AR3038

Faculty: Arijit Chatterjee | Shilpa Mevada

TA: Keerthan B v

Architectural Salvage: Reviving a Floating Shelter

In February 2018 Asile Flottant/ La péniche Louise-Catherine sank under the waters of the River Seine after a period of intense rain and flooding. This seemingly anonymous 70m long ferrocement barge is a lesser known work of Le Corbusier: a former coal barge reconfigured to serve as a floating homeless shelter in Paris from 1929-1995. In 2008 Louise Catherine was designated as a historic monument by the Direction régionale des affaires culturelles. Including Corbusian elements whilst retaining the original industrial character of the barge, the vessel is a striking work of fluvial architecture, marrying spatial and social ambitions with aquatic constraints.

This Design Studio will focus on designing a space to safely house the reconstructed barge, whilst enabling the remaking of the vessel to be a spectacle for participants, curious observers and the city of Mumbai. Through a combination of individually-made large scale models, urban to detail scale drawings this space and the situations it enables will be imagined as a series of props that sit within or on top of a floating dry dock on the Royal Bombay Yacht club seafront.

Studio Unit

Studio Brief and Case study drawings by students

Student design iterations

Resultant drawings of imagined interventions shown through plans and sections

Axonometric drawings of imagined interventions

1:25 Model photographs of imagined interventions