Bringing in Design Solutions that are contextually insightful – Ar. Uday Goswami
“A firm follower of a ‘process driven design approach’, I try to bring in design solution that is contextually insightful.” says Uday Goswami, an architect and designer, currently working on several projects in leading cities of India and East Africa. Uday studied Architecture from Chandigarh, (CCA) and completed Masters in Advance Architecture from IaaC, Barcelona in the year of 2008. After completing his Masters, Uday moved to Mumbai and joined Edifice Consultants Pvt. Ltd. He has worked on different national and international projects. His notable projects include social housing at Djibouti, Africa, townhouse projects for Godrej in Bangalore and Pune, IT SEZ building for TRIL in Chennai.
Prior to his post graduation in Barcelona, Uday worked in New Delhi and Mussorrie. He is an awardee of Le Corbusier certificate of proficiency for his intellectual project, revitalising Corbusier’s office in Chandigarh.
Uday has been closely working on competition based programmes, of which IIM Udaipur was one prominent project where Edifice’s proposal got shortlisted in the list of top three proposals. Design proposals for Bajaj R&D center, Airtel HQ in Nairobi, Dhirubhai Ambani University at Bhopal, and JSW Township at Bellary were a few, invited competitions that have been developed by him being the lead designer for these projects.
For the past couple of years Uday has been heading the Design studio (Architecture and Master Planning) at Edifice Consultants for residential and institutional projects. His recent project for Tata Housing (Avenida) at new town, Rajarhat, Kolkata a residential project spread over 13 acres was awarded the Best Residential Design of 2013-14 by NDTV – design and architecture forum. This project is featured here.
The project was commissioned in 2013 and is expected to be completed in 2017 with a built area of 1.5 Million Sq.Ft. which includes residential space(11,94,000 Sq.Ft.), a club house (25,000 Sq.Ft.) and Retail (6000 Sq.Ft.)among others.
The concept & project architect is Edifice Consultants Pvt. Ltd. Mumbai, while the concept design team (EDIFICE) includes Manoj Choudhury, Uday Goswami, Subhrendu Das, Debashree Turel, Akhil Ladda, Parag Mistry and the project team (EDIFICE) consists of Uday Goswami, Sudip Choudhury, Paromita Chanda, Sanil Kumar, Sandeep Naikude
Avenida exhibits a set of spatial narratives that exemplifies the idea of an invigorated urban dwelling pattern with a strong sense of community living and shared social spaces. The design reinforces the idea of an identifiable public realm formalised within a tree lined central boulevard surfeited with a series of urban activities, setting a platform of social engagement for the citizens.
The design process started with the extrapolation of spatial characters in the urban patterns that are still inexistence in the core town area that have been transforming in character since its colonial heritage era. The spatial relationship with the walkable streets, public plazas, nodes and squares were redrawn and repurposed (to the suitability of the present context) in the master plan to create the quintessential sense of place making that defies the conventional privatised and individualistic segregation pattern.
The arrival plaza with an entrance gateway signifies the moment of arrival with a low rise club house holding the street edge at the arrival point. The 29 storied residential towers are planned to counterpoise the sweeping curvilinear boulevard in a radial pattern, oriented towards the South and South East directions responding to the prevailing wind pattern for maximised air flow into the habitable spaces.
The boulevard epitomises the inherent socio-cultural values of society with a series of spatial framework to hold civic activities encouraging public participation. It is a place of social interaction, recreation, cultural activities and occasional festivities. The ephemeral festival corner and an art gallery, library with an outdoor tea bar, grocery and other conveniences all spread around the walkable 200 meter long curvilinear street contained within a single story footprint with covered colonnade and collectively defines the quintessential urban character of the neighbourhood. It has a dedicated side walk with outdoor seating spaces, tree lines and single storied public programs that intensifies the spatial relationship with the street at human eye level.
While the boulevard exhibits a vital urban quality, an elevated landscape park connected through a ceremonial stairway to the boulevard contained at the backyard of the town homes and two towers makes it a passive zone for outdoor sit outs, to counterbalance the active boulevard. The pedestrian network connects all the programs within the site making the whole development a barrier free environment.
Spatial transition from the urban boulevard to the secondary lanes, from the elevated park to the walking trail network, from a sculpture court to acommunity lounge at tower base, collectively manifest the multiplicity of urban character in the neighbourhood. The base of each tower at grade is designed to house garden apartments with a front garden formed above human eye level from the adjacent street. It provides the sense of privacy to the private garden occupants and at the same time allows them to stay connected to the ground affairs, reminiscent to living in individual house. It also defines a landscape edge to the streets.
A total of 30 atypical unit typologies have been designed to offer a large range of lifestyle choices in the neighbourhood. The town homes and the courtyard houses hold within themselves exquisite intimate sanctuaries of private nature scapes. Each tower houses a variety of unit types, starting with garden apartments at the base, intermediate duplex units at every five floors, simplex units with penthouses on top create a great lifestyle mix within the tower each provided with deep balconies and decks as outdoor spaces.
The towers are also strategically planned to counterbalance any imminent high rise developments within the adjacent neighboring plots.
Two distinctively profound colonial elements, twin columns and horizontal shading louvers are reinterpreted to form a façade that continues over the amenity spine, club house and the base two floors of the towers. The repetitiveness of these two elements across a varied set of volumes imparts a part to whole and whole to part relationship within the entire street scape of the neighbourhood. Above this sits the tower mass with a façade that performs towards creating comfortable spaces inside by responding to the climatic behaviour. The deep balconies intensify the relationship with the exterior, provide outdoor space and sometimes buffer the interior zone from the exterior harshness. A combination of horizontal and vertical fins (projected from the external surface by 500 mm) around the building openings is used to create a façade that controls the harsh rays of the sun and shades the building surface providing thermal comfort to the habitable spaces inside.
Uday firmly believes in examining his ideas by handling the critical thought process that goes above a certain account of the project needs with its actual scheme. The process version includes human centric design with people as end users along with their cultural aspects as well as technology adoption which generates a physical reality that is dimensional, preliminary and developing at times and it also brings a different design solution with certain architectural quality.
