by Vaidehi Davda, M.Arch 2020
Advisors: Chris Falliers and Nataly Gattegno
Local TECH (Territorial, Environmental, Cultural, Habitation)
This exploration is a critique of the even grid which is the western organization of space to the use of the Mandala (the ancient Hindu pattern of the 9 square) as an organizing device. This focuses on the architecture of reconfigured ground and the design of community in low lying areas which together allow for forms and autonomies at different scales.
Here, the 9 square is seen as a model of the universe, but the thesis tries to explore how the 9 square could also be used in a way to think about ecological form, environmental and social form? It addresses: With low lying lands being more precarious, why and how do people still live on this land? They will, both for economic reasons, and for cultural and social reasons that have to do with that land.
The design at a formal scale explores the range of architecture and territorial form within the larger Mandala in the low lying yet productive land of Gujarat on the west coast of India. Thus, it becomes necessary to explore new relationship between development and two forms of environment: Harnessing of the productive land and the Adaptive responsive to precarious lands.
This thesis project is designing a new set of communities and territories around the Mandala as an environmental form and not a closed form. It tries to show the grids relationship to growth, and its relationship to different environmental conditions of agriculture, salt, marshy lands, terrain and low-lying lands.
The different scales of autonomies and versions of thickening the gridlines become part of the architecture. For example, the Rice field community here is a thickened line, so the town becomes a line and the rice paddy wall has underlying infrastructure to carry water. A thickened line in the Mangrove community becomes a place to dry wet fabrics. It produces a new figure of center and a framing of space that happens at every scale where the thickening of the line becomes architectural. At every scale the Mandala allows to emphasize on these two forms of architectural features and ideas of centers and ideas of linear forms. The center can be social and small or landscape and large.
It is an exploration of the relationship between habitation form, agricultural from and form of precarious land and how we organize and inhabit them. It tries to show how the Mandala and the territorial conditions can co-exist by tying together where people live and their economic resource which the modern grid tended to separate like the courtyard community’s proximity to its economic source. It produces closer relationships between people and environment to promote environmental characteristics of form and not just human growth. In conclusion, The Mandala as a model for universe now becomes a Mandala as a model for equalizing environmental form, habitation form and agricultural form.