The Home as an Experience: Studies in the Design of a Developer-Built Apartment Residence
The developer-built apartments in Mumbai are advertized as ultimate symbols of iconic lifestyles. Referred to by evocative names, these are self-sufficient, gated microcosms. These advertisements claim uniqueness in terms of amenities; each attempting to
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Abstract The developer-built apartments in Mumbai are advertized as ultimate symbols of iconic lifestyles. Referred to by evocative names, these are selfsufficient, gated microcosms. These advertisements claim uniqueness in terms of amenities; each attempting to outdo the other by projecting a more exclusive lifestyle. They declare: Purchase houses, acquire lifestyles. This paper intends to examine the relationship between lifestyle conception and house composition. A case-study of the design process of an apartment-housing project in Mumbai offers insights into this lifestyle-architecture combination at the moment of conception. The assumption here is that the space and moment of design allow unselfconscious forms to become apparent and be subjected to interrogation. Also, design itself might offer critical positions to view the relationship between where we live and how we live. The results of the case-study analysis point to how new lifestyles require the incorporation of other diverse spaces usually never associated with urban residences. The shape of this lifestyle emerges in the form of the superbuilt-up space, beyond the individual dwelling unit; the value-addition space that belongs to all and none in particular. A particular lifestyle-architecture configuration also seems to posit specific relations between the individual dwelling unit, the collective apartment and the urban neighborhood. Also brought forth is the underlying assumption of aesthetic congruence between lifestyle and house design. Keywords Housing
Architecture Experience Lifestyle
P. K. Neelakantan (&) Industrial Design Centre, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Powai, Mumbai, India e-mail: [email protected]
A. Chakrabarti and R. V. Prakash (eds.), ICoRD’13, Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering, DOI: 10.1007/978-81-322-1050-4_24, Ó Springer India 2013
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1 The Apartment-Block As a type, the apartment-block is a single ‘house’ belonging to a community of dwellers. This house is further divided into smaller dwelling compartments called flats. It can also be thought of in terms of a vertical stack of a series of peculiarly interior ‘houses’ called flats having different owners. The type is an interior structure of a form/principle. It is capable of shared meaning and infinite variation. Therefore the tension between invention and form would be evident in the manifestation of any type. What role does the house play in the apartment-type? This question also pertains to the relationship between the house-space and the home-space. The house-space is part of the material-spatial realm, in comparison to which the home-space is the more amorphous socio-politico-economic realm. Various relations have been posited between the house and the home: the house as a register of socio-cultural changes in the home-notions/practices [1]; as a place-bound aspect, the house acts like a geographic centre for the inhabitants [2]. The household in the form of the fusion of the house and the home, has been considered a socio-
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