Nikita Aneja

In 1923, Corbusier publishes the Five points of Architecture and outlines how a house should be in the Manual of Dwelling. He showcased these ideas with his work in Villa Savoye in Poissy. However, now, the house is much more than a machine for living. Looking at the Faraday Works Charlton complex, I am drawn to the ideas of how design can generate a feeling of civic responsibility and community building in new residential developments.

My manifesto challenges the Manual of Dwelling which is limited to the private house or the Corbusian Villa and extends that into the public realm to explore what lies at the intersection of domestic interiors and the design of urban life.

Domestic Underground is a strategic and programmatic demonstration of how the housing crisis is changing our public and private spaces as we know it. It finally takes the form of the Faraday Public House situated at the 37 Bowater Building.

Projects early on in the year, namely, Cryptography of Sleep and PRO, start to inform the strategies employed a the Public House at Charlton.

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Degree Details

Nikita Aneja is an Indian origin spatial designer. Her interests in Exhibition and Interior design along with her professional experience in Architecture situates her practice between different facets of the built environment. Her practice explores how we breathe new life into forgotten spaces and the conversations created when historic and contemporary materials converge. Working at the intersection of urban and interior scales, Juxtaposition is a recurring theme that she has actively engaged with in her works at the RCA.

She completed her architecture affiliation at The University of Indraprastha, Delhi in 2017. Since, she has worked in the industry as an architect in various offices in India, Japan and London. At Architecture Discipline, she was involved in large scale commercial and residential projects that have been published on various design forums.

The Room: Hotel l’Era du Can, Burges (2014) by Brad Downey (1980)

The Object: An Enigma Machine Code Breaker

Cryptography of Sleep

In my childhood, I spent many summer nights sleeping on the terrace, Open to Sky, mainly due to reasons of power outages. It is a memory I cannot forget because of how secure it made me feel sleeping with my large family in times of crisis.

I associate the image of this room, as borrowed from ASOR (A Series Of Rooms) to sleeping in the public where one could see neighbours on adjoining terraces. The bright night sky and the heat would make falling asleep very difficult and I would find myself lost in thoughts for hours gazing at the stars.

The project explores the physical dimensions of the act of sleeping in public, objecting to the idea of the context at the same time. The object, the Turing machine helps add to that physicality. The room and the object interchange physically to fulfil their respective function which are derived from the visual and physical connections between my room and the object.

Cryptography of sleep becomes the programmatic starting point for my final project, Domestic Underground at Bowater Road.

Lutyen's Alternate Dimension - A Film

P.R.O (Propositional Research Object)

The project brief intends to develop work around the observations of ‘Waiting’ and the BMA house to produce a Propositional Research Object or ‘PRO’ at the site of the BMA house, where the Hastings Lounge is the focus of my study.

The Observation Document contains the Pattern Library of the Hastings Room that starts to inform the Journey Mapping through the exclusive Members Lounge. The final piece of work is a weave developed with these patterns and the film, 'Lutyens’s Alternate Dimension' which attempts to capture the impressions of the Hastings Lounge in Edwin Lutyens’s other project, Page Street Housing as the context in study. This juxtaposition is the result of developments based on the themes of Sensory Overload in spatial design.

The sensorial themes explored in the PRO are used in the spatial and material strategy of my final thesis project situated at the Bowater Road.