Instructor: Prabhat Arora

Designing a human-centric futuristic start up incubator, workplace masterplan with integrated residences and entertainment spaces.

The Societal function of urban and architectural design is the innovative ordering of social processes. This function depends on the communicative capacity of the designed environment. The enhancement of this capacity poses the Semiological Project: to design the architectural project as a system of signification.

The workshop brief calls for the design of a human-centric, futuristic building as an instantiation of a simultaneously designed spatial-morphological language or a system of signification. The studio will start by researching various visual languages like Street-Signs, Dactyloscopy, QR Code, Morse Code, etc.. as examples of the visualization of information as source domains for the analogical transference of semiological design intelligence into architecture. The design of an architectural semiological system implies the build-up of a lexicon of distinctions with spatial position, shape, morphology, materiality, color, etc. as registers of the semantic encoding – to enhance a space, and the behavior of its users will be directly informed through these distinctions.

The design task that will serve the students as a vehicle for this design research project will be an urban block accommodating an incubator space with related residences and related public event spaces. The site can be chosen by the students (A 25,000 sq.m urban block for this exercise), and the design brief asks for a Start-Up Incubator/Workplace Masterplan similar to an amazon/google campus.

Our task is to design a Live-Work-Entertain space - a startup incubator with integrated residences as a system of signification. Grammar allows the characterization of space. The Architectural communication via agent systems is the single space, zone, or territory as an architectural sign defining a particular, distinct social situation for example, the colour/shape of the furniture, the height of the boundaries and the texture of the floor and the lighting conditions give us the social situation of the particular zone, this exercise will define how the user can navigate a space with ease and understand what’s happening within the urban environment through information-rich signifiers as architectural elements within the space.

The workshop will guide the students to get a grasp on Autodesk Maya as a tool to explore complex geometry and to incorporate this within their human-centric, futuristic projects. We will also try to explore a visualization tool like Keyshot/Enscape to enhance the way this project is represented.

Workshop Schedule
Date: 18th - 20th March
Duration: 3hours/day 
Time: 3:30 pm - 7:30 pm India Standard Time (IST)
Mode of Teaching: Online