Architecture has long been a reflection of its creator’s quest for accommodating responses that transcend beyond functional needs and rather inform the building’s awareness of the physical, social, and cultural landscape that it inhabits. The relationship between a building and its context is not merely about placement within a space; it is about engaging with the tangible and the intangible surrounding environment with a holistic approach. Whether harmonising with the local topography, resonating with cultural traditions, or responding to social dynamics, architecture acts as a bridge between the different elements that compose the built environment and its users.
While creating residences, it is important to understand that they are not just shelters; they are spaces that embody the identities, values, and evolving needs of their inhabitants. The relentless drive to meet economic constraints in the domain of affordable housing has led to the creation of dwellings that fail to sensitively integrate the user’s culture, respond to the surrounding climate, and accommodate the evolving nature of a home over time, all while fostering a sense of community within the larger scheme of things. By embracing a more thoughtful and contextual approach to housing design, we can create environments that are not only functional but also deeply connected to their place and purpose.
Understanding of Cultural and Social Dynamics
Incorporating cultural and social aspects of a community allows the infrastructure to be rooted in its context and transcends a house from merely becoming a tangible shell for residence into a shelter that the dweller resonates with and feels a true sense of belonging. When one looks at successful housing developments like Doshi sir’s Aranya Low-Cost Housing in Indore, one understands the role of responsiveness to social dynamics like growing family sizes, the sense of ownership for the people, and the adaptiveness of infrastructure to the attitude of improvisation as and when required by the families has resulted in a housing where architecture, rather than imposing aesthetics, becomes a facilitator of life.
As much as it’s important for the infrastructure to be responsive to social dynamics, the planning of the development on the larger scale in itself needs to be equally responsive to the life that extends outside these homes, which involves people gathering, celebrating, and connecting with each other. Indeed, this creates a complexly layered development where each and every aspect of people is understood and responded to. Belapur Housing by Charles Correa reflects this with its hierarchy of courtyards, where it starts from a small private verandah for each unit and then the common courtyards develop in the plan with each cluster. With the growing clusters and share of users for each courtyard increasing, the scale and propositions of the court respond and grow, eventually becoming anchors of community life that make such housing developments vibrant.
Integration of Climatic Response
A house is nothing but another piece of infrastructure until it makes its dweller comfortable. When the logic of climatic response and understanding of a comfortable environment for human life are fed with architecture that relies less on mechanical and artificial ways of inducing comfort and more on the building itself, it results in a shelter that seamlessly integrates with its surroundings and enhances the overall well-being of its inhabitants. Rahul Mehrotra’s design for the Mahouts and the elephants housing at Jaipur is a contextually relevant solution that has been derived out of the understanding of the inhabitants (mahouts and elephants) as well as the context of quarrying grounds on which the site sits. The design involved the creation of a microclimate that not only makes the interior of the houses more comfortable, but also improves the conditions on the outside where the lives spill out and the community resides.
Understanding The Dwellers
When talking about context, the link between culture, community life, and climate is all the people that eventually become the interacting network between these elements, and hence any contextual design remains incomplete without people becoming part of the frame. Especially while doing affordable projects for rehabilitation and redevelopment where the inhabitants are not found post-construction but rather are already present, special attention must be paid to understanding their needs and preferences in order to create a design that truly enhances their quality of life. The Sanjay Nagar Slum Redevelopment Project reflects community participation in the design process, where dwellers themselves get freedom for configuring their housing layouts as well as take responsibility to oversee the development administration by becoming active stakeholders for the project.
Context is a very complex term, and how it is interpreted remains the right of the individual user, but it’s to be understood that as much as requirements of the site are part of the brief, so should be context and the people, their culture, their social dynamics, and the geography and climate that combine to form the umbrella term. Hence each housing design problem is unique due to its context and so should be the answer to it. A cut-copy-paste response reduces the dwellers’ connection with the shelter and eventually affects the quality of their lives, which has multifold ill-effects on the community. Therefore, today’s developing cities should make sure that their infrastructure makes the residents feel a part of it, otherwise rendering them to be obsolete, lifeless compositions of shells, not shelters.
References:
Abdel, H. (2022) Sanjay Nagar Slum Redevelopment Project / Community Design Agency, ArchDaily. Available at: https://www.archdaily.com/982534/sanjaynagar-slum-rehabilitation-project-community-design-agency (Accessed: 24 August 2024).
Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (2021) ‘Sanjay Nagar : Case Studies of Collective Housings in Asian Cities Series’. Asian Coalition for Housing Rights.
Charles Correa Foundation (2022) Incremental housing, Charles Correa Foundation. Available at: https://charlescorreafoundation.org/2022/03/13/incremental-housing/ (Accessed: 24 August 2024).
Community Design, A. (2022) Sanjay Nagar Slum redevelopment project, Community Design Agency. Available at: https://communitydesignagency.com/projects/sanjaynagar/ (Accessed: 25 August 2024).
designboom, andrea chin I. (2013) Rahul Mehrotra of RMA designs Hathigaon Elephant Village, designboom. Available at: https://www.designboom.com/architecture/rahul-mehrotra-of-rma-designs-hathigaon-elephant-village/ (Accessed: 28 August 2024).
RMA (no date) Hathigaon, RMA Architects. Available at: https://rmaarchitects.com/architecture/hathigaon/ (Accessed: 24 August 2024).
Signum37d (2017) Signature Global Affordable Housing Project Gurgaon, Wikimedia Commons. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Signature_Global_Affordable_Housing_Project_Gurgaon.jpg (Accessed: 27 August 2024).
Turlapati, L. (2014) Aranya Housing Project, Architecture in Development. Available at: https://architectureindevelopment.org/project/401 (Accessed: 25 August 2024).
