Public

The project will increase awareness of the environment through interpretation tunnels, urban furniture which aim to provide information on wetlands, bird watching towers and a deck, general public gathering spaces and children’s play area.

Retrofitting solutions into an area without public engagement or consensus rarely work. This project looks at the revitalization of a dying ecosystem through the creation of a socially inclusive, informative public space.

‘Public spaces on Water edge’, is an exploratory vision for water edges for Chennai in 2020. Through these projects, we show how to create a public realm for Chennai that is socially inclusive, ecologically responsible and beautifully designed. A series of pilot projects represented through ideas, images, plans, and diagrams are collated to demonstrate this.
These projects broadly work in the intersections of ECOLOGY, CULTURE, and INFRASTRUCTURE. They highlight the opportunity and demand for such places for a better quality of life. The following sample projects show a model for the development of public spaces.

Waterfront as Transit and leisure space – Chetpet Lake
Water bodies, natural or man-made dot all over Chennai. They have been characteristic to Chennai’s landscape. Well-developed waterfronts can ease the need for green areas within the city.
An ideal transit route along the waterfront, Chetpet Lake is located between the proposed underground metro station at Kilpauk Medical College and Existing suburban station at Chetpet connecting Chennai Central and Tambaram. This proposal provides an ideal condition for a safe and comfortable public space to thrive amidst daily commuters and a place for local neighbours to gather at other times of the day.

Public space for Culture – Museum Theatre Complex area to Lalit Kala Academy
Egmore and its surroundings have always been the setting for institutions that promote culture in Chennai. These institutions, state-run and privately managed exist independently in function without relating its existence to one another. The goal of the project is to highlight the need to connect these institutions (particularly large ones like Egmore Museum and Lalit Kala Academy), identify them with an experience and reflect an Image of the city along the redeveloped Cooum Riverfront.

Ecologically curated public space – Pallikaranai Marsh area
This project demonstrates a case of public space for leisure amidst an ecologically conserved marshland.‘The uniquely heterogeneous hydrology and ecology of the Pallikaranai Marsh makes the marsh one of the most diverse natural habitats of the country, with over 330 species of plants and animals.’ Based on this adaptive management plan for conservation of pallikaranai marshland, this proposal explains the threats that lie ahead for the marsh, ways to address these challenges and scope and opportunities for a public space while doing so. This proposal ensures an ecologically sensitive city level public space with various degrees of habitation, ranging from a nature trail for enthusiasts to a leisure park for families in a unique landscape setting.

‘Cities are an archive of time in space’…Working on the premise that, every intervention within the fabric of the city be a reflection of the time that it is set in, the proposal is a manifestation of this notion.

The Kathipara flyover is the entry and exit to the city of Chennai. Given a design brief to address the ground plane beneath the grade separator in an appropriate manner, the site is looked at as a ‘transit park’ – in response to the way the junction works and also providing for a safe, easily navigable and pleasant experience for pedestrians on the ground plane.

The Transit Park re-contextualises 5 fundamental landforms of Tamil Culture as described in Sangam Literature to achieve a space that is purely functional but also visually diverse, congruous in time and symbolic in culture. As an emergent landscape, the Transit Park is not unlike the grade separator above it in that it is not a destination reached but a delightful precinct that will make the transit route a lasting impression in the minds of many people that cross it every day.