Culture . Life . Time

• Location:  New Delhi, India
• Area:  29,000 sqft
• Year:  2021
• Work Type:  Professional
• Institute / Firm:   Sneha Dhanuka + Dhruv Shah
• Status:  Conceptual
• Team Members:  Sneha Dhanuka + Dhruv Shah
• Supervisor:  -

Cross Laminated Timber
Culture, Life + Time

The ever increasing need for adequate urban housing solutions in many growing cities in India has led to the formation of a different kind of living culture in places where the developers or the government proposed housing schemes have not been able to make their mark yet. One among many such localities is located in Dilshad Garden area in the city of Delhi, namely Kalander Colony.
Here, the settlement has increased organically over time, ungoverned by the strict systems of confined areas and blurring boundaries between the private and the public shared spaces. This has created a very unique typology of informal housing, which accommodates a thriving life of closely interconnected communities.
However, such informal housing areas are also home to many shortcomings of what can be defined as a good quality of urban life, including inadequate lighting, an extreme crunch in spaces, crime, improper drainage, etc.
The idea is to replicate the existing social community structure into the proposed CLT housing system, incorporating the essence of informality and belongingness by creating local community pockets of varying scales, while correcting the aforementioned shortcomings. To reinforce this idea, the volume of the interior spaces is also modulated, creating different spatial experience within the same building.
This results in the formation of various community spaces which can take up any function based on the requirements of the users, be it for spiritual gatherings, commercial activities or simply as a recreational space, inspired from the close knit relationship of the open and built that the user group was accustomed to.
A site area of 2700 sq. mt. is taken for the redevelopment, with the vision that the proposed structure will be incremental in nature and that gradually over time in a number of phases, the remaining area of the settlement will be switched to the CLT system of housing modules.
The ground floor is treated as an extension of the surrounding commercial urban landscape, allowing for an increase of pedestrian footfall in the site and creating much needed porosity into deeper extents of the selected area.
The housing units accommodate a small family, with scope of incrementing the area and accommodating various additional functions based on the future family expansion requirements or financial situation of the dwellers.
The primary 1BHK CLT module is designed on a footprint area of 6m x 6m. The modular nature of the size and functioning of these units allows utilising the standard CLT panel sizes to the maximum extent, greatly reducing post fabrication wastage. The extension unit for these modules is designed for an area of 6m x 3m, which allows for a linear progression of built area in a given floor plate.
The structural loads primarily rest on the steel cores, which also act as a means of vertical circulation within different levels of the building. The secondary structural grid of glulam columns and beams creates the actual modular grid in which the CLT units are placed, and is attached to these central cores.
As the community is introduced to the system of CLT construction and the accompanied modularity as a solution to the housing crisis, the materiality itself becomes a core part of the culture, ceasing to become an alien idea to the user group as a whole.