“Our academic endeavours are aimed at enabling students of design to better grasp the visual culture, understand the processes of design development and create independent ideas in domains of interest,” Prof. Pithawala explains. “The disciplines of architecture, art and design are increasingly intertwined in visual culture. At The Red Studio, we are conscious about the overlapping domains and the impact of cross-disciplinary discourse. Through lectures, presentations, discussions, workshops, time-problems, exhibitions and seminars, the studio intends to broaden the horizons of architectural discourse and enable multi-disciplinary exposure to design students and professionals.”

With design and architecture research at the base, The Red Studio will provide a fertile ground for exploring digital tools, new methods of representing design, drawing techniques and mediums, emerging international influences, academic and professional issues, current discussions on urban design, technology and concerns of contemporary architecture. It will foster an environment which will encourage initiation of new projects, and enable participation in national and international design competitions.

This concept has been executed in a residential building – combining two adjacent three-bedroom apartments. The design brief now includes a residential studio, an office, display gallery, and a multi-usage space. Various space divisions and configurations are further made possible, using sliding-folding partitions.

The owner who is himself an avid collector of art, and art objects, had an intense desire to live amidst art, to draw inspiration from it at all times while dwelling within it.

Design process thereby envisages making of a place where the boundaries between living, working, and display are blurred and intertwined with each other. Interior space is largely kept free by aligning in-built cabinets and display cases along peripheral walls.

Further, the alignment of the furniture pieces helps to organize the internal spaces. Furniture elements can be classified into stand-alone objects, assemblage of objects and space-defining objects.

Individual pieces of furniture have been individually selected by the owner-architect from his ancestral family home; each of the items having strong childhood memories and associations – and therefore its own story to tell. In that sense, the space becomes a repository of sorts where collective memories co-exist with present day living.

The overall ambience of the place can be selectively altered by reshuffling the order of these individual elements and their visual connections to each other within the space.

The home, then, with its flexible and adaptable programmatic syntaxes, can easily be listed in a selection of the most unusual homes, anywhere in the world. The spaces within, are seen engaging in a dialogue with the user; configuring themselves to rather disparate requirements.