A bench for the 600+ acre Aravalli Biodiversity Park that spans the southern ridge from Delhi to Gurgaon.
The design is a attempt to redefine the park bench. To remove it from the rigidness of sitting with your feet down, hands in your lap or besides you, and facing in one direction.
The bench is a result of a careful study of many ways of how people sit in India, and how the bench could be used to provide not just conventional seating, but a place for rest, for activity, for engagement and for curiosty. In its departure from the convention (while still retaining a faint resemblance to older ideas of benches) the design tries to address all age groups of users, from todlers, to young adults to the older amongst the users fo this mangnificiant park.
The bench also addresses the need for sustainaible and environemntally appropriate intervention in an age of increasing consciousness. The design by virtue of a component assembly system requires mere assembly at site, removing any chemical activity from an ecologically sensitive site.
Serious yet playful, functional and imaginative, and with studied flexibility of use and arrangement, the design was awarded as the winning entry to the competiton.
