Sem 03 / Form and Space Studies
Space Syntax | Roadside Shrines

Anuj Daga

Contrary to the institutionalised form of large temples, everyday religiosities across most urban centres of  India unfolds around the seemingly temporally set up roadside shrines. Often varying in their shape scales and sizes, closely responding to the physical, social, cultural and political context, roadside shrines present diverse dispositions and unique manifestations within dense cities. They are put together through provisional materials and continue to settle incrementally over time. Roadside shrines fall in the everyday routes, are easily visible and mostly adjacent to a public roadway. Often, they are triggers, or safe havens for a variety of enterprises and allied functions that support the economy of a place. Roadside shrines may not always be benign and are often politically embedded. Here, the rituals of the city combine with those of the spiritual producing spatial hybridities. What rituals of the city and community come together in the bringing together of the roadside shrine? How do contesting interests, spatial constraints and urban pressures shape the form of roadside shrine? Despite these, if the roadside shrine remains a publicly accessible resource on the road, what diagrams does it take? How can these diagrams be strengthened to formulate spatial syntax that not only speaks to the interests of a community, but grows incrementally into an urban culture.


In addressing the above brief, students were asked to navigate the neighbourhoods they transact everyday between their home and school, and identify a roadside shrine. The shrines were individually studied to understand the different activities they facilitated within and around them, and how their different elements extended its publicness.

The crude formal presence, the programme it held along with worship and the materiality of the site was then represented through a collage to bring out the experiential characteristics of the site. The collage was chosen as a method to record site conditions for it indexed the patchwork of ideas, claims, material imprints and incongruencies which were afforded by the shrine. These could then become the vectors that informed the brief for imagining an urban expression for the shrine in its very embedded location. The site was subsequently mapped to understand the extents of architectural intervention.


Micro-programmes like sitting, moving, waiting, watching in conjunction with the forces of city dynamics were then used to articulate architectural elements that could generate appropriate enclosures to not only house the shrine of worship but also lend their forms to allied public activities. New potentials of accessing and multiplying use of space were explored in the process, given the contested nature of the shrines impinging upon public space itself. These instances included, for example, Ronit Kothari’s shrine located on a footpath in the neighbourhood of Charkop in the suburb of Kandivali - that almost blocked the pedestrian movement. His syntactical operations reogranised the shrine into a thoroughfare by eliminating the compound wall behind, and using folded metal frames allows the people of the building interact with the shrine as well as releasing. Similarly, Saanvi Deshmukh’s shrine blocking a thoroughfare on the road in the same neighbourhood used the strategy of plinths and platforms to dissolve the block into a garden for relaxation, interaction and worship  making it an integral part of daily life for residents.

Several shrine conditions were extended into transient homes or shelters for the pavement dwellers such as those observed in the case of Jeet Guneria, who chose a shrine shifted to the existing corner during the road expansion operations of the city during late 1990s. The local dwellers, many of whom work as laborers, maintain the shrine using materials they gather from their jobs. Responding to the site condition of multiple trees and pavement besides the newly constructed Shumpoli metro station, she created a pavilion of fabric and dancing columns to maintain the environmental porosity of the site while also creating soft habitation for the transient labour. Shrines located


Nirali Mantry and Ronak Dagha addressed shrines of different faiths that happen on central crossings of two or more roads, but which also hold mirco community infrastructures. Using slow graduating steps and plinths, both the above create sculptural forms that enclose the shrines while also creating spaces to hold the passers by along with tucking in community requirements. Sujal Kothawade studies a shrine near the local train station in Borivali West, that infact hides a local bar behind. Thus exploring the tension between the sacred and the profane, the hidden and revealed, he evolves a language of the screens that contain and direct people within its interstices while it also hold the space of worship elegantly.

The shrines conditions thus offer opportunities within urban settings to become more than what they are assumed to be. These offer unique fusion of programmes to imagine new syntaxes for urban situations, where architectural interventions may become instrumental in holding public activities more elegantly in already existing spaces. Roadside shrines are potential opportunities to create more inclusive and open cities within our contemporary contested and transforming urban landscape.

The work from the course is collected and archived here.