Riya Venkatesh
The Song of Hampi
Architecture, traditionally seen as a container of life, often stands as a ‘petrified form’ in space and time, its fixed form, location, and shape enduring for many years after construction. However, this rigid perception belies the potential of architecture to serve as a reflection of life itself, evolving and adapting to the changing needs and aspirations of society. Embracing pluralistic values and challenging the domination of functionality, architecture can transcend its static constraints and become a catalyst for innovation and progress. By exacerbating existing conditions, architects can provoke thought and inspire creative solutions to pressing issues such as climate change. Through sustainable practices, organic systems, and imaginative storytelling, architecture can re-imagine the future urban landscape, projecting diverse urban typologies that resonate with the complexities of contemporary life.
In this envisioned future, architecture becomes more than just physical structures; it becomes a narrative, a journey through supernatural circumstances, alternative realities, and imagined settings.
Each room, each space, becomes a canvas for endless exploration and discovery, blurring the lines between reality and imagination. These architectural creations create a dreamlike, playful, and calm atmosphere, inviting inhabitants to spend their lives discovering.
By privileging the dream world as an integral element in architectural design, sensitivity becomes a virtue, expanding our everyday world and revealing new realms unknown to us. Through constant change and adaptation, architecture becomes more intimate and more connected to the environment and the inhabitants it serves.
The project works within this vocabulary to elevate it through sustainable construction methodologies and imagines the city of Hampi, in India, to be a growing incremental landscape of productive infrastructure that allows for sustenance and considers the inhabitants to be a crucial part of the ecology as stewards of the land. It explores local livelihood practices, rituals, and traditions as identity practices to develop spatial typologies that not only elevate the significance and resilience but also allows for the construction of a spatial identity.
The Indian Song celebrates Indian culture through the speculative lens of art and architecture.
It aims to not only make history relevant to the present scenario but also envision a future.
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