communities.
This thesis reimagines the teerthams as active commons- spaces where the nature–culture link is re-established through water. By designing interventions rooted in the stepped tank typology, the project creates equitable spaces of access, ritual, and performance for three key users of the island: the local, the pilgrim, and the tourist. Through architectural insertions addressing the local, pilgrim and tourist, the proposal positions these sacred water structures as anchors of both cultural continuity and ecological resilience and the design becomes a medium to restore lost links between people and place, ecology and ritual, nature and culture.

Drawings

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The Community-centric Livelihood Hub

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Author: Parindra Sur
Site Location: Shantiniketan, West Bengal
Institute: Techno India University
Advisor: Sayan Chatterjee

Description

This thesis investigates the potential of architecture to serve as a catalyst for socio-economic development in rural India through the creation of a Community-centric Livelihood Hub in Shantiniketan, West Bengal. The study addresses the challenges faced by rural artisans—particularly in infrastructure, visibility, and sustainable livelihood—by proposing an architectural intervention that integrates traditional knowledge systems with contemporary sustainable design principles.

A mixed-method research approach was employed, combining site observations, stakeholder interviews, and literature review. Comparative case studies of Auroville (India) and METI School (Bangladesh) informed the design philosophy, highlighting models of participatory, environmentally responsive, and culturally rooted architecture.

The final design comprises multifunctional spaces including training centers, market areas, artisan residences, and community halls—organized around vernacular spatial principles and constructed using local, climate-resilient materials. Emphasis is placed on passive design strategies, community engagement, and the preservation of the local Baul and artisan culture.

By contextualizing architectural design within the framework of rural development and cultural continuity, this project contributes to a replicable model for sustainable rural transformation. It demonstrates how architecture can bridge the gap between tradition and innovation while empowering local communities.

Drawings

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Kashmiriyat – A Center for Social Revival

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Author: Iqbal Aashiya Hussain Priyanka
Site Location: Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir
Institute: Sir JJ College of Architecture
Advisor: Dr. Vilas Ramteke

Description

A Cultural Center has long been an architectural design approach to curb the ignorance of social and cultural values of a region. For the region of Kashmir however, the problem is deeper. Kashmiri people have long been guardians of their cultural values and traditions, with a rich blend of civilizations from all over South-east and Central Asia. However, with recent disturbances, the people of Kashmir suffer through plights of depression, social alienation, stark unemployment, drug-use and so on. Once the crown jewel of the country, the closest place to heaven as people say, now finds itself covered under the dark clouds of a collective shared trauma. However, the true glory of Kashmir, Kashmiris and their Kashmiriyat is immortal, and this intervention intends to revive those values. The design intends to kindle the ability to experience healing – as it remains especial for those blessed enough to experience pain and suffering. Therefore, architecture’s inane quality to heal, rejuvenate and revive, births a solution to the plight of Kashmir and its Kashmiris.

Drawings

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Susegad: A Centre for Island Living – Revitalize Economy and Culture through Architecture in Goa

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Author: Shreeya Kamath
Site Location: Divar Island, Goa
Institute: BMS College of Architecture
Advisor: Dr. Leena Thombre

Description

This thesis proposes a community–visitor center on Divar Island (Site Location Pin: 15.53439611522159, 73.90173249052955) as a shared platform where locals and tourists come together, designed to nurture cultural exchange while protecting both heritage and ecology. The intent is not only to provide facilities but also to create an environment that celebrates coexistence. For locals, the spaces generate income, revive agriculture, and sustain artisanal practices that risk being lost. For visitors, they provide opportunities for authentic experiences—ones that are mindful, meaningful, and deeply rooted in the island’s identity. Material limitations are embraced as strengths, with locally available resources guiding construction and demonstrating the wisdom of vernacular methods. The architecture resists spectacle and excess, relying instead on its rhythm of blocks, courtyards, and pathways that weave built and unbuilt spaces together. These interstitial areas foster interaction, community gatherings, and a constant dialogue with the landscape. The design ensures that the built does not overwhelm the natural; instead, it frames it. In this way, the architecture blends modestly into Divar’s timeless setting, appearing grounded, enduring, and inseparable from its place.

