Community and Builtform

Not so long ago, Benedict Anderson (1983,15) famously wrote, “Communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity / genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.” A community is held together by interests and practices whereas institutions have organizational structures that evolve over time. Therefore, when we look closely at communities and their institutions, we observe that they are produced and lived through several subjective contestations which often blur, defy, subvert, disregard or occupy space in awkward ways. In institutions that emerge locally over time, such as the langars, local libraries, reading rooms, khanwals, aanganwadis, community halls, such logics of unexpected occupations are often visible. How do community spaces offer new paradigms of publicness, and inversely, how can the informed design of public space, learnt from such localised practices, hold the varied, often contesting practices and interests of a community?

 

The studio will observe the nature of public activities in neighbourhoods within specific socio-spatial encrustations and identify architectures of public space to weave the community together. Institutional spaces in smaller towns find themselves in unique programmatic conditions that occur between new kinds of transitions and aspirations tending towards development. Observations of the specific socio-spatial practices on the site will be undertaken to get a nuanced description of its lived spatial detail. These observations and propositions formulate the context for architecture of the institution, programmatically as well as typologically. Questions of material systems and services, contextual relevance, environmental and ground processes, societal issues will critically craft and imagine spaces and built form.

 

The focus of this studio is thus three fold - first to assimilate and understand the logic of communities and their institutions. Second, to be able to generate field specific programmatic responses and third, to identify the architectonics of public space that is able to hold diversities and contestations of a given community. Here, students engage in  diagramming the forces of a chosen site through social- cultural- environmental considerations that shall serve as key ingredients to inform the architecture of the institution. The building could then become the medium to build communities that share practices and places, thereby forming a distinct localized culture.