Redesigning Market Precincts
Academic Project
Tools
Project Description
Team
Aanchal Khandelwal
Mansanjam Kaur
Pragya Kher
Simar Paul
AutoCAD
Sketchup
Lumion
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
The project revolved around creating a mixed use development containing offices, retail, and group housing. The primary aim was to rejuvenate the empty land and create a welcoming space for the local community in the neighborhood.
Role
Skills
Architectural designer-
Majorly handled Group Housing and Site Planning/ landscaping.
Spatial Design
Contextual research
Experience Design
Location
Timeline
Hauz Khas, New Delhi, India
August 2020- December 2020
Project Description
The project aimed at creating a digital platform that connects people with physical disabilities to designers working in the field of adaptive fashion in order to make adaptive clothing accessible to for people with disabilities.
Case Study Analysis
Commercial loop and Split Volume
The sides of the site can be utilized for commercial facades to attract more pedestrian footfall. Additionally, by splitting the massing and creating a central spine, the user flow can be further directed from the commercial edges inside the building.
Scale reduction
High rise buildings can be intimidating to the pedestrians. To tackle this, vertical bands can be incorporated into the facade to create an illusion of less floors and thus, humanizing the scale.
Public Private segregation
Understanding the level of privacy required for different spaces in a mixed use arrangement and segregating the spaces accordingly creates comfortable spatial arrangement.
Dynamic edges between
Public- private realm
Open
Homogenous spaces
Built
Heterogenous spaces
Visual Connectivity
Work-live-play integration
Built-unbuilt
connectivity
Landmark
in city space
Scale + Height
Visual Manipulation
Contextual Analysis
Existing Land use
The site is majorly surrounded by residential and commercial land uses which exposes the site to a high footfall.
Public
Private
Pedestrian
We conducted an in-depth site analysis to understand the site conditions, connectivity to the site, and the potential user groups.
Edge Conditions
The site edges were segregated into public, private and pedestrian edges to understand the user flow on the site and then utilize it to decide how different functions would be placed on the site.
Connectivity
The site map was studied to understand it's accessibility and connectivity through different modes of transport such as metro, private vehicles and bus routes. And, as it turns out, the site had very good connectivity.
Area Analysis
In the meantime, we placed different functions on the site to understand which functions should be placed in proximity to each other for optimum user flow on the site.
Design Development
We translated the findings from the contextual analysis into design through 3D massing. The following iterations show the development of the design through 6 stages.
Public- private segregation
Pushing the building edges in to create welcoming entrances for the pedestrians
Creating diagonal connections with the existing diagonal street to form anchor points in the site
Pushing the open greens to the edges to attract more pedestrians into the site.
Creating a central spine to optimize walkability and connections between different spaces
Final Design
Site Plan
Concept and Vision
Public-private segregation:
Their is an intermixing of functions due to which the front edge of the site remains active throughout the day, even while offering complete security and privacy to the housing complex.
Greens:
Retail facilities open to commercial greens which are suitable for placing informal kiosks and eateries.
The active greens are strategically are placed in the core pedestrian areas and the central green of the site to attract maximum footfall.
The passive greens are enclosed by the housing towers provide privacy to these spaces.
Hotel Block Design
Office and Retail Block
Office and Retail: Views
Group Housing Design
Views: Group Housing
Final Walkthrough
My Learnings
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Working on a large scale project opened my mind to human-centered design on absolutely new scale, since, in this project, we constantly had to think about how the placement of different functions would impact the footfall of the users, what would attract more users into the site, where should the green spaces be placed for community gatherings, and so on.
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Additionally, since we had to design hotel, group housing, retail and offices- all in one site, we had to look into how these functions should be integrated to provide the most seamless experience to the users.
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Furthermore, since all of these functions have different user needs such as housing needs to be more private and far from noise and public activities, retail shops need to be at the most visible locations to promote the business of the shop owners. Ergo, we had to ensure that these user needs for different spaces were not being compromised as we went ahead with designing this mixed use development.