Allied Design Module, Vertical Studio, Semester 7 & 9
Mentors : Dushyant Asher, Milind Mahale, Chinmay Shidore, Mihir Desai
-Dushyant Asher
Urban spaces in Indian cities such as street edges, railway bridges, unused vehicles, small and large open spaces, on the one hand, and environmentally sensitive conditions such as hill slopes with habitation, on the other hand, often present us with contexts for the spatial manifestation of multiple kinds of objects and furniture. Most of these manifestations go beyond the conventional of well-designed edge conditions with street benches, lights, planters and so on. These innovations provide form to everyday, often mundane, activities of street economies, leisure, religiosity and even domestic and public life. This project explores the relationships that such objects mediate between space and everyday activity with the intention of generating new street elements/stalls/personal objects. It develops intense relationships of densities of the hard and soft of the city with innovative adaptive spatial conditions.
This research project is embedded in the emerging complex conditions and densities make intense use of existing hardware and software in the city. Where the hardware is the applied micro infrastructural fabric of used in the everyday. These make innovative adaptations (the so called ‘Jugaad’) rise everywhere, which do the job for the everyday. The approach and outcome of such adaptations are primate and uninteresting. In these intense relationships of densities of the hard and soft of the city a convincing need and desire arises to respond this evolving domain. Inserting objects/furniture into these dense urban contexts gives a scope to engage with the everyday, infusing a new utilitarian sense to urban life.
The module was anchored around a matrix which was developed on these precarious relationships of objects and urban space. A pattern of new economies, occupations, individual design and resilience strategies for the emerging urban ecology for new interventions and objects were the responses through a variety of student initiated projects.
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