Winners Announced: Architectural Essay Writing, 7th Cycle: 'Thresholds of Movement'

Architectural Essay Writing Contest, 7th Cycle floated by Architectural Journalism & Criticism Organisation announces the Winning Entries.

Theme described for the Competition was - ‘Migration & Immigration’

“Migration is an expression of the human aspiration for dignity, safety, and a better future.” — Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General.

Migration and immigration are among the most defining forces shaping contemporary societies globally. Beyond statistics and policy debates, they involve questions of identity, belonging, borders, labor, and culture. As movement between borders follows haphazard and unplanned motives and routes, it becomes the responsibility of architects, urban planners, and designers to work alongside policymakers and governments around the world to intervene in the built environment and present solutions that not only speak to the convenience of residents but also to the dignity of those immigrating.

Another aspect that has been a defining factor in movement is migration. As economies and populations burgeon around the world, as of mid-2024, the global number of international migrants reached a record 304 million, representing approximately 3.7% of the total world population. This figure has nearly doubled since 1990 (see: https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/migration). [...]

- Megha Balooni (Curator for 7th and 8th Cycles, AJC Essay Writing)

The 'Special Mention Award' goes to Shrinithy G

The Place We Leave Behind

The flowers are still there.

They continue to bloom outside a house whose walls have slowly faded. But there is no one to pick them anymore. There are no children playing in the street, no familiar voices calling from one house to another, no evening conversations spilling into the roads. The house remains, the street remains, and yet something has disappeared.

Yes, the people once who lived in the place have moved.

But what happens to the place?

Migration is often understood as movement from one place to another which is driven by factors such as education, employment, family, opportunity, safety or the hope for a better life. For the person who leaves, it can be the beginning of something new. A new city, new people, new opportunities and a new way of living. But for the place that is left behind, migration can mean the gradual disappearance of the everyday life that once gave it meaning.

I have experienced this movement not as one migration, but as a series of transitions from my grandmother’s Agraharam house to a tier-two city, and later to a metropolitan city.

My earliest memories belong to an Agraharam house. The house was not merely a shelter. It was a sequence of spaces that supported everyday life. Spaces like “Muttram” where rain could enter the house, a “Thinnai” that extended domestic life towards the street, a “Rezhi” connecting spaces, a courtyard, a well and spaces for everyday household activities. The street itself was an extension of the house. Children played there, neighbour’s interacted there, festivals occupied the street, and everyday rituals gave the place a rhythm.

The architecture was inseparable from the way people lived.

When my family moved to a tier-two city, the house changed, but our practices did not disappear completely. We found a larger house with a garden, plants and a tulasi maadam. The courtyard was gone, but there were other spaces where our everyday life could continue. Every morning, I remember having coffee on the staircase surrounded by plants and the fragrance of Parijatham flower. Slowly, that staircase became more than a staircase. Through repetition, memory and routine, it became a place.

I did not consciously understand this transformation at that time.

A house slowly had become a home.

Years later, another movement took me to a metropolitan city. This time, the transition felt different. I was excited about the new city, the opportunities, the new people and the unfamiliarity of metropolitan life. But finding a house was unexpectedly difficult. I thought I was simply looking for a safe and affordable place to live. Looking back, I realised that I was searching for something more familiar, where a space that could connect me to my previous understanding of home.

I eventually found a house that had familiar colours and an arch opening towards the kitchen. These were small details, but they felt strangely familiar. The vessels I used, the plants I brought, the way I arranged the rooms and the routines I carried with me gradually transformed the unfamiliar house.

The house did not become a home in a single day.

I transformed it, but it also transformed me.

This is perhaps the quietest part of migration. We often imagine migration as the moment of departure of a train, a bus, an airport, a border or the arrival in a new city. But migration continues long after arrival. It takes place in the way we arrange a room, prepare food, interact with neighbours, celebrate festivals and perform small rituals from a life that existed somewhere else.

The built environment becomes the medium through which memory is carried.

The old agraharam had spaces that contemporary apartments may not provide. There may be no muttram where children can watch the rain, no “Ammikal” or “Aatukal” for traditional kitchen practices, no large garden from which flowers can be picked for worship, and no street that functions as an extended living room. Yet people adapt. A balcony can become a small garden. A modern kitchen appliance can replace an old domestic tool. A common corridor can become a temporary playground for children.

The form changes, but the practice searches for another expression.

This gave me a question whether people transform places or places transform people.

Perhaps it is neither one nor the other.

People arrive with memories, habits and expectations of how life should be lived. They modify spaces to accommodate those practices. But the new environment also places limits on them. A metropolitan apartment may demand quieter behaviour than an old street. A smaller kitchen may change how a family cooks. A balcony may replace a garden. The absence of a street may reduce casual encounters with neighbours. Architecture does not simply receive the migrant. It participates in shaping the migrant's new everyday life.

The migrant therefore exists between places.

One place is physically left behind, while another slowly becomes familiar. Belonging is not necessarily transferred from one place to another. It can accumulate. The Agraharam remains part of memory. The tier-two city remains part of lived experience. The metropolitan city becomes part of the present. Each place adds another layer to the meaning of the home.

