IIA Cochin Center Organized The Monsoon Architecture Festival At Bolgatty Palace Resort

ABOUT MAF

Monsoon Architecture festival was the grand culmination of the two year long LIVING MONSOON program which was the theme for this tenure of IIA COCHIN CENTER. During these two years from 2015 –2017, 6 Design Talks featuring 12 invited architects were conducted.

ABOUT LIVING MONSOON

Living Monsoon was the underlying theme of the curated series of design talks with the objective of igniting deliberations on authentic culture of architecture and urbanism appropriate to the climes, environs and socio – cultural dynamics of regions with high precipitation and bio diversity in the Tropical zone. It was also a self-limiting framework to organize the content and sequence of events for the two years right up to the Monsoon Architecture Festival. It is for the first time that a series of talks have been held on such a theme which earmarks a global region based on a specific climate and aims to study its architecture with reference to the past and to present day..

Monsoon as a physical context refers to regions formed by combining the tropical monsoon and tropical rainforest climatic zones prescribed by the Koppen – Geiger climatic classification system. It includes all major regions adjoining the Indian Ocean such as the entire west coast of India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Vietnam, Philippines, Fiji, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore as well as the central and south eastern regions of Africa such as Madagascar and North western areas of South America. The Architects who were invited belonged to one of these regions and were chosen based on their work that responded to the climate directly.

In a way we looked to celebrate authentic architecture in this climatic zone understanding the culture and socio – religious differences, making them unique to their respective contexts.

MAF DESIGN TALKS