Enhancing Resilience: Reimagining Temples of Vanjaravaas

The Project ‘ Enhancing Resilience: Reimagining Temples of Vanjaravaas’ envisages the Temple in Vanjaravaas as an anchor point that provides relief during heat stress and brings the community together. With this objective, the temple and adjacent open spaces were analyzed in terms of their scale, accessibility, user group, and activities conducted. These activities mainly include cultural practices, community gatherings, and an extension to events and festivals. Based on the synthesis of data gathered, design strategies were developed to enhance the temple's functionality, ensuring it aligns with existing activities, provides thermal comfort, and contributes to a sustainable urban environment. The design includes a set of strategies - evaporative cooling, extending shade, vegetation, and vertical shading. The different typologies of spaces are designed to cater to the user group and current practices but are interlaced together through these strategies. Each space builds upon the community's existing adaptive methods. Furthermore, the spaces were designed with consideration for their temporary nature and the community's characteristics, making them incremental and resistant. These spaces consist of detachable lightweight structures that can be assembled and disassembled as needed. These strategies provide thermal relief and the building of active public space where users can respond to the intervention in a flexible manner, celebrating the multi-use nature of the design and its adaptability. This design serves as a pilot for other temples in the community, offering a toolkit of strategies and elements that guide the users. This is achieved through planting trees, shading using fabric, or using thermal insulating materials with high reflectance. Overall, the design will provide a climatic relief space and a programmatically dynamic space that fosters a people-centric and productive environment within the community