by Samira Rathod & Yash Ghorecha
This is the brief of the studio conducted for the Senior Studio Unit at KRVIA.
Abstract
A dream, a flash and a honk. Mumbai wakes up from a dream layered simultaneously as a narrative. The city like a collage emerges out of its layers of cinema, class, creed, capitalism and the culture that develops around it. The studio uses the city of Mumbai as a tool to peel these very layers to understand the emergent architecture through its lost,abandoned and forgotten structures. Does architecture create a catharsis of architecture? How do these layers affect architecture and the people?
The study is an investigation in this community of various forces coming together to form the collage city. The learning lies in the microcosm that is created when these structures of various scales and programmes are assembled on a site together. What kind of architecture emerges out of it?
Pedagogic Intent
The studio ‘Montage City’ is a provocation for an individual to think, meditate, and question the ideas of tectonics, its composition, and what beauty means in architecture. The studio intends to achieve this by looking at certain parts of Mumbai, studying its context, and creating a building through a certain process.
How does one interact with her context? How does an entrance space become experiential? Does the door need to be of a certain dimension? It will require an individual to think of architecture on various scales, from a window to an urban street. Questions of architectural composition, phenomenology, how the environment and materials impact a space, shall be discussed in its nuances. The studio will be sacrosanct to its process; the results emergent from the process shall be pivotal in understanding the process of composing architecture.
During certain periods of the studio - each class will alternate between a conversation with the mentors - individually and as a collective to strategise and create an end product. The study material and the context of Mumbai will be the primary prompts through which the learnings shall be imparted.
Study
Architecture and moving imagery in films share similar memories in our consciousness: how light enters a room, the movement of subjects in a space, the creation of a space, and its eventual demise. Memory serves as a bridge between these two realms of practice. The studio aims to use film as a tool to meditate on the relationship between architecture and the composition of a space. How does one frame a scene in architecture? How does one layer time in a space? Questions regarding narratives and composition shall be explored through this medium.
Students will be required to draw out / make models of certain frames from the movies with a small write up of how they felt about the narrative and composition as a whole.
Collectivism
"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”
The studio envisages the end product to be a collective hive mind of either a singular building or a small precinct. This will be done through a process of dialogue between the students and understanding which part of each building can interlock with another. To then create one final building/a precinct.