Sem 10 
Design Dissertation

Prasad Khanolkar

The Design Dissertation Symposium for the academic year 2024–25 was held on April 26, 2025. This event marked the culmination of six months of design research undertaken by the cohort, driven by their individual theses. Each thesis proposed a new spatial argument, exploring the interplay between life and spatial configurations across varied contexts.

The dissertations largely centered around three thematic inquiries: (1) Rethinking Architectural and Organizational Forms – How can housing and community infrastructures be reimagined amidst the pressures of capital-driven development, unchecked urban expansion, labor economies, medicalization, and communal politics? (2) Making Space for Life’s Intensities and Densities – How can architecture accommodate the nuanced and often overlooked aspects of life—such as memory, social bonds, idleness, playfulness, and sensory experience? And (3) Reworking Typologies – What new architectural forms can emerge by transforming conventional typologies—like markets, office spaces, transit hubs, healthcare facilities, and housing—to foster alternative social relations, mutual care, entrepreneurial practices, and inclusive habitats?

These inquiries materialized in diverse programmatic and architectural interventions, including crematoriums, hospitals, community toilets, migrant housing, market redevelopments, industrial and residential transformations, and multi-use transit terminals. The symposium sparked critical discussions relevant to both pedagogy and practice in architecture. Key questions emerged: How do working, aging, and gendered bodies become central to thinking about architectural form? How do the intensities and densities of bodies moving through, inhabiting, and transacting in space provide a basis for thinking about new typologies for housing and public institutions? How can architecture provide a platform for new forms of care, sharing, publics, socialities, and solidarities? How can the affective sense of memories, loss, intimacy, and estrangement inform architectural form? These important questions point towards a larger question, that is, how architectural form and methods hold these intensive aspects of life?