KNOWN UNKNOWNCreative Expression as Urban Residue
Category- BArch
Location- Dharavi, Mumbai
Year- Thesis 2022
Type- Individual
In the contemporary metropolis, identity is no longer constructed—it is outsourced, aggregated, flattened into lifestyle subscriptions. The city offers two operative zones: domestic inertia and economic urgency. Between them, no sanctioned space remains for the accidental, the expressive, the unnecessary.
This thesis identifies an emergent typology: spaces of creative surplus. Not leisure, not work—pre-functional, post-productive zones that accommodate cultural exhaust, self-invention, ritualized gathering. These are neither public nor private; they exist in the cracks, the “unprogrammed.” They resist efficiency. They institutionalize the unproductive and exist outside return-on-investment.
‘‘Community develops for itself a medium for self-expression and interpretation. art either manifests, articulates, or reconfigures the style of a culture from within the world of that culture. In this sense, art is capable of revealing someone else’s world and producing a shared understanding.’’- Martin Heidegger, 2016.
In Dharavi, the informal is not a deficiency—it is a structure. It is precisely here that expression is spatialized—not by design, but by necessity. The thesis proposes that such “expressive territories” do not emerge from planning, but from failure of planning, from the overdetermined city’s inability to anticipate its own users.
What begins as absence becomes opportunity. Expression as spatial glitch. Identity as architecture’s unintended consequence.
Studio Instructor-
Pinkish Shah