The Busker Town

University of Moratuwa (UoM), Faculty of Architecture, Department of Architecture, Moratuwa

Project idea

The busker town is a idea based on providing the street artist community of Sri Lanka with an initiative to support and promote their craft. The performing centre along with the youth hostel will be the basic architectural input into this initiative while the implementation of the project itself will be benefitial in social, cultural and economic aspects of both primary and secondary users. The performing centre and the youth hostel will be introduced as a training centre for the street artists spread around the country, while the venue will be the prime public space for the busy city centre of Nugegoda.

Project description

Nugegoda is a busy, mix-developed suburban city located about 20 km away from Colombo, the financial capitol of Sri Lanka. With the densly spread residential belt and commercial cityscape, Nugegoda is equipped with thousands of daily commuters and heavy traffic congesion all year. The train station and busy bus routes going across the city services majority of commuting passengers. On the other hand Nugegoda is very famous locally as a venue for quality education. Dozens of schools, higher education centres and tution centres are located in the vicinity and these
education centres attract students from all over colombo and surrounding suburbs eveyday of the week.
However the need for a public space was growing substantially over the years for such a busy city centre while the legibilty of the city was reallly discouraging with lack of proper demarcation of the city centre.
With the proposed design for "Training centre for street artists" the main city square centering the Super market building will be developed as a urban park while the training centre being the main element of the city green patch.
Defyining the primary user, the street performing artists are extremely under-rated and not properly recognised catogary of artists, and were not facilitated through out the history. The proposed traing centre will cater them as a space to form a artist community of themselves based on informal arts while sharing and upgrading their value and get the deserving respect and recognision in the society as a street artist. Also the formal organised arts can be introduced and street artist would be able to offer their talent and experience to the formal arts while sharing their knowledge among themselves.
The programme of the training centre will include 1 or 2 week resident programmes for street artists from all over the country and they will train , perform and educate to value their talent in a more professional way. The process will be implemented mutually among street artists community in a hierarchial order where they all share the benefects. Other than that outside resource persons and organisations will contribute in the process making this community based system sustainable.
That is where the public space/urban park factor of the training centre will become benefitial. The public will be able to come and enjoy the public park city centre while the street artist would be able to sell their craft to the target customer while getting the experience properly. The training centre will be the bridge between those two entities.

Technical information

The main element of the design is the cylinders poking out of the building including the main cylinder where as the main theatre space, have double glased roofs for open to sky ambience inside. The gutter system is specially designed so the rain water will pour to the ouside of the concrete shell. The whole of the building is layered in straight forward manner to implement their usage. The entire ground floor and the roof terrace area will be open to public spaces while the first floor would be dedicated to the youth hostel making it the semi public area.
The structure of the building will be consist of column-less structural wall system and a ring beam structural system to preserve open plan- organic shaped layouts.

Documentation

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