Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe6M6nqWaZY&t=0s&ab_channel=TheVivekEadaraShowTheVivekEadaraShow

DWIJ HIRPARA 

Dwij Hirpara is a final year student in the bachelor’s program at the Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University, Ahmedabad and is particularly interested in using design as a catalyst to explore alternative possibilities of building future habitats.   

Dwij pursued his internship with the Pritzker winning Spanish firm RCR Arquitectes followed by working on several notable public projects in Ahmedabad and Vadodara which are still under construction.   

He is very passionate about architecture design and in particular, he has an edge for graphical representations. His project titled - Time, Public and Architecture is the recipient of the CEPT Gujaral foundation excellence award 2021 where his project was shortlisted as one of the top five. He is an articulate and expressive thinker which makes his works and conversations insightful. 

TIME, PUBLIC AND ARCHITECTURE.  TUTOR: KAIWAN MEHTA   

Project Description The political will of bringing a neighbourhood stimulus was to attenuate notional boundaries which are always porous and allow metathesis of activities to adapt to an expanding culture. Our built environment is a physical and tectonic object that has an expanding life and evolving history relating to ecologies that are influential on the way we understand the architectural elements and the way meanings and ideas of any material changes. Introduction to the idea of a neighbourhood began with the realization of numerous activities which are indissociable activities comprising an impalpable form of a fabric that we know as our neighbourhoods. By looking at the neighbourhood as a reflection of a combination of events, activities, and thought objects, the idea of this project is to insert a 'pacemaker' in the ageing heart of the town.   

The site is an abandoned factory premise which once boasted of a landmark building in a much unconscious industrial heritage of the vicinity. The design intervention functions like a machine that runs the city while its site edges are composed of municipal ward offices overlaying with other public activities. The conceptual framework and its integration allow substantive movement for people to reminisce and revive the past to serve a present purpose while its form and tectonics give birth to an exploration of changing times and networks. Thus, by living through the process of history and heritage, the user is immediately enticed by a rich sense of the existent past and an awareness of the present.   

The architectural form provokes a powerful discourse in regards to the social responsibility of public functions to enrich shared urban spaces. Understanding the scale and the volumetric language that interacts uniquely to both - the inside and the outside, the facades become an archaeological scenery providing physical and metaphorical intimacy with times past, concerning profused ideas associated with Time, Public and Architecture.