Semesters 9–10, 2026–27Thesis, in progress

Malleshwaram, Bengaluru

The City on Repeat: the neighbourhood around Mantri Square at night, every home's screen-glow drawn out along the streets and the metro into the mall's first floor; the unfinished towers, park and nala left dark.

My thesis, in progress. Cities are built to grab your attention. This is about places that help you get it back.

01The idea

Wanting without arriving

Every space we walk into today is designed to keep us inside it. The mall, the metro and the phone in your pocket all run on the same thing: wanting without arriving.

So the pre-thesis started with the brain, not with buildings. From what I read, dopamine has more to do with wanting than with pleasure: it rises in anticipation of a reward. Quick triggers like notifications push it much higher than sunlight, music or a walk, and then it drops below where it started.

Out of that came a manifesto of twelve rules. Everything I've designed since gets tested against them.

Fig. 1Dopamine above baseline, by source: quick spikes against slow release.
Fig. 2Artificial triggers spike two to ten times higher, then crash below baseline.
The Antidote Manifesto, rules 1 to 6.
The Antidote Manifesto, rules 7 to 12.

The Antidote Manifesto. Twelve rules from the pre-thesis: uneven ground, no fixed programme, temporal honesty, accidental encounters, a structure that borrows from what's already there, and more. Every later move has to pass them.

02The site

Reading the site

Mantri Square in Malleshwaram is the strongest version of the trap. The metro sky-bridge drops commuters straight into the mall's first floor, so train, mall and phone become one sealed loop.

On the other side, Srirampura is cut off by a rail moat four to six metres deep. The maidan is fenced off, and a nala runs buried underneath it all.

Fig. 3My mapping: the paths people take (red), the buried nala (blue) and unmapped green land (green).
Fig. 4Site model: the rail moat between Srirampura and Mantri Square.
Fig. 5Site model: looking from Srirampura towards Mantri Square.
Site photo: the hoarded plot.
Site photo: commuters waiting at the bus shelter, on their phones.
Site photo: the metro over the buried nala.
Site photo: the rail moat.
Site photo: Srirampura.
Site photo: the unfinished Centrium towers, built and never used.

Site walk, July 2026.

03On trace

Verbs, then bands, then snakes

Before drawing any plan, I wrote the programme as verbs along the paths people already take: rest, eat, make, talk. On butter paper, the paths thickened into bands, and the bands into three snakes: create, consume, and just be.

Butter paper: the programme written as verbs (rest, eat, talk, dance, maidan, perform) along the paths people already take.
Butter paper: a function-heavy outer ring of paths around relaxed central courts.
Butter paper: the paths thicken into coloured bands, the three snakes (create, consume, just be).
Butter paper: a snake given a body, a hatched ochre band running along the rail edge.
Butter paper: bodies that branch and knot, a blue hatched network between two yellow blocks.
Butter paper: a stack of cross-sections cut along the site at even intervals, the uneven ground, one cut picked out in red.
04The crit

Snakes become alligators

At a crit, the grey massing I'd moved on to got called out. It had thrown away everything the snakes had: the floating band, the open ground, the see-through parts. So the snakes went back onto the site and grew into alligators, with bellies (rooms and courts) and throats (passages). A body you can actually occupy. And the manifesto had to be on every sheet from then on.

Fig. 6Red pen on my ground floor plan, and the sketches that came out of it.
Crit markup, close-up of the centre of the ground floor plan: red-pen questions about the nala edge and the road edge, 'too much green', and 'add manifesto and keep referring!'.
Butter paper: the first alligator in red, a body grafted onto the contextual buildings with a long parasitic tail ('infiltration', 'site spills in').
Butter paper: section thumbnails testing the levels, with the red alligator plan and its edges.
Butter sheet over the printed section B-B': ground, ribbon (pink) and hide redrawn by hand in coloured pencil, pinned up.
The knots, hatched by hand in pencil over the printed key plan.
05Where it is now

A ground, a ribbon and a hide

Traced from the butter sheets: a ground that steps down to −3 m, a pink ribbon that climbs to +12 m, and a triangulated green hide over both. Where the ribbon crosses itself, it knots, and the knots hold a crèche, a library and talking steps.

This is still in progress. I'm detailing it by hand right now.

Fig. 7Review 4: the ground (grey), the ribbon (pink) and the hide (green).
Fig. 8The jury model, in context at Mantri Square.
Fig. 9Under the hide: the ground steps down beneath the green roof.
Fig. 10The knot, in plan and section.
Detailing by hand: a section through the green hide on steel.
The green hide in axonometric, from my notebook.
Green roof layers, from my notebook.

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Culinary Arts Institute