Scale & Proportion

Poignant Memorial for Victims of Lynching MASS Design Group

The memorial consists of a number of different elements, such as a garden, four sculptural groupings, explanation texts, and quotations, as well as a building that resembles a temple and has hanging rectangular boxes made of corten steel.

Before entering the lengthy main entrance hallway, visitors first see the Peace and Justice Memorial Garden.

The garden is meant to be a place for reflection as well as a place to appreciate the structure.

You start on level ground inside the memorial structure, your body parallel to the coffin-like structures. If you like, you can lean against the monument and run your finger over the letters’ cutouts or feel the uneven surface.

The corten steel boxes soar far above you as you enter the memorial, suspended in the air and outside of your physical location. These rusting monuments bring to mind pictures of black people strung from trees.

Through play of heights and proportions, the memorial aimed to make a visitor feel the injustice and pressure of this unfortunate past and eventually opened to a scale beyond reachthe sky which symbolises a bright future.

Arestroom is a distinct type of public restroom that serves a specific purpose. The Restrooms go beyond the obvious toilet blocks to give ladies a private social place, which is typical of Indian cities.

Two factors led to the conceptualization of the restroom’s layout around a tree. One that embodies the notion of incorporating nature and context into the architectural form and utilising its attributes to safeguard the garden below from the elements. Due to this intervention, the box is illuminated by natural light during the day that filters through the trees and by the box at night.

The women’s restrooms as a whole attempt to convey a coherent plan that engages with the city.

We should consider people and events in cities as architects and planners. A city’s history is not determined by how it seems; rather, it is determined by what occurs there, particularly in gathering areas. Because of this, public areas in a city are crucial gathering places for people. New ideas are created in this setting of mental interaction.

Moreover, for a fundamental space like restrooms which is way more than just a place to refresh, but is a place to pause and feel comfort amidst the chaos of our busy life. The space offers comfort to every user through various functions incorporated.

The Kasungu Maternity Village MASS Design Group

The MASS team visited the prospective Maternity Waiting Village, which will be built next to Kasungu’s district hospital, where expectant mothers from nearby villages would travel to give birth, before starting their design work. A design associate in MASS’ Rwanda office was astonished to see these women in the rain and without cover during his first site visit. Others slept outside under the trees while some slept in tents.

The design aims to make this a special place for these mothers to give birth, as well as a special place for people to alter their mentality about not necessarily giving birth at home or in their communities.

The team discovered this by studying the layout of typical Malawian villages: even as younger generations start their own children, they all remain in the same neighbourhood, close to the homes of their parents and grandparents. Family life is freely extended.

Pregnancy outside the village was a concept new to everyone there. This design hence was a very conscious insert to make the sensitive time of pregnancy more safe and secure for the women and their families. It aimed for a futuristic design for the vicinity there that gave the community a safer space to keep their women into which was well equipped with the crucial facilities, hygiene and care required.

Volontariat Homes Anupama Kundoo Architects

This project made use of a unique technique developed by Ray Meeker of Golden Bridge Pottery, which involves baking a mud house in place after it has been created. A fired home, also known as a fire-established mud house, is essentially a mud house made of mud bricks and mud mortar that is cooked after construction is complete to give it bricklike firmness. The structure’s inside is filled with additional mud bricks or other ceramic goods, such tiles, and baked as though it were a kiln. Normally, the walls of kilns absorb 40% of the heat produced. The home serves as the kiln in this method, and the “heat loss” is intended to burn the house and stabilise it against water damage.

The items within are significantly responsible for the gasoline expense. The piece of mud would theoretically have the strength of a brick. Additionally, the mortar mixture would no longer require the cement.

This method nearly entirely relies on labour, with very little money spent on “bought” materials. As a result, the money spent benefits the local economy.

The project tries to aim high in terms of technological exploration and innovation for a cause so holy. Technology is very wisely used as a boon through this initiative with a function so crucial. Also the usage of technology is thought through with very less wastage and usage of locally available concepts, fundamentals and labour.

Quarter of the world’s population currently resides in cities with a population of one million or more, and this percentage is rising faster than the global population. While growth has not always been easy, it is now unstoppable. The environments and biodiversity required for foraging and hunting have long since disappeared and could never support the current level of world population. We cannot ignore either urban life or agriculture. Indeed, it is challenging to envision a human future that is not more urban than our own, unless it is a dystopian society built.

