Savsani Bhakti

HR4000

The studio ‘Histories of Making and Design’ was to formulate the research proposal using decoding of the building as a tool. The building that I studied was the Watson hotel, which is a late 19th-century pre-fabricated cast-iron building in Bombay imported from a foundry in England. The studio was divided into two modules; Module I was decoding the building in terms of structure and construction process based on the available online evidence and Module II was formulating a research proposal which started with the reading seminar in order to understand the existing scholarship on the modern architecture in India that helped in situating our buildings into the time frame. My proposal is the survey of cast-iron technology used in buildings in India in the late 19th century. It emerged from the question of lack of scholarship on the subject, especially about the buildings in India, and thus the project highlights this interstice through this proposal.