Four elements from the brief were central to us for the design of this community centre. Flexibility, Community, Education & Cost and hence it's in response to these that we shaped our proposal, as we think they very well encapsulated everything that the centre aimed to achieve.

Flexibility : We see it as a key principle for a socially, environmentally & economically sustainable development. Although we reject any undertones of standardisation, in favour of adaptive architecture that is based on strong foundational principles - that allows utmost flexibility for growth on the given site. While with the change in context, the principles become guides to which appropriate changes can be made in relation to the differences in context.

Community : We believe robust, inclusive programmes and facilitators are the key aspect of a community center. Architecture's role even though is secondary, but nevertheless important and two folded. First - to be the best possible stage to assist in the unfolding of these activities, for which it's essential that it balances well the seclusion and openness, where the formal activities can thrive alongside the spontaneity of informal village events, without being hindered by them. Second - It is essential to craft a place, where the architecture has diverse modes of interacting with the village, and capturing its attention, becoming a part of its psyche/collective consciousness. This is critical to counter neglect and develop care and sense of belonging for the physical space, beyond its programmatic relevance.

Education : A cornerstone to social and personal upliftment, the brief rightly so places a great deal of emphasis on learning, from toddlers to adults. We believe architecture can play a crucial role in different manners for each group. For preschool toddlers this first social experience needs to inculcate a positive feeling of capacity and agency, hence the environment is carefully designed to the child's view point and easy access. For young school kids in their formative years, a balance between the mind and the body, through easy access between indoor/outdoor classrooms, play areas, gardens and natural open areas is crucial. For the adults it becomes important that they can gather in small as well as large group sizes at sometimes overlapping times, to be able to engage in capacity building & awareness programmes.

Costs : We believe any just architecture needs to justify its cost - social, environmental and economical. The systems we practice in, often make most of them incompatible with each other. So design becomes a constant negotiation and priority exercise as much as a creative endeavour. We've tried to find the optimum cost solutions at every stage of the design, based on the priorities of our own and the ones we gauge from the brief.

The proposal of “Aatala Arugu” thus needs to be seen as one manifestation of the developed core principles, and not so much as a blueprint product. The hope being that it would be developed and edited with the different stakeholders of the project - villagers, funders, animals, plants, biota - so that it can truly represents the needs as well as the aspiration of its users.

In areas where sporadic development often outpaces formal planning, the landscape often becomes a mosaic of narrow, elongated plots—a legacy of generations dividing farmland through inheritance. These slim parcels, each with single-road access present unique constraints and opportunities for a home. Unlike a traditional one organized around a central courtyard or the modern one centered in-between an expansive lawn, this house unfolds itself to the user in a different spatial rhythm as they traverse the length. Interior passages that provide access to sequentially arranged spaces run parallelly to outdoor green corridors with few moments of intersections that become the release spaces of the house

Two other peculiar design possibilities come to front. First- In the act of sequentially arranging programs it becomes evident, that among the different range of public to private spaces, the kitchen best holds the center- a space with fixed and multiple moments of activation spread across the day.

Secondly, while the plot may impose limits on the floor plan, it conversely offers remarkable freedom in vertical design. The elongated form becomes an asset when viewed in section, opening up potential for varied levels and layers. Floors and roofs can step, shift, and interact along the length in ways that would be challenging in a more conventional non-linear layout.

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Reflections from the sites of several projects where I had the opportunity to contribute in varying capacities - small and big - including site supervision, detailed design, consultant coordination etc.

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01. SC RETREAT

Learnings :

1. The development of a project from preliminary design to on-site execution provided in-depth understanding of necessary drawings, detailed specifications, and extensive coordination requirements.
2. Designing exposed brick wall patterns while coordinating electrical connections and aligning the different opening and clear heights.
3. Using landscaping techniques to address severe erosion on a treeless sloping site through strategic bunds, intentional land grading, interconnected ponds, earth berms, endemic vegetation, and boulder placement
4. Creating landscape lighting designs that respect local wildlife in hilly areas while fulfilling required functional needs
5. Designing and detailing vault roofing systems using perforated terracotta blocks

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02. DELFI HOUSE

Learnings:

1. learned about managing kitchen waste using mulch pits integrated with a kitchen garden
2. grasped the order of executing a house - from the civil to the different finishes and fittings- in what order and how to then effectively manage the timeline.
3. learned the insulation detailing for a flat RCC roof - Aerated concrete block with chicken mesh and a final layer of white rejected tiles with optimal reflectance ratio.
4. figured out how electrical conduit planning and installation must precede Poured Earth Concrete (PEC) wall construction.
5. Learned that segregating demolition and construction waste on the site from the project's start enables material reuse and prevents problematic mixing of different waste types
6. Gained experience with hybrid solar electrical systems and requirement of proper electrical phasing throughout the house

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03. ANAGAYA

Learnings:

1. Techniques for repairing and touching up poured earth walls.
2. Understanding ferrocement thicknesses and the execution process for creating window fins, reveals, and inbuilt shelving.
3. Steps involved in the execution and finishing of IPS (Indian Patent Stone) for bathroom walls.

