What Entrances Tell Us

The entrance of a house is a stage where residents perform expressions of how and why they own the space that they call home. This space tells you stories of function, of fears, of everyday routine and planning for the future. It also tells people to stay away, to be cautious, that if one were to transgress a home, there could be potential conflict. It talks of celebrations, often common ones where many entrance spaces join hands, and become a collective stage for festivities.

This conversation intends to discuss stories about a collection of such entrances in apartment housing, colloquially termed as ‘colonies’ or ‘societies’ in the urban Indian context, and how they define its residents and their identity. For the study, a total of 106 houses across five housing projects in Navi Mumbai were studied by filling up questionnaires, inventories and taking detailed photographs of the individual houses as well as the compound areas of the various housing colonies formed within the housing projects. Site activities, spatial appropriations and areas for congregation that aided friendship formation were documented using photographs. The talk will also put forth various factors that affect the expression of ownership at the entrances of houses in community living in urban India and will make a case for the existence of this very pertinent architectural element in the mutating housing typologies of the future.

After the presentation, a participatory activity/method will engage the audience to draw their house entrance, write out, in their languages, what this interstitial space is called (Eg: aangan, katta, jagali, otla) and try to write/sketch the activities/ memories that are associated with this space. A template with a few lines as a print-out may be provided as a cataylst for participants to begin with the activity. These sheets are then pinned up and we will discuss our experiences of this space collectively.