Project Title: Scripting Homes: Studies in Apartment-dwelling design

Supervisor: Prof Uday Athavankar


This study focuses on a sub-set of practices of home-making – the practice of conceiving and designing a house.Given a milieu, and its conventions of home-making and housing, how does an individual negotiate his own private practice of conceiving a house? What role does design play in this activity? The milieu is Mumbai, and the housing type is an apartment complex (an aggregate of housing units called ‘flats’).

The apartment complex pits the individual dwelling unit against the collective. From the perspective of the home, it throws up this challenge of conceiving the individual dwelling-unit in relation to the collective. How does uniquely personal space get negotiated/ constructed/ onstituted with and within collective dwelling?

The above questions also bring to fore the practice of interior design as a manipulative tactical employment ofdesign-practice in contrast to the strategic structuring provided by architectural design; the dual role played by the design-professional. How is the dwelling unit conceived in the absence of the prospective inhabitant, in the design of developer-built apartment-complexes? How the dwelling unit is conceived when the inhabitant participates in the design (interior) of the dwelling unit? Does it reveal specific relations between the individual flat-house and the apartment complex-house?

The above questions are explored through a couple of case-studies: (a) the interaction between the interior designer and the clients (a newly married couple); this being a four-month long process of doing up their flat (this forms the core material for the research) and (b) a group of architects conceiving a design for an apartment-complex.

Contact details:
Industrial Design Centre,
IIT Bombay ,
Powai, Mumbai 400076

Telephone:
091-022-25767812

E-mail: neel.blu[at]gmail.com