THESIS SYNOPSIS

Submitted by

N.VARSHINI
(16136024)

SCHOOL OF PLANNING ARCHITECTURE

HINDUSTAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE, CHENNAI - 603 103

Aim:

Revival of urban market hubs that connects the urban users to its grassroots

Description:

The architecture of the market is merely the stage for this enthralling drama. The bloom and
evolution of departmental stores and shopping complex has changed the dynamics of user
experience in a market space.

With the recent steady decline in such complex has let to introspect the user experience in
such spaces. With others players like online markets that has bought great amount of
comfort and wide variety of chooses. What will become the driving force that encourages
the users to actively engage with physical market spaces.

The traditional market space is often associated with obsolete for many reasons. Reasons
such as age and unsafe facilities, lack of parking spaces, environment, air circulation,
problem with waste and water. With revival of urban market, it tackles and provide
substantial solutions.

Development of culturally rooted urban marketscape empowers all the users to feel
connected to its grassroots. By taking reference grown the rapid and organically grown city,
the market takes the user around with its world building aspects. Not defined by buy and
sell exchange of users, it aims to become a place of social exchange and tourist attraction
hotspot.

Large shopping complex have subconsciously created walls of emotional complexities with
its user and internal complex associated with class and economic status. It's important to
eliminate and radical overhaul of the existing regulatory framework of urban market space.
With the upward trend of flea market in cities, the casual engagement of user is developed.

Reference:

Municipal Market, in Abrantes, Portugal, by ARX Portugal:

Most markets are all roof, but not this one. Its staggered cubic volumes in white-painted
concrete link two streets that are separated by a steep incline. In order to negotiate this
level change, a floating shuttered concrete stair is draped through the building’s five
storeys, unravelling like a bleached intestine. (A less convoluted route between the two
streets is provided by another staircase to the side of the structure.) A strip of windows on
the north face of the upper floor admits gentle natural illumination. This is dispersed
through the building via a void, onto which each of the four levels of stalls looks from
unevenly undulating balconies.

Baltic Station Market, in Talinn, Estonia, by KOKO Architects:

The Modernist motif of the floating roof, whether cantilevered or supported on impossibly
spindly legs, found its ideal functions in the factory and the market. Historiographic
prejudice has tended to favour the architecture of production, but the heroic pioneers of
iron and concrete also crowned vendors of fruit and veg with stunning spans. When Enric
Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue won the competition to redevelop Santa Caterina Market
in Barcelona in 1997, this tradition was given a Postmodern flavour: their rainbow-tiled roof
rests gently on the extant historic fabric rather than sweeping it away in favour of structural
clarity. This idea is returned to by KOKO Architects in their recent redevelopment of a
market in Talinn. Established after the break-up of the USSR, when the black market came
out of the shadows all over the former bloc, the old warehouse buildings have now been
given a new zigzag timber roof resting on iron trees. This structure is drawn out into the
square to shelter temporary stalls.
Outcomes expected:

1. Approachable urban market centre

2. Providing context and culture appropriation to the space in a market

3. Finding ways to connect the user to their grassroots in a middle of bustling and rapidly
evolving urban city.

4. Eliminate the emotional complexities of the users, created by previous mass market
complex.

5. Revival of urban market spaces that becomes unique to its surrounding and forms
backbone of economic and tourism revenue for the city.
 Tackling the social isolation of urban youth in cities

Aim:

Identify and tackle the social isolation of newly employed urban youth by creating
community nest while exploring change in work- home dynamics of spaces.

Description:

For many residents of urban areas around the world, cities represent the promise of a
rewarding life that allows them, more than their rural counterparts, to reap the benefits of
economic growth, developments in mass transit, and technological innovation. As a by-
product of this progress, however, densely populated metropolitan landscapes pose unique
psychological challenges not found in other environments. the psychological research
suggests that solitary confinement results in a number of measurable negative mental
health outcomes including clinical depression, anxiety disorders, abnormal sensory arousal,
vegetative-like states, and suicide. Long periods of isolation can lead to changes in
perception, affective disturbance, difficulties thinking, concentration issues, disturbing
thoughts, and lack of impulse control (Arrigo, 2007). Collectively, these damaging effects of
isolation have given rise to the term SHU syndrome. General anxiety, panic disorder, and
hallucinations are included in the cluster of behaviours described by the syndrome (Arrigo,
2007).

Younger people seem to be more vulnerable to loneliness because they typically don’t have
the emotional resilience that people develop as they get older, according to James Duggan,
a research fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University.

With increasing number of graduate and migration to city in hope to find better standard of
living, the already exploding urban sprawl and put tremendous pressure in the urban
development and planning. Duggan explains that in many Manchester neighbourhoods,
families have been stuck in poverty for decades, and younger generations feel they will
never find a place in the wider world. Experts call this feeling of not being valued by society
“collective loneliness.”

While the hope to find homes for individual becoming with economic feasibility is difficult,
the expectation to provide psychologically feasible homes is luxury to many. The thesis aims
to tackle the evolving relation of economically non stable urban youth with the spatial
relationship of spaces in terms of work-homes. This in turn has created a gap between
individuals to socialize with the community.

Outcomes expected:

1. Feasible community housing for the newly employed urban youth.

2. The evolving relation of work-home in urban youth.

3. Tackling the economic and psychological association in community.

4. Identify and tackle the collective Loneliness of youth, which becomes the community of
the future.
 Alternate response to urban sprawl and slums through science fiction

Aim:

A take on the alternate reality of urban slums in science fiction, and taking cues to approach
urban slums in real time.

Description:

The megacity: an urban sprawl so huge, so monolithic, that it eats up most of continent —or
a planet. It’s a familiar concept in sci-fi, and has been at least since the days of Fritz Lang and
his titular Metropolis.

One reason the megacity remains so prevalent is simple: while it seems futuristic and exotic,
the fact is, the concept is pretty familiar in the real world, as cities like Boston, New York,
and Philadelphia inch closer together every year. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which
coast-spanning megacities actually exist, but still, the concept retains its power in an SFnal
setting.

Life imitates art, and then art imitates life. This eternal back and forth can be seen explicitly
in the evolution of our cities over the last century. What is perhaps most striking right now is
the tendency for some of these grand futuristic cities, such as Dubai, to be influenced so
explicitly by science fiction visions profoundly entrenched in dystopian perspectives. Steve
Graham, an academic with a particular focus on cities and speculative fiction, sees a
somewhat unsettling trend playing out in some of these new, large-scale architectural
visions.

Unconventional organization of masses and imaginative reuse of objects become the basic
unit of a science fiction urban slum, thought becoming futuristic, it still aims to be rooted
with its settings. The urban slums are always agitated as results of imbalance power and
resources in society. This in counter reproduces imaginative reuse and regeneration of
components that becomes the bases of building.

As change in dynamic of social class in such dystopian world in bridge the gap in the lower
economic class while widening the gap between the upper, middle and lower class of the
society.

Finding new relationship between no reusable Material in the built environment is one of
the key findings in a sci-fi world.

The real test lies in the translation of such idea in real world. The topics dwells in finding
such new innovations and discovery that always pre-existed in the fiction worlds. Also taking
the prediction from future expansion of urban sprawl, the regeneration of existing slums as
response.

Outcomes expected:

1. Application of dystopian/sci-fi understand of slums into real world problem

2. Discovery of usage of dynamic components of the built environment into creating

3. Finding new means to solve the urban sprawl in slums with dystopian diction.

4. Unconventional building components as acts as basic units.