‘Spatial Narratives’ in Architecture: Designing a Dance Institute for the Nomadic Kalbelia community at Pushkar, Rajasthan, in India

Abstract

The paper begins with an overview of the Storytelling potential of Architecture. It tells how the experiential process of moving through spaces and decoding the messages embodied in Architecture has the potential to nourish the perceiver spiritually and emotionally, going beyond the physical traits of the structure and imbibed functions. To understand how a designer can imbibe a narrative while designing a project, the paper then describes the design process of an academic project – A Dance institute for the Kalbelia community at Pushkar, Rajasthan, in India. The description ends with the experiential journey of the perceiver to decode the spatial narratives encoded by the conceiver while conceiving the project; supplemented with the drawings of the design proposal and the inferences.