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Travelling Studio (Ahmedabad) (ABPL90261)
Graduate courseworkPoints: 25Not available in 2018
Overview
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Travelling studios are working laboratories for design thought and production, and involve the exploration of complex, real-life issues. They expose students to unfamiliar cultures, places and people, and stimulate their ability to think creatively and solve problems. These studios aim to bring together students from architecture, urban design, landscape and planning streams and encourage an interdisciplinary focus. Pre-trip briefings or seminars will precede the travel component of the studio. The studio will incur travel costs, in addition to tuition fees. Faculty subsidies will, however, be available.
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SPECIFIC INFORMATION ABOUT TRAVELLING STUDIO (AHMEDABAD)
Following its independence from the British Monarchy in 1947, India underwent twenty-five years of rapid cultural change, with the simultaneous reclamation of a national Indian identity and the struggle for inclusion in the industrialised world. These forces coalesced in the architecture at the time, which embodied internationally modern characteristics but with reverence to the distinct Indian climate, cultural modes of occupation and available materials and technologies. The city of Ahmedabad is a perfect microcosm of this particular building dynamic, yet it is also a dystopian example of the parallel pressures of urbanization.
On the one hand, it bears a living vestige to some of the most prominent Indian modernist buildings of such time, including those designed by internationally acclaimed architects, such as Le Corbusier’s Mill Owner’s Association Building (1954) and Louis Kahn’s Indian Institute of Management (1974). Furthermore, the old city of Ahmedabad has a traditional fabric of courtyard houses with small alleys and secret pathways built from local materials, which contain rich domestic modes of occupation particular to the city. Integral to this fabric were innovative infrastructure support systems, such as those related to water management dating to the XVIII century. On the other hand, the majority of the city’s structures built from the 1950s to the 1970s contain neither the ingenious technologies derived from their context and witnessed in the old city, nor the grandeur of Le Corbusier’s or Kahn’s modernist structures. Rather, they reflect the explosion of the speculative building practices that make Ahmedabad the city it is today, interspersed with cultivated (and mostly concealed) architectural propositions at a small residential scale. This begs not only the question of what contributes to the built identity of Ahmedabad as a modern city, but also whether such identity can enable and support the more contemporary needs and aspirations of Ahmedabad as a growing contemporary metropolis, with a population that has doubled in the last ten years.
The travelling studio offers students a great opportunity to learn about Ahmedabad’s post-independence multilevel residential typologies, and the craft/trade-based systems and technologies adapted or discarded within this period of architectural transition. The analysis of the technological apparatus behind Ahmedabad’s great housing wave of the 1970s will be employed to analyse and design/document the eventual restoration of one of the now fast disappearing large single-family residences in the centre of the modern city, designed and constructed by a local builder for a traditional family structure. The house includes features such as on sitemade blockwork, extensive stone surfaces and encaustic wall finishes, all of which are becoming rare in today’s increasingly prefabricated and standardised construction. The use of this case-study will enable students to develop an understanding of the fledgling modern construction industry, and the interaction between design and construction in the post-independence regionalist era. It will also offer an opportunity to investigate what happened to that industry and the actors populating it, particularly women, and to reflect on whether it is still economically, socially and environmentally possible to design and build utilising local craft/trade-based systems today.
APPROXIMATE COSTS
Return Flights: $2000
Local Travel: $500
Living expenses (meals and incidentals): $650
Note: Participating students will receive a one-off subsidy of $800 from the Faculty - utilised towards student’s accommodation costs. Prices listed are subject to change.
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For further information please check the following link: http://edsc.unimelb.edu.au/travelling-studios
Intended learning outcomes
- To provide students with an experience in international collaboration.
- To encourage students to identify and engage critically with specific cultural practices, industrial contexts and socio-technical traditions.
- To stimulate systematic/creative thinking and problem solving within students through their experiences of how local issues govern planning, design and construction processes in a particular location.
Generic skills
- Interdisciplinary teamwork.
- Understanding and navigating social and cultural difference.
- Knowledge transfer.
- Organisational collaboration.
- Managing risk.
Last updated: 3 November 2022