Yet there is another side to this movement.

While I was excited to enter a new city, somewhere else a house was becoming quieter.

The flowers continued to bloom, but nobody picked them. The animals that once waited for food moved away. The walls stopped receiving fresh paint. The sounds that once filled the house disappeared. The architecture remained, but the everyday practices that animated it slowly faded.

This is the paradox of migration.

For one place, migration can be a beginning. For another, it can be an absence.

At the scale of an individual, this may simply be a family moving from one house to another. But when repeated across communities and cities, these movements can reshape neighbourhoods, public spaces, housing patterns and the cultural character of cities. Migration is therefore not only a demographic movement. It is also a spatial process.

Cities receive people who bring their memories, cultures, food, languages, rituals and ideas of home. The city provides new constraints and possibilities through which these practices are negotiated. New forms of belonging emerge from this encounter. Streets change, neighbourhoods transform, houses are adapted, balconies become gardens, shops respond to new communities, and public spaces acquire new meanings.

My own movements were never forced.

I chose each city. I could afford to search for an arch that resembled an old kitchen, to carry vessels and plants across state lines, to wait until a house felt right. Not everyone is given that patience.

Somewhere in the same metropolitan city, another migrant arrives with none of these choices. A worker sleeps on a construction site that will one day become someone else's balcony garden. A family occupies a room with no thinnai, no muttram, no possibility of a staircase for morning coffee, but only walls that must hold an entire life until the next site, the next city, the next uncertain stay. For them, there is no eventually. There is only the present arrangement, made to work because it must.

My migration has built layers of belonging. Theirs is often built to be temporary, even when it isn't.

If architecture shaped my staircase from a “Space” into a “Place”, what does it fail to offer those who are given no staircase at all?

Perhaps, then, migration should not be understood only as leaving one place and arriving at another.

It is a threshold between what we were, what we carry and what we are becoming.

I started by visualizing an empty house. Today, I have realised that the house is not simply empty because its people have left. It carries traces of the lives that once occupied it. And the homes we create after migration carry traces of places we thought we had left behind.

Maybe that is what migration does to architecture.

It leaves buildings standing but changes their meaning.

It moves people but carries places with them.

And somewhere between the place we leave and the place we enter, we quietly learn what it means to call somewhere home.

Certificate of Appreciation goes to Richa Malhotra

Eleven Kilometres

A checkpost on the Maharashtra–Gujarat border. 

It was the last weekend of July 2026, and I was driving from our recently purchased land in Talasari, a small town in Maharashtra, towards Umargaon in Gujarat to buy a few electronic items for the new place. Umargaon, a recently developed city, is barely 11 kilometres from where our land is located. The nearest city, for many of the things we needed, happened to be across a state boundary.

On one of the internal roads along this coastal stretch, I came across a small police chowki alongside the two-lane road. Its windows faced the passing traffic, and a few chairs were placed outside for the policemen. Across the road, metal barricades had been positioned alternately from one side to the other, forcing every vehicle approaching the chowki into a gentle serpentine movement. The barricades carried the markings of the respective police forces, making the administrative division visible even within this otherwise continuous coastal landscape and road. 

There was no large gate announcing the border. No wall divided one state from the other. The road continued, but the barricades interrupted its rhythm. Cars, two-wheelers and other vehicles had to slow down, change direction and pass through the narrow gaps created between the metal barriers.

The arrangement reminded me of a nakabandi. Yet unlike a conventional roadblock, the intention here seemed to be less about stopping movement than slowing it down enough to make it visible. The policemen did not need to close the road or build a substantial structure across it. A small chowki, a few chairs and a set of movable barricades were enough to turn an ordinary road into a threshold.

What interested me was the economy of it. The architecture of the checkpost did not announce itself as architecture. It was almost incidental to the road. And yet, through the positioning of a few objects, it altered the behaviour of everyone passing through it.

The barricades control movement without stopping movement.

I began noticing the border differently after that.

Umargaon and Talasari are geographically close, but the experience of moving between them is not symmetrical. Umargaon's market is larger, and on that particular trip it was where I went to buy the things I needed for the new house. Most of the shops were located under buildings, rather than standing as isolated units, creating a continuous row of commercial frontage along the road. The shops carried on one after another for at least two kilometres, making the market feel less like a single destination and more like a continuous stretch of everyday commercial activity. That afternoon, I was there looking for air conditioners and inverters for the new house, especially because we had been told there was load-shedding every Friday. The Gujarat-registered autos around the area were another small reminder that this was not simply a line being crossed occasionally by outsiders. Their presence felt ordinary. They were part of the everyday movement of the place, just as the road itself was. Nothing about the traffic suggested that the state boundary had created a corresponding break in the way the surrounding landscape was used.

My own journey was an ordinary example of that movement. I was not travelling to another city because I had decided to cross a state boundary. I was simply going where the things I needed were available. From our land, Umargaon was about 11 kilometres away. Dahanu, the more obvious town on the Maharashtra side, was about 32 kilometres away. The state boundary therefore did not correspond to the geography of my everyday needs.

