Living the Ethos: Emblazoning the “Maada Veedhi”

Shanthi K.

LA4008

Mylapore is one of the oldest and significant temple towns amidst Chennai’s dense urban center - A corridor where religious, cultural, and historical values are merged primarily serving as a religious destination; this is also a major social space for the localities. This corridor supports 80% of small-scale retail activities and contributes to the economy of the city. It is an everyday corridor for daily temple users that transforms to support large annual events. So overall this corridor has strong characteristics of social life, religious life, and commercial life. Thus the proposal on ‘Maada Veedhi’ or ‘Car Street’ aims to create a socio-cultural network that enhances the history and cultural quality of the neighborhood as well as of the city.

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Reading the city’s structure, identifying significant corridors with their potential, and envisaging the vision for the unique corridor

Understanding the chosen corridor’s land-use pattern, activities, and street typologies along with its religious, cultural, and historical values

Observing and analyzing the vehicle’s flow density, users, and their activity pattern across the corridor | social, religious, and commercial life

Drawing inferences and categorizing the site potentials as values; religious value, social value, cultural value, commercial value, and ecological value.

Reclaiming streets and establishing strategies to create a Socio-cultural corridor, to achieve legibility as a temple precinct, enhances the cultural qualities of the place and adaptability so the streets are flexible enough to support diverse activities

The masterplan is showing how the street activities are rearranged to achieve a better spatial and program organization vs existing. To fill the gap between the daily and annual program introduced few temporal events, yellow colors are indicative temporal locations.

Establishing strategies and elements to signify the pocket; this plaza is a place where people move through into a destination itself. Employing, enhancing, and engaging people in an urban environment that is explicitly new, while retaining its historical character.

Signifying the activities, elements, spaces adaptability, and crafting a transition of plaza’s central space. To revive the life of the tank was designed in such a way to manage runoff water from roads that will be collected through the drain and connected with the tank| creating planting strips along the street| softer edges along with the steps| modifying the tank bed

Transition and seasonality: the plaza was designed in such a way as to occupy several temporal events, temple festivals, and community celebrations are keeping alive the ethos of the place by embracing the Maada Veedhi or Car Street.

Applying derived design tool kits across neighborhood and city scale to create strong links of cultural corridors and become a symbol of the history and cultural image. So the street becomes a most valuable cultural marker in the public realm that will serve as a Religious, Commercial, and vibrant public space.