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04. R&R HOUSE

Learnings:

1. Strategies for managing water on sites with a high groundwater table, including:
   • Utilizing overall land grading and earth berms to channel water effectively.
   • Designing ponds of varying sizes and depths to hold water temporarily before overflow.
   • Planting suitable endemic species to stabilize soil and thrive in waterlogged conditions.

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“what is not constant can no longer be a friend”

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Without complete access and re-clamation of our own time, we can barely pretend to care even to ourselves about the climatic changes and their global and local effects. The imagery is misleading; the rising trend line of a growth chart has moved beyond economics and penetrated into everything we experience, whispering promises of boundless abundance, including our relationship with time. It's almost as if money and resources can sedate the clock for us, as if our seconds can count for more than they dare. The modern myth has us rushing to claim and feel everything in less and less time, and no matter the rush, we just don't have the time for the things we deem important for the world.

It's only with the fall of this myth that it seems possible to feel at ease with nature. Maybe it'll be easier to accept the many other ways of inhabiting time, beyond the time of an individual, seeing Life-Time across generations, and adapting our actions and movements slowly with knowledge and humility of a larger consciousness through time, like trees (maybe).

It's only with the humility of re-placing ourselves in the multitudes of existences in nature that newer paradigms of existing might start to seem obvious. Our very physical relation with the world might become apparent, the relation of matter and material — the finite and nuanced existence of matter that is extracted, processed, packaged, and sold as the material of our modern world, for our infinite "immaterial" digital era. We might see the error of logic and reason, the shortcomings of an individual consciousness.

So it seems that it can be with the re-claiming of the agency of our time, the humility of seeing our place in nature, and the distrust in our logic of infinite extraction that we can begin to engage with an architecture of sustainability, care & beauty.

Thus the pavilion becomes a site for testing our relationships with time, nature and matter. The physical pavilion being just one of the manifestations in an intentional & crafted process that starts much before and continues long after. The envelopes that hold the spaces of gathering, tread lightly on the ground beneath while channeling the water from above, back into the ground letting nature take its course. The materials used become sites to test their behaviors of growth and decay, making evident the non-static and non-permanent nature of all matter

“The allure of the “city” is stained. Worldwide cities have gone from being physical manifestation of human ingenuity to manifestations of brute inequality and unsustainability, and while all of us in cities sit and boil in the discomfort of this grim reflection, it seems more uncomfortable to get out.

Simultaneously identity of the “village” is seized. Worldwide villages are seen as “to-be developed town to, to-be developed city” but no longer as parallel ecosystems, and its very people lured by the promise of individual economic freedom, have desolated or deconstructed their own villages for more cities to be bred“

“In the vast Himalayan Mountain range lies Thapli, a remote village on the verge of being abandoned by its own people. In this slow process of desolation, the first to leave are the men, while the women work trifold holding the agrarian village together. Our interest lies in the Women of Thapli, the last fully functioning members of the village, that were systemically kept outside the “economic scheme” and hence the only one capable of challenging it.

By appropriating the traditional concept of a library / pustakaalay / gyaan ashray for the women of Thapli, this intervention aims to create a transformative space that challenges the prevailing notion of progress defined solely by urbanization. Instead, it highlights the intrinsic value of self-sustaining village ecosystems and their potential to chart a more environmentally sustainable and inclusive future.

In the midst of technological advancements, the role of a library has constantly been in question. Thapli’s library transcends the notion of a mere collection of books, embracing the purpose of being a bridge for dialogue and learning closing the gap between the villages and the outside world. Harnessing technological resources including AI to overcome the traditional barriers of illiteracy and language.

Library not as an institution that sublets knowledge, but instead as excuses that percolate into the everyday routines of women of different class, caste and age.

As the women traverse the entirety of village, interacting with different places in varying intensity, it informs the dispersion of the library in location and in scale all over the village.

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Within these interventions, what could a library be in order to shape a new claim to the imagination of the village by the women themselves.

