weekend meetings update

Jaya, Shibani, Sharat and Gaurav met on Sat 28th March

• Jaya has done an alternative site planning scheme based on a vedic progression of a student's life. The canyon is forested, and a site for 'comtemplation and rejuvenation'.
• Shibani put forward her alternative scheme of building into half the canyon
• Shibani put forward a 'grid' of user experience vs programme, to help with site planning. scan coming up as next post.
• Gaurav put forward his idea of Open Source Urbanism as the overarching Big Idea.

Key debates

We clarified a confusion around the exisiting vegetation - the stuff to be retained is the 'woodland', grey on the vegetation map, not the 'kikar forest', green on the vegetation map. according to brief, the kikar is to be kept where possible, but also thinned out for safety purposes.

lake / no lake was debated again.

pros of collecting all runoff in canyon:

• water recharging
• novel waterside experience
• natural ecosystem

cons:

• filling the canyon is not the path of least intervention
• may be seen as 'luxury' in delhi's water parched society
• the exisiting canyon has a sense of looking out over the tops of trees, which would probably be lost

possible compromise:

• Shibani suggested a usable (not neccessarily potable) water dispensary as part of the on site health centre, for the infrastructure deprived villagers in the viccinity. token system etc. if there's enough water for this to work, as well as fill up the canyon in the rainy season, shibani will withdraw her grave concerns about canyon as water-body idea.
• Further ideation on the canyon ecosystem needs specialist input from a landscape person. Madhur? Thapar? we need to set up a meeting with one of them. also possible, Uttiyo contact a landscaper (e.g. Krishna) in Delhi. what we hope to achieve from this is a much clearer idea of the best possible intervention into the canyon ecosystem to give it a new life injection. theoretically, this is possible with and without filling up the canyon with water.

Open Source

All agree that the idea has huge potential, though needs very careful application to an urban design scheme. All agree that the idea goes beyong the design itself, into the management and running of the future SPA. The campus can act a demonstration of the principles in several ways - e.g. transparency of built form, specific links between uses, degree of choice and freedom for users to form programme links, etc.

the Big Idea 'Open Source' works at 2 levels - it is a strong metaphor that ties all of various intents together (transparency, sustainability, social inclusion, flexibility, etc etc). it can also work at the design level, through consulting stakeholders at appropriate levels and times in the design and construction proccess; also through making a percentage of very flexible use spaces (also known as semi-aware spaces).

Amit, Shibani, Sharat and Gaurav met on Sun 29th March.

• Amit has done axial maps at 3 levels. a map of 20 steps from new spa campus is most relevant. local maps showing levels of integration and choice can also be used. space syntax analysis can also be done on the site plan we'll come up with, to demonstrate how we are using variable movement flows in and around site to our advantage, by programming spaces accordingly.
• Amit's site visit showed that the site will actually be accessed from the south west corner rather than the north east. exit can be taken from north west. no vehicular entry into pylon strip, but Amit recommends that we propose pedestrian links into the (gated) neighbourhood south of site.

ACTIONS

1. everyone is to come up with a few site planning options, and upload them to the blog as jpeg images + text (if you want), by wednesday 8 pm.
2. everyone to individually research and brainstorm on the idea of 'Open Source Urbanism', and write text (even phrases or bullet points welcome) on what they think this can mean for our project.
3. Whole team Skype conference on wednesday 1st April at 8 pm to review progress, and make big decisions for next weekend's work.

As you can see, this was typed in a big rush. please COMMENT if you disagree with, or don't understand some of these notes.