The checkpost made that administrative line physical.

It also made me think about the difference between a place as it appears on a map and a place as it is experienced. On a map, Maharashtra ends and Gujarat begins. On the road, however, the transition is much less dramatic. There is no sudden change in the landscape that tells you that you have crossed into another state. The road continues, the landscape continues, vehicles continue, markets continue. What changes is the small infrastructure placed in between: a police chowki, a few chairs and alternating yellow barricades.

The coast around Talasari, Dahanu, Gholvad and Umargaon is itself an example of how territories are formed through movement and exchange over time. The chikoo belt stretches continuously along the coast, from Bordi through Dahanu and onwards towards Udvada. Commercial chikoo cultivation began around Gholvad in the late nineteenth century, around 1888. The agricultural landscape therefore predates the state boundary that now cuts through it.

Our own land in Talasari was purchased from a Parsi owner. In conversations around the property, he spoke about the ways people in the area move towards Umargaon for their needs. It was another indication that the direction in which people move is not necessarily determined by the administrative or political boundary they live within.

The landscape has its own history of movement.

The Parsi presence on this coast is itself tied to migration. At Sanjan, a few kilometres from Umargaon, Zoroastrian refugees are traditionally recorded as having arrived on the western coast of India around 936 CE. The memorial column at Sanjan marks this history. Long before the contemporary states of Maharashtra and Gujarat existed in their present form, people had already arrived, settled and established communities along this coast.

Then, in 1960, the Bombay Reorganisation Act divided the territory differently. The old Umbergaon taluka was split: forty-seven villages and three towns went to Gujarat, while the remaining twenty-seven villages became the Talasari mahal in Maharashtra in 1961.

One taluka became two administrative territories.

The landscape, however, did not become two landscapes.

That distinction is what the small checkpost brought into focus. The political boundary is relatively young when compared with the history of settlement, cultivation and movement across this coast. It has had to be made visible through infrastructure because the landscape itself does not necessarily announce where one state ends and another begins.

The checkpost is one such device.

It is a small piece of architecture, but it performs a disproportionately large administrative function. Its windows are oriented towards the road because the road is what needs to be watched. Its chairs are outside because the policemen need to occupy the edge between the chowki and the traffic. The barricades are not fixed walls. They can be moved, rearranged or removed. Yet when placed alternately across the road, they change the speed and direction of every vehicle passing through.

A wall would stop movement. A gate would clearly mark entry and exit. The barricades do something subtler. They allow movement to continue while making it slower, visible and controllable.

This is where the checkpost resembles a nakabandi, but also differs from one. A nakabandi can be set up almost anywhere because its purpose is to interrupt movement temporarily. At this border, the interruption has been given a permanent place on the road. The arrangement of the barricades has become part of the everyday choreography of crossing.

The architecture is minimal, but the threshold it creates is not.

For someone travelling through the area, the difference may last only a few seconds. The vehicle slows, turns slightly, passes between the barriers and accelerates again. But within those few seconds, the state boundary becomes something physical. It becomes a change in speed. It becomes a turn of the steering wheel. It becomes the possibility of being stopped and questioned.

And yet the road remains open.

The threshold does not eliminate movement. It regulates it.

Migration, too, is often discussed as movement from one geographical location to another, as though the important event is the crossing itself. But the physical crossing is only one moment in a much longer process. Movement changes the relationships between places. A place that is administratively peripheral can become central to someone else's everyday geography simply because it offers a market, a workplace, a connection or a route onward.

The Talasari–Umargaon landscape makes this visible in a particularly ordinary way. A person can live in Maharashtra and shop in Gujarat. Gujarat-registered autos move through Maharashtra-side settlements. Even the agricultural belt continues across the state boundary. A community that arrived on this coast centuries ago can become part of its landscape. And a political decision made in 1960 can divide an administrative unit without dividing the physical terrain on which it sits.

None of these movements require a dramatic architectural object.

Sometimes they are visible in the smallest things: the direction a road bends, the location of a market, the vehicles using a route, or the presence of a checkpost where the state needs to make its boundary legible.

The border was not a wall. It was not even a gate. It was a small police chowki beside a two-lane road, with windows facing the traffic and chairs outside. Between Maharashtra and Gujarat, yellow metal barricades were placed alternately across the road.

They made my car slow down.

They made me turn.

And then they let me continue into another state, eleven kilometres from where I had started, simply to buy something for home.

Jury Panel for the Competition were

•   Dr. Manu P. Sobti, The University of Queensland, Australia

•   Dr. Giorgia Aquilar, Berlin International University of Applied Sciences, Germany

•   Dr. Shruthi Joshi, Bhanuben Nanavati College of Architecture, India

•   Aliaksandr Shuba, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany

•   Megha Balooni, Studio Meiso, India

•   Pappal Suneja, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany

Note: No entry was found worthy of the ‘Citation Award’. 

Head Image © Ar. Kamini Badnore, Asst. Professor, IPS Academy, Indore

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