EPISODE THREE

This episode addresses the weaving of conflicts occurring in Kashmir in relation to youth identity, freedom of existence, and mending of broken communities through a series of stages of different scales and programs. The site exists around the border at locations surrounded by political tensions. It becomes a site of speculation under the global microscope. Those displaced can finally be seen and heard, by each other and by the world.

Characters such as youth protesters, military personnel, and displaced families migrate to the site as tensions climax, as a method to actively participate in their own representation to battle the systems of oppression against them.

The watchtower, when occupied, represents escalated tensions between India and Pakistan and when abandoned remains as a memorial of the conflict. During occupation, the structure and its immediate landscape is a zone of safety. Bomb shelters become homes, and the tower becomes a beacon of stages for expression and communication.

Occupation is a direct reflection of the political relationship between India and Pakistan and the effects of it on the Kashmir civilian.

Military authority is challenged as the watchtower grows under the global spectacle. Traces of normality are introduced through bomb shelter homes, “temporary” markets and other forms of leisure. It is a place of constant tension and stage vocalizing struggle and violations to human rights.

The resulting architecture is designed and controlled by the civilian. The result memorializes the conflict and struggles that are faced on a daily basis. The watchtower is isolated from its landscape, however a duality is still expressed through different methods of building and adapting. Existing traces of military occupation have been transformed into methods of vertical circulation. vertical transformed forms of leisure. It is a place of constant tension and stage vocalizing struggle and violations to human rights.

A systematic chaos exists by the non-architects choices based on necessity. Methods for sustainable habitations in a war zone, stages for representation, methods for cross border communication and infrastructure to allow speculation from global audiences are programmatic elements of the watchtower.