January 31–February 10, 2017
Step Up New Babylon
The Gujarati desert air blows through the Architecture Studios, cooling down the students and teachers. Students draw, design, build, plant, define and project, while another gust of wind rustles the Neem tree leaves outside. At 10 in the morning or 11 at night, the studio life is ever-dynamic. And just when the energy levels go down the tea man comes along with his little cups of steaming energy. Life at CEPT is good and it is going to get better as Archiprix International 2017 just started!
Making Habitat, Megacity Micronarratives, the Archiprix International Workshops, kicked off on January 31 with a Student Council welcome and four CEPT Professors. Dean Anne Feenstra and Sachin Soni had an open dialogue about the imaginary Delhi 2050 scenarios. Jigna Desai and Iñigo Cornago curated the 11 workshops for 114 young architects, urban designers and landscape architects from 41 countries. In the coming nine days they will develop design proposals for critical sites in the city. Innovative and perhaps controversial reflections will be produced for the city of Ahmedabad, inhabited by six million people. Amongst the guides are Madhav Raman, Anupama Kundoo, Surya Kakani, Riyaz Tayyibji, Shubhra Raje.
What is the potential role of designers in the current global urbanization process? Will the design proposals provoke convincingly? Will the evidence produced step up to Constant’s New Babylon? Henri Lefebvre had explained that while Babylon stands for evil, New Babylon was to be the good, transforming itself into a gigantic physical model depicting a city of the future. Can we create more optimum organization of material conditions? What is the future role of designers in collective networks?