Drawings

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Tribal Development at Kudampudar, Odisha

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Author: Nashra Hasan
Site Location: Kudampudar, Odisha
Institute: Axis Institute of Architecture
Advisor: Ar. Abhishek Mishra

Description

The proposed thesis project is situated in Kudumpadar, Kundra block, Koraput district, Odisha, spanning across 50 acres of land. The vision of the project is to establish a Self-Sustaining Tribal Ecosystem rooted in harmonic coexistence with nature, integrating biophilic design principles and clustered hamlet-based planning. Inspired by traditional tribal settlement patterns, the master plan draws from the geometry of Kolam design, where grid patterns form the basis of sectoral division and cultural motifs influence building forms. Key facilities include housing clusters, educational spaces, a healthcare center, training and skill development zones, marketplaces with exhibition areas, and communal gathering spaces such as an open-air theatre. The architectural approach emphasizes the use of vernacular construction techniques and local materials, ensuring both cultural relevance and sustainability. The project aims to enhance the quality of life of tribal communities by addressing their social, cultural, and economic needs while simultaneously promoting eco-tourism and cultural exchange. By bridging traditional wisdom with contemporary planning strategies, the project seeks to serve as a model for inclusive tribal development and resilient rural ecosystems.

Drawings

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Ritual and Right: Water as a Democratic Urban Experience

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Author: Aleena Paulson
Site Location: Kochi, Kerala
Institute: SEED – APJ Abdul Kalam School of Environmental Design
Advisor: Ar. Jills Philip

Description

This architectural thesis explores the democratization of water in urban spaces by reimagining water infrastructure as an inclusive public realm. It emphasizes equitable access for all users, regardless of gender, age, or physical ability, while reviving the cultural significance of communal bathing—once central to social interaction, well-being, and collective identity. The project addresses the disappearance of shared water bodies due to urbanization and privatization, positioning water as not only a utility but also a spatial, social, and emotional connector.
The chosen site at Kakkanad, Kochi, located along the Seaport–Airport Road, provides excellent connectivity through road, metro, and Water Metro links. Its sloped terrain and natural water reserve create opportunities for layered spatial experiences, where water becomes both symbolic and functional, mediating between the dense urban fabric and the surrounding landscape.
Conceptually, the design begins with a simple mass divided into public, semi-public, and private zones. A cross-through access organizes movement, while addition and subtraction of volumes shape a dynamic composition of open and enclosed spaces. Envisioned as an “oasis in the city,” the project ensures physical, social, experiential, ecological, and urban equity through universal accessibility, inclusive water interactions, affordability, diverse modes of engagement, and preservation of natural resources.

Drawings

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Wari The Ephemeral Permanence

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Author: Mrunmai Sujit Patil
Site Location: Pandharpur Wari, Maharashtra
Institute: D Y Patil School of Architecture
Advisor: Anita Shyam

Description

The project explores equitable design interventions along the Pandharpur Wari, focusing on temporary settlements, transitional villages, and urban streets. Typology A addresses rural temporary villages, creating modular clusters that provide uniform accommodation, shared resources, and sanitation facilities for pilgrims while minimizing permanent impact on the land. Typology B intervenes in semi-developed villages like Sansar, where the design balances the seasonal influx of pilgrims with the needs of local residents, enhancing community facilities, circulation, and economic opportunities post-Wari. Typology C focuses on urban areas, transforming streets and open spaces into safe, accessible, and multi-use zones that support both daily city life and the pilgrimage. Across all typologies, design decisions prioritize inclusivity, accessibility, and adaptability, ensuring that diverse user groups—including women, children, the elderly, and differently-abled—are accommodated with dignity. Sustainable materials like sugarcrete and temporary infrastructure strategies are employed to reinforce the principles of circularity and minimal environmental impact. By integrating cultural practices, social behaviors, and ecological sensitivity, the project seeks to preserve the inherent equitability of the Wari while providing contemporary, functional, and context-responsive interventions.

Drawings

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Metamorphosis of Sonsoddo: Bridging the Gap Between Waste and Public Consciousness

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Author: Muhammed Swaleh Beg
Site Location: Margao, Goa
Institute: Goa College of Architecture
Advisor: Dr. Uma Jadhav

Description

Metamorphosis of Sonsoddo – Bridging the Gap Between Waste and Public Consciousness reimagines the Sonsoddo landfill in Margao, Goa, as a catalyst for renewal rather than neglect. Once a peripheral site, now encroached upon by residences and schools, Sonsoddo symbolizes both environmental degradation and systemic failure in waste governance. This thesis proposes a transformative model that integrates waste management with public life, positioning the site as a shared urban resource.

The project critiques the prevailing linear “take-make-waste” economy and instead advances a circular approach, where discarded materials are reintegrated into productive cycles. Facilities such as upcycling workshops, training centers, an eco-market, awareness spaces, and landscaped trails transform the landfill into a place of learning, opportunity, and ecological restoration.

