Abin Chaudhuri’s illustrious studio created an intriguing design for India’s biggest community festival, Durga Puja, last year. The physical manifestation of Abin Design Studio‘s vision for a pavilion of worship that pays homage to children and childhood spans 350 square meters and was assembled with local materials and craftsmen. Read the studio’s description of this masterpiece below:
‘Children’ and ‘Childhood’ are going through a crisis in the Global context. ‘Art’ can be a strong medium to express the concerns pertaining to the children, who are actually the future flag bearers and responsible for the progress of our civilisation.
The installation is based on the idea of ‘Childhood’. At the entrance of the installation, an abstract flight of birds overhead depicts the freedom of thought and creativity in young children. The wings gradually diminish and the birds tessellate into an array of boxes. Along with the deconstructed arrangement, the boxes put forward a commentary on the scenario of a child’s immense inherent potential getting slowly confined into a metaphorical box. The form of the installation then compels the viewer into a ‘void’, a place to sit and contemplate, in the axial presence of “Maa Durga”.
The cube is the null character of the design. Given the time constraint, it was vital to propose a design based on modularity. The sole element ‘cube’ becomes a module that is easily mass manufactured in 3 different sizes and arrayed interestingly to form the composition that creates the festive space.
The Design intends to articulate neighbourhood’s identity in the symbolism of the pandal and was conceived collectively with the backdrop of the existing neighbourhood buildings rather than in isolation of them. As a result, no neighbour windows were screened and buildings in the backdrop invoked a strong sense of context and place.
Most interestingly, the physical spaces of the festival are not specialised public spaces but ordinary urban spaces such as streets, common plots, and parks. These spaces assume the character of an extravagant public space only during the festival. So the pavilion was envisaged to be a module that can be repeated to activate other dead urban spaces in the city and as a space that fosters public interaction and skilfully interweaves worship with mass celebration.
