Sutanu Karmakar

Advisor: Neil Minuk

The thesis panel "Autonomy Through Complexity" examines modular housing and city planning, with an abstract on challenges and goals on the left. The right displays a vibrant architectural drawing blending nature, movement, and scale.
Thesis Panel.
The floor plan "Remembrance: Childhood Home Recreated from Memory" features spaces like a play area, prayer space with a Tulshi tree, and rainwater harvesting. Footprints, textures, and notes evoke movement and cherished memories, such as a pet bird and a window-side chair.
Remembrance: Childhood Home Recreated from Memory.
The image compares an ant colony with color-coded chambers to a modern vertical structure featuring stacked, color-coded rooms for activities. Both integrate functional design and a connection to nature.
Organic Growth and Domains: Parallel Between Systems of nature and Humans.
The image depicts organic growth in human settlements with grid patterns, modular units, dense structures, and adaptable layouts. It emphasizes unpredictability and deconstructed forms like fragmented cubes.
Autonomous / Organic Growth in Human Settlements.
The image shows four geometric models—hexagon, triangle, circle, and square—with white exteriors and colored interiors (orange, blue, red, grey) on a dark surface. Icons and text blocks below match each shape's interior color and attributes.
Study Models, Study of Geometric Shapes.
The map of South Point Douglas, Winnipeg, highlights yellow zones of interest, with a circular inset detailing the river area and a yellow polygon marking a 104,456 sq. ft. site. A compass rose provides orientation.
Site Context: South Point Douglas, Winnipeg.
The image highlights architectural grids, with overlapping colorful grids on the left showing "blurring the grids." The center and right display multi-level floor plans with structural and modular layouts.
Blurring the ‘Systems’: Grids

Autonomy through Complexity

How can modular housing be more acceptable and promote autonomy and flexibility for inhabitants? This is the core question of this research. With the backdrop of Canada’s ongoing housing crisis, modular housings emerged as potential solutions for reducing project timelines and costs while balancing standardization and optimization. However, the recurring lack of emotional connection, identity, and adaptability has always limited its worldwide success. From the last century, modular approaches envisioned generating a ‘System’ of rationality and efficiency, treating housing as a repeatable, mass-producible entity. This ‘System’ can be defined as the standardization of many aspects, such as ‘Grids’ that dominate spaces and structural resonance, horizontal and vertical circulation, building operations, etc. When the system becomes too visible and comprehensible, people start to find it controlling and less flexible as it regulates their lifestyle and personal domains to an extent. 

This thesis aims to reshape modular systems as effective yet less visible, complex yet not controlling. Drawing inspiration from organic growth patterns in nature and human settlements, it will focus on fostering flexibility, individuality, and a sense of community, while addressing materialistic optimization and meaningful repeatability while breaking the rigidity. 

The process of these research takes the following steps- 

  1. Study of Organic Growth in Nature: Organic growths like ant colonies exhibit apparently incomprehensible systems, balancing order and chaos. These provides insight into creating modular housing with ‘subtle’ systems that remain flexible and adaptive to change. 
  2. Patterns and Sections: Modular housing is often rigid and cellular. It will be rethought as an architecture of emotional attachment and a space of belonging. By blending unpredictability with standardization, inspired by modular and non-modular patterns, these concepts can be tested by studying section patterns. 
  3. Domains and Connections: Addressing personal domains and dynamic human nature while connecting private and communal spaces. Inclusion of social interaction and natural spaces to ensure inhabitant’s well-being and connection to culture and contexts. 
  4. Modular Building Limitations: Rethinking issues such as scalability without unnecessary repetitions, independence of design from structural systems, preventing structural rigidity to affect the flexibility of layout, integrating vertical circulation and form, etc. 

The Context of the research can be described within 3 aspects- 

  1. Historical Precedents: While examples like Le Corbusier’s ‘Unite d’Habitation’, and Kisho Kurokawa’s ‘Nakagin Capsule Tower’ emphasized optimization, their imposing systems often led to user dissatisfaction. Again, examples of such as ‘Kowloon Walled City’ in Hongkong, ‘Favela de Rocinha’ in Rio De Janeiro and Moshe Safdie’s ‘Habitat 67’offer unique insights into autonomous architecture despite having limitations. 
  2. Personal Experience: The experience of growing up in a modular housing in Bangladesh inspired this thesis. Meaningful drawings recreated from memory provides insights about design philosophy, emphasizing flexibility, individuality, and human-centric solutions and limitations of community space and adaptability. 
  3. Site: The site in South Point Douglas, Winnipeg, next to the Red River, offers opportunities to address industrial workers’ housing needs while revitalizing an underutilized, polluted area. The proposed design will integrate green spaces to improve human connectivity with nature and the river.