Indian cities present an interesting problem for designers. At one level, they are steeped in history and seem to be in a time warp of some sorts and at the same time, they are sites of aspiration and are speculating on the future that nobody has seen. Some city contexts are loaded with such meanings and have also been playgrounds for testing different architectural ideologies. In this studio, the students learned to design a public building as an urban insert in one such site in Sardar Baug area of Ahmedabad, which was also the site of modernist experimentation in the 1960s.
The project was to design a National Stock Exchange Building. The stock exchange building program threw up interesting possibilities; from a new interpretation of the Stock exchange in the digital era to its public function in context of the city and much more. The designs addressed the issues of the program and the context in a very clear fashion. The emphasis here was on taking a strong design position and developing a coherent architectural language.
