home for the aged . thane railway station.

the landscape of the periphery of the city is pitted with gruesome blackened and rotting rcc buildings that ravage the hills and valleys in which they stand. they follow a typology that explicably derives its aesthetic from a rationalism and a modernism of the 1950s without even the slightest consideration of how modernity began to reimagine the relationship of the inside and the outside… and the outside is gorgeously green in the middle of the monsoon.

at neral when rupali and me visited the old peoples home we saw a perfect example of the devastation that architecture can create, when a plan is generated mindless of the existing topography of the land. its an architecture that emerges out of shapes in plan arbitrarily organized and completely inward looking. even more terrifying are the cottages themselves. there is an amazing similarity between the way children, the sick, the aged and the prisoners are treated architecturally. it always ends up being about protection and surveillance as a two pronged attack on the body. panic buttons, soft edges, a paranoia about control of the outside.

on the way back through thane the area around the railway station deserves a study on type. large blocks that have undergone layers and layers of transformations are in need of a study. a study to decipher the codes and methods of their growth as the new negotiates its way within the existing fabric jostling with the old and reshaping it. rcc buildings that have been colonized wildly from the inside and submerged under the overspill and the wrapping of new facades.