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COA National Award for PG thesis

30.11.2018

Faculty of Architecture

FA: M. Arch student wins COA National Award for PG thesis in Architecture 2018

Nishith Urval’s thesis on Designing Secular Spaces in Juhapura, using the medium of sequential art won the top honors at the National Jury for Council of Architecture (COA) Awards. Urval's guides are Prof. Seema Khanwalkar and Ar. Gurjit Singh Matharoo, while the review panel comprised of Prof.Madhvi Desai and Prof.Pratyush Shanker.

This thesis uses the medium of sequential art to explore and communicate ethnography, site studies and architectural process. Sequential art can not only surpass barriers of language and geographical boundary, but they can cross boundaries created by class, education and age as well. Architectural language is now restricted to plans, elevations, sections and views which is not easily communicating with the general crowd outside the architectural fraternity. Hence, comics/graphic novels can be a valuable tool in communicating complex architectural ideas and urban narratives to the people, bridging the gap between Architects and the common man.

As a designer of spaces Urval felt that one has to build context from inside the belly of a city. There are many public spaces in the old-city of Ahmedabad that are used by all communities. All these spaces are genetically coded in the city. These spaces were great examples where, the spatial quality of the place itself broke the notions of communal barriers in peoples mind. This thesis is an attempt to replicate such spaces in Juhapura.

This thesis attempts to design secular public spaces in the border area of Juhapura. Case studies of public spaces in old city and ethnographic studies in Juhapura resulted in final program and strategies to dissolve the physical and notional border in Juhapura.

WHY SHOULD WE USE SEQUENTIAL ART AS A NEW MODEL FOR DESIGN RESEARCH?

Architectural drawings, like plans and sections have existed for generations but have failed to evoke any kind of emotion in minds of the people who are outside the architectural fraternity. Will Eisner’s work demonstrates how he uses architecture as backdrop for dramatic action in the foreground. Various activities play out dramatically, like theatre, in front of an urban backdrop. In Eisner’s graphic novels, the inhabitants of the city experience it in fragments, because that is how one perceives his/her environment… one frame at a time, in sequence, relative to space. Hence built form /architecture of the city is interdependent on the melodrama that plays in front of it. One cannot exist without the other.

While importance of technical architectural drawings cannot be denied, sequential art can result in larger engagement of the common folk in understanding complex urban and architectural research.

In order to understand any kind of anthropological or architectural research one has to analyse the context logically and aesthetically. Graphic novels have the potential to form the connecting tissue between logic and beauty, capable of evoking compassion and empathy in the minds of the reader.

It is time we stopped thinking of comics as low literature. Instead we should embrace it as a powerful tool that echoes human experience capable of educating and transforming the mind of its readers.

COA National Award for PG thesis