Jyoti Hosagrahar is faculty at Columbia University, New York and Director of Sustainable Urbanism International at Columbia University, and Bangalore, India. Architect, planner, and historian, she advises on urban development, historic conservation, and sustainability issues in Asia. Her research interests include urban heritage, cultural and environmental sustainability of cities focusing on the intersections of nature, culture, and the built environment, and postcolonial perspectives in design and planning. She serves as an expert for UNESCO on historic cities.

Hosagrahar is the author of Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism (Architext Series, Routledge, 2005) awarded a 2006 book prize by the International Planning History Society. At Columbia she teaches courses on urban sustainability and postcolonial perspectives on non-Western architecture and urbanism. Recently, Hosagrahar has been extensively involved in the conservation and sustainable development of historic cities in India in partnership with UNESCO. She is directing the preparation of an integrated site management plan for the conservation and sustainable development of the heritage of the Hoysala towns in Karnataka.

Sustainable Urbanism International’s minimalist design and planning interventions aim to enhance local economic development, while enabling local populations to express their historically derived placed-based identities. SUI is involved in a range of studies, policies, and design interventions for historic townships through extensive community and stakeholder consultations. With Sustainable Urbanism International in partnership with The Energy Resource Institute, India, Hosagrahar has coauthored, ‘An Exploration of Sustainability in the Provision of Basic Urban Services in Indian Cities’. (TERI, 2009).

Stay tuned for Part -2 of Jyoti’s video where she discusses Indigenous Modernities. We will release that shortly.

The Mobile Activation Station by Holobiont

The Mobile Activation Station designed by Holobiont (Haruka Horiuchi & Frank Hebbert) has been selected as the winner by our three esteemed judges – Raul Smith Correa of ‘Faiscas‘, Soo-in Yang of ‘The Living’ and Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai. They win a grand or $1000 to make their idea come to life. The Mobile Activation Station is a portable reconfigurable table with built-in power distribution, lighting and storage. It turns empty stores into communal spaces. Once built, the Station will be available for short-term use in vacant storefronts along Rogers Avenue in Crown heights, Brooklyn.

The Bus Roots Project by Marco Antonio Castro Cosio

The second favorite project for the judges especially Soo-in is the Bus Roots Project by Marco Antonio. Bus Roots is a living garden on the roots of city buses. It brings life to a forgotten space and provides humans with a reminder to pause and let naturte help lead a healthier life.

Traffic Cones into Flower Receptacles by Daniel Ebuehi

The third favorite project for the judges, especially for Raul Smith Correa is the project by Daniel Ebuehi from Philadelphia. In an attempt to bring vitality as well as sustainability directly into the streets of Philadelphia – literally in the middle of the street – this scheme transforms the ubiquitous traffic cone into a flower receptacle that can be assembled to form a garden retreat.

Our special thanks to the third and final judge who helped us make the final decision – Bijoy Jain from Studio Mumbai.

This competition would not have been possible without the generous contributions from these amazing people and friends :
Ravisharon Kaur
Ramakrishnan Subramanian
Rahul Pande
Kiran Kannacheri
Saravanakumar Velayudham
Sameer Kumar
Keerthik Sasidharan
Saad Tabani
Ritwik Dey
Giana Gonzalez
Sonali Sridhar
Jairam Ranganathan
Amit Desai
Priyanka Gupta
Shweta Mudgal

A Grand Idea -Inhabit Section competition culminated on June 17th. A lot of  interesting entries came pouring in from all round the world. The ones published are a few that stood out. Our judges Raul Smith Correa from FAISCAS and Soo-in Yang from The Living are going over the entries and plan to pick a winner soon. The winner gets to develop a prototype of their design using $1000.

Vid de Gleria & Ziga Kresevic – Urban Rebagers

Robin Liu – Popup Bookstore

Haruka Horiuchi & Frank Hebbert – Mobile Activation Station

Jirawit Yamkleeb – Double Take

Marco Antonio Castro – Bus Roots

Hiroyuki Ichihara – The benches of Tsuchibokasi

Robyne Kassen – Monkey Bar Bike Racks

Jurriaan de Brujin – Metro

Yusuke Sakuma & Akihito Matsushita – Forest Bath

Dominik Chung – Park Hill, Sheffield

Daniel Ebuehi – Construction Cones

If you would like to see more than one design to come to life, please make a donation. The donations are tax deductible.

If you would like to see more than one design to come to life, please make a donation. The donations are tax deductible.

What is this competition about?
This competition is focused on design solutions that can change our immediate urban environment into places that we can truly inhabit. The first series of ‘The Grand Idea Initiative’ is called ‘INHABIT‘. The ultimate challenge of which is to create solutions that introduce fun, sustainable, and innovative ways people use public space. The intervention can be components that are spatial, graphical, digital or purely strategic. These ideas have to be US $1000 in budget and need to maximize the return in the shape of a built design solution.