At its core, the proposal envisions a pilot ecosystem where enterprises, artisans, craftsmen, students, and the elderly work alongside each other, creating social, economic, and cultural value. Recyclable materials and RDF become resources for industry, while other materials are recycled, displayed, and repurposed, breaking down barriers between waste, knowledge, and community.

Through thoughtful site planning, sustainable infrastructure, and inclusive programming, the thesis positions Sonsoddo not as a symbol of exclusion but as a model for collective growth, resilience, and renewal.

Drawings

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Building a Bridging Community: Re-imagining the Lives of the Sexworkers and Children of Sonagachi Redlight Area

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Author: B Vishnu Priya
Site Location: Sonagachi, Kolkata
Institute: Department of Architecture and Planning, College of Engineering, Trivandrum
Advisor: Arun Cherian

Description

Going into Sonagachi and identifying the real issues inside is one of the most challenging tasks known to India. Over the years, It has formed impenetrable layers of security within itself making it difficult to leave once trapped inside. A sexworker’s  desire to escape from the cycle of prostitution, abuse and illness is overshadowed by fear and a lack of sufficient support systems.

This project aims to provide the sexworkers and children the freedom of choice by providing all required facilities to leave the profession and transition back into society as strong independent citizens. Once a sexworker has chosen to leave Sonagachi behind, this project welcomes them to join the process of reintegration.

The design program involves a newly curated administrative and architectural self-sustaining ecosystem to provide housing, opportunities for upskilling, assistance with child care and access to education, leisure and sense of belonging.

Exclusion can only be addressed by involving the public in the sustenance of this project. Hence the project forms 3 layers of privacy on site. The site level zoning forms a market area where the people of Howrah and Kolkata can freely move about. The second level stacks the housing of the women on top of the commercial zone creating a secondary street network exclusively accessible to the tenants. The third layer addresses the need for institutional facilities required for liberation.

The future of Sonagachi is not written in stigma, but in the strength of its women. A city that no longer defines them by the walls they were once confined within, but by the possibilities they are free to pursue. This project is a step toward an urban fabric that chooses inclusion over exclusion, dignity over neglect, and liberation over silence. In reimagining the lives of the women and children of Sonagachi, we are reminded that architecture is not just about structures—it is about lives, choices, and the collective courage to create change.

Drawings

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Kasaykaar – A Journey From Ore to Finish

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Author: Yashashree Pimple
Site Location: Near Aathawada Bazar, Teli Ali Ratnagiri
Institute: Aayojan School of Architecture and Design
Advisor: Ar. Divya Makhijani

Description

In the heart of Konkan, the rhythms of rituals, marketplaces, and seasonal festivals still echo through the streets—but the Tambat coppersmiths, once central to this living heritage, face quiet decline. Their tools are outdated, their knowledge undocumented, and their presence fading from the city’s evolving fabric. Rooted in the coastal town of Ratnagiri, Kasaykaar is a cultural center designed to revive the declining legacy of local coppersmiths—artisans whose knowledge, once central to the region’s economy and rituals, is now on the verge of disappearance due to lack of documentation, generational discontinuity, and limited adaptation to modern techniques. Despite high demand, most craftsmen struggle to meet market needs owing to outdated tools, absence of design innovation, and diminishing local recognition.
The center acts as a bridge—where tradition, technology, and equity converge. Equipped with shared workshops, material labs, and collaborative studios, it empowers artisans while engaging youth in reviving the craft through modern design tools and knowledge exchange.
It also celebrates the cultural richness of the Konkan region by creating a platform for endangered practices like Konkani Ranmus, supported by local activists striving to keep these traditions alive.
Strategically located between a temple and an active marketplace, the center integrates with its surroundings—offering shaded verandahs, transitional courtyards, and public thresholds that invite spontaneous engagement.
More than a building, Kasaykaar becomes an evolving identity—an inclusive space where artisans, locals, and visitors shape culture collectively, ensuring that heritage is not preserved in silence, but practiced through living participation.

Drawings

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Water Edges: Navigating Inequity and Dilemmas related to Urban Water

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Author: Dweep Jain
Site Location: Nashik
Institute: L.S. Raheja School of Architecture
Advisor: Ar. Mridula Pillai

description

‘Water edges or boundaries’ are challenging to define due to water’s inherently fluid and dynamic form. In the rapidly urbanizing society, water in the urban realm is increasingly vulnerable. Such is the plight of the Godavari River also known as the as the Dakshin Ganga, is India’s second-longest river. The river is enshrined in scriptures as one of the four sacred rivers worthy of reverence and worship. Godavari not only harbours a strong cultural significance, being the stage for the Kumbh Mela, but also is home to delicate ecosystems. Despite people worshiping the intangible idea of the river, its tangible form has been subject to abuse in the name of development. The inequities become especially severe at the source, in Nashik, where rampant concretization, illegal encroachment etc have severely compromised the river’s health and its ecological network, creating an alarming situation in need of immediate intervention.

