Portfolio / Selected works 2013-2023

prologue odyssey

noun

a long and eventful or adventurous journey or experience.

This portfolio encompasses selected works done during the postgraduate (AA M.Arch Housing and Urbanism) and undergraduate academic course, as well as a few projects that I have worked on, in my professional career in the firm, morphogenesis and makers studio. The projects highlight the various typologies and scales worked on as well as the design strategies and processes behind them. The exposure gained through addressing different contexts after thorough research and analysis is translated in graphical portrayals of the design drawings. Each project adds a level of perspective in architecture as a device of change and reform of the socio-economic and culturally driven needs of the society. It is an odyssey of incredible learnings, spatial experiences that changed my approach towards the built environment. This is an attempt to portray glimpses from my odyssey in architecture.

contents masters // M.Arch Housing & Urbanism (2021-2023)

1. THESIS

Blurring the ‘Line’

2. DESIGN WORKSHOP

undergraduate // B.Arch (2013-2018)

3. THE ENDLESS LOOP

Architectural Thesis Project of a Space Research Centre

4. DIVERGENT FULCRUM

An Urban Insert project with a multi-typological approach

5. HABITAT : MODUS OPERANDI

A housing scheme for various user groups focused on spatial exploration

professional work // (2018-2021)

6. CORPORATE CAMPUS

Headquarters of a leading corporate office in India

7. HOUSING

Viaduct as a piece of integration

Blurring the ‘Line’

M.ARCH HOUSING & URBANISM / Thesis Project // Mentors : Lawrence Barth + Dominic Papa Architectural Association School of Architecture

London’s urban areas are always in transformation. There is no place where this is more evident than along our rail viaducts. The reason for this is a variety of things that have been happening in the recent years. The viaduct can be perceived in multiple ways. The viaduct itself holds an opportunity for new patterns of work, leading to new ways of life. The way in which it can be interpreted as more permeable than we thought is crucial as it consequently can become an element in the life of the neighborhood, extending on either side of the armature. Most importantly, the rail viaduct, is no longer understood as a nuisance, as it was in the past. The freedom of light and air that it offers can be utilized in creating a better quality of living environments. Therefore, the viaduct can be a subject of a new kind of domestic engagement. The area of Bermondsey with its light culinary industries along the arches become a driver of change, making it a testing ground for integrating the infrastructural armature into the urban fabric, creating a new diagram for the neighborhood.

This leads us to rethink the ground levels adjacent to rail viaducts, which can be repurposed to offer new patterns of interactivity. The streets and blocks structure can be investigated such that it creates a more active environment that takes full advantage of the new economic potential of the viaduct and pull the vitality into the buildings.

Asymmetry in urban fabric - a driving factor

The rail line creates an interesting geometry in the urban fabric. Through the years, the projects around the line have evolved in a way that creates asymmetry on either side. This asymmetry leading to irregular block pattern allows for the existing and future buildings to have a unique relationship with the viaducts, sometimes acting as service grounds for the industries underneath. If we embrace this difference in the pattern along the line, it enables multiple conditions with opportunities for a new orientation, frontage and open space. It is not about filling the voids in the urban area but to nurture the asymmetry through meaningful interventions, creating an active ground that pulls in the productive nature of the viaduct and the open space that comes with it, as an urban strategy.

The Rouel road estate, consists of a long linear slab building that creates a walllike structure along the rail line, creating an edge, a boundary to shield from the pre-conceived notion of the nuisance that comes with the rail viaduct. With immense potential to establish a relationship with the existing ground conditions, there lies an opportunity to rethink the way housing estates were built on irregular blocks. The three hundred meters stretch can bring in moments of consistency while challenging the idea that linearity has the ability to be permeable and embrace variation.

The concept of the collective Evolution of the pragmatic household

There is a reluctance to buy items such as homes, cars and luxury goods and instead, people prefer a new set of services that provide access to products without having the burden of ownership. This idea, if applied to the concept of a pantry, a place to store the perishable/non-perishable groceries and the trend of hyper-localism, where there is a greater emphasis on local supply chains and entrepreneurship, brings out a new typology of living with shared domestic services.

Housing can then be looked at as an urban strategy that brings people together through not only having communal spaces for social gatherings but by providing spaces for shared productivity. Through harnessing the local talent networks of our central urban areas, there lies an opportunity for living and working by sharing the culinary tasks and needs. This would enable a move that focuses on new spatial strategies for living that beings the traditional space of the kitchen outside the home and into a sphere where the domesticity of the household is extended beyond the threshold of the house. By cultivating a new platform for the civic life to flourish, for small scale businesses to expand, this gives rise to exciting crossovers and assemblages at the scale of the neighborhood.

Typical Floor plan

Co-operative housekeeping strategies Liberation of services

There was a major breakthrough in the domestic organization of the home when groups of 12-50 women came together to organize cooperative associations that would perform all their domestic work collectively.8 By monetizing these ventures with membership fees groups like these would purchase a building to serve as its headquarters. The building was further furnished, keeping in mind the requirements of the appropriate mechanical equipment for all the domestic chores. This included cooking, baking, laundry and sewing.

This also came with a cooperative store with provisions. By utilizing smart ways of delivering food within the building, the floors were designed in such a way that the walls were movable, allowing a freedom of extension of space according to different tiems of the day. Pierce, inspired from Catharine Beecher, argued all those years ago, that architects should make simplified houses without kitchens. The houses, instead of being built around a square, could be set in the middle of it.

If we were to take this a step ahead, we could create a new type that did exactly this, in the context of a post-pandemic world that demands so much more from our housing. It makes more sense to collectivize the daily chores through a system that governs the housing, making it a process that is more participatory and de-centralized. Through the liberation of services in the depth of the floorplate, we allow more freedom in occupation of spaces and an opportunity to make the most of the orientation and vertical shear in the units. The core becomes a hub of not only the vertical circulation, but also functions that otherwise take up a sizeable space. Instead, the open plan encourages the diagonal relationship within the plan and harbors a creative space within.

Another way of organization is by employing the concept of indeterminacy. The accuracy of a single result has turned into a probability that several events occur at the same time. This has led to a shift in our worldview with indeterminacy now controlling events.

By using architecture as a framework of creating events as a part of everyday experience, this type makes the ground porous, nesting volumes within itself and creating a new culinary ecology. One that brings back the local resources into the building and has the ability to act as an extension of the vibrant environment under the arches. It harbours a space that can change its character at different times of the day and nurtures indeterminacy through a consistency of grid and regularity as we go higher up. The 4m grid accommodates a variety of units, for both individuals and families, by allowing a congregation of connected parts with a corridor that bleeds into the units, creating intermediate collective spaces. It uses the spatial strategies of staggering and shearing so that a diagonal relationship is achieved within, allowing more air and light in the interiors.