Crafting the Liminal: A Clay Scaffold for Calcutta’s Pavements

An irony exists between the two thresholds of Calcutta’s chaotic pavements.

On the kerb side the ‘Inside-Out’ inexhaustible activity of streetside commerce spills out onto the road: textiles, woodcraft, pottery and metalwork, a hive of independent sustainable handmade production gives hint to the wider intricate economic wonder of Bengal.

On the building side - behind the saris and sandals in adda on rawks – a backdrop of pealing plaster, exposed brick and engulfing plant life has left the once ‘City of Palaces’ as an architecture in decay. At the mercy of the ‘Oceans of Wetness,’ humidity and moisture are returning the city’s soft clay structures to the bed of the Hooghly.

Through the lens of craft, our contemporary architectural policy attempts to unite the two.

Avoiding the acontextual construction practices that have revolutionised swathes of India’s other re-urbanising cities; like a contemporary ‘City in Evolution’, Calcutta’s existing architecture should instead be understood as the scaffold for the next.

A scaffold where no drawn master plan takes command but rather supports and shapes itself on a cyclic economy of interdependent small-scale suppliers and craftspeople, whose unique locality preserves Calcutta’s urban identity, celebrating its zest of pavement culture, in end inspiring the emergence of an architectural Bengal modernity.