Date/Time
Date(s) - 31/01/2015
10:00 am - 1:00 pm
Location
Alliance Française de Trivandrum
Categories
An international architectural workshop on THE CHANGING TERRITORY OF KERALA : LANDSCAPE AND HOUSES on 31 January, 10.00am @ Alliance Française de Trivandrum.
The shared academic program of Bharti Vidyapeeth College of Architecture, Navi Mumbai and Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Architecture de Paris la Villette, Paris is learning from Indian cities. In India, cities and territories today know, heavy mutations: demographic explosion of the metropolitan cities, intensifying poverty in the countryside, increased mobility, densification of the historic cities, the development of the architectural and urban heritage protection. In the last years, they have approached these transformations through our field workshops in Karaikudi (Tamil Nadu), Navi Mumbai and Udaipur (Rajasthan). Some assert a major urban transition, others see an urban hybridization in progress.
Last year, in Udaipur, known all over the world for its extraordinary landscape of lakes and hills, its marble palaces and its fortified Rajput city, they have noted the growth of the Indian and international tourism which produces a spontaneous renewal of this city without any control. The architectural and urban heritage is transformed. The havelis are densified, new hotels are built, along the lake, to welcome the tourists. But the population finds in these changes, the opportunity to have a better economic life.
In Kerala, they wish to examine the cross between a touristic territory and a rural territory, as Kerala is one of the more rural States in India. The field observations in Kerala wishes to approach the mutations of the space at the two main scales. What are the basic transformations of the great territory? More specifically, what are the issues for the water landscape, the impact of the infrastructures of mobility (by boats, trains and roads)? And, at the other scale, what are the evolutions of the houses? How the new programs, the new ways of life, the new ways of building, change the house?
