The Urban Nest

India’s relationship with its over-population is one of duality. On a macro-scale overpopulation is an advantage like no other especially when it comes to things like cheap labour and the youngest nation in terms of workforce, but the same “young workforce” is often destined to not be able to achieve even the optimum living conditions due to lack of infrastructure. This was the sapling for the idea of our project “The Urban Nest”, a hostel envisioned as a haven for students to explore and be inspired by through the engaging experience of residing in the same. The Urban Nest was developed for the site located in an educational hub surrounded by educational universities with the idea of playing with the monotony of hostels/ dormitory architecture that we are accustomed to, instead of completely flipping it, and what came about at the end of our process was a residential dwelling in which no two-floor levels were identical. This leads to every user having a completely unique and interactive experience and every story and dwelling unit providing the same. The Urban Nest was conceptualized by keeping its users and their tangible/intangible needs at the center, since the users are going to be students in the course of their college education their mental health in their transformative years was one of the major contributors to the decision to introduce greens into our spaces, through terrace gardens, staggered recreational spaces, and meticulously created spaces to encourage communal living, respect towards surroundings and sustainable living culminating in widening their horizons and viewpoints. The hostel is a multi-story building because of its disproportionate relation between site dimensions and dwelling requirements with a stringent 37% ground coverage available and thus we had a unique challenge of taking our ideas of breaking the monotony of hostels and introducing green zones for mental wellbeing onto a vertical plane also instead of just the horizontal one. The Urban Nest needed to provide a better alternative for hostel typology where the users spend the majority of their time in their transformative years to create a unique and fruitful experience for its users for it to have both a positive tangible and intangible impact on them even in testing times like an international pandemic.