Not Quite Uncertain & Likely Imprecise

Item

Title
Not Quite Uncertain & Likely Imprecise
Description
Empress Market was inaugurated in 1889 on top of a former British mass execution ground: a calculated obfuscation of colonial violence. In post-British Karachi, the market spontaneously burst and haphazardly expanded, subconsciously becoming reclaimed by the locals. In 2018, local authorities weaponized the unsanctioned mode of this growth to demolish all encroachments, evict all vendors, and reinstate the colonial building as a monument-in-the-round. A second massacre at Empress Market. At a distance, Empress Market’s re-instantiation presents the idealized image of its colonial legacy. But the true register of Empress Market’s complicated past becomes visible on closer inspection: scars—of gradual weathering and of sudden demolition, of authoritarian violence and of popular life—are inscribed on the building’s surfaces.

Empress market today is paralyzed: an uncanny void in a dense city: a “public” space without a public, plagued by congestion and trash. This literal and infrastructural gap in the city is further deepened by the double ecological crises of heat and rainwater, which materialize in unpredictable but severe concentrated surges.

Hinging on the urgency for urban shade and rainwater control, this thesis improvises a roof to accommodate a return to the site’s mercantile past. A set of instructional documents produce an accumulation of imprecision in the improvisational construction they incite. Gaps in the groundscape hold excess rainwater, rifts within slabs produce a punctuated ceiling, cracks between roofs draw in light and air. The incremental and imprecise outcome rejects the precise and tyrannical colonial instigator.
Creator
Haidermota, Daniel M
Subject
architecture
instruction
karachi
pakistan
postcolonial
precision
Architecture
South Asian studies
Landscape architecture
Contributor
Lopez-Pineiro, Sergio
Date
2023-05-24T03:56:43Z
2023
2023-05-22
2023-05
2023-05-24T03:56:43Z
Type
Thesis or Dissertation
text
Format
application/pdf
application/pdf
Identifier
Haidermota, Daniel M. 2022. Not Quite Uncertain & Likely Imprecise. Master's thesis, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
30244731
https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37375319
Language
en
Item sets
Graduate School of Design