Dishita Galchat
The course started by orienting the tendencies of mass inhabitants. The design questions that emerged were what new and relevant formal and spatial imaginations could be articulated for mass inhabitations in the emerging context of urbanization in India’s metro cities? and what spatial affordances can lend to making a home. I was experimenting with the idea of partial retrofit and partial redevelopment. The idea comes from keeping in mind the future of the society over the next 15-20 years which is speculated to be largely populated by the elderly. The design strategy was to have co-working spaces facing the streets so that these spaces could be rented out to the city by the tenants and become a source of income for them. Each house has extensions in the form of a balcony or a corridor that creates stepped terraces.
The most important thing which I learned was the concept of retrofitting. One needs to take into consideration many aspects such as new structural systems to hold the new elements, the language of the building, and how one responds to the context keeping in mind the environmental conditions, service cores, etc.
Another concept was how you think of space spatially for the inhabitants, the concept of an open kitchen which is often thought of as a separate room. In the context of housing for the elderly, the idea of shared open spaces was understood as more nuanced. Stepped terraces should allow a range of activities from 4 kids playing to 50 people gathering. These terraces can be double height, semi-shaded, or open, allowing for newer grounds to be created. The built form should allow permutations and combinations of units to accommodate emerging splintered and fragmented household configurations.