Who should apply?
Anyone – You could be an architect, designer, a mad scientist, a housewife, a student or anyone else interested in making cool stuff for public spaces.

What kind of projects can be submitted?
Projects could be aimed at designing street furniture, environmental graphics, services, online communities, anything that changes peoples behavior to how a public space gets utilized.

Submission requirements
A photograph of the Site – The place of your intervention, preferably in your neighborhood
The Proposal – A 100 word design brief describing your project.
The Design – Your proposal in a visual format, e.g. sketches, drawings, photo collages, anything that clearly outlines what you propose to do.
The Budget & Timeline – Breakdown of the usage of the US $1000. A tentative installation/implementation timeline.

Please send all these requirements in a letter size PDF format. The number of pages in the PDF document should not exceed more that 4 pages.

What is the budget?
US $1000

Selection process
The selection of the final project will be based on creativity, innovative thinking, maximum impact and practical plan for implementation.

Our judges are -

Raul Correa Smith
Co-founder, FAISCAS
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture, Columbia University GSAPP

Raul Corrêa-Smith is a co-founder of Faiscas, a two-way cultural exchange channel geared towards boosting the architectural imagination between New York and Rio de Janeiro. Established in 2009 through Columbia University’s Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Faiscas is an evolving hub for the facilitation of such exchanges. Raul earned his BA from the Taubman School of Architecture at the University of Michigan in 1998 and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University’s GSAPP in 2002 with Honors for Excellence in Design. Born in New York City and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Raul currently resides in NYC where he works at Studio Daniel Libeskind and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia’s GSAPP.

Soo-in Yang
Co-Founder of The Living

Soo-in Yang created The Living with David Benjamin in 2004. Using an open-source, collaborative approach, the architecture firm designs both handheld interfaces and urban-sized buildings. Work by The Living has received multiple international awards and has been exhibited and published widely. Their current projects include a 50,000 square meter mixed-use development in New Jersey, and a floating network of pods in New York’s rivers that sense water quality and presence of fish, then display a cloud of light that changes colors according to environmental conditions. Yang graduated from Yonsei University with a BE in Architectural Engineering and received Master of Architecture degrees from Columbia University. Yang teaches at Pratt Institute and at Columbia University, where he is the co-director of the Living Architecture Lab.

Where should the entries be sent?
Send your PDF attachments to agrandidea@designwala.org. Please include your name and contact information in the body of the email as well as on the PDF document. The subject line should be “Inhabit Competition Submission”.

Important Dates
Inhabit Competition kicks off – May 17th 2010
Deadline for Submissions – June 17th 2010
Winners Announced – July 17th 2010

For more information
Contact us at info@designwala.org

This competition would not have been possible without the generous contributions from these amazing people and friends :
Ravisharon Kaur
Ramakrishnan Subramanian
Rahul Pande
Kiran Kannacheri
Saravanakumar Velayudham
Sameer Kumar
Keerthik Sasidharan
Saad Tabani
Ritwik Dey
Giana Gonzalez
Sonali Sridhar
Jairam Ranganathan
Amit Desai
Priyanka Gupta
Shweta Mudgal

Other things to keep in mind
* This competition is open to people from all countries
* Since public intervention laws are different in different countries, please choose sites that have the potential to grow without   upsetting any stringent legality.
* The project money is NOT prize money but money to build something small and useful

About the Grand Idea Initiative
A Grand Idea Initiative is a 5 part series competition – INHABIT, LEARN, ORGANIZE, HEAL & SUSTAIN. The rest of the competitions will take place as soon as we raise the prize money for them.

Watch the trailer for ‘The Grand Idea Initiative’.

Jay Thakkar’s first book, Naqsh, is reaching out to individuals from varied backgrounds and his second, Matra, was just named ‘Best written work on Architecture 2009’ by India’s ‘Foundation for Architectural and Environmental Awareness’. Jay Thakkar, author, designer and faculty member of the School of Interior Design at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, talks to Designwala about India’s vernacular architecture, documentation, and design policy.

Click below to hear the interview with Jay Thakkar:

by Shuchi Vyas

IN THE OLDEN DAYS, the popular Gujarati dish, Undhiyu (a medley of vegetables eaten during the Kite festival in January) was made underground in an earthen pot with carefully handpicked vegetables from the market and fresh homemade spices – and chatting while it was being cooked was a part of the ritual. Now it’s either made on the stove, or worse, it’s take out. “Crafts were about time, and people don’t have too much of time now. It’s all about getting things ready-made,” says Jay Thakkar. What Jay aimed to do with his first book, ‘Naqsh: The Art of Wood Carving in Traditional Houses of Gujarat’, was to present it all to a larger audience instead of confining it to academic circles.

