This project was the outcome of a public space design course called ‘Narrating Spaces’. As part of the course, we were expected to plan an exhibition space within a chosen site in the city of Bengaluru.
I chose Freedom Park as my site. The park has a serious issue of visibility – the large bounding walls on the periphery of the park completely isolate it from the outside and offer no sense whatsoever as to what’s going inside. For a place that is primarily aiming to attract a (tourist) audience, this works counter intuitively. Another is the issue of accessibility into and within the park – walking paths are very limited, too rigidly guided and fenced to allow any unguided navigation through the park and the lawns.
Apart from the park’s design failures to meet its functional intent, the site itself has a lot of historical value attached to it, which gets seemingly lost owing to the closed trade fairs which are frequently organised inside the park (and the walled perimeter as mentioned above).
So another aim of this exercise would be to strengthen and utilize this history and enrich people’s connect to the place, its history and possibly to the larger city of Bengaluru.
After finalizing my brief and design intent, I began with coming up with a few options for the navigation bubbles :
Post this I started addressing the issue of path reconfiguration to satisfy my navigation bubble diagram :
After deciding on a final path configuration I started ideating on the structure of my exhibition space :
Final Outcome :
Nitish Chopra 