At ThreeFlaneurs our main goal is to inspire people to travel with the objective of experiencing architecture and the culture and urban habitat that fosters it, which cannot happen within the pages of a magazine or an online website. Architecture and architects have many roles to fulfill beyond just the clients’ brief and it is very difficult to appreciate the complexity of a project without experiencing it in its context and especially without inhabiting it. Experiencing Architecture in the flesh also deepens one’s understanding spatially, temporally and tangibly.
The possibility of an interesting dialogue between people and architects, inspired us to setup a Mumbai Open House event in collaboration with the Urban Design and Architecture programme that happens at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival annually. The idea that design curious individuals could visit a project and get a guided tour by the architects, we hoped would foster a regard for design in the city and allow citizens to contribute their voices to the dialogue about the aesthetic and urban concerns addressed by architects. This would also help design discourse to move away from being within the purview of the architectural community alone. Design is consumed daily via restaurants and cafes however not many are privy to design within private domains or institutions which is where we find that the voices are most interesting and diverse.
The buildings that we present in the event have been carefully selected to represent a variety of different practices and largely different programmatic and typological concerns. The projects participating in this event are privately owned and generally not open to the public. They consist of a school, a private residence, an IT institute within a college campus, a private office set within the erstwhile mills of the city and a defunct industrial space converted to a studio that can be used as per the clients’ imagination. All the projects deal with the dense fabric of the city and address concerns of legacy, adaptive reuse, economics, construction, aesthetics and conservation and are extremely unique in their approaches to solving problems that are endemic to architecture in Mumbai.
The different projects on offer also address the various inhabitants of the city. From school children to teenagers and a single family owned house to a larger residential development. The IT project at the Somaiya campus has never been published or seen by the public before. Our hope is that the discussions about these projects open up questions about the various concerns of the city that range from from how one can generate an aesthetic architectural approach in spite of the existing building laws as addressed at the Green Acres academy, to how redevelopment projects within the city can be addressed at Smriti 57. The Synergy office project provides answers to how effectively one can adapt and reuse the existing infrastructure of our mill lands, while the Imagine studio project addresses the idea of conservation in a very interesting way outside the usual south Mumbai confines of where conservation is usually looked at. We hope that the event can raise a few more interesting questions if not at least provide answers to some.
KINDLY NOTE: Register for any two FREE events at - www.indiaarchopen.com - There will be NO on-site registrations.