Academic
Year
2016
Awards & Mentions
- First Prize | Urban lakes revitalisation competition
by Goethe Institut
Urban lakes revitalisation was a competition organised by the embrace our rivers initiative of Goethe Institut to start a dialogue on the conservation of water bodies in Chennai. The project won the first prize in this open competition due to our systems approach to design. While many see conservation of ecology and the growth of the economy as two extreme ends, the project focuses on the ways in which they can coexist and create value. There was an attempt to understand and deal with the issues from a macro and micro perspective in terms of scale.
Process and Notes
This project was part of the ninth semester urban design studio, along with one other project. This project’s brief is derived from a competition brief floated around the time by embrace our rivers initiative of Goethe Institut in Chennai.
The study involved going on site and engaging with the people of the community to understand their daily life. On-site observation of the lake and its context revealed the complex dynamics in play. The link between the various communities around the lake and the lake itself was a fascinating subject of study.
The design process involved identifying the idiosyncrasies and nuances in the site with respect to the community, culture, economy and the ecology. The next step was to synthesise solutions from these nuances. A blanket top-down approach would not suffice such a situation and thus a hybrid system with a top-down framework and a bottom-up grassroots participatory system was designed.