Agasthiyar Cave, the Space for Meditation

Agasthiyar Cave is an experimental project as part of ongoing research validating the cross-pollination between research, practice, and academics, to enable meaningful collaborations within them. Agasthiyar Cave is the Space for Meditation for a small group of around 8 to 10 people. This project explored the tangible and intangible aspects of Meditation. The space is been able to cut off a few senses and allows the user to go deep inside them to achieve a higher level of meditation state. The space gives you warmth and embraces a use more like a womb with appropriate temperature and light.

Space for Meditation is a research-based project to design and build a structure using an interactive approach towards form-finding and analogue computation. Targeted at fostering an understanding of the relationship between form and force, in an intuitive and playful way. This project investigated physical parameters as effective constraints in the process of design development. Further, the process was adopted to ensure continuity between the stage of design development and the materialization of the final output with respect to the core exploration of an interactive approach towards form finding. The Pioneering works of Antonio Gaudi, Frei Otto, Isler, Nervi and Candela have been a major source of inspiration for us. A quote from the book: ‘On Growth and Form’ by D.Arcy Thompson which is been a bible for a lot of researchers: “The ‘Form’ of an object is the ‘Diagram of Forces’...” has been a driving factor for this exercise.

Executed Hands-on, this ferro-concrete structure, devoid of any high-tech production systems, beautifully manifests itself in its simplicity of execution and response dictated by the context and material. This project was an attempt to design and build a structure using an interactive approach towards form-finding and analog computation, targeted at fostering an understanding of the relationship between form and force, in tension based curved surface structures, in an intuitive and playful way. This project utilizes the tensile property of steel to arrive at a Non-Standard/Non-linear process with On-site active bending as a design driver without any form-work or shuttering either to hold the concrete or guide the geometry. The base framework was derived on site using site parameters as generators which was followed by weaving and bending of steel on site based on our understanding of stress line methods to inform conceptual structural design.

Ar.Balaji Rajasekaran, Ar.Navaneeth, Ar.Shangary, Er.Murugaraj K, Ar.Durai Rajan R, and Er.Arun Kumar