Shail Sheth

IR3006

The enormously vast, seemingly immeasurable and loosely punctuated space of the Industrial building sitting in close proximity to the airport, which in its measure of floating flights, echoed the dimensions of infinity of space and mankind’s adventure to measure and experience it. The idea of the experience, the fancy and the thrill of being in air, experiences associated with being suspended, levitated, projected and pushed through space can not only be experienced but also be enriched by providing a deeper understanding of the science behind it. The Flightorium Center functions as an Experience and Science centre taking visitors from pragmatic and speculative experiences through a series of spaces in a sequential order and then opening up to the large volume which appears to be suspended through a tactile grid network. The existing spatial grid of the structural network of the site and the spatial dimension that it offers is stretched by offsetting it and punctuating it against another tactile grid which accentuates the depth of space and exaggerates the illusion of infinity. The constant referencing of both while moving around suspended volumes intends to give dimension of infinity, a thrill. The Flightorium, one of its kinds in India, intends to represent the quest about India’s first Space pioneers and Ahmedabad’s Vikram Sarabhai, through the dimension of experiencing suspension in space.