By conceptualizing the evolving riverscape as a “form,” this approach responds to the impending climate emergency in Nashik’s precinct. The form is designed to sustain and adapt to its ever-changing environment, creating a resilient and equitable realm. It revitalizes the riverscape, ensuring it nurtures the neighbourhoods and ecosystems that rely on it as their lifeblood. Here, the ghats and built structures are not static; they adapt dynamically to shifting climatic and cultural needs. This approach moves beyond mere preservation, establishing a sustainable and equitable framework that addresses contextual and climatic challenges, ultimately fostering a resilient and thriving precinct. Architecture, in this vision, transcends its physical form, becoming a living entity that adapts to shifting cultural needs as well as, integrates, and mitigates climate emergencies.

drawings

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Institute of Garbology

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Author: E Cynthia
Site Location: Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu
Institute: CMR University School of Architecture
Advisor: Prof. Renuka

description

In the tapestry of our urban landscapes, waste has become an ever-growing shadow, woven from the threads of rapid urbanization and swelling populations. This thesis embarks on a journey to illuminate a path towards a harmonious coexistence between our cities and the environment. By embracing the philosophy of a second life for products, we transform refuse into resources, curbing the blight of landfills and the scars they leave upon our Earth. Through the lens of interdisciplinary research and collaboration, thesis seek to craft a climate-responsive paradigm, where waste management is crucial, empowering communities to actively reduce environmental impact. Waste management serves as a hidden thread in the fabric of climate response, weaving together efforts to reduce methane emissions from landfills and breathe new life into resources through recycling and reuse. This vision aspires to weave a new fabric of sustainability, where urban resilience and environmental stewardship intertwine, fostering a society deeply attuned to the delicate symphony of our planet’s needs

drawings

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Re-imagining Social Housing through everyday infrastructures

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Author: Neha Dalvi
Site Location: Mhada Transit Colony, Mumbai
Institute: School of Environment and Architecture
Advisor: Prasad Khanolkar, Milind Mahale

description

In contemporary times, the highest level of sustainable and technological advancement in residential building types is often recognised through the infrastructural amenities the building can offer; most popularly in terms of water harvesting, electricity and compost gardening for waste management. 

Infrastructures are portrayed as the most sustainable and efficient infrastructural systems due to their capacity for space optimization and efficient service management, resulting in time saving. Thus, efficiency and sustainability today have become the chief advertising attributes that promise a better living, thus becoming aspiration generators among people from all socioeconomic backgrounds.

However, we fail to realize that these methods for achieving efficiency in residential building infrastructure are predominantly driven by the developers’ logic. This logic tends to perceive these systems as mere efficiency devices, often concealing them in smaller nooks and corners, which require separate maintenance and only caters to a particular class of people who have the economy to maintain it. 

When the same infrastructural systems are installed in low-income housing societies, they not only break the existing socialities amongst the inhabitants but also tend to fail due to the lack of funds for maintenance.  The thesis proposes a cooperative housing society for low-income housing that integrates both technology and sociality to create an inclusive and democratic space for living. A simple tweak that repositions these infrastructures is able to question the everyday practices of contemporary society through the lens of class, difference and caste.

drawings

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Saahor Alohi, Tea Experience Hub, Assam

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Author: Charlina J. Dutta
Site Location: Amchong Tea Estate, Assam
Institute: GZS School of Architecture & Planning, MRSPTU
Advisor: Ar. Amandeep Kaur

description

The thesis project envisions a transformative tea experience hub, set within a 24-acre estate, designed to immerse visitors in the art and culture of tea. The site is thoughtfully divided into two primary sections: a built-up area that houses key facilities and a cultivation zone dedicated to tea production.

The built-up area features a variety of carefully curated spaces, including a museum, a restaurant, guest accommodations, and recreational areas. Each structure is strategically placed to enhance the visitor’s connection with the surrounding landscape while offering insights into the tea-making process. The cultivation zone allows for direct engagement with the tea fields, offering a holistic experience that blends education with leisure. Central to the design are climate-responsive features that ensure sustainability and harmony with the environment. The architecture optimizes natural ventilation, minimizes solar gain, and integrates water management systems. Local materials further ground the design in its cultural and environmental context, creating a space that is both innovative and respectful of its natural surroundings.

drawings

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