Measuring Goa,
Goa

This study cuts across time in Goa to record the emergent house and small institutional forms. One of the documentations is that of the 16th century Reis Magos Fort, built by Franciscans to protect the narrowest point at the mouth of the Mandovi estuary. The fort has been converted to many uses since including a prison and now serves as a museum. Other sites documented include a Hindu family house, the Bhobe house, whose spatial type is constituted by a courtyard with multiple rooms around, and the Dempo house, which was a hybrid house, converted from an old Christian house but which also had courtyards within, showing how practices were much more hybrid. The study also documents one Portuguese house, the D'mello Vaddo, whose diagram differs from the Hindu or Konkani house to include an L-shaped plan flanked by a large verandah on one side and a small open space held in the ‘L’. There is no courtyard in this house. The study further goes on to document several contemporary works including Houses of Goa, a small museum of a domestic scale which houses an archive of the houses in Goa, Chatterji House, an architect’ house built for his mother and Mosaic, an architect’s office and community space that can be seen as a local institution in the neighborhood. Each of these contemporary renditions experiments with the fluidity and porosity of space, allowing a sense of publicness. They also experiment with materiality, as they extend the idea of local materials to include locally available natural material but also locally manufactured industrial material.