- an archive of its local voices (audio / visual books, songs, folklores)

- a place to showcase alternate case studies (radios, short films)

- a place to strengthen democracy (government bulletin board, information center)

- a collective voice to its own diaspora (newsletter/social media updates of the village)

- a node in a larger social-network of villages (establish a strong formal communication with neighboring villages)

- a museum of its practices (collection of objects/tools that represent collective memory)

- a place of respite and repose (shade water, seating, toilets)

- a place for harnessing natural resources (passive and active ways of harnessing, sun water and air)

- a place for celebration

- a place that gives identity

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Cities are getting denser. Whether reasonably so or not, they do. The density, the hurriedness, the energy of the city are demanding of its every inhabitant, and equally of their structures of inhabitation. Places can no longer afford to hold one function, but rather many things either temporally or “permanently”.

So how should homes be developed in a densifying town, to keep up with the increasing efficiency of the soon-to-be city.

The project began with a rectangular plot in a densifying gridded town and an aspiration to have a villa that can sustain itself socially and economically. The ground level is kept as a place for social interactions, private ( garden, play-area, seatings ) and public ( cafe & exhibition space ) The first two floors become rental units of varying sizes in order to maintain a good dynamic of long & short-term residents, and finally the last two floors become the villa. Villa that works with different levels within the two-floor height and external fins to create an intimate sense of nestling within the greenery.

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Articulating an opinion on these words is slippery. Separately, they have meanings in the deconstruction of places of different make-up.

Decolonization : seems all set for a past that is as treacherous as it is mythical now; it is an attempted surgery of an Alzheimer’s, extremely charged (almost brutal) in its attempts, but acted upon the blurred elements of our normalcy - from our aspirational language all the way to our very modes of working.

Decarbonization : seems all set for a future that seems as slanted as it is trendy now; it reads like a prescription by the disease for the diseased, extremely creative in projecting solutions within the tolerated ways of thinking. Whether it’s redrawing forests and rivers as entities for “protection” or tech-savvy resource management by rationing the legality of beings.

Although when spoken together it invokes hope - even if it is at the sight of some remembered decency in the hypocrite play of these words - for the future.

In the experience of cities, one cannot fail but notice varying degrees of hurriedness- ‘the constant need to move & work at an eager speed, under various work & live conditions.”.The project locates itself inbetween the conflict of the hurried bodies' tendency to find spaces for respite and the inability of the city infrastructure to lend itself to this tendency- attempting to reconcile the notion of “city as a machine” with that of “city as a home".The interventions are seen as retarding devices extending from existing infrastructure to create opportunities for pause. Trying to rethink urban-design process through the analogy of chess- challenging monumental intervention through informed moves, with a lot of wait and watch involved in the execution, and uncertainty factored in the design conception.

The act of planning, of short-sighted “development”, of the complete hijack by economical and legal language, are all acts of flattening. Flattening every nuance of how lives operate in the highly charged cities of our subcontinent. A culmination of such acts was the resettlement project of Mumbai Urban Transport Project, aimed “to make the life of Mumbaikars more convenient and efficient” as stated by the world bank. People were resettled from all over the city, to its outskirts. Some besides the city’s (read Asia’s) biggest garbage dump, resettled within 72, seven storey buildings spaced 3m apart, reaching a density of 5000 individuals per hectare, a feat possible solely after discarding all building regulations..20 years since construction, people have found their ways to settle and to make life possible. To assist in this process, even before proposing to add, a lot needs to be subtracted (if not the complete reconstruction). Only then smaller interventions can be installed, as simple-first moves, as provocations of play, social gatherings and community interactions.

As a landscape that has become speculative and an object of greed, it is often difficult to remind oneself that the city of Mumbai rests on a ground shaped by the actions of water over millennia. Not long ago, was when human alteration rose, first the gaothans were superimposed by the engineered infrastructures of the British, then post-independence development led an even more increase in the appropriation of land for purposes beyond local communities . Film City, Mahindra Factory and Charkop Industrial Area began to take root, impinging upon the rivers. Simultaneously the floodplains allowed for para-legal forms of occupation - the densest populations within the city are found here.Flooding in each Monsoon has led to increasing socio-economic aggravation for the urban poor, pronounced by administrative measures that favour gated communities, segregated planning and the automobile. In this context we asked the question of what would it mean to re-envision a relationship with the river?

As a landscape that has become speculative and an object of greed, it is often difficult to remind oneself that the city of Mumbai rests on a ground shaped by the actions of water over millennia. Not long ago, was when human alteration rose, first the gaothans were superimposed by the engineered infrastructures of the British, then post-independence development led an even more increase in the appropriation of land for purposes beyond local communities . Film City, Mahindra Factory and Charkop Industrial Area began to take root, impinging upon the rivers. Simultaneously the floodplains allowed for para-legal forms of occupation - the densest populations within the city are found here.Flooding in each Monsoon has led to increasing socio-economic aggravation for the urban poor, pronounced by administrative measures that favour gated communities, segregated planning and the automobile. In this context we asked the question of what would it mean to re-envision a relationship with the river?

