The studio explores how urban landscape is inhabited, made and remade through personal and collective acts, events, memories, and experiences. It cuts through the surface to expose the undercurrent of silent issues that constitute the everyday. Green, sustainable and loose-fit local technologies and spatial strategies are explored and manipulated to address individual student led programmes drawn from group exploration during immersion in an unfamiliar fast moving situation.
With a two week field trip in early November, Unit 6 will be focusing its project work in South Delhi: looking at imagining dispersed initiatives in the neighbouring diverse settlements and enclaves of Khirki (a hindu artists colony grown up around an abandoned 13th century mosque), Chirag Dilli (a 400 metre square dense walled urban village circumscribing the tomb of a Sufi saint, Mehrauli (a bustling town mingling with Mughal ruins) and Govind Puri (an old slum resettlement scheme). Providing diversity within the serendipitous interstices of planned and illegal, Mughal and modern, this variegated landscape is at the coal face of technical and social change as Delhi extends to enclose, engulf and urbanise villages and monuments; re-inhabiting the physical and re-inventing everyday life. We will be working with our partner NGO: CURE who have been charged by the Delhi Development Authority with looking at slum settlements in these areas.
Live projects in Delhi, Agra and Mumbai carried out within the Department’s Projects office will provide pragmatic and conceptual grounding.
Techniques of investigation including physical mapping and narrative exposition will be practiced in a preliminary project in October: Making Food, Making a Building.
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