Sem 04 / Form and Space Studies
Architecture as Building Systems

Milind Mahale 

The course develops an understanding of how architecture can be articulated to optimise resource consumption while allowing the built form to meaningfully resonate with environmental forces. It builds an awareness of how different building systems interact to produce both spatial experience and functional efficiency, and how multiple overlapping systems shape the building-making process.

  Students learn to work with systems such as water harvesting, solar energy generation, recycling and reuse, ventilation, and lighting, not as isolated services but as integral components of an architectural scheme. Through this, the course emphasises designing building systems that generate spatial qualities and experiential depth, enabling built forms to emerge through the thoughtful integration and overlap of environmental and infrastructural systems.

The site is located on Old Kabrastan Road in Jogeshwari East, a narrow residential-commercial street where everyday life extends seamlessly onto the public realm. The one-storey, self-built homes and shops spill into the street through plinths, shaded verandahs, steps, and temporary market setups that blur the boundaries between inside and outside. Throughout the day, this edge becomes a shared space where women gather to do household chores, men read, converse or engage in small-scale work, and elderly residents occupy the steps as informal baithaks.

At the heart of this dense neighbourhood sits an open playground maintained by the MCGM, one of the only breathing open spaces in the locality. Measuring approximately 3500 sq metres, the ground offers a rare expanse of openness, with its longer edge abutting Old Kabrastan Road. Its perimeter is lined with dense vegetation, creating a soft, shaded boundary that both shelters the ground and visually separates it from the tightly packed residential fabric around it. This playground acts as a communal anchor, accommodating play, pause, gathering, and everyday movements, and offering much-needed relief within the compressed urban environment.

Project by Aman Nandu

Project by Asmi Sawant

More work from the course can be found here.