Semester 5
Course 1- Environmental Flows
Daman is going through a lot of infrastructural development lately towards tourists’ recreation. The language of circulation inside the Moti Daman fort in a grid pattern causing discomfort at several places and providing shade at several. This forms microconditions inside the fort. The lack of maintenance also results in improper waste management. The old fort wall ruins also support the growth of vegetation over itself at various places inside the fort. Some of the microconditions are formed around these walls. How do the the walls respond to a public interface that blurs the street patterns and microconditions allowing the pauses to be more continuous and comforting?
The process began with drawing an argumentative sketch and forming a question about the environmental flows observed on site. The site we specifically observed was the Moti Daman Fort, where the streets had several microconditions along the street formed at small intervals along with improper waste management. This was seen around two of the old fort walls inside the fort. One of the walls was a tall wall covered with vegetation and the other was a curved wall with space behind the wall becoming a dumpyard. The transect passing through these walls begins with the entrance of the fort, the pargola garden, the Maratha Memorial wall, a tall wall at the entrance of the district library and an old, curved fort wall and the Dominican monastery.
The transect traces a walkway inside the fort which connects the historically important walls that have these microconditions around them. The design intended to blur these different harsh conditions through studying the vegetation, shade and street conditions. The transect was planned with two places of pause- the entrance of the district library and the curved wall. The space outside the library is marked by a tall fort wall, which now has vegetation growing over it. The reference for the transect comes by this vegetation creeping over the wall. These places of pauses are formed by the basic idea of extending these walls.
For the entrance of the library, the initial idea came from the old Portuguese arches. These were set in series in the L-shaped site and connected by barrel vaults forming a semi-open space for the library to be extended outside. This was also formed by extending the tall wall into an arcade inside to support the smaller arches.
The corner of the curved wall has a very harsh sunlight and is connected to a series of closed shops. These could be redesigned to blur the boundaries of the street and form a public interface breaking the grid pattern of the streets inside the fort. The initial idea for this portion came from the blurring of the edge along with a roof garden over these shops. The redesigning of these shops could be done in a way to make the space more open to the users.
The final design-
