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.

“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.

‍

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

‍

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.

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?

"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."

‍