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Architects: Studio ii
- Area: 325 m²
- Year: 2020
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Photographs:The Fishy Project
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Lead Architects: Mitul Desai, Priyank Parmar
Text description provided by the architects. Set in urban farmland - studios, workshops, shop, and other ancillary facilities for a designer mother-daughter duo was to be designed. With a farm on one side and a cowshed on the other - the site has a strong agrarian milieu. Taking a cue from this the project was conceived as an extension of this landscape and articulates a rather contemporary program with largely traditional spatial vocabulary.
The core program is further layered with forecourt, verandas, courtyards, and mezzanine spaces that reminisce traditional architectural terms from Gujarati language of an agrarian household like 'faliyu', 'otlo', ' osri', 'chowk', and 'maliyu'. The linguistic vocabulary imparts a richness to the architectural vocabulary. These peripheral extensions into the landscape make the spaces more humane and bring a sense of time that is slow and profuse. They also provide abundant possibilities for social and programmatic improvisation and infuse haptic richness to everyday tasks.
Through the course of construction, the project kept evolving with the client’s wish and vision – increasingly becoming more specific. The conceptual framework allowed the project to mutate along the way, becoming an improv architecture. The project even after completion holds enough bandwidth to grow and absorb any future changes in the initial promise of the project.
Cast in pigmented concrete and adapting to the existing trees on-site, the project lends itself seamlessly to the surrounding nature and becomes a part of it - being of the site than being on the site. The farm, the cows, the trees, the forecourt, and the project exist in constant resonance with each other exuding timelessness and equilibrium.