Batch 2025-2030
CC05 → Architecture as Building Systems
The course develops an understanding of how architecture can be articulated to optimise resource consumption while allowing the built form to meaningfully resonate with environmental forces. It builds an awareness of how different building systems interact to produce both spatial experience and functional efficiency, and how multiple overlapping systems shape the building-making process. Students learn to work with systems such as water harvesting, solar energy generation, recycling and reuse, ventilation, and lighting, not as isolated services but as integral components of an architectural scheme. Through this, the course emphasises designing building systems that generate spatial qualities and experiential depth, enabling built forms to emerge through the thoughtful integration and overlap of environmental and infrastructural systems.
PROJECT DETAILS
For this course, students were asked to redesign the Gyansagar Amphitheatre in Borivali, Mumbai, as a multifunctional public space that fosters community interaction, cultural expression, and environmental responsiveness. The exercise invited them to reimagine the amphitheatre as a civic landscape capable of accommodating diverse public activities while creating an inclusive gathering space for approximately 200–250 people. Through this, students were challenged to generate architectural form by integrating interconnected resource systems, including water harvesting, solar energy generation, waste management, terrain modulation, landscape design, and the recycling and reuse of materials, demonstrating how environmental strategies can shape spatial experience and public life.
SITE CONTEXT
The site is located at the Gyansagar Amphitheatre within the MCGM public garden in Borivali, Mumbai, a well-used neighbourhood open space that serves as a venue for recreation, social interaction, and community events. Surrounded by residential neighbourhoods and educational institutions, the garden attracts a diverse range of users throughout the day, including children at play, senior citizens on morning and evening walks, families seeking leisure, and local groups gathering for informal meetings and cultural activities.
Situated within this larger green precinct, the existing amphitheatre occupies a central position and acts as an important civic landmark. The site extends beyond the amphitheatre itself to include the surrounding garden. Rather than viewing the site as an empty parcel awaiting intervention, the project approached the Gyansagar Amphitheatre and its surrounding garden as a repository of existing resources. Students were encouraged to identify the ecological, material, spatial, and infrastructural assets already present on the site, and to consider how these could be retained, reused, recycled, or upcycled to minimise waste and reduce the need for new construction. The exercise shifted the focus from designing on the site to designing with the site.
The resource mapping included the identification of mature trees and existing vegetation as sources of shade, habitat, and microclimatic regulation; existing topography as an opportunity for terrain modulation and water management; existing paved surfaces and built elements as materials that could be dismantled and reused; and soils generated through excavation as resources for landscape formation rather than waste.
PROJECTS
By recognising the latent value of these resources, students developed architectural strategies that extended beyond the design of an amphitheatre to include circular material flows, closed-loop water systems, renewable energy generation, and landscape regeneration.