Genealogy of Institutions
- Ishwari Gorwadkar
- Oct 15
- 2 min read
Police Station
Faculty Co-ordinator : Rupali Gupte, Tushar Rajkumar, Dushyant Asher, Manasvi Patil
Ishwari Gorwadkar
The studio begins with questioning what is genealogy and the importance of drawing from the existing and seeing how it has evolved over time. This studio helps us rethink an institutional typology of a police station that is often perceived as rigid, hierarchical, and opaque. The module approached the police station not merely as a functional building but as an evolving social and architectural form; an institution shaped by political, cultural, and economic forces. Through the genealogical process of study, we traced its evolution, its role within the city, and the everyday negotiations it mediates between authority and public life.
The studio began with site visits to 3 police stations across Borivali and Charkop seeing how space performs authority, and how, at the same time, it accommodates the informal, the routine, and the human. Observing these environments grounded our understanding of how the institution operates spatially and socially, raising questions like: What does it mean for a police station to be civic? How can it be both secure and accessible?
The use of 2D and 3D collages became a crucial method of translation. Collages allowed us to articulate abstract relationships developing visual layers. In 2D, the collage served as a field of negotiation, where fragments of form, texture, and activity overlapped to suggest new spatial orders. Moving into 3D, these collages evolved into studies of depth, scale, and permeability. We also used collages to understand site forces such as orientation, circulation flows, adjacency, and gradients of activities to generate conceptual ideas and spatial responses, ensuring that the design emerged as a negotiation between institutional order and the dynamics of its urban context.
Design development was through conceptual iterations to structural and service resolutions. This process iterated between programmatic needs and spatial possibilities. It was interesting to work with a series of things like site study, genealogy, and moving from analysis to speculation, from diagram to design, this process helped in understanding how forms emerge depending on the social, economic, and political forces and how they then translate to architecture. While there were multiple approaches about ‘What is a police station?’ they were majorly categorized into police station as a civic anchor, as new grounds, as new organisational forms, as spaces of intimacy, as metaphors and as interfaces.
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