The In-between: Armature for Inhabitation

Abstract

Flyovers, or grade separated bridges or roads, are a type of urban infrastructure that has been used to facilitate high-speed vehicular movement. This once-popular strategy of the west, despite being considered as a failure for sustainable urban growth, has been adopted in Bangladesh to combat traffic congestion in Dhaka that has a crippling effect on daily life of the citizens. As was anticipated by many urban planners and architects, these expensive structures did little to reduce traffic congestion, but created additional problems of noise and air pollution as well as reduced pedestrian mobility. More importantly, these flyovers created wasted void spaces underneath that are uncomfortable, devoid of human scale and act as physical and visual barriers that cause tears on the urban fabric. The objective of this thesis is to explore how architecture can unlock the potential of the unused spaces under the flyovers in Dhaka, by turning these linear leftover spaces into dignified public places that improves the daily lived experiences of the urban dwellers, by minimizing the disruptions caused by the flyover and by realizing the potential inherent in the robust structure of the flyover. This thesis examines a democratized way of building, where the role of architecture is to facilitate organic and heterogeneous growth, addition and modification to the flyover in order to bring the human scale back to the massive flyover structure through a reconciliation of top-down and bottom-up approaches. The architectural interventions respond to the site conditions, potentials and demands. The architectural outcome is based on the concepts of creating a threshold, architecture as armature and parasitic structures.