WOMEN’S RESIDENCE at the COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING PUNE The College of Engineering Pune (COEP) is located at the junction of two of the city’s main arterial roads on a dense urban site. The residence is an eleven storied structure having common public spaces on the ground level. On the roof terrace level are a laundry, gym, medical centre and faculty apartments, placed around a large sun deck. The roof is covered with solar water heaters. The building is finished in exposed concrete, with stonecrete panels. Precast verticle fins provide a modicum of shade and bring scale to the strucure. Horizontal safety bars are of primary colors, as a counter-point with the raw concrete. The ground level is accessed off of a walk-through porch to the entrance lobby, dining halls and kitchen. There is also a convenience shop area, with its own entry off of the walk-through porch. This building is seen as a prototype hostel for the COEP campus, and a number of similar structures will be connected via “walk-through” porches. The “walk-through” porch, along with future walk-through porches in future hostels will create a pedestrian street for students to hang out on and to inter-connect resiential towers. The COEP Women’s Residence accomodates two hundred double seated rooms, or four to six hundred hundred women, with two rooms sharing a wet core (a shower, a WC and two basins). These wet cores are accessed via a “dry balcony,” shielded from the outside world by a concrete jaalis. The Entrance Lobby has a double height coffered ceiling on the Ground Floor. A reception desk, two high-speed elevators and a stair are located in the Entrance Lobby, with an adjacent large dining space looking out into the landscape through large windows. The building can accommodate up to six hundred girls with rooms twenty rooms per floor. The rooms have been designed for two or three girls each, with two rooms sharing a common dry balcony, shower, basins and toilet area. The elevators on each floor access through a generous common room. There is a second quiet common room on each floor for study and discussions. Murals composed of different symbols, designed by the architect, adorn form-finished surfaces on corridors of all floors. The building orientation and form have been designed with consideration for an ‘iconic’ banyan tree that has been conserved. This work of architecture reflects Benninger’s earlier use of exposed concrete and exposed concrete murals in various campuses and projects over the past two decades. The design draws on the urban aesthetics of Jose Lluis Sert, Benninger’s teacher at Harvard and in whose studio he worked as a youth. The employment of concrete jaalis is a very Indian addition to the vocabulary. These jaalis add texture to the structure. The residence attempts to create social layers with the rooms as the “homes” for smaller social groups, common rooms making a “house” of each level and the expansive dining halls and roof terrace, recreation areas, refering back to the Habitacion in Marseilles, by Le Corbusier. The fabric of the structure’s facade attempts to break down the scale of a large, verticle building. Benninger sees this as a new urban challenge for India, which the “concrete box” of the west has failed to resolve.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 16:11:55 +0000
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