IN MY FEELINGS / is an investigation of the campus through the lens of water and situate the interpretation through subjective cartographies. Based on the readings of the campus, a speculation is presented. Driven by personal intuition and interest, new realities, or provocations are imagined, related to water within and around the campus. THE SHAPE OF WATER / “Water has achieved an invisibility in our lives that is more remarkable given how central
it is.” - Charles Fisherman, The Big ThirstWe believe that all water problems are local, but the consequences, the damage and the costs are anything but local. The project aims at taking a step towards comprehensive data collection at city scale as well as spreading awareness among citizens about their impact on the overall consumption of water by generating a unique water footprint for each individual that represents an abstraction of how much water you carry with yourself. BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER / is a critique on the increasing dependency on dams as sources for water and energy. As paradoxical as it sounds, what would’ve it been like, if dams weren’t built for the sole purpose of managing water? What if, after they are ‘abandoned’, have an added purpose of serving to the public by becoming more diverse and dignified spaces for inhabitation, taking a step towards becoming more ‘serviceable pyramids’ of our contemporary cities.
The map illustrates different feelings felt (subjectively) at certain spaces around the Cept campus in relation to water. These feelings are then expressed via senses of touch and smell.
To represent it, small wooden boxes are covered with 3D printed plates of the specific space. Inside the box can be found an object or material that best represents the distinct feeling felt there.
For example, if a box has bubble wrap inside, it is depicting the feeling of ‘satisfaction’, since popping The Speculation tries to address the idea of how the experience of space, which is infinitely thicker than any linguistic description of that experience, be made more marvellous by material poetry. It revolves around designing installation encircling the current studio space, that bring out or induce a certain kind of feeling once experienced in another space. They are neither visualised as real projects nor mere fantasies.
The idea is to make architectural interpretation and look at the feelinThe drawing machine- shape of water, is an interactive tool to generate an abstract form of water footprint that is unique to each individual. Each rotating disk is a parameter
which represents the average amount of water one carries in a day. Aduino circuit is used which is then connected to Grasshopper. This goes inside the base of the machine where the rotating disks are connected to motors which reads the information fed in Grasshopper. Overall information regarding the water consumption values are given which are used in the program. The flow of functions show how the process works in calculating the water consumption by a person and also geolocating to generate maps. The Drawing Machine / ModelThe Dharoi dam, built in the 1970s turned the river Sabarmati into a polluted open drain, carrying water only during the monsoon season. The Sardar Sarovar along with the Narmada canal came to refill the riverbed, after nearly 35 years, leaving behind dead dams and murdered rivers.
Dharoi dam no longer serves its purpose of supplying water to Ahmedabad city, though it still sits there, without any significant contribution.
The Mehsana and Sabarkantha district, are areas that fall under the Dharoi dam command area. According to the District Human Development Report (DHDR), around 50% of the working population is in agriculture sector, and 30% of the total population is poor, out of which most of the families are BPL and live in hunger. These figures illustrate that these are small, economically weaker districts with agriculture as a major occupation. One of the prime issues that these areas face are that of povertyThe project focuses on utilizing the now defunct Dharoi dam for civic benefit. It acts as a station, which promotes social forestry and agriculture, which will cater to the nearby settlements along with becoming a platform of public gathering and ecological rectification. The speculation introduces the concept of detachable floating infrastructure, where the forepart of the dam is extended to create a step-like structure that acts as native plant nursery, where as floating agro-forests are developed on the reservoir, that are handled by the unemployed farmers for recovering the forest loss incurred due to the construction of the dam. In addition to this, the dam also serves as a dispatiching station where crops from around the region are brought and stored to in The inside of the dam is used for administration, healthcare and storage services. Thus, the area in and around the dam is completely utilized for public welfare and and benefit of nature and its surroundings without destroying it.
