Batch 2024-2029

Studies of Form as Object, Meaning and History
Studies of Form, Space and Experience
Studies of Form as Pattern, Geometry and Material
Computational and Digital Methods to produce form and space
Environment and Architecture
Architecture as Building Systems
Type in a Cluster (Behaviour, Meaning and Experience)
Genealogy of Institutions
Community Dynamics and Infrastructural Forms
Building Making and Management
Mass Inhabitation
Thesis
Dissertation

Culture Studies Courses

Settlement Studies

CC06 → Architecture as Building Systems

The course develops an understanding of how architecture can be articulated to optimise resource consumption while allowing the built form to meaningfully resonate with environmental forces. It builds an awareness of how different building systems interact to produce both spatial experience and functional efficiency, and how multiple overlapping systems shape the building-making process. Students learn to work with systems such as water harvesting, solar energy generation, recycling and reuse, ventilation, and lighting, not as isolated services but as integral components of an architectural scheme. Through this, the course emphasises designing building systems that generate spatial qualities and experiential depth, enabling built forms to emerge through the thoughtful integration and overlap of environmental and infrastructural systems.

PROJECT DETAILS

For this course, students were asked to design a community library along Old Kabristan Road by exploring how environmental systems, material choices, and spatial strategies shape experience. The exercise invited them to imagine the library as four intertwined conditions, a Library for Play, a Library for Knowledge, a Library for Work, and a Library for Care. Through this, students were challenged to generate built form by integrating overlapping building systems that respond to climate, resource efficiency, and community use.

SITE CONTEXT

The site is located on Old Kabrastan Road in Jogeshwari East, a narrow residential-commercial street where everyday life extends seamlessly onto the public realm. The one-storey, self-built homes and shops spill into the street through plinths, shaded verandahs, steps, and temporary market setups that blur the boundaries between inside and outside. Throughout the day, this edge becomes a shared space where women gather to do household chores, men read, converse or engage in small-scale work, and elderly residents occupy the steps as informal baithaks.

At the heart of this dense neighbourhood sits an open playground maintained by the MCGM, one of the only breathing open spaces in the locality. Measuring approximately 3500 sq metres, the ground offers a rare expanse of openness, with its longer edge abutting Old Kabrastan Road. Its perimeter is lined with dense vegetation, creating a soft, shaded boundary that both shelters the ground and visually separates it from the tightly packed residential fabric around it. This playground acts as a communal anchor, accommodating play, pause, gathering, and everyday movements, and offering much-needed relief within the compressed urban environment.

PROJECTS