2019_Gautami Kasat — SEA Archives

SEA
ARCHIVES

Designed as a comprehensive resource on spatial thinking, experimental pedagogy, and academic practices, this archive serves as a record for reference and critical analysis.

More than a traditional institutional repository, it is envisioned as an "Archive of Ideas," structured to mirror the conceptual and intellectual framework of SEA. The platform captures specific engagements, explorations, and pedagogical reorientations, expressing the school's distinct set of practices constituted by its students and teachers.

The collection encompasses intellectual articulations—from course books and objectives to studio briefs and lectures—alongside a documentation of student work, field studies, and thesis projects. Through this structure, the archive navigates complex inquiries into typologies, ontologies, and genealogies, while exploring themes of environment, urbanisation, futures, and ethics. It serves as a space for rethinking geographies and histories of type, offering the school's co-learning experiments and its ongoing articulation of space and form.

+ CORE COURSES

+ CULTURE STUDIES

+ CHOICE COURSES

+ SETTLEMENT STUDIES

Land-water interface: a narrative of the land-water edge along the Godavari River, Nasik
Skins and Thresholds
Gautami Kasat, 2019

“ How have the architectural interventions along the land-water edge of Godavari in Nasik responded to the river ecology, its surrounding built-form and the key activities governing that place ?”

Over the years, architectural responses have visualized the land-water edge as hard-edge conditions. Under the smart city scheme, various riverfront projects have started coming up along the banks of the Godavari river in Nasik. Most of the projects are imagined as hard-edge riverfront schemes. Such conditions are not only happening in Nasik but in Ahemdabad (Sabarmati Riverfront), Pondicherry (Seaside promenade), Varanasi (Assi Ghat) and many more cities residing along water edges. For this dissertation, I recognize that new imaginations of the waterfront redevelopment across cities predominantly envision the land-water interface as a hard edge. However, there exist a wide range of land-water edge conditions whose architecture is important to understand towards developing an ecological approach for this interface. Thus the aim of this dissertation is to analyse the interplay between ecology, built-form and everyday activities along a river’s land-water interface and to explore the role of architecture in responding to such vulnerable conditions.

To begin with my research, I chose six cases along the stretch of Godavari. The cases travel the course of the river as it enters the city and ends as the river starts exiting the city. The sites are Ganesh Gaon, Savargaon, Navshaya Ganpati temple, Riverfront Jogging Track, Ram Kund and Tapovan. All the sites vary in terms of architectural responses to the water edges. They range from being agricultural villages, vineyards, temple ghats and riverfront parks.

Every case was documented in terms of ecology, built-structures and the culture of the place. To establish my parameters for ecological mapping I draw from Anne Sprin’s theory of the structure of natural processes in a space and map the cases with respect to terrain and water, soil and soft grounds and variation in vegetation. Building on Anthony Acciavatti’s theory of juxtaposing built parameters with unbuilt to map a river, I document the built environment with respect to roads, built structures and the hardness of the land-water edge conditions on-site. People’s activities are traced to set the tone of everyday activity governing the place.

A comparative study between all the cases helped me to establish a relationship between ecology, built-form and everyday activities of a place. With the reduction in soft ground cover, the built-form of the place increases and vice versa. With the reduction in variation of vegetation along the land- water edge of the river, hardline edge conditions amplify and vice versa. When the terrain of a place is altered without considering water flow and water percolation, architectural responses along the edge fail. Thus I conclude that the negotiations between the three parameters are not symbiotic. An increase in one leads to a reduction in other and vice versa. This argument sets the tone in thinking about how a sustainable design model along such vulnerable edges could be thought of. A model aiming to balance ecology and built-form while responding to the cultural logic to the place. The end argument which this dissertation puts forth is to explore the following design question : What could the architectural response of recreation, work and tourism be, along the land-water edge of the Godavari river in Nasik? How could a sustainable design model be demonstrated in such a context?

Read also under ‘Skins and Thresholds’:

Land-water interface: a narrative of the land-water edge along the Godavari River, Nasik

Spatial learnings from cellular phenomenon

Living in the forest: a study of settlements in and around the edge of the forest

Stories of urban thresholds from Mahad

Of building skins

Life resettled: work, life and leisure in the resettlement colonies alongside the edge of the Deonar dump

Spatiality of roughness/softness of streets

A routine of happiness: in-between realm and the spaces of respite