design · 2011
A window onto the old walled city of Ahmedabad. Visitors look through a frame and see the street around them with its history and everyday information laid over it. We chose augmented reality so the city stays in view instead of disappearing behind a screen.
The walled city grew over generations without a plan: pols, havelis, gates, temples and mosques, formal and informal markets, narrow lanes and loud streets. Tourists, students and people from the new city each read it differently. Field visits, readings and a conversation with the architect Yatin Pandya framed the project: work with the experience of the place, not only its architecture.
An early concept imagined the whole walk as a system: visitors set their interests, installations along the route tell stories chosen to match their mood and the weather, a print shop turns the journey into a map, and visitors pin it to a public wall.
The idea narrowed to one object: a window you hold up to the street. We sketched its height, handles and stand, then drew it full size on a blackboard before cutting the first models.
A one-to-one board model came first, then the final form: three overlapping frames, a nod to the layered city. It rotates fully and tilts 45 degrees, so it can take in the street around it.
We designed the screens over Teen Darwaza, a fifteenth-century gateway. History mode places the gateway on a timeline: Foundation, Mughal rule, the Maratha empire, British rule and Independence. Turning the control moves through the eras, and each one brings its own stories and images. Information mode shows the same street today: festival sales, shops, bakeries and local news, with an option to receive it by SMS.
Held up to the street, the window shows what is around now; held up to a tomb, it shows the same courtyard in an earlier era. These views are composed mock-ups of the experience.
The window stayed a concept and a working mock-up. To test it in place, we took the frame into the walled city and staged a visitor’s walk with it: finding the window, trying the modes, then leaving it to go and eat at a place it recommended.
