a meadow and a forest
terrace garden for an office
Mumbai
82 sqm
completed
2022
design team:
project architects:
Arjun Sharma, Gaurav Shetty
S+PS Architects, Mumbai
Located in an office building, off the new link road, Andheri, the site is a terrace facing the west. There used to be an existing garden designed about 15 years ago, and the garden, the interiors, as well as the structure was in need of an immediate upgrade.
During the construction work of the interiors of this space. Some trees were placed together in a group. This grouping gave us the idea for this project. This terrace had the peculiar condition that it would seldom be used, meaning that it would be accessed by not more than two people at a time, probably once a day.
So, this site offers up the intriguing idea of a “personal garden”. We can think of deploying a comparatively large chunk of space towards the creation of an experience for (say) a single chair. As innocuous as the above statement may sound, it dramatically impacts the manner in which we think about space-making and place-making. In our case, we could design this terrace in a way that makes it mostly non-accessible “spatially”, but from the perspective of place making the entire terrace could cater to the creation of an experience for that one location.
In this case, we thought of two separate places on the terrace, which could look at two different kinds of gardens. Here we have the opportunity of exploring the idea of two different ways of being in a garden. One way is cosy and introverted and the other (by contrast) expansive and extroverted.
We tried to express this by juxtaposing two contrasting ecosystem typologies.