Kathipara Transit Park

‘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.

Location Chennai
Typology Urban Landscape
Year 2008
Status Concept / Unbuilt
Size Site – 40000 m2
Client National Highways Authority of India
Design Team Vidhya MohanKumar,Mahesh Radhakrishnan, Prem Balasubramaniam, Shaktivel S, Prakash