As a landscape that has become speculative and an object of greed, it is often difficult to remind oneself that the city of Mumbai rests on a ground shaped by the actions of water over millennia. Not long ago, was when human alteration rose, first the gaothans were superimposed by the engineered infrastructures of the British, then post-independence development led an even more increase in the appropriation of land for purposes beyond local communities . Film City, Mahindra Factory and Charkop Industrial Area began to take root, impinging upon the rivers. Simultaneously the floodplains allowed for para-legal forms of occupation - the densest populations within the city are found here.Flooding in each Monsoon has led to increasing socio-economic aggravation for the urban poor, pronounced by administrative measures that favour gated communities, segregated planning and the automobile. In this context we asked the question of what would it mean to re-envision a relationship with the river?

As a landscape that has become speculative and an object of greed, it is often difficult to remind oneself that the city of Mumbai rests on a ground shaped by the actions of water over millennia. Not long ago, was when human alteration rose, first the gaothans were superimposed by the engineered infrastructures of the British, then post-independence development led an even more increase in the appropriation of land for purposes beyond local communities . Film City, Mahindra Factory and Charkop Industrial Area began to take root, impinging upon the rivers. Simultaneously the floodplains allowed for para-legal forms of occupation - the densest populations within the city are found here.Flooding in each Monsoon has led to increasing socio-economic aggravation for the urban poor, pronounced by administrative measures that favour gated communities, segregated planning and the automobile. In this context we asked the question of what would it mean to re-envision a relationship with the river?

Geometry in architecture- It has been used to devise divine logic for beauty, as a way to formulate frameworks for design or sometimes just brute and tiresome after-process to bring artistic will into existence. Given a “green field” site, where once the question of - whether one should build? is skipped very few constraints remain visible. Geometry then can be used as an anchor, that can both set limits as well as help justify any one particular direction from the sea of possibilities that a farmhouse can be.

1. Developing a system of grid, by selectively giving value to certain attributes of the site, and then using the system to locate the house, distribute the functions, establish proportions, and articulate movement.

2. Using geometrical moves of bisecting, splitting and intersecting as gestures to shape the form of the building in an attempt to give sharp, unfamiliar and dynamic quality to its spaces (in theory)

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A proposed residential development in the quaint village of succoro, aimed at making a “good” profit for a “good” design. When the country was crippling under the shock of COVID-19, goa was being flooded by anyone who could; to enjoy the susegaad life. This usual situation turned unusual, when no one retreated as the year passed by. Instead more investment entered, mindlessly inflating the speculative balloon for luxury residences, instigating a statewide obsession to make something, somewhere..A feasibility study sets the stage. A number crunch for a “good” design; how many villas, how much sqft, fits in what plot sizes? The optimum number guides the shape & size, starting the iterative process of discovering the “good” design.Once discovered, it enters the stage of facing the realities of a house, its plumbing, electricals, structure and all its excavation, however complicated this resolution gets, priority remains the integrity of the discovered design of a “good” profit.

“It’s a prescription from the disease, to the diseased”, I wrote when thinking about decarbonization, in the context of “us” from the developing nations, prescribed to by “them” the developed nations. Sitting in the far-away mountains of the Himalayas, on the mud-plastered verandah of my village home, the lens has zoomed in, and I have become “them”- the disease and my village the dis-eased. Today when i see the disintegrating population of my village into a few old houses with few old people - a effect of “palayan”- migration motivated by the search of- education, employment, aspirations, convenient lifestyle, sometimes in that order, sometimes not. When i see the morphing of these few old houses into concrete boxes with metal lids, when i see the hazy-ignorant understanding that i am left with of the deep, collective knowledge of the village, when this is what i see my reflex remains to present solutions.

But soon i find myself realizing how no matter what the solutions are but this very act cuts my experience from its long line of causes- many of which are very local, sometimes national and suddenly creates it as an isolated problem that i begin to look at in the background of some or the other global or national cause(climate change, hyper-consumerism, communalism etc.) justifying the urgency in which it needs to be resolved, suddenly the scale has changed disproportionately. The nuances of the local & the personal, flattened out, the sense of “time” hijacked.

