Metros and Migrants: the Mughal and the Modern
Delhi’s Changing Hybrid Landscape 2009

Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources

The studio aims to tease out and develop the individual architectural sensibility and design skills of its students within the context of rapid cultural and technical change in a situation of scarce resources.

Delhi’s fast, cheap and ultra modern Metro rapid transport system is advancing quickly, spreading its net across the seven cities: both ancient and modern. Rich and poor, modern and traditional city settlements are being connected as never before and the interstices between these settlements filled by migrants arriving from rural areas to make their living in this ultra urban, gritty, polluted and often insanitary context. Local situations are novel and enriching, full of both promise and despair. Providing diversity within the serendipitous interstices of the planned and illegal this variegated landscape is at the coal face of technical and social change as Delhi extends to enclose, engulf and urbanise villages and monuments, squatter camps and gated middle class communities; re-inhabiting the physical and re-inventing everyday life.

Unit 6 will be focusing its project work around the hybrid topology being transformed by the building of three Metro stations: Malviya Nagar, Qutb Minar and Chhatapur in South Delhi

With a two week field trip to Delhi in early November the studio will explore how the imposition of the new Metro web on the urban landscape has created new spaces which are being inhabited and remade into personal places through collective acts, events, constructed memories and daily experiences. It will practice and develop methods which cut through the surface to expose the undercurrent of silent issues that constitute the everyday. These methods include those of architect as detective, architect as author and architect as craftsperson. Green, sustainable and loose-fit local technologies and spatial strategies will be explored and manipulated to address individual student led programmes drawn from group exploration during immersion in this unfamiliar fast moving situation.

Live projects in Delhi, Agra and Mumbai carried out within the Department’s Projects office will provide pragmatic and conceptual grounding. 5th year students continuing from 4th year in studio 6 will be constructing two community classrooms in Navi Mumbai and then moving out from these sites to study the wider landscape, its transport infrastructure and interstitial settlements as a basis for developing their major projects adopting similar methods to those used in Delhi.