Shah Suhani Amit

CR4007

Conservation discourse can evolve to encompass more than monumental architecture. In the context of modernist historic housing, it is time to recognize that everyday architecture; often modest, aging, and heavily lived-in carries as much cultural and social value as formally celebrated architecture. To engage with them is to acknowledge that conservation can serve the ordinary not just through preservation, but through transformation. These interventions are thoughtful responses shaped by care, grounded in resilience, and guided by a commitment to ecological responsibility and respectful reuse. Within this shift, I position myself as someone who sees conservation as a future-oriented, user-driven act of care. I consciously move away from the idea of restoring these buildings to a singular, idealized past. Instead, I embrace the messiness of change, the informal extensions, the improvised uses, and the spatial negotiations that reflect people’s real needs. These everyday modifications are not failures, but expressions of agency and survival, and must be treated with dignity. My approach builds upon what exists, retrofitting for accessibility, managing infrastructural systems, replacing makeshift elements with more durable and economical materials, and reactivating the terrace as a communal sky-space. This approach advocates for a conservation ethic that values continuity over spectacle, participation over prescription, and the everyday over the exceptional. In doing so, it reaffirms the dignity of both the architecture and the communities it serves.