Time, Public, and Architecture

This studio explored the ideas of TIME and people as PUBLIC in the design and architecture of a building. The studio focused on the notion of TIME in Architecture and the City (neighborhood): Architecture and the sense of the city/neighborhood are always imagined in a linear sense of Time often explained as historical growth or development, and justified chronologically. Another notion of Time, i.e. memory, is also often invoked in architectural or urban imagination, but it is also treated as if suspended in Time or located only in very specific situations. This studio proposed TIME as: material and spatial histories that allows us to see the changing and ephemeral nature of the built world. The second focus of this studio, which flows in a way from the former, has been the notion of people as PUBLIC and their formal/informal relationship with architecture and urbanity. How do we understand the tenuous and evolving relationship that people have with operations and networks that get orchestrated in architectural propositions within neighbourhoods of the city, and the nation? Exploring form and tectonics within changing time, and changing relations/networks of people - the conditions of contemporaneity, the final design project in the neighbourhood was to build a Municipal Ward office with a Balwadi, a reading room and some allied programmes.