A majority of drawings for Naqsh were done during Jay’s graduation thesis at the School of Interior Design (SID). “I wanted to do something which was urban, so I looked at old cities and how the urban inserts started to take place. I would sit down in the old city of Ahmedabad and just sketch. This turned into an expression of wood carving which Naqsh was then based on,” he explains. Along with his team, he completed the entire project using one of the earlier versions of Pagemaker, which in hindsight seems almost impossible and primitive considering it lacked the basic ‘undo’ function.

Naqsh has been used extensively by people in the restoration field, historians, textile designers, and pattern makers, among others. A teacher at the Mahatma Gandhi International School in Ahmedabad even conducted a class exercise where the kids made colored versions of the Naqsh designs

While the purpose of publishing ‘Matra: Ways of Measuring Vernacular Built Forms in Himachal Pradesh’, co-authored by Skye Morrison, was to cater to a larger audience and broaden the dialogue on vernacular architecture, it was also a reason to get SID students out of their classrooms and feel architecture and design. About 60 students voluntarily and enthusiastically worked with him, and brought in different perspectives and various design technology to enhance some of the images.

“In India, there are two categories of books on architecture: coffee table books and research books. The idea for publishing Matra was to combine both – it’s more of a research travel book,” says Jay. After Matra was published, the team went back to each home in the Himachal village, gave them copies of the book and asked all those involved in its making – students, drivers, villagers and their children – to sign the first couple of pages of one of the books as a symbol of ownership and involvement.

Click here to see the video of the book signing

“People became a part of the book. We wanted it to be of use to the local people and we made everything three dimensional so that it could be referenced by the masons and carpenters,” explains Jay. He also had architects and builders in mind for if and when they want to reference the structures covered in Matra there to build something similar in the future. “Technicians get to see the seismic side of the region as Himachal has a history of earthquakes and landslides which we’ve managed to cover,” says Jay. This detailed work also caters to historians and anthropologists, even as it is an easy read devoid of jargon for the layman and tourist interested in vernacular architecture.

Some useful insights about vernacular architecture came to the fore during their travels to Himachal Pradesh for Matra. For instance, the team studied a particular house that was made with 40 trees. You’d gasp, “How is that environment friendly?” Jay feels it is: As the lifecycle of a tree is about 25 years, people in the village made it a ritual to plant anywhere between 25 and 40 trees whenever a child was born, so by the time he/she grew up there would have enough raw material to build a house. “While we buy insurance, they invested in nature. If you have a reforestation process in place, wood becomes very economical, but we don’t have that system in India,” Jay explains. The sad story now is that the government is restricting the use of wood and so these people don’t have wood to repair their houses.
“There are a lot of students that want to pursue research after Matra’s success,” Jay says. “Now when we take up a project at school, we think about the possibility of it being published, and we work on it in such a way that it becomes viable,” he adds. CEPT has been documenting since 1962, which means that it has a sizeable amount of work. “But because there has been no real encouragement for research, it all remains on campus,” says Jay. It’s only recently that SID started a research cell and gained the required funding to be able to publish about a dozen books. The Sir Ratan Tata Trust published Matra and some of the other work that is now being published from CEPT.

Another problem he outlines is the lack of funds for academics. There are individuals that are interested in research, but are carrying it out on a small scale. “When we were working on the second book, my whole team gathered around 6:00 pm and work till 3:00 am for two years. You can’t sustain yourself like that, you’ll soon burn out,” says Jay. “If academics are asked to write a grant, do the research, get the publishers and do their own marketing and publicity, isn’t that too much?” he adds. But this is slowly changing. The Indian government is getting more involved and interested. The system for disbursement of funds for such projects is a slow and laborious one, but CEPT has a few proposals in the pipeline.
Jay feels the main issue that plagues interior design today is licensing. As the field is relatively new in India, there are no laws or regulations that certify the practice. Anyone can practice interior design without the required education and training – a carpenter, a housewife and even celebrities call themselves ‘interior designers’. But this is changing with efforts by the Institute of Interior Designers (www.iiid.org) that is formulating rules and plans to certify those from a five year course and encourage those from a two-year course to work a little before meriting them with a license. The Council of Design is being formulated by the Government of India to regulate most design fields in India.

So, what’s next for Jay? He is interested in publishing more research work, for which he is looking for funds and grants from the government, individuals or NGOs. The larger issue is how to enable it to reach more people and not just lie in store rooms. CEPT University is not allowed to sell research books that are worked on by the students, so whatever money comes in for Jay’s books, is mostly in the form of a donation. “I have worked on these books honorary. Normally, you need a grant, publisher, research assistant, production designer and a team,” he outlines.

