SEA Pavilion, Mumbai
How do we create shelter from climate change?
Rust Collective opening, SEA Pavilion, Mumbai
The winners of the SEA Pavilion Open Call Rust Collective – Dhruv Sachala and Neel Shah – are an architecture and collaborative design practice based in Mumbai, India. Rust Collective’s new Liminal Pavilion, focuses on natural building materials, experimental architectural tectonics and self-build potentials in the face of rapidly advancing climate change.
Invisible Dust (UK) and artists Raqs Media Collective (Delhi) are collaborating with the School of Environment and Architecture (SEA) Mumbai (India), to celebrate the School’s 10th Anniversary through this new pavilion. Through an open call, architects and artists aged 30 and under were invited to conceive of pavilions and other ephemeral architectural forms.
Their designs will be constructed in December 2024 at the School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai. Proposals were encouraged to embody radical and sustainable approaches to shelter with climate change. Through a selection panel, SEA commissioned the Liminal Pavilion design from Rust Collective.
The Liminal Pavilion serves as an incremental space, constantly absorbing and adapting to its surroundings like a ‘sponge’. Its porous nature fosters new encounters and connections, inviting the neighborhood to engage with it.
Rust Collective
Climate change has meant that warming seas give rise to erratic rainfall departure and arrival schedules. How does a city plan, calmly, rationally to live and sustain itself, after the waves have risen beyond belief? These questions need urgent attention. They need the attention of science, architectural thinking, urban planning and de-planning, of imagination, of poetry, of theatre, and cinema. They need to be thought through in terms of equity, justice, and well-being. They need as many minds, as many ways of new thinking and doing, as possible.
How to find shelter from unpredictable weather? What form does the shelter take? What are its material properties and effective construction details?
Opening Celebration
On 11 December 2024, the SEA Pavilion opens at the College campus in Borivali, North Mumbai. Join SEA for the opening celebration, including a performance and exhibition featuring 30 designs from the open call.
In partnership
SEA Pavilion is a partnership of the School of Environment and Architecture (SEA) Mumbai (India), Invisible Dust (UK) and Raqs Media Collective (India) and the Design Village with the support of the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai.
Rust Collective
Rust Collective is a Mumbai-based collaborative design studio that works at the intersection of art, architecture, and design. Dhruv Sachala and Neel Shah are graduates of the School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai, and founded their studio in 2022. Rust Collective is a practice of longstanding collaboration with artists, engineers, and craftsmen. Research and teaching are a continuous backdrop for the studio. Sometimes described as ‘Bricoleurs’, the studio works with materials, tools, histories, and cultures in hand, recombining them to find new connections between them. The studio’s approach is grounded in the search for contextually appropriate solutions. They strive to create things that are simple, beautiful, and timeless.
https://www.instagram.com/rustcollective
The School of Environment & Architecture (SEA)
SEA (School of Environment and Architecture) is an initiative of the Society for Environment and Architecture. The Society is a collective of architects, artists, designers, environmentalists, urbanists, cultural theorists and activists registered as a Society and a Trust in India. It aims to create experimental and innovative spaces for education, research, and advocacy in architecture, urbanism, and environment and culture studies, focusing on emerging contexts in South Asia.
SEA provides education that is critical in orientation; sensitive to physical, socio-economic and technological contexts; imaginative in terms of exploration and innovation; relevant in terms of engaging with discourses and technology; fostered through self-led research; and capable of producing interventions that are implementable in terms of realisation and buildability.
https://sea.edu.in
Raqs Media Collective
Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, b.1965, New Delhi, Monica Narula, b. 1969, New Delhi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, b. 1968, New Delhi) have been variously described as artists, media practitioners, curators, researchers, editors and catalysts of cultural processes. Their work is located at the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory, often taking the form of installations, online and offline media objects, performances and encounters. Raqs follow their self-declared imperative of ‘kinetic contemplation’ to produce work that demands the viewer look anew at what they take for granted. Myths and histories of diverse provenances, a deep ambivalence towards modernity and a quiet but consistent critique of the operations of power and property inform their diverse oeuvre.
https://www.raqsmediacollective.net