In cities’ complicated three-dimensional terrain, people may travel about with ease. We combine a sense of local territory (our homes, our neighbourhoods) with a capacity for exploring and mapping new spaces that is far superior to that of our closest animal relatives. We are also adept at forming social groups with strangers as well as family members, tolerant of the new (and frequently nutritionally impoverished) diets that cities impose on their residents, and capable of building social groups with strangers as well as family members. We could have been bred to live in urban areas.

Of course, modern cities are much more complex. Few ancient cities had a population of greater than 100,000. There are currently around 30 cities with a population of above 10 million. We’ve learnt to build our dwellings up higher and denser in our nests. The pathways through which food and water enter the nest and waste is evacuated from it—the neurological and circulatory systems (electricity, gas, the internet) of modern cities—have improved in importance.

Fast transportation is essential to the modern megacity since it enables residents to dwell far from their places of employment. Although these technologies differ from those used in Alexandria, Baghdad, and Tenochtitlan, their underlying concepts are the same.

Our major infrastructures were created for urban populations, and for the previous few thousand years, most of our societies have been governed from cities. This situation is extremely promising for both humans and the environment. City living is the most environmentally beneficial way to live when done properly. Cities are easier to manage than rural areas when it comes to waste management, sanitation, and recycling.

The use of private vehicles that are fueled by fossil fuels will disappear in our generation. Already, a large portion of city people travel primarily by public transportation. Both electric vehicles and buses are environmentally and city-friendly.

But the cities today are driven towards capitalist driven growth. In a world changing with every sun down, mankind has deviated towards practising in a bubble, only for individual benefits, comfortably protecting himself from not seeing the pain of the marginalised, the ones affected with our growth.

Architecture has proven to be an organically born and grown practice. But in these capitalistic cities today, it has extensively been used as a medium to establish power, to claim a space, to stand ahead in the race. People prefer their own future over a cohesive development. The cities that began with the root thought of development and globalised associations have now become centres of greedy means calling haphazard sprawls of people. These cities running faster with every moment, the people have lost the connection that binds mankind as one species and has influenced it to stomp over the ones not able to match their ways, eventually resulting in a =n evident loss of empathy.

Inference:

Co-existence has been a proven truth of life on earth. From a food-chain to the entire ecosystem, dependency has been the way life exists and continues to grow till today. Having said that, survival of the fittest has been a thumb rule for generations, pushing the mankind into a rat race. A race that constantly demands growth and development from its competitors. The race did start to be one that aims for a cohesive win, but has now become majorly about mankind’s selfish needs. A species that emerged from civilizations that certainly didn’t prefer growing in isolation, has today subconsciously become a population that aims for personal benefits and achievements, marginalizing everything else that surrounds them in metropolises.

Chapter 02

As the Indian metropolises continue to develop according to global approaches, an evident isolation of context that formed their distinct identity is observed. Furthermore, Mumbai as a metropolitan has been a city built by migrants. Diverse communities embodying strong and varied cultures moved to this port to earn a better living. Different communities through similar occupations, customs, routines, and social statuses began co-existing here making it a familiar space for their next generations. Hence, mapping this influx over the years and evolution to understand the current conditions of Mumbai becomes crucial.

2.1

With poverty seen right on its streets, homeless making pavements their beds, entwined traffic that defines its flyovers and bridges, slums growing in number and facilities every day while congested skyscrapers continue to touch new heights, Mumbai is sadly a city famous for all the wrong reasons today. Who would have thought that Mumbai was once the most important natural harbour- the only one to provide 75 square miles of deep water? Back then, it was known for its geographically rich existence and subsequently for its economic prosperity.

“Mumbai was never an agricultural settlement even in the loosest sense, much of her eventual land surface went straight from semi wilderness to suburban occupation.

...A city was envisaged from the first...A concsious creation and furthermore an urban creation almost from the beginning”

~Gillian Tindall

The Greek traveller Ptolemy described Mumbai as a group of seven islands when he visited India in the third century AD, which is perhaps the earliest known name for the metropolis. On the west coast of India, a promontory 12 miles long that is encircled by the Arabian Sea was formerly an archipelago of marshy islands. If theories are to be believed, the number of islands was five with salt water creeks flowing through them. It is during high tides that the water rushed in increasing the number to seven distinct islands namely- Mahim, Worli, Parel, Mazagaon, Isle of Bombay, Little Colaba (Old Woman’s Island), and Colaba, which were handed over to the Britishers as dowry in history.