Today if i even try to imagine why would an urbanized population come back to the village and if they do, in what way will they engage? will they inflict what was inflicted unto them, under the sweet name of urbanization. i try to imagine why would homes still be made of stone and mud, when they cycle of its maintenance and the feasibility of its sources and the value of “time” has all been changed, weakened and exploited. i try to imagine how someone like me, exposed early to the cellularising world of a modern city- where the individual’s consciousness, development, rights  are to be of the highest importance and everything else a derivation of it- can even begin to value the collective consciousness, knowledge of a village, slow cooked and assimilated over generations, authoritative yet tolerant sometimes, messy and violent at other times.

So should it then be left to take its course, hoping for self-organized forms of resistances and rethinking to emerge from the within, by them, for them. Maybe yes, a healthy community can think, it can resist, and it can figure its own priorities, the only value the disease can provide the diseased is to be let open, to present itself in its most constrained and un-harmful way for its own dissection, for them to see what filth lies at the heart of it. For them to see through the eyes of the perpetrators and best figure for themselves not just their defense but their action forward.

"Cities have been seen as generators of employment, economy, goods, and aspirations. But at the same time, cities allow for the creation of multiple kinds of urban living, and these are reflected in the form of the city. The everyday lives of people in cities depend on several external factors (work, leisure, services, etc.), and the aspiration of the people always remains to function in sync with all of them. The importance given to these external factors generates the urgency to act, producing hurriedness in the process.

People in cities experience hurriedness—the constant need to move and work at an eager speed—under the influence of various working and living conditions. Different places experience different levels of hurriedness in the city.

This hurriedness is blatantly noticeable in metro cities at several instances. Whether it's a small purchase made at a street vendor in complete haste, often using simple monosyllabic communication, or an automobile driver always attempting to "make the next light." A quick cup of coffee or cutting chai is gulped, and people have breakfast standing on the road at a fast footstall before reporting to work. At the station, one dashes in haste to get aboard a local train, which will be followed in five minutes by another. In these, as well as several other subtler processes of hurriedness, the city or the immediate environment is experienced in a very different way compared to strolling through the same place.

These experiences of hurriedness become evident and noticeable when a person moves, either from one city to another or within a city. For example, when a person living in a metropolitan city visits a second-tier city, it is common to hear them exclaim how the ambiance of the place felt extremely laid back. This general statement made often about cities being slower or faster is essentially saying that the experiential time of the people in either of these cities expands or compresses beyond what the people are used to in their everyday lives. This expansion/ compression changes the experience, and hence the image of the place.

The image of a place is crucial to the way people develop associations with it. For example, people in metro cities nearing the age of retirement often express a longing to move to a particular town or second-tier city. One of the reasons is that these places have less hurriedness, and there's a belief that it will allow for a peaceful and stress-free life. This notion of relating the absence of hurriedness in a place to the quality of life is not limited to a specific age group, but even the idea of a vacation for a metro city dweller usually involves escaping from the city to a less hurried life, even if it is for a small period of time. These examples from within the city show how experiences of hurriedness in the city may also have implications for the city itself.

Hurriedness might also have a spatial character that it generates. When we talk about space for an individual, it can be generated through three means:

- the experience of the form and its characteristics (the idea of the container),

- the people around him/her and their activities, social position, character, etc. (the social space),

- and the space created by his/her own state of mind and body (the space of the self).

Hurriedness is the experience generated by a place on an individual. This hurriedness of the self-and/or social hurriedness both change the space the individual. The change is more in the sense of space (perception), which may then cause a change in the physical form, or the way spaces are appropriated.

This relation of hurriedness of a city and the space that creates it or the space that gets created seems to be an interesting enquiry, which could enable one to generate a new lens for evaluating spaces in cities and their relationship with people."

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Stuck here! People with money - need anything, present something. But, how much, for how much? Well, "the market" will decide, it's said. Baba's life got spent in this circus. Within these blurry-noisy-sweaty lanes of chitchats. Not mine! I'm going to rise, rise above - float. Not just another hand in these faceless exchanges. But a hand of creation rather. Creation of meaning, identity, risen from this very foundation of baba’s creation but not limited to! Never limited by the “market” Not another protagonist with a complex . But something that's sturdy, safe and that can support! Support not just us and it. But all. That’s what I will be.

maybe the stretch matters.

sometimes enjoyed,

sometimes vexed

stretching for years now looking back is hard

an abyss ahead an abyss behind!

the foot still sensed

but almost lost

grabbing enough to not fall

Image might be blurry for the head left behind

but the hands kept stretching

two snakes robbed blind.

every once in a while

fate jumps over the aisle

one hand touches another

mistakenly clasp together

but mistakes are corrected

and bigger ones are made

repulsed from one another

they grow away

closed fists, move ahead.

but tighter it gets

reminiscing what has never been

sinking nails past the skin

could the pain set it free

could it end the dream