Recentering Delhi
Instructors - Inaki Alday, Pankaj Vir Gupta, Eric Barr
Location - New Delhi, India
Fall 2015
AIA Central Virginia Honor Award
Re-centering Delhi is a three year research initiative addressing the connections of the city of New Delhi to the Yamuna River, one of the most heavily polluted river systems in the world. Through various site interventions, the goal of the studio is to restitch the urban fabric of the heavily disjointed cityand reconnect that fabric to the desolate Yamuna Floodplain. This studio spent a week on site in the city of New Delhi, India to document, experience, and propose new projects both along the floodplain and in the inner city. Through on-site experience, key infrastructural areas, such as mobility, housing, public space and trash remediation were identified as key project rivers in the overall master plan, which will be combinedinto a single urban proposal from all the studios which have contributed to the initiative.
This particular intervention seeks to break the physical barrier formed by the existing regional rail system, which separates the northern and southern sections of the city. This particular site, the Tilak bridge is one of the only pedestrian crossing points throughout the stretch, and also represents one of the most heavily traveled secondary roads linking the cities cultural monuments. The site furthermore represents a prime area of intervention for an inter-modal transport hub, which contains two major metro stations and an underutilized regional station, all of which are heavily disconnected from each other despite being less then a kilometer apart. This proposal seeks to connect these mobility systems, while integrating a new housing typology to bridge the regional rail embankment, creating cross pedestrian access from north to south, thus reconnecting the northern and southern sections of the city.