If all goes as planned, Jay hopes to work on a host of projects: For one, he plans to work closely on wooden architecture in India. “There are five states that have wooden architecture that’s bound to get lost soon. So first, the idea is to document it, which will hopefully open it up to further research,” he explains.  Jay is thinking about a large-scale project on the vernacular architecture of India, for which, he jokes, he will “need a lifetime”. The books available on the subject today are a few and niche. As 2010 is ‘Swarnim Gujarat’, the State’s heritage year as it completes 50 years since establishment, he wants to produce a body of work on the state’s indigenous arts and crafts by creating a platform to bring NGOs, handicraft corporations and the government together to better document these subjects.

Click below to hear Jay’s views on India’s cultural and social issues :

Having spent a long weekend with Archana Prasad –Co Founder Jaaga, National Institute of Design alumnus and Bangalore based artist, in Pondicherry, where she was performing with her group The Manjunauts, (she is also a VJ) at the Freedom Jam; I had the chance to engage in a dialogue with her about Jaaga.

Jaaga’s name has been popping up at a very frequent rate, in the art+ design circle here in Bangalore. Over the last couple of months, it has become a hotspot for performances, exhibitions, workshops and social interventions. To break it down, Jaaga, which means space in Kannada, is an urban community art-architecture experiment, currently situated in Bangalore. It is a modular structure that employs a participatory design process where the community helps build and use it. It includes web enabled workspaces and large multi-level public spaces. The fact that this building is mobile and can be moved to different neighbourhoods, cities and countries; taking with it its culture of pushing the envelope of innovation and pro-activism at a neighbourhood level to greater heights, is an added bonus.

Jaaga was born out of Archana’s insatiable desire for a dedicated space for the city’s artists who are rich in talent albeit not necessarily in funds, to showcase their work.  Together with fellow artists Suresh Kumar G and Shivaprasad S, they founded an artist collective called Samuha. With 23 artists of various disciplines like painting, sculpture, new media and performance arts, Samuha is running for 414 days, having started June 22, 2009. Each artist member owns 17 days at the space and can use it for exhibitions, seminars, workshops and interactions on art practices.

Samuha being in place, Archana’s quest for an artistic haven – a creative common place, was still on. A chance meeting between Archana and Freeman Murray, an American technologist in India, lead to the creation of Jaaga, Having successfully worked with pallet racks in the past through various projects in the US, he suggested constructing a modular sturdy structure using this warehouse shelving, usually used for heavy duty industrial purposes. Pallet racking is a material handling storage system designed to store materials on pallets. Although there are many varieties of pallet racks, all types allow for the storage of palletized materials in horizontal rows with multiple levels.

Jaaga is a massive structure made up of red and blue pallet racks put together and looks like a movie set. With the assistance of volunteers, Jaaga was built up in all of 15 hours. The flooring is made up of plywood and metal wires and the walls are made of billboards. Being fully mobile, it can be dismantled and reassembled within hours. Jaaga is currently redesigning itself into being more spacious and modular. The entire structure will be a dichotomy between a natural earthy airy area and cyber industrial space.  Jaaga’s USP is that it brings together art, technology and social change activists to share their practices with the world and with the neighbourhood. It also re-looks the concept and conception of space; and that real estate can be moved, folded and floating.  Archana wanted the whole structure to look like a Lego building. When they got the space, a 300 sq. ft plot, they had to clean it up, as there was a lot of garbage and weeds that had grown around it. Volunteers came in and helped remove the garbage and weeded the place out.

The first event at Jaaga was the Robert Bosch Art Grant ceremony. Since its inception, Jaaga has hosted various events, including a performance by the Attakkalari Center for Movement Arts, which had eight dancers performing in eight modular spaces. As a space, it is available free of cost and artists or anyone interested are invited to submit proposals with ideas on how they would like to use the space. The vision of Jaaga is that it becomes a future University that harnesses the power of modern technology to herald a new breed of creative thinkers and doers; also to be a virtual repository of avant-garde thinking stemming in India and rooted in the world.

To quote Archana – “We live the reality of a world whose path, starting from mass production – industrialisation, has created the tensions that the West worries about. We already live it. Being an artist in that landscape can only be interesting. As artists we are super sensitive to these cracks and tears in the fabric of society. Our works are reactions, imaginations, renditions, and explorations of the chaos that surround us. How can anything honest that comes out of such stark, harsh, cruel yet beautiful reality be anything short of exciting. India is a hotbed of superbness now.”

For more information visit – http://jaaga.wikidot.com/

FrontlineWorld had an article about building sustainable communities in India post Tsunami. An Architecture for Humanity initiative led by Cameron Sinclair and an Indian Architect trained in America, Purnima McCutcheon were responsible for helping out this village in Tamil Nadu to rebuild their community which was in pieces after the Tsunami hit the village a little over four years ago. To learn about the story of their accomplishment -

Watch this video.

Read the story here. .