See all the winners of the 2020 Studio Prize.

Studio Brief | Looking at the specific needs of Jaipur, India, this Fall 2019 studio explored urban and architectural strategies to address the need to harvest water during the few months of monsoon rain, while also striving to create a more equitable city in terms of natural resource allocation and access to egalitarian public amenities.

Investigation | This semester-long research studio at the University of Virginia School of Architecture in Charlottesville, Va., brought two research professors together with 14 students across architecture, urban planning, and landscape architecture. Following six weeks of initial research, the studio (along with a group from Tulane University investigating a similar program) spent a week in New Delhi and Jaipur.

“The trip was formative in understanding the complexity of the city,” assistant professor María González Aranguren says. “We run the studio as an office where everyone has to work with different disciplines, learn from others, and work in a group.”

The preliminary research was presented to local officials while the class was in Jaipur.

“If you are going to make a difference in the world, then working in collaboration with government representatives, as well as citizens groups who may not have the voice, means, or status to approach a professional, are key to delivering successful solutions—especially in the developing world,” professor Pankaj Vir Gupta adds.

Following their return to Charlottesville, the students designed their own strategic interventions, informed by their field research and observations. “These students are attentive to the people who remain unrepresented, who never have a voice in requesting architectural help,” Gupta says. This ethic was reinforced by the instructors, who helped them to develop meaningful prototypical solutions that are tailored to the pressing need for obtaining, maintaining, and regulating clean water by Jaipur’s inhabitants. “It’s important for the students to realize who the user of everything is when they’re trying to make an equitable city,” Aranguren says. “This does not mean an absence of poetry or creativity,” Gupta adds. “In fact, there’s more need for it.”

For the jury, this scheme was the obvious choice for the Sloan Award. “It’s compassionate, it’s immediate, and there’s a need for it,” juror Victor Body-Lawson said. “These are smaller interventions that could be plugged into different neighborhoods that have water and health problems.” Weihan Vivian Lee lauded the different tactical scales that the studio explored to solve real problems: “I like the finer grained exploration of how you would implement this,” she said, while Jonathan Tate appreciated the rigor of the investigation, noting that “every component is categorized and described, documented, and contemplated.”

Student Work |

Revitalizing Amanisha Nala | Qinmeng Yu and Allie Ta analyzed water management at the Amanishah Nala Drain, where stormwater runoff filters through 2 meters of trash before hitting the waterway. Yu and Ta’s proposal includes strategies to help extract solid waste from graywater traveling from upstream, including waste incentives, clean water strategies, and incremental installations of public amenities.

The Death and Life of Water: Improving Water Use in Jaipur Public Space | Chenjie Xiong examined access to clean water for Jaipur’s residents. Only 52% of households (out of 9,000 in the test area) had access to treated tap water; nearly 80% of rainwater is lost during the monsoon season due to impermeable surfaces. Xiong’s proposal integrates systems that combine water management with public amenities, lending visibility to the water collection process.

Bathhouse Prototypes Near Jawhar Nagar Slum | Mary Kate Graeff’s proposal includes a series of bathing facilities, each with private, public, and hybrid spaces that support many household needs while providing an opportunity not only to conserve and reuse water, but to safely remove and treat contaminated water.

Studio Credits

Course: The Rajasthan Cities: Jaipur
School: University of Virginia, School of Architecture, Charlottesville, Va.
Level: Advanced studio offered in the last semester of undergrad or grad work
Duration: Fall 2019 semester
Instructors: María González Aranguren (assistant professor in architecture); Pankaj Vir Gupta (professor of architecture)
Yamuna River Project Fellow: Darcy Engle
Students: Mary Kate Graeff, Chenjie Xiong, Qinmeng Yu, Allison Ta (submitted work); Gaelle Gourmelon, Nicholas Wittkofski, Huiru Shen, Chloe Nagraj, Wenyan Yu, Audrey Liu, Karim El-Araby, Grace Douthit, Emmett Debree