Ashtavakra

The student housing was designed for students of Medicine at the K.J. Somaiya Medical College and Research Centre in Mumbai, India. The design brief of the housing evolved from the clients concern for its functionality and the performance of the building climatically. With 21,000 square meters of built up space, the building provides adequate outdoor space on each floor in the form of open balconies and the covered circular lounges. To provide a sense of ‘openness’ to the occupants in a city like Mumbai was one of our design goals. We chose a modular approach towards the overall design for the building. This led to the creation of a sense of variety in spaces, while maintaining an architectural scale to the entire composition. An important aspect of the project is the way it deals with space allocation and energy performance of the building in the dense urban context of Mumbai. To accommodate 900 plus people in a single building while providing a variety of living units was the challenge. The building has 7 different types of living accommodations. The building has, a dense configuration of a dormitory with bunk beds, a 3 sharing room, a studio apartment, a 1 bedroom hall apartment and a 2 bedroom hall apartment, special rooms for persons with disabilities and accommodation for the resident staff. This programmatic requirement created a unique opportunity. We were able to design an anthropometric grid for the spaces, which could be expanded or shrunk to fit the variety of living units, within the uniform structural grid. In addition to the living spaces, the buildings programme was further developed to provide recreational spaces like indoor games, a 400 seating capacity cafeteria and its kitchen, an ATM and a convenience store besides the functional spaces such as a pantry, a laundromat and study spaces. Though, located in the hot and humid climate of Mumbai, the building has no air conditioning except for the ground floor office spaces. Our design decision to use a ceramic building envelope has substantially reduced the solar heat gain in the building. It has shown high potential as a cooling method, given its historical precedence, affordability, and accessibility. The stoneware ceramic customised to have a hollow geometry with the highest possible ratio of surface area to internal volume. This extrapolates the interaction between the ceramic surface and air. The ceramic elements are stack in a staggered formation similar to traditional bricklaying. This securely joins the structure horizontally and vertically, providing exceptional strength against gale force winds and rare seismic forces in the region. An aluminium screen facade on the East and a ceramic building envelope on the West, coupled with recessed windows creates a conducive interior environment even during the harshest sultry summer days. This reduction in heat gain has resulted in massive energy savings and a unique aesthetic appeal to the building. The building has several accolades to its credit. It has the largest ceramic building envelope in a single building in India. The building envelope has provided huge energy savings to the institution. Due to its modular design the building has the highest open space per occupant within the building for a student housing in Mumbai. Due to the anthropometric grid mentioned above, the building provides the highest volume of storage space per student for any student housing in the city. Such functional and user-friendly design decisions have created a unique experience for the occupants of the building.