WADA POW WOW​
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PUNE, MAHARASHTRA
What is the typology of a settlement or place?
How to interpret elements and spaces that are part of a historic continuum?
What is the deepest structure of a place? How do you recreate it?
How do disparate spaces come together as a community?
How does architecture of the present enable a dialogue of the past into the future?
Would more than one architect create an orchestra or a cacophony?
Culinary Institute
6000 sqm
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Alleyways leading to Tulshibaug Temple are portals, transporting one from narrow, busy, old city streets to a large, open courtyard. The alleys are characterised by diffused light, busy, narrow facades and an intimate scale. This precedes the temple courtyard, which is a sudden contrast in light, scale and material. This coming together of two polarities was the basis of design of new buildings in this temple complex.
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The Pune Culinary Institute is imagined as a recreation of this experience. Spaces of "tension" lead to spaces of "release". A structure possesses a kind of tension by the virtue of repetition, progression and stability. Space is held in tension. A break in this structure (through scale, light and/or material) creates a sudden ease in the tension, releasing space. The circulation spines and interstitial spaces are imagined as spaces of tension, which "break" into program areas, areas of recreation or points of reflection.
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The typological understanding of a the present (and past) spaces in the wadas of Pune is extended into an idea that isn't limited to elements or scale, but feeling. And in its execution it also strives to "create" a complexity that gets erased upon the construction of a new building - layers of spaces or narratives acted out by different people, living together get replaced by clean lines and clear volumes. Part of the charm in the courtyards of Pune was felt in the lack of consistency the signs of change and time, apart from the lived-in-ness of the buildings.
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This spatial and material richness was natural and local to the old building. A new building, on the other hand, can make multiple connections: of past, present and the future; of local and global; of various languages and gestures. The idea of light, movement and scale that create tension and release can have multiple translations. As an analogy to program it represents. the new building becomes a thali, highly textured, with varied elements, deconstructed in appearance, and filled with possibility and surprise.
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The exploration started with the question:
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How, if possible, can one re-create the feeling of tension and release, as experienced on site?
Images sourced from the Internet
The studio was definitely structured to keep shifting the ground below our feet. We went to Pune with a lot of talk of typology in mind, we asked to find these typologically strong instances in our walks there. After some cursory studies for a day or two, we found ourselves in the old city, studying precincts or 'peths'. Our group was looking at Kasba Peth, one of the oldest in the city and I studied the Kasba Ganpati temple with a classmate. This is probably the oldest ganesh temple in Pune, and has an accumulated architectural form of over the years. We made drawings and analysis of buildings around, like Nanawada, after coming back to college from our study.
The architecture project started after, wherein we formed teams of two, and were given a site. Now, out of sheer luck, my partner Revati and I had visited Tulshibaug Temple Complex, on a lark, while roaming in the older parts during our stay in Pune. We could relate the drawings and studies done by another group with our experience of being in that space. We were then asked to choose a word that would be an operative word for our exploration, along with a complimentary image.
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We chose the word 'Elevate' and our image was a rich, decorative image of a Hindu god, celebrating strength and lightness, like the surprise of seeing the shikara of the temple that isn't visible while walking the streets outside Tulshibaug. And then we got to making models. Just lots of them, tearing our brains at the seams at this purely syntax-ical exercise. We found that what we thought of as an elevating experience was related to the two extremes of space, a contrast from walking into a narrow, highly human-scale alli (alley) to a large open courtyard, with the shikhara marking the space. It was that moment of tension and the release that took over the concept of the project and a diagram that we liked.
Then came the program out of nowhere. A culinary institute and a sports club. In hindsight, it makes me lose my head a bit! Who was the one bearing the loudspeaker in the faculty room who got everyone convinced of this program? At the time of working on the project, we just accepted it since we were already trying to come to grips with what our architectural motivation would be. A culinary institute. That is what I chose and my partner went with the other one. We didn't quite see the point of building them as one, plus the sports facility required wider open spaces, so we split the site into two, trying to get on with it.
The idea was to replicate the feeling of this courtyard typology. A sense of tension and release. I set out with arranging the program, realising the volume at hand, while also starting to create a sense of structure. After some iterations, the structure was so tense, that the only release was one would walk into the courtyard of the temple. Oh, yes, the culinary institute was to be built on L-shaped peripheral plot of the temple, skirting the road, becoming a wall for the temple. (Why were the old houses and shops that existed here and fostered a community to get demolished? I don't know, I'm not the tabula rasist!) So the way to create more experiences of release was the challenge. Considering the purist approach to the studio so far, I found gravitating to an architecture that was not particularly contextualised. The building could make connections, far and wide, looking at pure, architectural devices that would be suited to the program and the climate. This gave way to a diagrammatic approach, while contextualising it with site axes, climatic considerations and views. The structure, when "broken", would release space, creating a multitude of spaces, a character as busy, if not as local, to the original morphology of the site.
The outcome was a kind of thali of spaces, a conglomeration of spaces for the Culinary Institute where each room could be a building by itself, an ingredient and a dish. The courtyard was reshaped into an ovular form, manifested in a landscape intervention, where trees would create a soft barrier between the new program and the temple complex - and also a return to a temple in the 'baug'.
That was the short or long of the project Wada Pow Wow