Water and Architecture in Indian Subcontinent
10 Giugno, 2008
Water and Architecture in Indian Subcontinent
Tradition and innovation
Prof. Researcher Stefania Rössl
University of Bologna Italy – Faculty of Architecture
Sub theme Rethinking Architecture
15 July 2007
Infinite repetition characterizing an Indian existence serves as inspiration for a vision based on figures taken from everybody reality, fixed images that observe the landscape around them, conscious of being part of it. Immobile, static, hieratic presences that merge with the cyclic motion of nature and its very existence within the city.
It is sometimes hard to distinguish animate from inanimate in these places where searching for a polished stone corresponds to researching the origin of life and where every object exists in its symbolic essence.
Everyday existence only knows present time, and lives it with constancy through the sign of a past memory, that is also future. The present not only lives on fragments and instants, but optains support from past experiences that suggest what is to come. The metropolises appear in the name of different occupations, they do not conceal but declare their strata, underscoring the succession of uninterrupted contemporariness. Everything becomes the building blocks of a possible tomorrow, and this becomes evident to anyone who stroll through the winding alleys of the old towns and venture into the labyrinthine itineraries between the dwellings, shreds of public spaces that teem with everything and everyone. Abandoning oneself to the image of the city therefore means to be able to capture a vision on an everyday existence that yearns to communicate.
The city takes the form of an immense container with ephemeral borders, a stage where persons and objects may interrelate. The outwards appearance of every object conceals significances that evoke others, suggesting a multiple reading that corresponds to the very idea of divinity.
Element of water has in India, more than other countries, universal significance and symbolic values that step to an identification of some significant places.
This proposal set some questions: how the character of a place consecrate to the water today could step upon conservation, transformation or rehabilitation of some contexts, defining new models to come upon natural and urban landscape; how some architectures for water, traditional reference and needs for past communities, could now gets new configurations for the contemporary settlements and their social spaces.
Theme of architecture for water gets an accurate configuration and identity in Indian Subcontinent where climatic conditions cause long periods of drought, and had produced numerous stepwells and tanks, necessary water supply, located in the desertic Regions of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Haryana.
These are monumental architectures built from XI to XX century, where could be search, better than other typologies, laws that regulate relationship between Natura et Artificium.
Studying archetips and images from the ancient times, one could focuse closer link from architecture and water; this research propose a study of buildings series where formal structures is very close to their functions.
Typologic studies point out relationships between architectural and symbolic matrix, form and function, and materials and techniques.
Architecture-cuttings become original condition to build, and shows inside-outside relationships, where earth-line and architectural drawing find its essential root into hypogeal dimension.
Some selected examples are necessary to thematic reflections on element-water, on relationship between water and architecture, on possibilities of build “places to stay” around water.
